1) If ANY kind of lawsuit could be brought for "buying too many boxes, and then using them in an unapproved manner", it would be in small-claims court.
2) Since they couldn't find a way to sue him for ketchup violations, they decided to sue him for trademark violations?!? And the argument involves DMCA and the.com domain name? And a lawyer gets paid far far too much to draft this lawsuit up, so they could sue a man who can't afford Ikea?? That's comedy man!
Intel and AMD CPUs shipping this year are going to support easy virtualization. Those hardware companies are pouring money into VM software, and that VM software is free, so anyone and everyone will be able to run VMMs on their stock machines. One way to limit some of the damage of viruses/spyware is to make it a habit to run with multiple VMs. Even grandmothers should do this. (on top of security, VMs have a wide range of other benefits that make them hard to sideline)
On the other hand, DRM is becoming more popular. MS will have its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base that will try to have sections of memory that are very secure and protected. Grandmothers are going to want to play their DVD's inside a VM, and play her secure.WMA files, and...
Multiplayer games are often hacked, and hacks can ruin a multiplayer game. Microsoft's new NGSCB promises to have a secure authenticated path from the USB hub to the software. Hackers come out with things like fishing bots that multiplayer game authors would really like to prevent. Normal players would like to play hack-free games, within a VM.
Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway? I mean, it's not like this internet connection is protected or anything. If the content provider sends a packet to reflash the player, just don't let it get to the player. Have something in between to filter it out.
Public-key encryption? Anything remotely resembling SSL? (eg. something you use in your browser every day to prevent people from modifying your bank transactions done over the web)
As usual, there are a bunch of fundamental flaws in DRM that will always keep coming back no matter what the content providers try to do. I see DVD Jon cracking this in a week after it's put out on the streets.
There are a few fatal flaws, yes. The biggest flaw is that you have to hand the end-user a device which fundamentally contains the key that's used to decrypt the content they buy. In particular, software-only copyright protection is usually fairly quickly cracked, since it's not hard to put it inside a box and debug it.
HARDWARE-based DRM, on the other hand, while it does have some fatal flaws, is proving to be increasingly difficult to crack. Read that description of hacking the XBox. It's starting to get a little insane the lengths one has to go to these days to break into a box, and it'll get worse over time. It's impossible to say if manufacturers will eventually win or not, but you CAN say that over time, there will be fewer and fewer hackers who have the skill, experience, and money to get around this kind of thing.
Perhaps 17 USC 107 has something to say about that?
the fair use of a copyrighted work, including [blah blah blah] is not an infringement of copyright.
No, it's not in the Bill of Rights. Yes, it's an actual law that says you never infringed in the first place. No, it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can use once you show up in court.
WoW's Hippogryphs and Windriders don't count as an ongoing money sink? I haven't played FFXI, so I can't compare, but in WoW, the primary form of transportation is absolutely rented, not owned. Also, even though WoW mounts are two-time money sinks, they're very LARGE money sinks, which counts for something. As for the auction house in WoW, there's also two types of fees involved as well... Deposits (which are 2.5% of the vendor-buy price, for every hour that you have your item listed at the AH), and Sales Tax (approximately 5% cut from the final sale price).
I think that most MMORPG authors try to add as many money sinks as they possibly can while keeping the game fun. And for 5 years at least, we've had a solid base of MMORPG economy experience to work from. As a result, it seems like most modern MMORPG's have almost the exact same money sinks.
