Well, I've been on of the import 'scene' for a while, but I never knew anyone who used a chip for piracy (however it wasw often a topic of discussion). And as a previous poster asked, how many total games are their for the PS2 (even though the author never referred to a PS2, but a PS1, I think it's a safe assumption that he was confused)? And while it is very likely that this guy was pirating like mad, I wouldn't be surprised if he just had access to that many imports (so having the availability of hundreds of imports would constitute distributing that many). After all, this is Sony were dealing with here. I just think theirs much more to the article than meets the eye. Afterall, it's very vague. However, no matter what, the store owner is very stupid to think that people will believe his excuse that 'he didn't know'. Installing mod chips as I remember is a fairly intensive process involving disassembling the unit and soldering a chip onto another chip without shorting everything out. If it was something that was meant to be done, it wouldn't be that complicated.
I always thought that the main reason that people installed mod chips was to play imported games? Sure, theres the benefit of playing pirated copies, but I think most people use them to defeat region protection. And if I remember correctly, didn't the Gameshark CDX for Dreamcast act like a mod chip (put in the gameshark disc, remove it and insert an import to play). And while I'm sure he knew what he was doing was illegal, couldn't those 400 games have all been imports?
Ok, well this doesn't have much to do with the actual topic, I just though I needed a place to vent this information. I was watching G4 TV (video game channel) today, and for their 'Players' series (which intereview celebrities about video games), they went to Asia Carerra's house. For those who don't know, Asia Carerra is a master of the copulating arts (or a pornstar if you want to be a d*ck about it*). Well, apparently Asia is very much into PC gaming and running her own website. And when I saw running her own website, I mean I think she's actually the sysadmin. In her gaming room were 4 PC's and a massive bookshelf with books on linux, unix, tcp/ip, photoshop, apache, etc... She even creates her own Unreal Tournament skins in photoshop. Now damn...i'm impressed. How come I've never heard of this before, particularly being a member of the geek kingdom? And just to make this thread relevant, how does the BSA deal with people owning multiple copies of a game and not using all of them? So, what counts as use; does a sale count as use or does the game need to be used, for it to be use. Use use use.
I also have to take a second look when I check out MTV cribs. Supposedly...according to RIAA and some newspaper articles, all musicians are dirt poor and struggling to eat on the $.02 they get per CD. However Lil Bow Wow has a pimped out Mercedes C class with 20's and richie rich on the floor mat, and a house filled with crap bought on mad spending spree's. Then Master P (his dad?) rolls up in a Bentley. Truly though, I think that Antares (makers of the Auto-Tune, it can gently snap a voice into certain keys, or when abused it can often be mistaken for a vocoder) should start collecting fee's from the RIAA because Antares makes it possible for even Brandy to sound like she has a shred of talent. I can almost guarantee that 45 of the top 50 albums use Antares or similar hardware/software. I recently read an interview with BT (he produced N'Sync's "Pop!"), and he described how he went through literally a thousand differen't edits on their vocals. And J'Lo's music is 66% background singers. ARGG! I CAN'T TAKE IT. I'M GOING TO ESPLODE (the correct spelling of course, lol). Well, back on subject. Of course both airwave and net radio stations should pay royalties. Especially the webcasters, because all those people are out to do is make money and rape musicians intellectual property. If it weren't for organizations like the RIAA, who else would stick up for the little guy?::puking puddles of sarcasm right now::
I'd like to reccomend MP3.com. They have a great library of music and at this stage in your musical development...it's just best to find out what your into. While much of the IDM (Aphex Twin, Autechre) and big beat (Crystal Method, Chemcial Brothers) is good music, you musn't limit yourself. My guess is that you would be into progressive house (it's similar to house, usually darker, and often contain bongos and congas), or progressive trance. So download some music by some of the MP3.com artists, some of it is actually pretty good. Then once you find your style, check out the major labels. Yoshitoshi and Bedrock are great progressive house labels. But you still shouldn't limit yourself to any specific genres. Tower Records has a pretty good selection of music (more than any other major chain). And I think this is the best example of how P2P's can be good...boot up Kazaa Lite or a Gnutella client and go nuts.
While i've never been overseas, from what I hear piracy is rampant. Microsoft is trying to sell $100 to a family in russia that makes zilch. There are massive piracy for profits outfits in countries like russia and china, where they just sell software for $2 among crowds of other vendors. And while I don't feel it's right to mess shut those pirates down, they play a robin hood role in my mind, shouldn't that be a larger target?
