So you're annoyed that your carefully crafted message on your state owned media is being undercut by the free flow of ideas on the Internet? Yeah, I'm just not seeing what is in this for me. Do you have some treaty concessions you would be willing to make in exchange for keeping your stranglehold on what your populace sees and hears, because I'm not seeing how this is my problem.
Also, I feel a sense of loss that this was a real opportunity to put some actual (much needed) legal limits on what you can and can't do with a EULA, but Pystar was much too small and didn't have the money to fight a legal battle all the way up the legal chain.
$30,000 is not much money at all compared to the potential legal bills (it's way less than you might get hit with if you were sharing a single song for instance). It's not really a surprise that they took it. Even if they had won, it would only be a matter of time before Apple started adding some sort of cryptographic handshake (no matter how uselessly easy to bypass it might be) to the boot process just to turn it into a DMCA matter.
I personally don't see the big deal about reusing the same disc if you've bought enough copies to cover all of the machines you're going to install on. Apple doesn't even use product keys or anything.
I'm also a bit confused as to how it's copyright infringement even if they cracked open all 750 boxes and used a separate disc on each machine. Surely installing OSX on non-standard hardware isn't covered by standard copyright, Apple had to set up special rights to cover that case, basically the EULA.
Your argument is basically: It's illegal (copyright infringement) to resell a Mac that has MacOS installed. Given the way the EULAs are worded, this is probably technically true, but I'd hate to be the lawyer attempting to defend this position in front of the Supreme Court if it came down to that.
Illegal because the EULA doesn't allow it, so this is coyright infringement. Important: It is not "breaking the EULA 750 times"
This statement is self-contradictory. If it's illegal because the EULA doesn't allow it, then that's "breaking the EULA" by definition.
Depends if they can get the Crytek engine ported into Javascript or maybe Flash I guess. Should only require all of the computers in the world to get reasonable performance.
I thought with the PyStar case that PyStar had actually bought the copies of the OS off of the shelf, so Apple couldn't hit them for the full cost of the software. They ended up having to go with a much less effective "breaking the EULA on 750 copies of the software" case instead, which is why the judgement in that part was so low. Of course Apple was able to nail them with the DMCA violations instead, which have much sharper teeth because it was written by the recording industry.
It may shock you to hear this, but there are places in forests where you can get a view of the sky, and typically foliage fade is manageable unless you're in a tropic rainforest anyway.
Heck, they don't even need to have the person click. There was (is?) a long standing exploit that allows carefully built USB sticks to automatically overflow the USB driver and get kernel level permissions before the device even shows up on the desktop. Turning off autorun is no help, your computer is 0wned before Explorer even knows the stick is there.
Even if the exploit I'm thinking of has been fixed, I would be surprised if there weren't more lurking about in the USB drivers. They're so big and nasty that I can't imagine that all of the exploits have been found and fixed yet.
I hear all of those reasonable sounding reasons, but I feel you have missed the biggest (by far) one of them all: People own guns because shooting things is fun. The whole "economically advantageous way to acquire food" segment is absolutely tiny, and with the way hunting permits work it's not really viable anyway. The only ones for whom that is true are the really really backwoods types that don't give a damn about hunting permits and eat mostly what they shoot. There are maybe a few hundred left in the US. The anti-government types are there too, but frankly they're a pretty small minority too. If you press most gun owners, it will come down to they own the gun because they enjoy shooting, plus a reasonable percentage that are worried about home invasion.
The problem with gun laws is that they punish everybody just because some fucktards shouldn't be able to get their hands on guns. Unfortunatly, there is no reliable test for fucktardiness, so the choices end up being: take guns away from a lot of people (including responsible ones), or don't take guns away from just about anybody.
Japan, seriously, how many times do we need the protagonist to be a 13 year old boy with no fashion sense and spiky hair? Also, would it kill you to have the story make some goddamn sense for once?
Seriously, when I find out that the main character is the dream of a ghost and the answer all along was that we needed to combine all of the feelings of love throughout the world to break the time loop or something I just want to kick the writer in the nuts.
That's why I tend to prefer western RPGs, even if they do spend way too much time stealing ideas wholesale from Tolkien, again. I'd love to see more studios go the Mass Effect or even Alpha Protocol route just to freshen up the genre.
