That's obviously the game publishers' argument, because it bolsters their case, but they have yet to provide evidence that the people ripping off these games/movies/songs would have paid for them sight-unseen.
is the University going to go to bat for the students and fight the litigation on the ground that it's based on zero evidence, and on the ground that the students weren't given prior notice and an opportunity to be heard?
The thing is, the RIAA doesn't really want to sue people. They want people to roll over and pay the $3000. That's almost entirely free money - they pay some small amount per IP to their dogs at MediaSentry, they pay some paralegal to fill in blanks on a form letter, and they pay some postage in order to send them out. Then they just wait until the money starts rolling in. A 10:1 profit margin wouldn't seem unreasonable, even if you factor in the supposed "losses" due to online sharing.
But every time someone fights back, whether it's against the RIAA's ex parte tactics or in a full-blown lawsuit, it costs them big. There are real lawyers getting paid real money to litigate real suits. Any returns are years off, and it's a roll of the dice as to whether they'll see anything for their efforts besides a bill from the defendant's lawyers.
The only reason that the RIAA files these lawsuits is because a few people have called their bluff. Imagine if the mob decided that breaking people's kneecaps was too risky/costly. Once people found out, nobody would pay them the protection money. Very similar situation with the RIAA: if the RIAA started ignoring people who ignored their settlement letters, and other people found out about it, then nobody would pony up the $3000. (Which, of course, is why these articles usually get tagged "mafiaa".)
By not forwarding the settlement letters, Duke complicates the cash cow portion of this formula. Ostensibly, the RIAA could find some way around this, but it'll undoubtedly be more complicated and cut into their settlement revenues. At some point, there's a line at which any hoped-for decrease in sharing is more than offset by the increase in pre- and litigation costs, and once the RIAA actually realizes that, their litigation campaign will stop. While many of us believe that the RIAA has been past that line the whole time, it'll take a lot more people fighting back to convince the RIAA of that.
Oh, and a ruling on unconstitutionally high damages favorable to the public interest wouldn't hurt, either.
I'm not sure this works with all games on Steam, but for a lot of the ones I've bought, I can just create a shortcut to the game executable directly. (The Steam-created shortcuts actually run Steam first and then run the game.)
They're not exactly equal. On GeoCities, everybody had a hideously god-awful web page because so few people had any talent in web design. But on MySpace, having a hideously god-awful website is you're supposed to do.
Starting salaries at the PTO are in the $52k to $71k range, with recruitment/retention bonuses dependent upon your field of expertise.
Also, promotions come pretty fast at the PTO. If you have sufficient production, you can get promoted at six months for an increase of two pay grades, for example. Anybody who stays a few years should be able to reach GS-13, which pays a minimum of $91k, and most people who make a career out of it will reach GS-14 or GS-15, which puts them into six digits.
Look here if you're interested in job security, good pay, and government benefits. Just be warned that it is a production environment, and they do let people go for not meeting their quotas.
Considering this, why would anyone expect to find the ruins of their house or some other prominent landmark in the Capital Wasteland is beyond me
That wasn't exactly what I said. Nobody expects to see the ruins of their house, but they might have hopes that they could make a guess based on the maps and other info provided in the game and then go there. Unfortunately, though, the geography of the area are profoundly different from that in real life.
For example, the Lincoln Memorial is on the west end of the National Mall, not too far from the east bank of the Potomac River. If you're standing in a building on the National Mall and you ask where the Lincoln Memorial is, you would expect them to say "west", but instead, they say "east".
Also, the Metro map layout makes it nearly impossible to figure out how to get there from here, regardless of where here and there are. Simple concepts of direction and distance are twisted into unrecognizable form. While it's nice that you can navigate most places in the game's DC area by hiking through the Metro tunnels, attempting to figure out how the locations of the surface exits correspond to the Metro system map is futile.
None of this is to say that it's a bad game, because it isn't. Yes, it's a lot like Oblivion with guns, but with slightly better rails for those who don't like open-ended RPGs.
Sadly, the similarities between the Washington DC area and Fallout 3's representation of it don't go much beyond those landmarks and a few borrowed community names (Falls Church, etc.). DC area residents hoping to go where their house was 269 years ago will be disappointed, because the locations of various towns, bridges, rivers, etc., are nowhere near their present-day locations. One might have thought that the decision for a DC-area company to produce content set in the DC area would have resulted in a world a bit truer to the real thing than what they actually came up with.
On the plus side, at least some of the Metro stations actually do look a bit like the real thing.
If, as an applicant, you are in possession of potential grounds for rejection, you have a statutory duty to disclose those grounds to the PTO. Later on, if your patent ends up the subject of litigation, and it becomes apparent that you intentionally withheld information from the PTO relevant to the patentability of your invention, that alone is grounds for invalidation of the patent.
