I'm no fan of the RIAA, but you're the only one hearing jackboots in the wind. They suggested she drop out of college to get a job. They could've suggested she sell a kidney, or put on a tube top and hang out in the Combat Zone, or borrow it from her parents. They don't care where the money comes from, and if she didn't want to face the dilemma of interrupting her schooling to pay off a settlement, she shouldn't have put herself in a position where she was legally liable.
Years ago, the PR guy for the RIAA climbed up on a stool so he could get the rope around his neck, then put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger after swallowing four bottles of aspirin, two bottles of Tylenol, and a fifth of Jack Daniels.
The plastic bag around his head, secured with an elastic, is just insurance.
She's not being made to drop out of college. She's being offered a $3,750 settlement, which is cheap compared to what it would be if lawyers and the courts got involved. Dropping out of college is something she might do so she can get a job to pay the settlement; she might also get a part time job, she might borrow it from her parents, she might sell a kidney. The RIAA doesn't care how she got the money, and phrasing it as "The RIAA wants her to drop out of college" is a misdirection that avoids the real issue: She incurred legal liability when she couldn't afford to, and now has to deal with that.
I think it's a bit more direct than that--she doesn't really think she's guilty of anything where the price to pay causes any sort of hardship. It's like she shoplifted something and is now complaining that she has to spend 45 days in jail: "But that'll interrupt my schoolwork! It'll screw up the term! I guess the justice system wants us all to be in jail, not getting our degrees and becoming productive members of society."
The real thrust of the essay is that her handwaving at accountability is a throwaway as she argues exceptionalism in her case. What's the point of a punishment that isn't felt? She's also not acknowledging that $3,750 is a pittance compared to her costs if lawyers and the courts actually get involved.
Before Wal-mart came along, Target and K-mart were the low-end big-box stores. When Wal-mart ate their lunch at that end of the scale, Target successfully recreated itself as a high-end Wal-mart by engaging big names like designer Todd something-or-other to brand special lines for them (among other things). They're doing fine, and now Wal-mart is chasing them, to a degree, insofar as Wal-mart is now trying to spiff its image with better brand names. Probably hopeless, though, since Wal-mart is now firmly imaged in people's minds as the cheapest place to find cheap goods. People who would happily sniff at Walmartians have no problem saving cash at Target due to the veneer of 'not the lowest option available'.
Contrast that with K-mart, who tried to go head to head with Wal-mart at the bottom, and declared bankruptcy four years ago. Wal-mart explicitly targetted K-mart by opening stores across the street with more square footage and cheaper prices; K-mart ran out of money upgrading its stores and dropping its prices. With the bankruptcy, it was able to default on a lot of leases for unprofitable stores that it couldn't afford to upgrade, and was able to shed the losing-est 1/3rd of their outlets. They also tried to brand-name themselves by having Martha Stewart stamp out a line of K-mart only products, but we know what happened there:)
The reason I call it hotheadedness and not integrity is that the values were not the values of OpenBSD but of Theo de Raadt. He was against the Iraq War (so am I, and so are lots of people), which is irrelevent to the goals of OpenBSD and OpenSSL. DARPA wasn't threatening to limit or close or classify those projects (not that they could); they were offering funding to further them and then use them as they were.
When a leader affects a group for the sake of his values, not the group's (assuming the group didn't put him in place for those specific values), then he's just a bad leader using the group to further his own ends. I agree that OpenBSD is an amazing project, but were I member of that project, I would no longer be involved when the leader is so involved in himself. You can view de Raadt as hotheaded, or as cynically manipulative of his followers--I was trying to be charitable by going with hotheaded.
Except that, as was mentioned in the article, the people running these botnets are sitting in countries like Taiwan and Morocco, which have even weaker computer crime laws than the U.S., and require international law enforcement co-operation to attack. The practical barrier to prosecution is simply too high for a crime who's priority is too low.
It had nothing to do with idealistic positioning: Theo shot off his mouth about the Iraq War in a newspaper interview (Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper), putting DARPA in a position where they couldn't publicly support the projects he led. It's politics 101, and this sort of hotheadedness is exactly why Theo got turfed out of the NetBSD project.