Anything that's a heat engine (which account for most every way we know to generate power today) won't work because a heat engine requires both a hot side and a cold side. They'll have plenty of hot, but finding a cold side when you're immersed in magma is not going to be easy.
TEGs require a cool side as well, so they won't work.
I wouldn't be happy with the way they tend to push out moderates to elect their own conservatives. Moderates are a dying breed in politics and I don't endorse anyone who hastens their demise.
The big advantage is that it can loiter over a particular area for a long time. This is wonderful for something like relaying radio traffic. The problem with satellites is that they're either overhead for only a few minutes at a time, or they're so far away you need a 3 meter dish to communicate through it (not to mention the speed of light starts to become noticeable). It should also be suburb for surveillance work for the same reason: You can have one hang out over a target area for as long as you like, unlike a satellite where you are a slave to orbital mechanics.
The downside is that a slow moving drone, even at very high altitude like that, is pretty easy to shoot down.
The NES came out in 1983. FPS shooters (the kind that use WASD) didn't really appear until 1992. Even then, in the early games WASD was not the default, the default was to use the arrow keys for movement, and ctrl/alt for actions, opposite of what a Nintendo gamepad uses unless you can find some obscure keyboard where the arrow keys are on the left.
Using the mouse in combination with the keyboard didn't take off until a few years later (especially since the default mouse bindings on games like Doom were terrible). WASD was a result of people wanting to use the mouse to aim in their FPSes, and since the mouse is usually on the right hand side of the keyboard this meant using the left hand for movement. WASD happen to be on the left side of the keyboard where the left hand can most comfortably reach.
Wouldn't this be useful for someone who bought a piece of hardware that subsequently had the keys revoked? You could decrypt the stream on the fly so you could still use the hardware you bought.
It's not even that the hardware isn't free (like it should be), but when you're using it you're using up your own power and bandwidth (after you already shelled out $100 for the hardware), and the companies still charge your minutes when you're using it.
Also, because unlike Mario, Ninja Gaiden started you out with fairly high difficulty. There were boxers on the very first level where if you mistimed your sword swing even a little bit (easy, because the sword was very short), then they could stunlock and kill you. Level 1, first stage. That's how you tell your players that you're not screwing around.
I dare you to play Mafia Wars and then call it fun. About the most you can say about the gameplay is "it's addictive". In fact try that with any Zygna game, or really almost every game on Facebook.
There are some standouts that at least try to be fun. Crazy Planets for instance is a worms clone that does alright, although it's directly in EA's crosshairs to be ruined next. Family Feud is a quick diversion and sometimes humorous (mostly with the "answer detection" anomalies). Most games are "click to spam your friends, then click a zillion times, then come back 4 hours later to repeat".
Zygna's business model, as the article says, is to just copy a game and then add a whole lot of "spam your friends" features. Unfortunatly, like AOL disks before them, this works and they've got the largest base of gamers on Facebook. The absolute worst part is that other companies saw the success of the "spam like hell and don't worry about the consequences" business model and immediately followed suit, so that all games on Facebook feel the need to post 4 or 5 messages a day to your wall/friends wall/friends messages/email/sms/friends email/etc...
Even big names like EA got into the game. They bought up Playfish earlier and immediately started adding as many "spam your friends" features as they could think of to all of the PF games. Worse, as Facebook adds features to block (automatically or manually) said spam messages, the companies work as fast as possible to get around the blocks. Right now I have half a dozen posts from some damn fugly animal breeding game or something that make it through because they're posted as pictures in the account or something.
Also, if you want to see what unbridled evil look like, pull up any of those games and check out the "free cash offers", which look like an inbox without a spam filter. "Sign up for an UzbeckBank Credit Card and get 100 fake "real money" coins!". Fill out this fake survey with tons of personal information for 10 coins. etc...
I thought Halogens were barely better than standard incandescent bulbs? In fact I thought they were basically just incandescents that burned hotter and longer.
I have the same problem. I used to recommend Commercial Electric bulbs to everybody, because I got a huge number of them back in the day and they've been excellent, but you can't buy them anymore and the replacement brand (n:vision or something) is not as good.
