Take for instance gwbush.com for the period from about 1999 to 2001. This was a great, but completely parody-related, website making fun of Bush. The RNC demanded that the webmaster, Zach Exley, give up every domain that he had registered. He refused. They threatened to sue him but to my knowledge never did so.
Then the Republicans bought every single domain they could possibly think of that had words such as Bush-Sucks in it. They have since sold most of these domains back to the random public, but the fact that a major political party tried to suppress criticism through massively buying domain names against third parties is amusing to me.
This has been going on for some years now, obviously.
It is possible to make a living, a very good one at that, playing StarCraft in South Korea at a top competitive level. Guillome Patry (mentioned earlier in this thread) did so for an extended period of time; however, he recently has retired from professional StarCraft because he wasn't making enough, and was living off of his savings.
Guillome Patry first became famous when he won the Blizzard Brood War Ladder championships two seasons in a row as X'Ds~Grrrr..., taking home twenty thousand.
The top players now are SlayerS_'BoxeR', iLoveOOV, and [ReD]NaDa, all of them terran players. Boxer is referred to as the "Terran emperor" and his 3 DVD boxed set about StarCraft has sold more copies in South Korea than the entire Matrix series.
This stuff is insanely popular in South Korea. However, in the U.S., there is no hope for professional gaming, unless you eventually move to Korea to play StarCraft. The biggest you can walk away with is a WCG grand prize once per year, and that's usually taken by Koreans anyways. For non-SC players, don't expect to ever make a living as a pro-gamer. For some reason in the U.S., pro gaming has not taken a foothold, and most non-starcraft players are in the U.S. or Europe.
[ReD]NaDa recently signed a contract with KTF team and several TV stations (yes, Koreans have 3 dedicated TV shows to gaming, particularly SC) which earns him a six figure income for a long period of time, not including his tournament wins.
There's more out there, but these are the highlights. Now get practicing at StarCraft: Ten hours of it a day is about how much most progamers play. Nobody can keep up with Koreans because of their dedication at this level to the game.
-Foo
By aggressively targeting unencrypted P2P networks, the RIAA's attempt at halting filesharing, specifically of pirated music, will fail miserably. The reason is simple: more and more users will switch to anonymous and encrypted P2P networks such as bittorrent and WASTE, both of which basically nullify the possibility of lawsuits and make it impossible to track offenders / pirates.
I have been at LAN parties where some users have connected to 50-100+ Peer WASTE networks. Unless an insider is present, each user is connected to the network through a PGP style 2048 (or higher) bit key. It is almost impossible without a hell of a lot of, literally, undercover spies (tens of thousands), to break a WASTE network. It's also ridiculously illegal to even attempt to find one. WASTE lets you fill your hard drive with whatever you want without basically any fear of big government or big agencies like the RIAA eavesdropping.
By suing users using "lighter" P2P networks, the probability of the RIAA succeeding becomes even lower as more users will simply switch to methods to get files that are untraceable.
This is a culmination of the effects of the recording industry first attacking Napster, which used a centralized server method; now users have moved to a decenteralized server method (ALL of the current protocols follow a super-node configuration) which basically means it's impossible, unless a LOT of lawsuits are filed, to halt the network. When the RIAA attempts to stop the third level of file sharing, i.e. completely anonymous and/or encrypted file sharing, it will reach a roadblock that it cannot hurdle over with ANY form of legal action.
The RIAA has made two giant mistakes: not embracing Napster, and now not embracing supernode style P2P networks; it is nearing the end of its life and further lawsuits demonstrate that it is only capable of acts of desperation. The end is near for the RIAA as a functional part of the music industry.
I currently own a $1,400 solid-state (read: transistor) headphone amplifier to drive my HD650 headphones, a custom headphone replacement cable, and I use a RME 96/8 PAD soundcard ($400 retail).
There is an obvious difference between tubes and solid state. On the high end, a $3,000 tube amp is likely to sound "warmer," or more "liquid." This stems from two things, primarily. When tubes distort, they produce clipping on even-order harmonics, especially the second, which adds to "body" or "fullness," and this is extremely obvious even to an untrained listener, when listening to two high end pieces of equipment side by side, one tubed and one solid state. Solid state amps tend to produce distortion on odd-order harmonics, especially the third and those at extremely high multiples relative to the fundamental; this creates the "cold," or "icy" feeling that a lot of solid state amps have. I own one of the most powerful small-output amplifiers on the market in terms of sound quality; total distortion is literally zero and it possesses something like a -130dB noise floor (see www.headphone.com for more info).