And I'd also like to be one of the many people here to point out that just because I've pirated software such as AutoCAD, 3DSMAX, Logic, Cubase, Photoshop, blah blah, etc..., doesn't mean that software companies are losing out on $30k. I would have NEVER purchased that software. They simply provided me with some entertainment and exploration on a rainy day. Anyone who has a legitimate use for AutoCAD...has the cash to pay for it. Anyone who needs $10k software...has the means to pay for it. Warcraft 3 is a differen't story however. Stats saying that software companies are losing out on billions of dollars is insane.
Kazaa and programs based on it's code (Grokster?), have a rating system that allows you to rate a file (very good, goo, bad, very bad). I'm not sure if it average the ratings of all the users who have it and who have rated it, so it's not fool proof. In addition...not one ever really pays attention to the ratings, most don't even know their there. But you do have the ability to filter results.
***BTW, while I was testing all the differen't P2P apps, Morpheus installed a little "shopping helper". The jist of it is that certain websites (mainly retail sites), when visited prompt a "would you like to view special offers from this company" box, and this is supposedly intented to list offers on the page which wouldn't otherwise be availabe (i.e. discounts). In reality, I'm sure the program is just used to create a user profile to tailor the retail site based on your downloads. However the weirdest thing is the ATT Broadband has a partnership with this spyware company, so you get the prompt when you go to their site. Isn't it odd that ATT, who is suppose to be outraged over P2P and bandwidth consumption, is paying a spyware company associated with them? It's the equivalent of Sony making mp3 players and bitching about their poor record sales.
It would be interesting to see an article about the worldwide groups of chemists and the lengths they go to. They probably even synthesize their own chemicals used in production. Mass orders of kerosene and sodium carbonate are sure to turn heads. Also...Coca leaves don't magically turn themselves into cocaine hydrochloride, that has to take some skill.
May I reccomend Sparknotes.com. Their mainly known for their own online brand of Cliff's Notes, however their math sections are quite in depth. Plus, everything is free, however occasionaly you'll reach a page that will ask for you to sign up, which is also free. I'm really quite happy with their site. I'm a high school student who's quite unsastisfied with the average level math track that I downgraded to (i've learned pythagorean's theorum 4 times since 4th grade, whoopi!). IMHO, the full fledged text books at my library were quite boring and made little distinction as to whats important to learn...and the other 500 pages of in depth clauses and contradictions.
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That was what I was suspecting. Where did you get you info?
Well, I've been on of the import 'scene' for a while, but I never knew anyone who used a chip for piracy (however it wasw often a topic of discussion). And as a previous poster asked, how many total games are their for the PS2 (even though the author never referred to a PS2, but a PS1, I think it's a safe assumption that he was confused)? And while it is very likely that this guy was pirating like mad, I wouldn't be surprised if he just had access to that many imports (so having the availability of hundreds of imports would constitute distributing that many). After all, this is Sony were dealing with here. I just think theirs much more to the article than meets the eye. Afterall, it's very vague. However, no matter what, the store owner is very stupid to think that people will believe his excuse that 'he didn't know'. Installing mod chips as I remember is a fairly intensive process involving disassembling the unit and soldering a chip onto another chip without shorting everything out. If it was something that was meant to be done, it wouldn't be that complicated.
I always thought that the main reason that people installed mod chips was to play imported games? Sure, theres the benefit of playing pirated copies, but I think most people use them to defeat region protection. And if I remember correctly, didn't the Gameshark CDX for Dreamcast act like a mod chip (put in the gameshark disc, remove it and insert an import to play). And while I'm sure he knew what he was doing was illegal, couldn't those 400 games have all been imports?
Ok, well this doesn't have much to do with the actual topic, I just though I needed a place to vent this information. I was watching G4 TV (video game channel) today, and for their 'Players' series (which intereview celebrities about video games), they went to Asia Carerra's house. For those who don't know, Asia Carerra is a master of the copulating arts (or a pornstar if you want to be a d*ck about it*). Well, apparently Asia is very much into PC gaming and running her own website. And when I saw running her own website, I mean I think she's actually the sysadmin. In her gaming room were 4 PC's and a massive bookshelf with books on linux, unix, tcp/ip, photoshop, apache, etc... She even creates her own Unreal Tournament skins in photoshop. Now damn...i'm impressed. How come I've never heard of this before, particularly being a member of the geek kingdom? And just to make this thread relevant, how does the BSA deal with people owning multiple copies of a game and not using all of them? So, what counts as use; does a sale count as use or does the game need to be used, for it to be use. Use use use.
'sall in the title.