He also said that the best way to get a patent through is to contact the patent reviewer assigned to your application near the end of the month, agree to a rejection on specific grounds (even if they are minor, simply to help them fill their quota), and then resubmit the next month with a response to those issues.
"Agree to a rejection"? As an applicant, you don't have any say in whether your application gets rejected or not, aside from doing your best to ensure that the application meets the statutory requirements when you file it or amend it. You could contact the examiner, I suppose, and say that you happily accept a rejection, but the examiner still has to write up a rationale for the rejection. Once you get the office action describing the rejection, you have some time to submit a response, and at that point, it's up to you to decide to be a dick about it or not.
Also, PTO quotas become more important at the end of a quarter and particularly at the end of a fiscal year. Some agents will pester examiners for interviews around that time in the hopes that the examiner will be more amenable to allowance, since allowance = disposal = a count.
That's not entirely true. All of the PTO's funding still has to be appropriated by Congress, but they generally give back roughly all the revenue that the PTO collects.
Also, since KSR v. Teleflex last year, allowance rates are down sharply.
This ruling goes along with the PTO's current practice to a large degree, actually. The only major hole through which software patents can be driven through under current practice is the "machine-readable medium encoding a program"-type of claim.
With respect to Windows, there are really two major things that add to the delays. Yes, POST takes some time, but it's not a ridiculous amount of time if you turn off the memory check (or set it to the short version if that's what your BIOS allows).
One: Registry bloat. It takes time for Windows to process the registry, and that time increases the longer it's been since your last reinstall, because everything out there these days adds tons upon tons of pointless crap to the registry (I'm looking in your direction, Adobe!). All of it gets parsed during bootup, and older machines feel some serious pain during this process.
Two: Simultaneous startup programs. Windows doesn't have any facility for intelligent startup of programs. It looks in the Run key or the Startup group and simultaneously runs everything it finds. The end result is a ton of processes, all looking to do their initialization routines (frequently disk-heavy operations), with the processor task-switching among them. The bottlenecks cause none of the startup programs to load quickly, and furthermore, the total startup time ends up being more than if each program were started up one at a time. Multicore processors have mitigated this somewhat, but we shouldn't need a hardware solution for what should be considered a software problem.
BatMUD was my first foray into the world of online gaming as well. The amazing thing is that it's nearly two decades old itself, and still going moderately strong (although it doesn't get the 300+ peak simultaneous users it had back in the '90s).
Well, the compile date on PHP was October 8, and our site got hacked October 9. I think it's a safe bet that the setting got altered at the same time that they last tinkered with PHP.
By the way, we didn't have access to alter php.ini on that box, so I'm certainly not going to blame us for the setting getting changed.
The scripts we're using are all fine (mainly vBulletin, which has been redundantly turning register_globals off on a per-script basis for ages now), but you never know when someone else hosted on the same server is running something with a known vulnerability.
Hilarious! A website I co-maintain switched away from IX just last week, because when they last recompiled PHP, they set the register_globals setting to "on", thus allowing our site (and who knows how many others) to get hacked. When we asked them about it, they claimed that the default setting in PHP 4 and 5 is "on", which isn't true (the default has been "off" since 4.2.0, in 2002, and the setting is being done away with altogether in PHP 6).
They have horrible service, with response time to service tickets measured in days. We've had numerous issues with the database servers being pegged as they've expanded their customer base without upgrading their servers. You can't restore from backups without contacting customer service. Sure, it's cheap, but as they say, you get what you pay for.
The incident mentioned by the OP is apparently the frosting on the cake.
Most of those "users" were probably spambots, if it's anything like the forums I maintain.:P
As for the entrapment angle, this one's easy. The FBI guy sets up the site, drops a few whispers around the Tubes, and gets people to show up. Maybe the FBI has some controlled info to spread around so that people get interested, but they can turn those accounts off quickly enough that it doesn't spend a lot of taxpayer money.
After a while, people start exchanging their own stolen credit card info for cash using the site as an intermediary. They discuss their own criminal exploits, and they unwittingly provide the information needed to trace themselves to their physical location, because they now trust the site and don't bother using a proxy for anonymity. The FBI guy only has to stay involved in a general way, making his presence felt as the site's maintainer, and everyone else will continue willingly providing evidence against themselves without the direct prodding of the FBI guy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's obviously the game publishers' argument, because it bolsters their case, but they have yet to provide evidence that the people ripping off these games/movies/songs would have paid for them sight-unseen.
is the University going to go to bat for the students and fight the litigation on the ground that it's based on zero evidence, and on the ground that the students weren't given prior notice and an opportunity to be heard?