Look at guitar amps. Good guitar amps are always tubed for this reason: overdriving a vacuum transistor (a tube) produces these full bodied, rich, beautiful harmonics, whilst solid state just never seems to sound right, and in most cases sounds downright wretched.
This is old hat to a lot of people. Worthy of posting on slashdot, although the article is ridiculously verbose and poorly demonstrates differences between the two; it is more of an objective analysis.
-Foo
Do corporations outlaw email because someone could smuggle an important corporate document through a simple email attachment? You can put a heck of a lot of info on a single freemail attachment in a text file, and / or use a corporate POP3 mailserver too.
Do corporations also outlaw CD-Rs because they could be used to copy important data? Do corporations outlaw floppy discs? And, above all, do corporations give their employees a darned internet connection to begin with? What about the internet itself? If someone is truly paranoid about security, it'd be more effective to plug already existing giant holes in security, and completely strip their employees of all the fundamental tools of the information age.
It's hard to prevent the exchange of information on the computer: after all, a computer is a device specifically designed for just that purpose, anyways.
If someone goes through all the trouble to smuggle files on an iPod when he could simply PGP encrypt them over email, it would be an act of stupidity anyways.
Conclusively, it's a bad idea banning the iPods from offices.
-Foo
If you are referring to UT2003, try GibGames.com port 2206 or 2225 for the more "skilled" players, or just connect to one of the countless deathmatch servers. Cheaters are rarely a problem; I encounter a cheater once in every twenty matches on UT2003. With Quake 3 your best bet is to only join servers with punkbuster enabled (this should have been obvious already) as it seems to stop cheating to some degree.
Some inexperienced FPS players automatically assume that someone's cheating when they get smacked down, often repeatedly. 99% of the time it's just skill, in my experience. I often thought the same way when people would have 20 frags and no deaths. However, I now realize that it's just talent. I am not in any way saying that you are one of these people, it's just that cheating is a lot rarer on online FPS games than one might expect from reading this post.
I have no experience with Half-Life: Counterstrike. This only applies to Q3 and UT2003.
That's incorrect. The logic is as follows:
1. IF 2^P - 1 is prime,
THEN
2. P is prime.
Since 2^4 - 1 is not prime, 4 is not prime. The theorem is true as such. Please RTA before posting.
This is actually an excellent step forward from a software perspective: not only will products be sellable with lower quantities of packaging material, but the actual disc medium itself is tiny. This is obviously a step forward for the environment. Storing your solid medium on chips of that size would greatly cut down on size, although the cost is going to have to be pretty low to get the market to convert quickly (it took a good five to ten years for the market to start embracing CD).
Another excellent side effect of this technology will be its influence on the price of CDs. If it's fully marketed, the average sale price for a compact disc will drop significantly, both due to the fact that producers favor the newer format and also stores cleaning out their inventory. This is what's happening with vinyl now: lots of people are selling their records for TWO DOLLARS a pop, and people who still feel that the sound quality of CD is inferior to vinyl are having a heck of a time. This is bound to happen with CDs. Good deals will be found everywhere, etc.
The only thing that's bad about chips like this is the chance to re-write the rules, so to speak, and design a system from the outset which embraces copy protection. Remember, CDs weren't designed from the outset to have foolproof copy protection as the problems were not realized for quite some time. Giving companies the chance to design a music format FROM THE OUTSET with digital piracy in mind would lead to perhaps unbeatable (correction, pretty darned good) copy protection.
Of course, whatever companies do, there is one grand rule: you MUST appeal to the high-end market when starting a new format. This is how CD got going back in the eighties: because of production costs, only the audiophile one percent of the market was worth looking at due to sheer quantity and per unit costs. Only after the high end community purchased the new format did it finally filter down to average human beings (anyone remember the extraordinary costs of the first few CD players?). This is leading somewhere: in order to appeal to the audiophiles, the format must SOUND GOOD. CD sounded passable and thus gained a foothold. If copy protection degrades the sound quality (.wma etc) then nobody in the high end market will even look at the new format and it will die.