The (next) holy grail of games is the fully destructable environment, where damage isn't a sprite on a plane, but actual particle rearrangement of walls and buildings and such. This is a pretty strong step in that direction.
The problem is that the internal logic of games like Quake and Half-Life is that, if the environment reacts correctly with respect to the physics of weapons, any game environment will quite quickly be reduced to piles of rubble and little more. Think of the pictures of Europe in WWII, and then imagine the map after a few rounds using the BFG. All those clever hidey-holes and corner sneaking tricks become useless when the terrain is quickly reduced to vaguely hilly, rolling rubble landscapes.
There'll be some dodges, like "this weapons does radiation damage, not explosive, so that's why the gyprock walls of the apartment building aren't destroyed while everything inside is pulped," but fundamentally, we're headed for a design crisis where the only remaining plausibility will be found in historical combat sims.
You're missing the point: DHS is an umbrella organization that includes the Secret Service, which is responsible for "financial instituation fraud, [and] identity theft", among other things (from here: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/ed itorial_0515.xml). Looking into this sort of scam is exactly what DHS should be doing.
The misdirection in the story is that people hear "Homeland Security" and think terrorism, and the article doesn't dispel that notion.
However, to play devil's advocate for a moment here: if you have someone's identity, you can probably find out the balance on the card, and write your check for that amount. As for calling the holder, the bottom line is that a line of trigger code in the payments program is a lot cheaper than a human being making calls, and you can be certain that when you freeze the card, the cardholder is going to call you.
As for "That fraud can't happen if there's that much money owing onit", either the check pays off existing debt, freeing up at least that much credit, or it drives the card balance negative for the cardholder, freeing up at least that much credit. I presume the point of the scam is to avoid having the card rejected and possibly flagged at the store by exceeding the limit.
The real story here is that the Department of Homeland Security is also responsible for credit fraud. One of the scams people pull is to steal a number, write a bogus check to the credit card company for that card (which guarantees the credit will be there), and then spend the amount that was written on the check before the check is cashed (and detected as bogus).
The auto-trip flag for this is that when a large payment comes in that's many multiples of the payee's normal history, the credit card company will hold the payment until the check clears, which is within 10 days at the outside.
In other words, this has nothing to do with terrorism, the fascist Bush regime, the gestapo at DHS, or any other Orwellian fantasy you can cook up. It's an arguably poor fraud prevention measure, nothing more.
Gold farming is any activity that brings a high enough return in-game for it to be worth selling for real money out of the game. That can mean camping NPCs with good drops, mining out valuable ores, continually running an instance to get the good drops to sell for gold... whatever it is, the noxious part of it is the selling for real life money because it makes the game industrial in nature. Farmers will chase away real life players from valuable territory, even ganking them if possible; they'll efficiently remove all the gatherable loot from an area so that players who come along on a quest or resourcing can't get any.
Both inflationary and deflationary effects are present because of gold farming and sales. Overall, I think gold farmers have a beneficial effect on the economy of the game because they enlarge it, which stabilizes the market forces. Low pop servers have problems with wild fluctuations in prices and availability, but in a game like Eve Online with a huge market, there are predictable trends and supply/demand situations that allow players to assess the 'normal' value of something and even capitalize on it themselves.
The problem with gold farmers is their impact on actual gameplay: They squat on valuable resources, chasing away real players who interfere; they exhaust statistical drops, effectively decreasing the odds of receiving certain loot for players for whom the game is just grinding towards getting something; they inflate the equipment in the game, meaning that your average player is further behind in terms of equipment (which has a big effect in PvP or raid slot availability).
Really, the fundamental problem with gold farmers is that they're jerks. If they were well behaved, their impact would be far more beneficial on the balance.
Your post is meant to be funny, but in fact there's a lot of evidence that RIM, finally learning to play power politics, has been effectively mobilizing congressmen to lean on the patent office to invalidate the patents to avoid losing their crackberries. RIM hired Washington lobbyists, and with a couple months the patent office fast-tracked a review of NTP's claims (something Microsoft couldn't even pull in it's patent case regarding plugins).
Mod parent up: A rare (for./) dose of common sense, well written.