I also have to take a second look when I check out MTV cribs. Supposedly...according to RIAA and some newspaper articles, all musicians are dirt poor and struggling to eat on the $.02 they get per CD. However Lil Bow Wow has a pimped out Mercedes C class with 20's and richie rich on the floor mat, and a house filled with crap bought on mad spending spree's. Then Master P (his dad?) rolls up in a Bentley. Truly though, I think that Antares (makers of the Auto-Tune, it can gently snap a voice into certain keys, or when abused it can often be mistaken for a vocoder) should start collecting fee's from the RIAA because Antares makes it possible for even Brandy to sound like she has a shred of talent. I can almost guarantee that 45 of the top 50 albums use Antares or similar hardware/software. I recently read an interview with BT (he produced N'Sync's "Pop!"), and he described how he went through literally a thousand differen't edits on their vocals. And J'Lo's music is 66% background singers. ARGG! I CAN'T TAKE IT. I'M GOING TO ESPLODE (the correct spelling of course, lol). Well, back on subject. Of course both airwave and net radio stations should pay royalties. Especially the webcasters, because all those people are out to do is make money and rape musicians intellectual property. If it weren't for organizations like the RIAA, who else would stick up for the little guy? ::puking puddles of sarcasm right now::
I'd like to reccomend MP3.com. They have a great library of music and at this stage in your musical development...it's just best to find out what your into. While much of the IDM (Aphex Twin, Autechre) and big beat (Crystal Method, Chemcial Brothers) is good music, you musn't limit yourself. My guess is that you would be into progressive house (it's similar to house, usually darker, and often contain bongos and congas), or progressive trance. So download some music by some of the MP3.com artists, some of it is actually pretty good. Then once you find your style, check out the major labels. Yoshitoshi and Bedrock are great progressive house labels. But you still shouldn't limit yourself to any specific genres. Tower Records has a pretty good selection of music (more than any other major chain). And I think this is the best example of how P2P's can be good...boot up Kazaa Lite or a Gnutella client and go nuts.
While i've never been overseas, from what I hear piracy is rampant. Microsoft is trying to sell $100 to a family in russia that makes zilch. There are massive piracy for profits outfits in countries like russia and china, where they just sell software for $2 among crowds of other vendors. And while I don't feel it's right to mess shut those pirates down, they play a robin hood role in my mind, shouldn't that be a larger target? And I'd also like to be one of the many people here to point out that just because I've pirated software such as AutoCAD, 3DSMAX, Logic, Cubase, Photoshop, blah blah, etc..., doesn't mean that software companies are losing out on $30k. I would have NEVER purchased that software. They simply provided me with some entertainment and exploration on a rainy day. Anyone who has a legitimate use for AutoCAD...has the cash to pay for it. Anyone who needs $10k software...has the means to pay for it. Warcraft 3 is a differen't story however. Stats saying that software companies are losing out on billions of dollars is insane.
Kazaa and programs based on it's code (Grokster?), have a rating system that allows you to rate a file (very good, goo, bad, very bad). I'm not sure if it average the ratings of all the users who have it and who have rated it, so it's not fool proof. In addition...not one ever really pays attention to the ratings, most don't even know their there. But you do have the ability to filter results. ***BTW, while I was testing all the differen't P2P apps, Morpheus installed a little "shopping helper". The jist of it is that certain websites (mainly retail sites), when visited prompt a "would you like to view special offers from this company" box, and this is supposedly intented to list offers on the page which wouldn't otherwise be availabe (i.e. discounts). In reality, I'm sure the program is just used to create a user profile to tailor the retail site based on your downloads. However the weirdest thing is the ATT Broadband has a partnership with this spyware company, so you get the prompt when you go to their site. Isn't it odd that ATT, who is suppose to be outraged over P2P and bandwidth consumption, is paying a spyware company associated with them? It's the equivalent of Sony making mp3 players and bitching about their poor record sales.
Thosa' mafia guys sure knows how to getta whadda they want, ehh? Yeah.
It would be interesting to see an article about the worldwide groups of chemists and the lengths they go to. They probably even synthesize their own chemicals used in production. Mass orders of kerosene and sodium carbonate are sure to turn heads. Also...Coca leaves don't magically turn themselves into cocaine hydrochloride, that has to take some skill.
May I reccomend Sparknotes.com. Their mainly known for their own online brand of Cliff's Notes, however their math sections are quite in depth. Plus, everything is free, however occasionaly you'll reach a page that will ask for you to sign up, which is also free. I'm really quite happy with their site. I'm a high school student who's quite unsastisfied with the average level math track that I downgraded to (i've learned pythagorean's theorum 4 times since 4th grade, whoopi!). IMHO, the full fledged text books at my library were quite boring and made little distinction as to whats important to learn...and the other 500 pages of in depth clauses and contradictions.