I think that MMORPG economy mechanics WILL change significantly over time, as authors find better ways to balance things. But so far, I haven't heard of significantly different ideas that still work (eg. UO's closed-loop economy failed... I've heard of a few MUDs that have a working closed-loop economy, but I don't see how they're any different from UO's closed-loop economy, and so they would likely fail if they had the larger scale of players that MMORPG's usually have?). If a large MMORPG tried one of these things, and it seemed to be working, then THAT would be news.
item degredation or even destruction while in storage (and somehow keep the players from starting an armed revolution)
a full-fledged closed-loop economy
a formal system of lending and borrowing
a formal system of contracts
explicit support of more complex financial activities. For example, you can do Auction Brokering in games now, but it seems like MMORPG authors would really rather everyone play the game the way normal people do, and don't encourage (or even in some ways discourage) financial intermediaries, even though there are many such legal jobs in real life, because they provide beneficial services (eg. increasing liquidity in the market, etc)
No, it's not the whole problem. It's not even a significant problem. Blizzard could clearly prohibit you from mailing an alt money. (proof: you can't bid on an alt's auction (because this would circumvent the 2-hour EQ-mailing-delay, at a cost of 5% of the vendor-buy price), so they even already have the code snippet to do it!) But they didn't choose to prohibit you from doing this. Why? Because having a lot of money does not allow you to level up significantly faster. Even the chinese-gold-farmers who offer power-leveling services (where they play your character 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) require 2.5 weeks to get to level 60 even though they have all the money in the world.
Being able to send alts money does cause inflation, but does not significantly alter the game.
Unless you stop the phenomenon that money (or any other resource) is abbundant and worthless at one end, but scarce and valuable at the other, a flow _will_ happen between the two.
Now you're completely crazy. In the general case, in real life, YES, some people have more money, and some people have less. NO, it's not a bad thing that the people on the low end want a part of that money, and are willing to perform duties in exchange for some of that money. Velocity of money is a GOOD thing.
IBM, AMD, and Intel are all contributing to Xen (both money and code). This is, I would assume, precisely the reason that VMWare is now opening up its code to these same kinds of companies.
So pick a way that will decrease the environmental impact of many launches into space. Maybe stick them all on the same "mass transportation" system. That would probably be the space elevator. But how many environmentalists will move on to complaining about the environmental impact of a space elevator?
FTFA: After they had learnt their lesson, they designed a pretty good system with the second version of the MCPX - but the implementation still contained at least three security holes
so, my bet is they just aren't clever enough.
*shrug* Not necessarily.
The first shuttle accident was caused by... institutional problems. The engineering issues had already been discovered and discussed, but there were institutional issues that prevented the engineering discoveries to be fully investigated.
The second shuttle accident was caused by... institutional problems again. Again, the engineering issues had already been discovered and explored as much as the engineers could. Certainly NASA tried to fix their issues the first time, but apparently institutional issues aren't as easy to fix as engineering problems are.
My bet is that there WERE at least 4 people at Microsoft who were clever enough, they just weren't involved in the code inspections. Even if those four people knew that it was absolutely critical that they be involved in the inspections, they were specifically not permitted to look at the code, because four other people had already inspected the code, and involving more people (especially people who are "eager" to "help") would simply increase the chance of internal leaks. And that's not an engineering problem.
(on a personal note, at the company I work at, there have been several cases of problems being solved that have well-known solutions, but management puts inexperienced people in charge of the project, and then surround them with many more inexperienced people, ensuring that they never come in contact with someone who can steer them in the right direction. If management doesn't have a process in place to put people with the right knowledge on the problems that really require their expertise (even in an advisory role), then the organization isn't going to perform as well as it otherwise could. (this relates more to the XBox problem... the Shuttle problem is obviously more complex))
I've posted these before, but this page and this page are absolute must-reads if you're interested in MMORPG economies. And they happen to deal with UO too, and in some places, with the dup bug in particular:
In the real world, we associate hyperinflation with the almost total devastation of a country and its population. In UO this really did not happen because there was little that players wanted that was purchasable with gold. The one major exception was reagents which were also cloneable! The hyperinflation, while annoying, did not preclude players from having fun and, in the end, this is all that matters.
This should perhaps introduce a bit of humility into the over-design of the economy - for all its complications, it is not required to make the game fun.
That's somewhat true in World of Warcraft too. Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon. This helps to some extent (eg. allows you to buy top-notch equipment and buy all possible skills and spells), but isn't such a strong and disruptive effect that Blizzard considered removing this mail-yourself-money feature.