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 1
From Netscape 3, and somewhat earlier, end users never paid for it, getting it either as a full-featured 'demo' download with no expiry, provided by their ISP, or used by their company. Netscape's business model at the time was to sell it to corporations and large ISPs as a brandable browser, but that never provided a significant revenue stream; instead, their web server was holding up the company.
Also, Netscape had the majority share of the browser market from version 2 to 4. It was only IE 4 that started the erosion of Netscape as browser king, and it wasn't until IE 5 that the last nail was driven into Netscape's coffin, largely because the Communicator 4.7 was just so unbelievably awful.
Here's what you do: take a simple task like adding RAM to a non-production server, and go through the entire, exhausting process in letter-perfect fashion, meeting every paperwork, audit, and permission requirement. Along the way, document every minute you spend on the process, showing exactly what you're doing, how long it took in minutes, and what requirement you were meeting. At the end, create a spreadsheet showing in careful detail that adding a $500 SIMM actually cost the company $5,000 in processes.
That spreadsheet becomes the club with which your managers and directors can beat the IT department because they're effectively offloading cost onto you at a rate of 1,000%.
Part of it is the staffer's POV, but the larger part is really having a large number of POV people fighting over the content of a small number of articles. In other words, the problem is really a larger number of edit wars than Wikipedia can handle smoothly. It's perfectly legitimate to recognize a structural problem and lock things down while discussions on a fix take place.
I sympathize with your desire to distance yourself from the results of the survey, but statistically, if the 2,000 respondents represent a proper sample, they're more than sufficient for the purpose of extrapolating to the views of all 60 million.
To really blow your mind, you need to know that all of NTP's patents have recently been invalidated by the patent office. So not only does a patent shed win against a company that actually makes something, but with bogus patents to boot.
The only problem with this is that the phone company may charge a per-connection fee of, like, $0.25 after x number of calls. X is a number you'd never exceed using it for calls, but when your modem is constantly disconnecting/reconnecting, you can easily exceed the number.
I found this out the hard way when I got my phone bill and there was an extra $40 charge on it.
They have a large effect on the game economy, introducing more gold into the in-game market than would normally be there. In accordance with good old supply-and-demand, the market inflates and prices rise (Blizzard has put mechanisms in the game to prevent this, known as "gold sinks"). I'm a programmer, not an economist, so I can't really predict the full effect of their actions.
Even without farmers, gold sinks are necessary because the nature of the game is the continual creation of wealth from actions. Gold sinks are the in-game method for controlling the overall gold supply, and are required independent of gold farmers.
While farmers increase the gold supply, they do so in large lots that are usually put towards those money sinks by non-farming players (e.g., someone spends $100 to get the gold for their epic mount), or towards the same blue or purple items that the farmers are selling at auction, causing that gold to be recycled through IGN (or whomever). The net effect is that not a lot of farmer gold actually ends up in the game economy.
At the same time as farmers are generating gold, they're generating drops as well which go for auction. An increased supply of drops means lower prices for gear, so the net effect of farmers is deflationary since their drops aren't balanced by the gold they're adding to the economy.
Overall, farmers have a large stabilizing effect on a server's economy, especially low-pop servers where the players themselves can't generate enough economic activity to avoid wild fluctuations in price and availability.
Blizzard doesn't need to ban farmers, they need to perfect the system so that farmers don't piss off the other players. And truthfully, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Blizzard is the silent partner of gold-houses like IGN so they can profit from an extra-game sales channel that they can't create themselves.
Everyone hates the farmers as players because they're jerks in game. But they have a massively stabilizing influence on the economy of the world. They increase the size of the overall economy for the shard by maintaining a constant flow of gold and drops into the system, which is deflationary. The gold that other players buy from IGN and others gets dumped into the economy in lots for epic items, and trickles down to regular players selling hot drops; or is simply recirculated through the farmers, who are making more blue and purple drops available on auction than would otherwise be available (again, deflationary); or goes into a money sink like an epic mount which removes it from the game.
The problem isn't that the farmers exist, it's that they're assholes. If they were smart, they'd be good, co-operative players, exerting a net benefit on their chosen shard.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please.