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So you're annoyed that your carefully crafted message on your state owned media is being undercut by the free flow of ideas on the Internet? Yeah, I'm just not seeing what is in this for me. Do you have some treaty concessions you would be willing to make in exchange for keeping your stranglehold on what your populace sees and hears, because I'm not seeing how this is my problem.
Also, I feel a sense of loss that this was a real opportunity to put some actual (much needed) legal limits on what you can and can't do with a EULA, but Pystar was much too small and didn't have the money to fight a legal battle all the way up the legal chain.
$30,000 is not much money at all compared to the potential legal bills (it's way less than you might get hit with if you were sharing a single song for instance). It's not really a surprise that they took it. Even if they had won, it would only be a matter of time before Apple started adding some sort of cryptographic handshake (no matter how uselessly easy to bypass it might be) to the boot process just to turn it into a DMCA matter.
I'm also a bit confused as to how it's copyright infringement even if they cracked open all 750 boxes and used a separate disc on each machine. Surely installing OSX on non-standard hardware isn't covered by standard copyright, Apple had to set up special rights to cover that case, basically the EULA.
Your argument is basically: It's illegal (copyright infringement) to resell a Mac that has MacOS installed. Given the way the EULAs are worded, this is probably technically true, but I'd hate to be the lawyer attempting to defend this position in front of the Supreme Court if it came down to that.
This statement is self-contradictory. If it's illegal because the EULA doesn't allow it, then that's "breaking the EULA" by definition.
Depends if they can get the Crytek engine ported into Javascript or maybe Flash I guess. Should only require all of the computers in the world to get reasonable performance.
I thought with the PyStar case that PyStar had actually bought the copies of the OS off of the shelf, so Apple couldn't hit them for the full cost of the software. They ended up having to go with a much less effective "breaking the EULA on 750 copies of the software" case instead, which is why the judgement in that part was so low. Of course Apple was able to nail them with the DMCA violations instead, which have much sharper teeth because it was written by the recording industry.
It may shock you to hear this, but there are places in forests where you can get a view of the sky, and typically foliage fade is manageable unless you're in a tropic rainforest anyway.
Heck, they don't even need to have the person click. There was (is?) a long standing exploit that allows carefully built USB sticks to automatically overflow the USB driver and get kernel level permissions before the device even shows up on the desktop. Turning off autorun is no help, your computer is 0wned before Explorer even knows the stick is there.
Even if the exploit I'm thinking of has been fixed, I would be surprised if there weren't more lurking about in the USB drivers. They're so big and nasty that I can't imagine that all of the exploits have been found and fixed yet.
I hear all of those reasonable sounding reasons, but I feel you have missed the biggest (by far) one of them all: People own guns because shooting things is fun. The whole "economically advantageous way to acquire food" segment is absolutely tiny, and with the way hunting permits work it's not really viable anyway. The only ones for whom that is true are the really really backwoods types that don't give a damn about hunting permits and eat mostly what they shoot. There are maybe a few hundred left in the US. The anti-government types are there too, but frankly they're a pretty small minority too. If you press most gun owners, it will come down to they own the gun because they enjoy shooting, plus a reasonable percentage that are worried about home invasion.
The problem with gun laws is that they punish everybody just because some fucktards shouldn't be able to get their hands on guns. Unfortunatly, there is no reliable test for fucktardiness, so the choices end up being: take guns away from a lot of people (including responsible ones), or don't take guns away from just about anybody.
Japan, seriously, how many times do we need the protagonist to be a 13 year old boy with no fashion sense and spiky hair? Also, would it kill you to have the story make some goddamn sense for once?
Seriously, when I find out that the main character is the dream of a ghost and the answer all along was that we needed to combine all of the feelings of love throughout the world to break the time loop or something I just want to kick the writer in the nuts.
That's why I tend to prefer western RPGs, even if they do spend way too much time stealing ideas wholesale from Tolkien, again. I'd love to see more studios go the Mass Effect or even Alpha Protocol route just to freshen up the genre.
Anything that's a heat engine (which account for most every way we know to generate power today) won't work because a heat engine requires both a hot side and a cold side. They'll have plenty of hot, but finding a cold side when you're immersed in magma is not going to be easy.
TEGs require a cool side as well, so they won't work.