Also, some data shows that inflation tends to always happen in MMORPG's, regardless of whether there's a dug bug. The papers above go a long way towards explaining the theoretical reasons for why that might be.
Three bugs within these 512 bytes compromised the security completely - a bunch of hackers found them within days after first looking at the code. Why hasn't been Microsoft Corp. been able to do the same? Why?
I can make a guess. I've worked near a similar security feature implemented in hardware, and they wouldn't let anyone ANYWHERE near any documentation that described how it actually worked. My impression was that no matter how much you know about security, the less the employees know about the implementation, the better, to minimize the possibility for internal leaks. I'm sure they got the minimum 4 people together to inspect the code, per our coding standards, but how experienced were those four?
In Microsoft's case, their 512 bytes are incredibly high-profile. And based on the extensive nature of the hacks, they had to find a couple of VERY experienced security people to inspect their code, and who they trusted 100% to not disclose inside information. My bet is they didn't choose the right people to inspect their code, and after the inspection, any other employees who showed an interest in making sure the code was secure were treated more with suspicion than anything.
Noooo. We JUST convinced Indiana to stop being the armpit of the midwest by changing to a more normal timezone. Right-thinking people don't use cows as an argument for setting national relations policy!
Okay, I thought about saying "doesn't automatically make them more slimy than anyone else in the Fortune-500", but I didn't want to be overly pedantic.
Moreover, the job I had at a Fortune-10000 (okay, it's an imaginary list I made up just now, just so you don't ding me for this one) company, located dead in the middle of rural farmland, had the same requirement, so I don't know that it's really all that particularly slimy.
Heck, by those rules, pleading the fifth is probably very slimy, even though it's part of the US Bill of Rights.
that is only possible if they are keeping a tight reign on their inner voice for public consumption.
Name me any Fortune-500 companies that DON'T prohibit their employees from talking directly to the press, or otherwise require the PR/legal departments to review all public statements? Having the CEO say "Linux is a cancer" to mainstream press and having a peon say "we benefit from and contribute to OSS!" to Slashdotters definitely gives you a slimy feeling about microsoft, but don't include the tight control over public statements as one of your reasons to mark MS off as slimy.
Yes, production/gathering items are absolutely in deflation. That's covered in the Ultima Online paper too.
For a manufacturing profession such as tailoring or smithing, players are motivated to improve skills because it will allow them to make better items for themselves on-demand in the future. Thus players, in the process of training, produce huge numbers of item regardless of whether there is a market for them. This, combined with the effects of macroing and the fact that some players create items for the shear fun of it, conspire to
shift the supply curve to the right. This results overproduction and deflated prices of many basic goods.
Ultimately, it's a game, and people will make things for non-economic reasons. So if you're more profit-driven than fun-driven, avoid these items. It's still a problem though that the game encourages players to create these items, but then gives them decreasing rewards for producing those items.
And yeah, there are definitely inflationary pressures when someone who is level 60 creates an alt. Normal level 10 players have to grind for money at lvl 10 to get their EQ. But there are a few people who instead are able to grind for money at level 60 for their level 10 EQ. I haven't seen good economic analysis of this to confirm how severe of an influence it is, but it's very obviously inflationary, and an increasing influence as time goes on. (if it were possible to remove this feature from an MMORPG though, the more global problem of the "open loop" economy creating inflation would still exist)
For storage, yes, you can mail things between yourself, but there's a 2 hour delay, not convenient at all, because in some situations you need items more urgently. For items that have no vendor-buy price (eg. enchanting materials), you can post them items to the auction house for 9999gold, then cancel the auction, and let the item sit in your mailbox. That's slightly more convenient, but you have to make sure you retrieve the item before the mail expires.
What's interesting is that that paper addresses attempts to tie the sinks and sources together. He says this was tried many years ago, in Ultima Online, but was eventually a solid failure. He says this is because players hoard items in various places, and this eventually ends up slowing down the money sources (mob drops, etc) to a very slow trickle, at which point it's no longer fun to play the game. (he also says that adding new money sinks in the form of item degredation while in the user's storage area was flatly rejected by players as creating more of a work atmosphere than a game atmosphere).