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but you're the only one hearing jackboots in the wind. They suggested she drop out of college to get a job. They could've suggested she sell a kidney, or put on a tube top and hang out in the Combat Zone, or borrow it from her parents. They don't care where the money comes from, and if she didn't want to face the dilemma of interrupting her schooling to pay off a settlement, she shouldn't have put herself in a position where she was legally liable.
Years ago, the PR guy for the RIAA climbed up on a stool so he could get the rope around his neck, then put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger after swallowing four bottles of aspirin, two bottles of Tylenol, and a fifth of Jack Daniels.
The plastic bag around his head, secured with an elastic, is just insurance.
She's not being made to drop out of college. She's being offered a $3,750 settlement, which is cheap compared to what it would be if lawyers and the courts got involved. Dropping out of college is something she might do so she can get a job to pay the settlement; she might also get a part time job, she might borrow it from her parents, she might sell a kidney. The RIAA doesn't care how she got the money, and phrasing it as "The RIAA wants her to drop out of college" is a misdirection that avoids the real issue: She incurred legal liability when she couldn't afford to, and now has to deal with that.
I think it's a bit more direct than that--she doesn't really think she's guilty of anything where the price to pay causes any sort of hardship. It's like she shoplifted something and is now complaining that she has to spend 45 days in jail: "But that'll interrupt my schoolwork! It'll screw up the term! I guess the justice system wants us all to be in jail, not getting our degrees and becoming productive members of society."
The real thrust of the essay is that her handwaving at accountability is a throwaway as she argues exceptionalism in her case. What's the point of a punishment that isn't felt? She's also not acknowledging that $3,750 is a pittance compared to her costs if lawyers and the courts actually get involved.
How many politicians are running on a platform of 'get rid of copyright laws'?
Before Wal-mart came along, Target and K-mart were the low-end big-box stores. When Wal-mart ate their lunch at that end of the scale, Target successfully recreated itself as a high-end Wal-mart by engaging big names like designer Todd something-or-other to brand special lines for them (among other things). They're doing fine, and now Wal-mart is chasing them, to a degree, insofar as Wal-mart is now trying to spiff its image with better brand names. Probably hopeless, though, since Wal-mart is now firmly imaged in people's minds as the cheapest place to find cheap goods. People who would happily sniff at Walmartians have no problem saving cash at Target due to the veneer of 'not the lowest option available'.
:)
Contrast that with K-mart, who tried to go head to head with Wal-mart at the bottom, and declared bankruptcy four years ago. Wal-mart explicitly targetted K-mart by opening stores across the street with more square footage and cheaper prices; K-mart ran out of money upgrading its stores and dropping its prices. With the bankruptcy, it was able to default on a lot of leases for unprofitable stores that it couldn't afford to upgrade, and was able to shed the losing-est 1/3rd of their outlets. They also tried to brand-name themselves by having Martha Stewart stamp out a line of K-mart only products, but we know what happened there
He didn't protect his funding, he lost it.
The reason I call it hotheadedness and not integrity is that the values were not the values of OpenBSD but of Theo de Raadt. He was against the Iraq War (so am I, and so are lots of people), which is irrelevent to the goals of OpenBSD and OpenSSL. DARPA wasn't threatening to limit or close or classify those projects (not that they could); they were offering funding to further them and then use them as they were.
When a leader affects a group for the sake of his values, not the group's (assuming the group didn't put him in place for those specific values), then he's just a bad leader using the group to further his own ends. I agree that OpenBSD is an amazing project, but were I member of that project, I would no longer be involved when the leader is so involved in himself. You can view de Raadt as hotheaded, or as cynically manipulative of his followers--I was trying to be charitable by going with hotheaded.
Except that, as was mentioned in the article, the people running these botnets are sitting in countries like Taiwan and Morocco, which have even weaker computer crime laws than the U.S., and require international law enforcement co-operation to attack. The practical barrier to prosecution is simply too high for a crime who's priority is too low.
It had nothing to do with idealistic positioning: Theo shot off his mouth about the Iraq War in a newspaper interview (Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper), putting DARPA in a position where they couldn't publicly support the projects he led. It's politics 101, and this sort of hotheadedness is exactly why Theo got turfed out of the NetBSD project.
