MUDs could afford to do that, because MUDs are (generally) free, running off the goodwill of the admins or the donations of the players. For-profit MMOGs have a much tougher time enforcing any set of play rules, because the player base is much larger, and the marginal rate of return per player tends to increase (so they want as many as they can get); and any subjective rule set meets up against those two facts, increasing the difficulty in enforcement as well as increasing the monetary costs of enforcement.
Fortunately for me, I didn't actually make an analogy, so there couldn't possibly be a flaw in it. However, I was highly entertained by the dozen people after you who felt it necessary to tell me that I'm wrong:)
There's a huge flaw in your analogy, because there's only one real use for cocaine: getting high. (Well, okay, two uses, because you can also sell cocaine to someone else, but that's beside the point.)
But a smartcard programmer could have other uses as well, both legal and illegal, and not all of them make a person financially liable to DirecTV.
*Actually*, it says that if you put a copyrighted file on a publicly-accessible network, you are considered to have distributed 10 copies during a 180-day period with a retail value of at least $2500. That means that all you have to do is put a file for which you don't have license to distribute it on a public network, and you get slapped with the same charge that the FBI warning at the front of videotapes describes.
The article was pretty good, touching on all the compliments and complaints people have been giving the game so far (although some of the specifics were weak - there are numerous bugs, some professions are having difficulty because of them, and those difficulties will last for another two weeks due to the QA process).
As far as SWG itself goes, it's really a lot more like The Sims Online, except there are things to do other than be a Sim (which was TSO's biggest flaw). Oh, and it's Star Wars. Sometimes. Depending on where you are and what you're doing. The power droids and mouse droids make the right noises, and there are miscellaneous NPCs to tie in with the continuity. Tatooine is there, too. But it's also possible to go places and almost forget that you're in the Star Wars universe.
I am at about $500, plus a bit of blood/sweat/tears, for mine. Admittedly, the video card was one I had lying around (an old TNT2 with a broken GPU fan that is still holding up nicely).
Still, the biggest thing holding back MythTV and Freevo is the periodic changes made to the TV listings (the most recent one involved me making manual database changes to get it to change the channel when recording). Until a free, low-bandwidth solution to TV listings is devised (good luck there), this will always be a problem.
"At least in EQ the "Game Masters" could materialize in front of you and looked sufficiently godlike. In SWG they are just a voice on the chat-channel (when you finally get them)."
I think they took a cue from DAoC on that one. A considerable amount of time was wasted in EQ CS by having to wait for your machine to zone, wait to do this and that, and generally figure out what was going on by going there. Yeah, you lose that personal touch sometimes, but the intent is to make the process more efficient (especially given that they are woefully understaffed).
Except design decisions aren't about customer service. Sure, perhaps UO completely failed in the arena of "casual PVP"*, but how was their CS?
( * Though in a game such as UO where advancement is such a huge focus of gameplay, I'm not sure how you can do casual PVP without a complete redesign of the entire game.)
Problems with Customer Service in online games are nothing new. The several people above complaining about CS in UO, of all games, should indicate that.
But the real problem is that CS in an online game is, believe it or not, hard. Reasons for this:
Customers asking for things they cannot have due to regulations governing CS. These are games, they have rules, and they have to be fair for everyone. If CS grants certain favors to some players and not others, those other people complain. Ironically enough, if CS doesn't grant those favors to some players and not others, the some players are the ones complaining.
Customers asking for immediate gratification through immediate information, even when the knowledge will not gratify them. So the servers are down. "Why why why?" "OMG wehn will tehy b bakc up!!!!1" If you've ever been in an online game's out-of-game chat when the servers were down, you've probably seen your fair share of this. The problem is, there are tons of people asking why, there are tons of people complaining, and many of them will not be sated by the truth anyway. Yes, the servers are down, and the players have reason to be distraught, but unless the company is completely slacking off, someone is working on the problem.
There are usually not enough CS staff for the number of players. This is exacerbated by two factors: one, a small portion of the player base makes an inordinately large portion of the requests received by the CS staff; and two, CS is notoriously underpaid in the MMOG industry. (For reference, EverQuest GMs used to be hired initially as temps, and after the temp agency took its cut, they were making about $8 per thankless hour, while living mostly just north of San Diego.)
Customers suck. Yeah, that's not a very polite way to say it, but drawing from some of the earlier points I made, this summary can be obtained: an inordinately small portion of the customer base complains both constantly and quite rudely to an overworked, underpaid CS team about issues beyond CS's control. Players blame CS for everything, because CS is the front line for a lot of their problems, regardless of where the request should go. CS generally doesn't handle tech support (though this depends to some extent on the company). CS certainly is not in charge of making design decisions. CS has a very limited scope of action, yet customers who do not (or refuse to) understand this continue to levy their complaints against the first people they see - customer service.