I think this is explicitely why World of Warcraft's storage areas are expontential in cost... the main long-term storage (the bank) costs 0.1g for the first expanded storage area, 1g for the second, then 10g, 25g, 50g, and 100g and that's it (for a max of 222 storage spaces, although it's very very expensive... players are likely to reach maximum character level with less than 70% of that). But perhaps this isn't sufficient to prevent the economy from being inflationary. (eg. if the storage space was too constricted, it would start to not feel like a game anymore... in fact, I'd say that the initial storage limitation is one of the least fun parts of the beginning game in WoW).
Japan's offensive into China wasn't a small action. Japan's army was the third largest at the time. 1,100,000 japanese soldiers died and 3,220,000 chinese soliders during the war. The war created 95 million refugees. It wasn't just some small war, the entire region was already destabilized. The US knew the region was being destabilized, they started trade embargos against japan. Japan knew the US was worried about the region, so they attacked Pearl Harbor because they thought that might pre-empt our involvement in their growing war. The Second Sino-Japanese War was a World War in its own right.
Near the end of WWII, 200,000 non-combatants were dying in Asia every month. The nuclear bombs were one option for stopping the war. Even after two bombs were dropped (three days apart), japan did not announce its surrender for SIX MORE DAYS. Obviously the Japanese were not anxious to see the end of the war.
Certainly the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dark events to be remembered, but I think they should be remembered more as bad things that happened during the course of a war, and not as separate, highly evil, things by themselves.
The UN sanctions against Iraq killed more civilians (500,000 to 1,200,000) than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (~350,000). Tens of thousands of civilians died during and after the 2003 US Invasion of Iraq. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were undoubtedly one of the most prominent symbols of civilian casualties in the name of war, but war in general follows a close second. War is never kind to the citizens who happen to live in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We must realize that war always has a large cost on everyone involved, and only resort to physical confrontation as an absolute last resort.
It's easier to argue that the falling exchange rates are more due to the in-game economy (eg. the economies have actual inflation) than it is due to increased competition among MMORPG currency sellers. In fact, that paper almost seems to be arguing that MMORPG economies, as they currently stand, are almost unavaoidably always inflationary.
(city of heros seems to buck the trend... is there anything fundamentally very different about its economy?)
You HAVE to have a way of getting new data into Wikipedia pages. Even long-ago historical events need to be updated when new evidence or new analysis brings new facts to light. History is never cemented. And Wikipedia has proven remarkably capable of keeping up-to-date with new events.
But yes, Wikipedia editing is sometimes like making sausage. No matter how good it tastes in the end, the intermediate steps aren't always good looking. You need to simultaneously hide this sausage-making from the casual user (by making the "stable" page be the default one to appear), while also making it not too difficult for people to contribute to the sausage-making process (by making the "draft" page only a single click away).
Slashdot Mirror
1) If ANY kind of lawsuit could be brought for "buying too many boxes, and then using them in an unapproved manner", it would be in small-claims court.
2) Since they couldn't find a way to sue him for ketchup violations, they decided to sue him for trademark violations?!? And the argument involves DMCA and the .com domain name? And a lawyer gets paid far far too much to draft this lawsuit up, so they could sue a man who can't afford Ikea?? That's comedy man!
Intel and AMD CPUs shipping this year are going to support easy virtualization. Those hardware companies are pouring money into VM software, and that VM software is free, so anyone and everyone will be able to run VMMs on their stock machines. One way to limit some of the damage of viruses/spyware is to make it a habit to run with multiple VMs. Even grandmothers should do this. (on top of security, VMs have a wide range of other benefits that make them hard to sideline)
On the other hand, DRM is becoming more popular. MS will have its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base that will try to have sections of memory that are very secure and protected. Grandmothers are going to want to play their DVD's inside a VM, and play her secure .WMA files, and...