The thing is, the RIAA doesn't really want to sue people. They want people to roll over and pay the $3000. That's almost entirely free money - they pay some small amount per IP to their dogs at MediaSentry, they pay some paralegal to fill in blanks on a form letter, and they pay some postage in order to send them out. Then they just wait until the money starts rolling in. A 10:1 profit margin wouldn't seem unreasonable, even if you factor in the supposed "losses" due to online sharing.
But every time someone fights back, whether it's against the RIAA's ex parte tactics or in a full-blown lawsuit, it costs them big. There are real lawyers getting paid real money to litigate real suits. Any returns are years off, and it's a roll of the dice as to whether they'll see anything for their efforts besides a bill from the defendant's lawyers.
The only reason that the RIAA files these lawsuits is because a few people have called their bluff. Imagine if the mob decided that breaking people's kneecaps was too risky/costly. Once people found out, nobody would pay them the protection money. Very similar situation with the RIAA: if the RIAA started ignoring people who ignored their settlement letters, and other people found out about it, then nobody would pony up the $3000. (Which, of course, is why these articles usually get tagged "mafiaa".)
By not forwarding the settlement letters, Duke complicates the cash cow portion of this formula. Ostensibly, the RIAA could find some way around this, but it'll undoubtedly be more complicated and cut into their settlement revenues. At some point, there's a line at which any hoped-for decrease in sharing is more than offset by the increase in pre- and litigation costs, and once the RIAA actually realizes that, their litigation campaign will stop. While many of us believe that the RIAA has been past that line the whole time, it'll take a lot more people fighting back to convince the RIAA of that.
Oh, and a ruling on unconstitutionally high damages favorable to the public interest wouldn't hurt, either.
I'm not sure this works with all games on Steam, but for a lot of the ones I've bought, I can just create a shortcut to the game executable directly. (The Steam-created shortcuts actually run Steam first and then run the game.)
They're not exactly equal. On GeoCities, everybody had a hideously god-awful web page because so few people had any talent in web design. But on MySpace, having a hideously god-awful website is you're supposed to do.
Starting salaries at the PTO are in the $52k to $71k range, with recruitment/retention bonuses dependent upon your field of expertise.
Also, promotions come pretty fast at the PTO. If you have sufficient production, you can get promoted at six months for an increase of two pay grades, for example. Anybody who stays a few years should be able to reach GS-13, which pays a minimum of $91k, and most people who make a career out of it will reach GS-14 or GS-15, which puts them into six digits.
Look here if you're interested in job security, good pay, and government benefits. Just be warned that it is a production environment, and they do let people go for not meeting their quotas.
Too bad the Moon's just one big tourist trap now.
I'm the Dungeon Master! I control worlds, universes! Every potion you drink, I mixed it! Every magic item you find, I put it there!
Are they connected again? The traffic is flowing.
The Spacing Guild must have complained.
The spice must flow!
Considering this, why would anyone expect to find the ruins of their house or some other prominent landmark in the Capital Wasteland is beyond me
That wasn't exactly what I said. Nobody expects to see the ruins of their house, but they might have hopes that they could make a guess based on the maps and other info provided in the game and then go there. Unfortunately, though, the geography of the area are profoundly different from that in real life.
For example, the Lincoln Memorial is on the west end of the National Mall, not too far from the east bank of the Potomac River. If you're standing in a building on the National Mall and you ask where the Lincoln Memorial is, you would expect them to say "west", but instead, they say "east".
Also, the Metro map layout makes it nearly impossible to figure out how to get there from here, regardless of where here and there are. Simple concepts of direction and distance are twisted into unrecognizable form. While it's nice that you can navigate most places in the game's DC area by hiking through the Metro tunnels, attempting to figure out how the locations of the surface exits correspond to the Metro system map is futile.
None of this is to say that it's a bad game, because it isn't. Yes, it's a lot like Oblivion with guns, but with slightly better rails for those who don't like open-ended RPGs.
Sadly, the similarities between the Washington DC area and Fallout 3's representation of it don't go much beyond those landmarks and a few borrowed community names (Falls Church, etc.). DC area residents hoping to go where their house was 269 years ago will be disappointed, because the locations of various towns, bridges, rivers, etc., are nowhere near their present-day locations. One might have thought that the decision for a DC-area company to produce content set in the DC area would have resulted in a world a bit truer to the real thing than what they actually came up with.
On the plus side, at least some of the Metro stations actually do look a bit like the real thing.
If, as an applicant, you are in possession of potential grounds for rejection, you have a statutory duty to disclose those grounds to the PTO. Later on, if your patent ends up the subject of litigation, and it becomes apparent that you intentionally withheld information from the PTO relevant to the patentability of your invention, that alone is grounds for invalidation of the patent.
He also said that the best way to get a patent through is to contact the patent reviewer assigned to your application near the end of the month, agree to a rejection on specific grounds (even if they are minor, simply to help them fill their quota), and then resubmit the next month with a response to those issues.