The (next) holy grail of games is the fully destructable environment, where damage isn't a sprite on a plane, but actual particle rearrangement of walls and buildings and such. This is a pretty strong step in that direction.
The problem is that the internal logic of games like Quake and Half-Life is that, if the environment reacts correctly with respect to the physics of weapons, any game environment will quite quickly be reduced to piles of rubble and little more. Think of the pictures of Europe in WWII, and then imagine the map after a few rounds using the BFG. All those clever hidey-holes and corner sneaking tricks become useless when the terrain is quickly reduced to vaguely hilly, rolling rubble landscapes.
There'll be some dodges, like "this weapons does radiation damage, not explosive, so that's why the gyprock walls of the apartment building aren't destroyed while everything inside is pulped," but fundamentally, we're headed for a design crisis where the only remaining plausibility will be found in historical combat sims.
You're missing the point: DHS is an umbrella organization that includes the Secret Service, which is responsible for "financial instituation fraud, [and] identity theft", among other things (from here: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/ed itorial_0515.xml). Looking into this sort of scam is exactly what DHS should be doing.
The misdirection in the story is that people hear "Homeland Security" and think terrorism, and the article doesn't dispel that notion.
I didn't say it was a good anti-fraud measure.
However, to play devil's advocate for a moment here: if you have someone's identity, you can probably find out the balance on the card, and write your check for that amount. As for calling the holder, the bottom line is that a line of trigger code in the payments program is a lot cheaper than a human being making calls, and you can be certain that when you freeze the card, the cardholder is going to call you.
As for "That fraud can't happen if there's that much money owing onit", either the check pays off existing debt, freeing up at least that much credit, or it drives the card balance negative for the cardholder, freeing up at least that much credit. I presume the point of the scam is to avoid having the card rejected and possibly flagged at the store by exceeding the limit.
The real story here is that the Department of Homeland Security is also responsible for credit fraud. One of the scams people pull is to steal a number, write a bogus check to the credit card company for that card (which guarantees the credit will be there), and then spend the amount that was written on the check before the check is cashed (and detected as bogus).
The auto-trip flag for this is that when a large payment comes in that's many multiples of the payee's normal history, the credit card company will hold the payment until the check clears, which is within 10 days at the outside.
In other words, this has nothing to do with terrorism, the fascist Bush regime, the gestapo at DHS, or any other Orwellian fantasy you can cook up. It's an arguably poor fraud prevention measure, nothing more.
Gold farming is any activity that brings a high enough return in-game for it to be worth selling for real money out of the game. That can mean camping NPCs with good drops, mining out valuable ores, continually running an instance to get the good drops to sell for gold... whatever it is, the noxious part of it is the selling for real life money because it makes the game industrial in nature. Farmers will chase away real life players from valuable territory, even ganking them if possible; they'll efficiently remove all the gatherable loot from an area so that players who come along on a quest or resourcing can't get any.
Both inflationary and deflationary effects are present because of gold farming and sales. Overall, I think gold farmers have a beneficial effect on the economy of the game because they enlarge it, which stabilizes the market forces. Low pop servers have problems with wild fluctuations in prices and availability, but in a game like Eve Online with a huge market, there are predictable trends and supply/demand situations that allow players to assess the 'normal' value of something and even capitalize on it themselves.
The problem with gold farmers is their impact on actual gameplay: They squat on valuable resources, chasing away real players who interfere; they exhaust statistical drops, effectively decreasing the odds of receiving certain loot for players for whom the game is just grinding towards getting something; they inflate the equipment in the game, meaning that your average player is further behind in terms of equipment (which has a big effect in PvP or raid slot availability).
Really, the fundamental problem with gold farmers is that they're jerks. If they were well behaved, their impact would be far more beneficial on the balance.
Your post is meant to be funny, but in fact there's a lot of evidence that RIM, finally learning to play power politics, has been effectively mobilizing congressmen to lean on the patent office to invalidate the patents to avoid losing their crackberries. RIM hired Washington lobbyists, and with a couple months the patent office fast-tracked a review of NTP's claims (something Microsoft couldn't even pull in it's patent case regarding plugins).
Mod parent up: A rare (for ./) dose of common sense, well written.