Multiplayer games are often hacked, and hacks can ruin a multiplayer game. Microsoft's new NGSCB promises to have a secure authenticated path from the USB hub to the software. Hackers come out with things like fishing bots that multiplayer game authors would really like to prevent. Normal players would like to play hack-free games, within a VM.
Is there an inevitable train wreck here?
HARDWARE-based DRM, on the other hand, while it does have some fatal flaws, is proving to be increasingly difficult to crack. Read that description of hacking the XBox. It's starting to get a little insane the lengths one has to go to these days to break into a box, and it'll get worse over time. It's impossible to say if manufacturers will eventually win or not, but you CAN say that over time, there will be fewer and fewer hackers who have the skill, experience, and money to get around this kind of thing.
I think that most MMORPG authors try to add as many money sinks as they possibly can while keeping the game fun. And for 5 years at least, we've had a solid base of MMORPG economy experience to work from. As a result, it seems like most modern MMORPG's have almost the exact same money sinks.
I think that MMORPG economy mechanics WILL change significantly over time, as authors find better ways to balance things. But so far, I haven't heard of significantly different ideas that still work (eg. UO's closed-loop economy failed... I've heard of a few MUDs that have a working closed-loop economy, but I don't see how they're any different from UO's closed-loop economy, and so they would likely fail if they had the larger scale of players that MMORPG's usually have?). If a large MMORPG tried one of these things, and it seemed to be working, then THAT would be news.
Being able to send alts money does cause inflation, but does not significantly alter the game.
Now you're completely crazy. In the general case, in real life, YES, some people have more money, and some people have less. NO, it's not a bad thing that the people on the low end want a part of that money, and are willing to perform duties in exchange for some of that money. Velocity of money is a GOOD thing.
IBM, AMD, and Intel are all contributing to Xen (both money and code). This is, I would assume, precisely the reason that VMWare is now opening up its code to these same kinds of companies.
And for tommorow's launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can find your own transfer orbit to Mars (for free, to boot).
So pick a way that will decrease the environmental impact of many launches into space. Maybe stick them all on the same "mass transportation" system. That would probably be the space elevator. But how many environmentalists will move on to complaining about the environmental impact of a space elevator?
The first shuttle accident was caused by... institutional problems. The engineering issues had already been discovered and discussed, but there were institutional issues that prevented the engineering discoveries to be fully investigated.
The second shuttle accident was caused by... institutional problems again. Again, the engineering issues had already been discovered and explored as much as the engineers could. Certainly NASA tried to fix their issues the first time, but apparently institutional issues aren't as easy to fix as engineering problems are.
My bet is that there WERE at least 4 people at Microsoft who were clever enough, they just weren't involved in the code inspections. Even if those four people knew that it was absolutely critical that they be involved in the inspections, they were specifically not permitted to look at the code, because four other people had already inspected the code, and involving more people (especially people who are "eager" to "help") would simply increase the chance of internal leaks. And that's not an engineering problem.
(on a personal note, at the company I work at, there have been several cases of problems being solved that have well-known solutions, but management puts inexperienced people in charge of the project, and then surround them with many more inexperienced people, ensuring that they never come in contact with someone who can steer them in the right direction. If management doesn't have a process in place to put people with the right knowledge on the problems that really require their expertise (even in an advisory role), then the organization isn't going to perform as well as it otherwise could. (this relates more to the XBox problem... the Shuttle problem is obviously more complex))
That's somewhat true in World of Warcraft too. Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon. This helps to some extent (eg. allows you to buy top-notch equipment and buy all possible skills and spells), but isn't such a strong and disruptive effect that Blizzard considered removing this mail-yourself-money feature.
Also, some data shows that inflation tends to always happen in MMORPG's, regardless of whether there's a dug bug. The papers above go a long way towards explaining the theoretical reasons for why that might be.