Honestly, I don't think this new mini-flash type format is going to be any problem at all for the end user who wishes to copy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Take for instance gwbush.com for the period from about 1999 to 2001. This was a great, but completely parody-related, website making fun of Bush. The RNC demanded that the webmaster, Zach Exley, give up every domain that he had registered. He refused. They threatened to sue him but to my knowledge never did so. Then the Republicans bought every single domain they could possibly think of that had words such as Bush-Sucks in it. They have since sold most of these domains back to the random public, but the fact that a major political party tried to suppress criticism through massively buying domain names against third parties is amusing to me. This has been going on for some years now, obviously.
Grrrr doesn't play 3v3. Furthermore, he hasn't played on battle.net in years. Plus he doesn't play money maps.
It is possible to make a living, a very good one at that, playing StarCraft in South Korea at a top competitive level. Guillome Patry (mentioned earlier in this thread) did so for an extended period of time; however, he recently has retired from professional StarCraft because he wasn't making enough, and was living off of his savings. Guillome Patry first became famous when he won the Blizzard Brood War Ladder championships two seasons in a row as X'Ds~Grrrr..., taking home twenty thousand. The top players now are SlayerS_'BoxeR', iLoveOOV, and [ReD]NaDa, all of them terran players. Boxer is referred to as the "Terran emperor" and his 3 DVD boxed set about StarCraft has sold more copies in South Korea than the entire Matrix series. This stuff is insanely popular in South Korea. However, in the U.S., there is no hope for professional gaming, unless you eventually move to Korea to play StarCraft. The biggest you can walk away with is a WCG grand prize once per year, and that's usually taken by Koreans anyways. For non-SC players, don't expect to ever make a living as a pro-gamer. For some reason in the U.S., pro gaming has not taken a foothold, and most non-starcraft players are in the U.S. or Europe. [ReD]NaDa recently signed a contract with KTF team and several TV stations (yes, Koreans have 3 dedicated TV shows to gaming, particularly SC) which earns him a six figure income for a long period of time, not including his tournament wins. There's more out there, but these are the highlights. Now get practicing at StarCraft: Ten hours of it a day is about how much most progamers play. Nobody can keep up with Koreans because of their dedication at this level to the game. -Foo
By aggressively targeting unencrypted P2P networks, the RIAA's attempt at halting filesharing, specifically of pirated music, will fail miserably. The reason is simple: more and more users will switch to anonymous and encrypted P2P networks such as bittorrent and WASTE, both of which basically nullify the possibility of lawsuits and make it impossible to track offenders / pirates. I have been at LAN parties where some users have connected to 50-100+ Peer WASTE networks. Unless an insider is present, each user is connected to the network through a PGP style 2048 (or higher) bit key. It is almost impossible without a hell of a lot of, literally, undercover spies (tens of thousands), to break a WASTE network. It's also ridiculously illegal to even attempt to find one. WASTE lets you fill your hard drive with whatever you want without basically any fear of big government or big agencies like the RIAA eavesdropping. By suing users using "lighter" P2P networks, the probability of the RIAA succeeding becomes even lower as more users will simply switch to methods to get files that are untraceable. This is a culmination of the effects of the recording industry first attacking Napster, which used a centralized server method; now users have moved to a decenteralized server method (ALL of the current protocols follow a super-node configuration) which basically means it's impossible, unless a LOT of lawsuits are filed, to halt the network. When the RIAA attempts to stop the third level of file sharing, i.e. completely anonymous and/or encrypted file sharing, it will reach a roadblock that it cannot hurdle over with ANY form of legal action. The RIAA has made two giant mistakes: not embracing Napster, and now not embracing supernode style P2P networks; it is nearing the end of its life and further lawsuits demonstrate that it is only capable of acts of desperation. The end is near for the RIAA as a functional part of the music industry.