"Agree to a rejection"? As an applicant, you don't have any say in whether your application gets rejected or not, aside from doing your best to ensure that the application meets the statutory requirements when you file it or amend it. You could contact the examiner, I suppose, and say that you happily accept a rejection, but the examiner still has to write up a rationale for the rejection. Once you get the office action describing the rejection, you have some time to submit a response, and at that point, it's up to you to decide to be a dick about it or not.
Also, PTO quotas become more important at the end of a quarter and particularly at the end of a fiscal year. Some agents will pester examiners for interviews around that time in the hopes that the examiner will be more amenable to allowance, since allowance = disposal = a count.
Have you been using the same Slashdot I've been on?
I'm just amazed nobody's blamed the Bush administration yet.
That's not entirely true. All of the PTO's funding still has to be appropriated by Congress, but they generally give back roughly all the revenue that the PTO collects.
Also, since KSR v. Teleflex last year, allowance rates are down sharply.
This ruling goes along with the PTO's current practice to a large degree, actually. The only major hole through which software patents can be driven through under current practice is the "machine-readable medium encoding a program"-type of claim.
With respect to Windows, there are really two major things that add to the delays. Yes, POST takes some time, but it's not a ridiculous amount of time if you turn off the memory check (or set it to the short version if that's what your BIOS allows).
One: Registry bloat. It takes time for Windows to process the registry, and that time increases the longer it's been since your last reinstall, because everything out there these days adds tons upon tons of pointless crap to the registry (I'm looking in your direction, Adobe!). All of it gets parsed during bootup, and older machines feel some serious pain during this process.
Two: Simultaneous startup programs. Windows doesn't have any facility for intelligent startup of programs. It looks in the Run key or the Startup group and simultaneously runs everything it finds. The end result is a ton of processes, all looking to do their initialization routines (frequently disk-heavy operations), with the processor task-switching among them. The bottlenecks cause none of the startup programs to load quickly, and furthermore, the total startup time ends up being more than if each program were started up one at a time. Multicore processors have mitigated this somewhat, but we shouldn't need a hardware solution for what should be considered a software problem.
that is a well thought-out argument for having it enabled by default
How many webmasters do you know who put that level of thought into their work?
Nah, the Supreme Court finally told the D.C. government that at least part of the Constitution actually does apply there.
Why does neither the game, nor the AI races, react appropriately when I take my ship to their homeworld and suck up all its atmosphere
They're probably in disbelief that you managed to guess the code to the atmospheric shield.
Who the hell even picked 9 and 5
Uh...... Dolly Parton?
www.bat.org
BatMUD was my first foray into the world of online gaming as well. The amazing thing is that it's nearly two decades old itself, and still going moderately strong (although it doesn't get the 300+ peak simultaneous users it had back in the '90s).
Well, the compile date on PHP was October 8, and our site got hacked October 9. I think it's a safe bet that the setting got altered at the same time that they last tinkered with PHP.
By the way, we didn't have access to alter php.ini on that box, so I'm certainly not going to blame us for the setting getting changed.
The scripts we're using are all fine (mainly vBulletin, which has been redundantly turning register_globals off on a per-script basis for ages now), but you never know when someone else hosted on the same server is running something with a known vulnerability.
Hilarious! A website I co-maintain switched away from IX just last week, because when they last recompiled PHP, they set the register_globals setting to "on", thus allowing our site (and who knows how many others) to get hacked. When we asked them about it, they claimed that the default setting in PHP 4 and 5 is "on", which isn't true (the default has been "off" since 4.2.0, in 2002, and the setting is being done away with altogether in PHP 6).
They have horrible service, with response time to service tickets measured in days. We've had numerous issues with the database servers being pegged as they've expanded their customer base without upgrading their servers. You can't restore from backups without contacting customer service. Sure, it's cheap, but as they say, you get what you pay for.
The incident mentioned by the OP is apparently the frosting on the cake.
Most of those "users" were probably spambots, if it's anything like the forums I maintain. :P
As for the entrapment angle, this one's easy. The FBI guy sets up the site, drops a few whispers around the Tubes, and gets people to show up. Maybe the FBI has some controlled info to spread around so that people get interested, but they can turn those accounts off quickly enough that it doesn't spend a lot of taxpayer money.
After a while, people start exchanging their own stolen credit card info for cash using the site as an intermediary. They discuss their own criminal exploits, and they unwittingly provide the information needed to trace themselves to their physical location, because they now trust the site and don't bother using a proxy for anonymity. The FBI guy only has to stay involved in a general way, making his presence felt as the site's maintainer, and everyone else will continue willingly providing evidence against themselves without the direct prodding of the FBI guy.
And that's not entrapment.