In Microsoft's case, their 512 bytes are incredibly high-profile. And based on the extensive nature of the hacks, they had to find a couple of VERY experienced security people to inspect their code, and who they trusted 100% to not disclose inside information. My bet is they didn't choose the right people to inspect their code, and after the inspection, any other employees who showed an interest in making sure the code was secure were treated more with suspicion than anything.
Since the linked article seems to no more information that what the summary says, here's another link that discusses virtualization+kernel a little more. It looks like it's the Xen work that's going into the kernel (the project that IBM and AMD and others have been putting money and developers into to get working).
I for one welcome our new 12-toed overlords.
Noooo. We JUST convinced Indiana to stop being the armpit of the midwest by changing to a more normal timezone. Right-thinking people don't use cows as an argument for setting national relations policy!
Slashcode needs to implement a new category, "Super-duper friend" with a +3 bonus, just for people like you.
Moreover, the job I had at a Fortune-10000 (okay, it's an imaginary list I made up just now, just so you don't ding me for this one) company, located dead in the middle of rural farmland, had the same requirement, so I don't know that it's really all that particularly slimy.
Heck, by those rules, pleading the fifth is probably very slimy, even though it's part of the US Bill of Rights.
Is there any chance such a contraption could be used to save some silly person's butt in case they decide to go that fast?
Ultimately, it's a game, and people will make things for non-economic reasons. So if you're more profit-driven than fun-driven, avoid these items. It's still a problem though that the game encourages players to create these items, but then gives them decreasing rewards for producing those items.
And yeah, there are definitely inflationary pressures when someone who is level 60 creates an alt. Normal level 10 players have to grind for money at lvl 10 to get their EQ. But there are a few people who instead are able to grind for money at level 60 for their level 10 EQ. I haven't seen good economic analysis of this to confirm how severe of an influence it is, but it's very obviously inflationary, and an increasing influence as time goes on. (if it were possible to remove this feature from an MMORPG though, the more global problem of the "open loop" economy creating inflation would still exist)
For storage, yes, you can mail things between yourself, but there's a 2 hour delay, not convenient at all, because in some situations you need items more urgently. For items that have no vendor-buy price (eg. enchanting materials), you can post them items to the auction house for 9999gold, then cancel the auction, and let the item sit in your mailbox. That's slightly more convenient, but you have to make sure you retrieve the item before the mail expires.
I think this is explicitely why World of Warcraft's storage areas are expontential in cost... the main long-term storage (the bank) costs 0.1g for the first expanded storage area, 1g for the second, then 10g, 25g, 50g, and 100g and that's it (for a max of 222 storage spaces, although it's very very expensive... players are likely to reach maximum character level with less than 70% of that). But perhaps this isn't sufficient to prevent the economy from being inflationary. (eg. if the storage space was too constricted, it would start to not feel like a game anymore... in fact, I'd say that the initial storage limitation is one of the least fun parts of the beginning game in WoW).
Near the end of WWII, 200,000 non-combatants were dying in Asia every month. The nuclear bombs were one option for stopping the war. Even after two bombs were dropped (three days apart), japan did not announce its surrender for SIX MORE DAYS. Obviously the Japanese were not anxious to see the end of the war.
Certainly the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dark events to be remembered, but I think they should be remembered more as bad things that happened during the course of a war, and not as separate, highly evil, things by themselves.
We must realize that war always has a large cost on everyone involved, and only resort to physical confrontation as an absolute last resort.
(city of heros seems to buck the trend... is there anything fundamentally very different about its economy?)
You HAVE to have a way of getting new data into Wikipedia pages. Even long-ago historical events need to be updated when new evidence or new analysis brings new facts to light. History is never cemented. And Wikipedia has proven remarkably capable of keeping up-to-date with new events.
But yes, Wikipedia editing is sometimes like making sausage. No matter how good it tastes in the end, the intermediate steps aren't always good looking. You need to simultaneously hide this sausage-making from the casual user (by making the "stable" page be the default one to appear), while also making it not too difficult for people to contribute to the sausage-making process (by making the "draft" page only a single click away).