Lawyers suck even worse. Ever since the AOL lawsuit regarding volunteer workers, MMOG maintainers have been scared shitless of the implications of being sued. EverQuest was and is, to my knowledge, the only professionally-published online game still to make use of volunteer customer service personnel. While the Guide Program was not the perfect solution to the customer service problem, it provided advantages in terms of cost to the end-user which are unavailable when all of a company's CS staff must be hired. Yes, a company should absorb the costs of customer service when they are making money hand-over-fist, but realistically, no company is going to cut the bottom line to make the customers happy when they have a parent company (with shareholders) breathing down their neck. (Alternatively, shareholders and parent companies suck and will be a thorn in the side of customers until their expectations on return can be brought to a more reasonable level.)
So, yes, CS is hard. Everyone hates you - the customers, the pencil-pushing-penny-pinchers, everyone. Do companies owe us good CS for our money? Yes, of course. For our $14.95 a month, we should be getting the same sort of CS we get from the phone company, the cable company, plumbers, banks, mechanics.......
...and hopefully the irony there was lost on no one.
Actually, I consider it to be more clear-cut than that. The examples you cited appear to be on the "good" side - at least, unless Communist agents in 1970s Norway would have been likely to kill US agents at the listening stations.
The issue here is that police officers could be targeted and killed serially with the information published. It may be legal to do it, and it may be an exercise of free speech liberties, but it is still a bad idea.
I don't really have a good question to ask them, but I might suggest that they take a look at the dslreports thread referenced at this link. The guy(s) those people are investigating are actually trying to sell other people's software for profit, not to mention spamming people to do it, which is a good deal worse than those who share music at the cost of their own bandwidth.
Oh, I take it back, I do have a question:
How much effort is being spent these days on investigating old-fashioned for-profit organized-crime software piracy, like selling WinXP out-of-the-box at local computer shows, versus pursuing home computer users sharing files over peer-to-peer networks?
Depending on the rules used to drive the CA, the number of columns could have an effect anywhere between no effect at all, or an effect dependent upon the value modulo some number which is dependent upon the rules.
In other words, some systems might not be affected by the number of columns at all (for instance, those where the boundaries of the affected CA cells don't expand - these are typically degenerate cases anyway. But another system might produce different behavior if it has 4n columns versus 4n+1, 4n+2, or 4n+3.
Ultimately, he should examine lots of different numbers of columns, at least up to the point where the behavior repeats qualitatively, thus determining the k in kn, kn+1, kn+2,... , kn+(k-1).
Boston University recently installed an additional set of extra-wide double doors for the sole purpose of permitting Wolfram to get his enormous self-absorbed head into the lecture hall.
"As members of the WTO, and signatories to TRIPS, these countries really don't have a choice; they'd be in breach of the TRIPS treaty if they do not ratify these laws."
But what's the penalty for not upholding the treaty? Are they suing each nation in its own courts, or is there some sort of EU-approved court that the suits are being filed in? Seems to me that, typically, the penalties for violating treaty terms range anywhere from "do nothing" to "enact sanctions" to "invade".
I suppose this was a victory for hard-line free-speech advocates and various other extreme hippies everywhere, but it just seems like a phenomenally bad idea to take advantage of this ruling. I mean, as others have mentioned, a cop gets whacked by someone who gets this information, and the next thing you know, the cop's family is suing the maintainers of the website.
There are good ways to work against the "establishment". This sure isn't one of them - after all, "pigs" are people, too.
I would mod them all to run Linux, and then have them all simultaneously post one reply each to this thread about making a Beowulf cluster out of them.
I am of the firm belief that a significant amount of total shit on the Internet would not have appeared had domain name registration not been "privatized". Pool.com should be counting their blessings that they can even broker in domain names in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
MUDs could afford to do that, because MUDs are (generally) free, running off the goodwill of the admins or the donations of the players. For-profit MMOGs have a much tougher time enforcing any set of play rules, because the player base is much larger, and the marginal rate of return per player tends to increase (so they want as many as they can get); and any subjective rule set meets up against those two facts, increasing the difficulty in enforcement as well as increasing the monetary costs of enforcement.
It's a shame more /. posts aren't more confusing. It might actually inspire more people to RTFA.
Fortunately for me, I didn't actually make an analogy, so there couldn't possibly be a flaw in it. However, I was highly entertained by the dozen people after you who felt it necessary to tell me that I'm wrong :)
Wow... Well, I went to the DEA's website expecting to see cocaine listed as Schedule I, but it is indeed Schedule II. I stand corrected.
There's a huge flaw in your analogy, because there's only one real use for cocaine: getting high. (Well, okay, two uses, because you can also sell cocaine to someone else, but that's beside the point.)
But a smartcard programmer could have other uses as well, both legal and illegal, and not all of them make a person financially liable to DirecTV.
Actually, there *are* differences in penalty depending on the volume of infringement.
But the entire *point* of the bill is to create FUD.
*Actually*, it says that if you put a copyrighted file on a publicly-accessible network, you are considered to have distributed 10 copies during a 180-day period with a retail value of at least $2500. That means that all you have to do is put a file for which you don't have license to distribute it on a public network, and you get slapped with the same charge that the FBI warning at the front of videotapes describes.