I wouldn't be happy with the way they tend to push out moderates to elect their own conservatives. Moderates are a dying breed in politics and I don't endorse anyone who hastens their demise.
I'm more curious how they plan to power such a device, and how they plan to wirelessly transmit signals through molten rock.
That really doesn't help unless you can build them in the time it takes an ICBM to fly over the pole.
The big advantage is that it can loiter over a particular area for a long time. This is wonderful for something like relaying radio traffic. The problem with satellites is that they're either overhead for only a few minutes at a time, or they're so far away you need a 3 meter dish to communicate through it (not to mention the speed of light starts to become noticeable). It should also be suburb for surveillance work for the same reason: You can have one hang out over a target area for as long as you like, unlike a satellite where you are a slave to orbital mechanics.
The downside is that a slow moving drone, even at very high altitude like that, is pretty easy to shoot down.
The NES came out in 1983. FPS shooters (the kind that use WASD) didn't really appear until 1992. Even then, in the early games WASD was not the default, the default was to use the arrow keys for movement, and ctrl/alt for actions, opposite of what a Nintendo gamepad uses unless you can find some obscure keyboard where the arrow keys are on the left.
Using the mouse in combination with the keyboard didn't take off until a few years later (especially since the default mouse bindings on games like Doom were terrible). WASD was a result of people wanting to use the mouse to aim in their FPSes, and since the mouse is usually on the right hand side of the keyboard this meant using the left hand for movement. WASD happen to be on the left side of the keyboard where the left hand can most comfortably reach.
Wouldn't this be useful for someone who bought a piece of hardware that subsequently had the keys revoked? You could decrypt the stream on the fly so you could still use the hardware you bought.
It's not even that the hardware isn't free (like it should be), but when you're using it you're using up your own power and bandwidth (after you already shelled out $100 for the hardware), and the companies still charge your minutes when you're using it.
Maybe some who is really, really into BitTorrent?
Motorola charged too much for the chip, that's why Commodore released a (nearly) pin compatible replacement for much cheaper and made a killing.
Yeah, turns out the best selling game is the one that's the pack-in for the best selling console. Go figure.
Also, because unlike Mario, Ninja Gaiden started you out with fairly high difficulty. There were boxers on the very first level where if you mistimed your sword swing even a little bit (easy, because the sword was very short), then they could stunlock and kill you. Level 1, first stage. That's how you tell your players that you're not screwing around.
I dare you to play Mafia Wars and then call it fun. About the most you can say about the gameplay is "it's addictive". In fact try that with any Zygna game, or really almost every game on Facebook. There are some standouts that at least try to be fun. Crazy Planets for instance is a worms clone that does alright, although it's directly in EA's crosshairs to be ruined next. Family Feud is a quick diversion and sometimes humorous (mostly with the "answer detection" anomalies). Most games are "click to spam your friends, then click a zillion times, then come back 4 hours later to repeat".
Zygna's business model, as the article says, is to just copy a game and then add a whole lot of "spam your friends" features. Unfortunatly, like AOL disks before them, this works and they've got the largest base of gamers on Facebook. The absolute worst part is that other companies saw the success of the "spam like hell and don't worry about the consequences" business model and immediately followed suit, so that all games on Facebook feel the need to post 4 or 5 messages a day to your wall/friends wall/friends messages/email/sms/friends email/etc...
Even big names like EA got into the game. They bought up Playfish earlier and immediately started adding as many "spam your friends" features as they could think of to all of the PF games. Worse, as Facebook adds features to block (automatically or manually) said spam messages, the companies work as fast as possible to get around the blocks. Right now I have half a dozen posts from some damn fugly animal breeding game or something that make it through because they're posted as pictures in the account or something.
Also, if you want to see what unbridled evil look like, pull up any of those games and check out the "free cash offers", which look like an inbox without a spam filter. "Sign up for an UzbeckBank Credit Card and get 100 fake "real money" coins!". Fill out this fake survey with tons of personal information for 10 coins. etc...
I thought Halogens were barely better than standard incandescent bulbs? In fact I thought they were basically just incandescents that burned hotter and longer.
I have the same problem. I used to recommend Commercial Electric bulbs to everybody, because I got a huge number of them back in the day and they've been excellent, but you can't buy them anymore and the replacement brand (n:vision or something) is not as good.