I currently own a $1,400 solid-state (read: transistor) headphone amplifier to drive my HD650 headphones, a custom headphone replacement cable, and I use a RME 96/8 PAD soundcard ($400 retail). There is an obvious difference between tubes and solid state. On the high end, a $3,000 tube amp is likely to sound "warmer," or more "liquid." This stems from two things, primarily. When tubes distort, they produce clipping on even-order harmonics, especially the second, which adds to "body" or "fullness," and this is extremely obvious even to an untrained listener, when listening to two high end pieces of equipment side by side, one tubed and one solid state. Solid state amps tend to produce distortion on odd-order harmonics, especially the third and those at extremely high multiples relative to the fundamental; this creates the "cold," or "icy" feeling that a lot of solid state amps have. I own one of the most powerful small-output amplifiers on the market in terms of sound quality; total distortion is literally zero and it possesses something like a -130dB noise floor (see www.headphone.com for more info). Look at guitar amps. Good guitar amps are always tubed for this reason: overdriving a vacuum transistor (a tube) produces these full bodied, rich, beautiful harmonics, whilst solid state just never seems to sound right, and in most cases sounds downright wretched. This is old hat to a lot of people. Worthy of posting on slashdot, although the article is ridiculously verbose and poorly demonstrates differences between the two; it is more of an objective analysis. -Foo
Do corporations outlaw email because someone could smuggle an important corporate document through a simple email attachment? You can put a heck of a lot of info on a single freemail attachment in a text file, and / or use a corporate POP3 mailserver too. Do corporations also outlaw CD-Rs because they could be used to copy important data? Do corporations outlaw floppy discs? And, above all, do corporations give their employees a darned internet connection to begin with? What about the internet itself? If someone is truly paranoid about security, it'd be more effective to plug already existing giant holes in security, and completely strip their employees of all the fundamental tools of the information age. It's hard to prevent the exchange of information on the computer: after all, a computer is a device specifically designed for just that purpose, anyways. If someone goes through all the trouble to smuggle files on an iPod when he could simply PGP encrypt them over email, it would be an act of stupidity anyways. Conclusively, it's a bad idea banning the iPods from offices. -Foo
If you are referring to UT2003, try GibGames.com port 2206 or 2225 for the more "skilled" players, or just connect to one of the countless deathmatch servers. Cheaters are rarely a problem; I encounter a cheater once in every twenty matches on UT2003. With Quake 3 your best bet is to only join servers with punkbuster enabled (this should have been obvious already) as it seems to stop cheating to some degree.
Some inexperienced FPS players automatically assume that someone's cheating when they get smacked down, often repeatedly. 99% of the time it's just skill, in my experience. I often thought the same way when people would have 20 frags and no deaths. However, I now realize that it's just talent. I am not in any way saying that you are one of these people, it's just that cheating is a lot rarer on online FPS games than one might expect from reading this post.
I have no experience with Half-Life: Counterstrike. This only applies to Q3 and UT2003.
That's incorrect. The logic is as follows: 1. IF 2^P - 1 is prime, THEN 2. P is prime. Since 2^4 - 1 is not prime, 4 is not prime. The theorem is true as such. Please RTA before posting.
This is actually an excellent step forward from a software perspective: not only will products be sellable with lower quantities of packaging material, but the actual disc medium itself is tiny. This is obviously a step forward for the environment. Storing your solid medium on chips of that size would greatly cut down on size, although the cost is going to have to be pretty low to get the market to convert quickly (it took a good five to ten years for the market to start embracing CD). Another excellent side effect of this technology will be its influence on the price of CDs. If it's fully marketed, the average sale price for a compact disc will drop significantly, both due to the fact that producers favor the newer format and also stores cleaning out their inventory. This is what's happening with vinyl now: lots of people are selling their records for TWO DOLLARS a pop, and people who still feel that the sound quality of CD is inferior to vinyl are having a heck of a time. This is bound to happen with CDs. Good deals will be found everywhere, etc. The only thing that's bad about chips like this is the chance to re-write the rules, so to speak, and design a system from the outset which embraces copy protection. Remember, CDs weren't designed from the outset to have foolproof copy protection as the problems were not realized for quite some time. Giving companies the chance to design a music format FROM THE OUTSET with digital piracy in mind would lead to perhaps unbeatable (correction, pretty darned good) copy protection. Of course, whatever companies do, there is one grand rule: you MUST appeal to the high-end market when starting a new format. This is how CD got going back in the eighties: because of production costs, only the audiophile one percent of the market was worth looking at due to sheer quantity and per unit costs. Only after the high end community purchased the new format did it finally filter down to average human beings (anyone remember the extraordinary costs of the first few CD players?). This is leading somewhere: in order to appeal to the audiophiles, the format must SOUND GOOD. CD sounded passable and thus gained a foothold. If copy protection degrades the sound quality (.wma etc) then nobody in the high end market will even look at the new format and it will die. Honestly, I don't think this new mini-flash type format is going to be any problem at all for the end user who wishes to copy it.