The article was pretty good, touching on all the compliments and complaints people have been giving the game so far (although some of the specifics were weak - there are numerous bugs, some professions are having difficulty because of them, and those difficulties will last for another two weeks due to the QA process).
As far as SWG itself goes, it's really a lot more like The Sims Online, except there are things to do other than be a Sim (which was TSO's biggest flaw). Oh, and it's Star Wars. Sometimes. Depending on where you are and what you're doing. The power droids and mouse droids make the right noises, and there are miscellaneous NPCs to tie in with the continuity. Tatooine is there, too. But it's also possible to go places and almost forget that you're in the Star Wars universe.
I am at about $500, plus a bit of blood/sweat/tears, for mine. Admittedly, the video card was one I had lying around (an old TNT2 with a broken GPU fan that is still holding up nicely).
Still, the biggest thing holding back MythTV and Freevo is the periodic changes made to the TV listings (the most recent one involved me making manual database changes to get it to change the channel when recording). Until a free, low-bandwidth solution to TV listings is devised (good luck there), this will always be a problem.
"At least in EQ the "Game Masters" could materialize in front of you and looked sufficiently godlike. In SWG they are just a voice on the chat-channel (when you finally get them)."
I think they took a cue from DAoC on that one. A considerable amount of time was wasted in EQ CS by having to wait for your machine to zone, wait to do this and that, and generally figure out what was going on by going there. Yeah, you lose that personal touch sometimes, but the intent is to make the process more efficient (especially given that they are woefully understaffed).
What, you people are still reading this? I've got karma to spare. :P
Except design decisions aren't about customer service. Sure, perhaps UO completely failed in the arena of "casual PVP"*, but how was their CS?
( * Though in a game such as UO where advancement is such a huge focus of gameplay, I'm not sure how you can do casual PVP without a complete redesign of the entire game.)
But the real problem is that CS in an online game is, believe it or not, hard. Reasons for this:
So, yes, CS is hard. Everyone hates you - the customers, the pencil-pushing-penny-pinchers, everyone. Do companies owe us good CS for our money? Yes, of course. For our $14.95 a month, we should be getting the same sort of CS we get from the phone company, the cable company, plumbers, banks, mechanics.......
Apologies to the extreme hippies who were offended enough by my post to rate it as flamebait.
Actually, I consider it to be more clear-cut than that. The examples you cited appear to be on the "good" side - at least, unless Communist agents in 1970s Norway would have been likely to kill US agents at the listening stations.
The issue here is that police officers could be targeted and killed serially with the information published. It may be legal to do it, and it may be an exercise of free speech liberties, but it is still a bad idea.
I believe that would be OSDN.
I don't really have a good question to ask them, but I might suggest that they take a look at the dslreports thread referenced at this link. The guy(s) those people are investigating are actually trying to sell other people's software for profit, not to mention spamming people to do it, which is a good deal worse than those who share music at the cost of their own bandwidth.
Oh, I take it back, I do have a question:
How much effort is being spent these days on investigating old-fashioned for-profit organized-crime software piracy, like selling WinXP out-of-the-box at local computer shows, versus pursuing home computer users sharing files over peer-to-peer networks?
Depending on the rules used to drive the CA, the number of columns could have an effect anywhere between no effect at all, or an effect dependent upon the value modulo some number which is dependent upon the rules.
... , kn+(k-1).
In other words, some systems might not be affected by the number of columns at all (for instance, those where the boundaries of the affected CA cells don't expand - these are typically degenerate cases anyway. But another system might produce different behavior if it has 4n columns versus 4n+1, 4n+2, or 4n+3.
Ultimately, he should examine lots of different numbers of columns, at least up to the point where the behavior repeats qualitatively, thus determining the k in kn, kn+1, kn+2,
Boston University recently installed an additional set of extra-wide double doors for the sole purpose of permitting Wolfram to get his enormous self-absorbed head into the lecture hall.
"As members of the WTO, and signatories to TRIPS, these countries really don't have a choice; they'd be in breach of the TRIPS treaty if they do not ratify these laws."
But what's the penalty for not upholding the treaty? Are they suing each nation in its own courts, or is there some sort of EU-approved court that the suits are being filed in? Seems to me that, typically, the penalties for violating treaty terms range anywhere from "do nothing" to "enact sanctions" to "invade".
I suppose this was a victory for hard-line free-speech advocates and various other extreme hippies everywhere, but it just seems like a phenomenally bad idea to take advantage of this ruling. I mean, as others have mentioned, a cop gets whacked by someone who gets this information, and the next thing you know, the cop's family is suing the maintainers of the website.
There are good ways to work against the "establishment". This sure isn't one of them - after all, "pigs" are people, too.
I would mod them all to run Linux, and then have them all simultaneously post one reply each to this thread about making a Beowulf cluster out of them.
I am of the firm belief that a significant amount of total shit on the Internet would not have appeared had domain name registration not been "privatized". Pool.com should be counting their blessings that they can even broker in domain names in the first place.
God, Reebok actually did this already once, and it was way funnier that time. Sound and everything. How lame.
(I would provide a link, but it's registration-required.)