From Netscape 3, and somewhat earlier, end users never paid for it, getting it either as a full-featured 'demo' download with no expiry, provided by their ISP, or used by their company. Netscape's business model at the time was to sell it to corporations and large ISPs as a brandable browser, but that never provided a significant revenue stream; instead, their web server was holding up the company.
Also, Netscape had the majority share of the browser market from version 2 to 4. It was only IE 4 that started the erosion of Netscape as browser king, and it wasn't until IE 5 that the last nail was driven into Netscape's coffin, largely because the Communicator 4.7 was just so unbelievably awful.
Here's what you do: take a simple task like adding RAM to a non-production server, and go through the entire, exhausting process in letter-perfect fashion, meeting every paperwork, audit, and permission requirement. Along the way, document every minute you spend on the process, showing exactly what you're doing, how long it took in minutes, and what requirement you were meeting. At the end, create a spreadsheet showing in careful detail that adding a $500 SIMM actually cost the company $5,000 in processes.
That spreadsheet becomes the club with which your managers and directors can beat the IT department because they're effectively offloading cost onto you at a rate of 1,000%.
Part of it is the staffer's POV, but the larger part is really having a large number of POV people fighting over the content of a small number of articles. In other words, the problem is really a larger number of edit wars than Wikipedia can handle smoothly. It's perfectly legitimate to recognize a structural problem and lock things down while discussions on a fix take place.
I sympathize with your desire to distance yourself from the results of the survey, but statistically, if the 2,000 respondents represent a proper sample, they're more than sufficient for the purpose of extrapolating to the views of all 60 million.
Sorry.
To really blow your mind, you need to know that all of NTP's patents have recently been invalidated by the patent office. So not only does a patent shed win against a company that actually makes something, but with bogus patents to boot.
The only problem with this is that the phone company may charge a per-connection fee of, like, $0.25 after x number of calls. X is a number you'd never exceed using it for calls, but when your modem is constantly disconnecting/reconnecting, you can easily exceed the number.
I found this out the hard way when I got my phone bill and there was an extra $40 charge on it.
They have a large effect on the game economy, introducing more gold into the in-game market than would normally be there. In accordance with good old supply-and-demand, the market inflates and prices rise (Blizzard has put mechanisms in the game to prevent this, known as "gold sinks"). I'm a programmer, not an economist, so I can't really predict the full effect of their actions.
Even without farmers, gold sinks are necessary because the nature of the game is the continual creation of wealth from actions. Gold sinks are the in-game method for controlling the overall gold supply, and are required independent of gold farmers.
While farmers increase the gold supply, they do so in large lots that are usually put towards those money sinks by non-farming players (e.g., someone spends $100 to get the gold for their epic mount), or towards the same blue or purple items that the farmers are selling at auction, causing that gold to be recycled through IGN (or whomever). The net effect is that not a lot of farmer gold actually ends up in the game economy.
At the same time as farmers are generating gold, they're generating drops as well which go for auction. An increased supply of drops means lower prices for gear, so the net effect of farmers is deflationary since their drops aren't balanced by the gold they're adding to the economy.
Overall, farmers have a large stabilizing effect on a server's economy, especially low-pop servers where the players themselves can't generate enough economic activity to avoid wild fluctuations in price and availability.
Blizzard doesn't need to ban farmers, they need to perfect the system so that farmers don't piss off the other players. And truthfully, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Blizzard is the silent partner of gold-houses like IGN so they can profit from an extra-game sales channel that they can't create themselves.
Everyone hates the farmers as players because they're jerks in game. But they have a massively stabilizing influence on the economy of the world. They increase the size of the overall economy for the shard by maintaining a constant flow of gold and drops into the system, which is deflationary. The gold that other players buy from IGN and others gets dumped into the economy in lots for epic items, and trickles down to regular players selling hot drops; or is simply recirculated through the farmers, who are making more blue and purple drops available on auction than would otherwise be available (again, deflationary); or goes into a money sink like an epic mount which removes it from the game.
The problem isn't that the farmers exist, it's that they're assholes. If they were smart, they'd be good, co-operative players, exerting a net benefit on their chosen shard.