How do you pay a monthly fee, when it's so easy to come up with the 300-350 million ISK for a PLEX?
Seriously, I played EVE Online for about 10 days, then I realized that it was possible to "win" the game by simply accumulating wealth at an absurd rate and play for free forever. To prove it, I made a brand-new character on a brand-new 14-day trial, bought him a speedy ship, and spent the next 48 hours literally adding digits to my ISK counter.
Is 48 hours of work worth less than the money for a paid subscription? I guess making that amount of money in Eve is a nice challenge, but if you continue doing it, aren't you basically working unpaid in order to do more unpaid work?
That's exactly why I think Diaspora is a brilliant name for an open distributed social network. Personally I wouldn't mind if people who don't get it avoid it. A social network without any idiots would only make it more attractive to me.
It's also the name of my favourite new RPG system.
There would be plenty of incentive to join Diaspora if it provides better privacy and security than facebook. Facebook's problems in those areas are widely reported. I wouldn't mind seeing an alternative.
No swords, but I do remember the occasional switchblade and butterfly knife. Cool stuff to kids, but fortunately kids at my school were smart enough to not actually use them.
Acid rain? You don't have to be anywhere near the smokestack for it to have a real effect on your life.
That is more of a problem, although still relatively near the ports, as acid rain tends to form up to 100's km from the source, not so much at 1000's km.
Contrary to what you seem to believe, not all cargo ships sail 1000s of km off the shore. Many busy shipping lanes, like the Channel, the Mediteranian, Suez + Gulf, Panama, Strait of Malaysia, etc, are near land. And even between those, lots of ships don't go all that far away from the shore. Certainly not 1000s of km. Otherwise all cargo ships would have to the middle of the Pacific.
This whole thing is so distorted. The REASON that we don't mandate these ships use strong pollution controls or clean fuels is specifically because pollution is part quantity, part location. If there's nobody to breathe a pollutant before it degrades, it's not hurting anyone. Car exhaust is released at ground level in populated areas.
No, the reason we don't mandate strong pollution controls over these ships is that no country has enough control to do so. Ships can easily sail under the flag of another country with more lax regulations, and nobody is going to ban all ships from less strict countries, because that's bad for trade, bad for the economy, and it's just going to make your port less important as other ports take your place as trading hub.
Of course you're partially right. Soot does way more damage in a high populated, urban environment than out at sea. But that doesn't mean it's okay that these ships pollute so much. The busiest sea lanes are between densely populated countries, and pollution there will effect those countries. The problem is that sea trade is a completely unregulated Wild West. It's not uncommon for ships to dump toxic waste in open sea. Usually, nobody will find out anyway.
Cargo ships are the most efficient way, from a fuel and CO2 perspective, to move a given mass of freight (even more than trains), at nearly 500 miles per gallon per ton.
True, but that doesn't mean that these ships are actually as clean as they could be. And should be. There's lots of room to make these ships a lot cleaner. And some people are honestly working on that. But as long as there's no world-wide regulations forcing ships to be cleaner, it's going to be a drop in a bucket.
Or perhaps they're worried they might distract the government from destroying the country.
Exactly. I think the terrorists have already won. The US (and most of Europe too) has been working pretty hard to undermine the rights and freedom of their people. How can terrorists possibly top that? They can just focus on stuff closer to home, and occasionally say or do something vaguely threatening, and we'll send ourselves down the abyss.
The most informative article on the uselessness and stupidity of the TSA was linked to from TFA. Very informative read, written by someone who really knows what she's talking about.
An armed guard on the plane is probably a lot more effective than all the invasive security procedures. Won't help against explosives of course, so add sniffer dogs at the airport. That's all the security you'll need.
That's nothing. They let me take a glass bottle of duty-free whisky onto the plane. One swing and that jagged glass is a lot scarier than your silly box-cutter or leatherman.
I asked one of the goons about this seeming paradox, and she said "If I had my way, you wouldn't be able to take that either.". I was tempted to ask her about all the terrorist glassing attacks, but I kinda wanted to get on the flight.
Of course you have to be able to take bottles of alcohol on the plane. People make a lot of money selling those!
I'm not just joking either. I'm convinced that security takes a backseat to profit. Harsh, inconvenient, invasive, even ineffective security is perfectly acceptable, as long as it doesn't cut into the profits of commercial interests.
Explain to me, how do you download from a torrent of copyrighted material without committing copyright infringement?
When you download, you don't make a copy. It's the uploaders who make the copy. Well, that's what Dutch law says anyway. Only not in the case of games, for some odd reason.
Let's apply this principle to something less contentious. Say, like many people, you have a bank account with your life savings in it. You willingly gave the bank money, and they kept track of the amount of money owed via some kind of digitally stored number. Let's say I then managed to somehow reduce that number to 0 and increase my number by exactly the same amount. By your characterisation of theft, this is certainly not theft. If anything, the bank is the one guilty of theft, because, by refusing to pay you money from an empty balance, they are depriving you of something you previously owned (even though you gave it to them willingly).
I think this might count as fraud rather than theft.
A lot of people say that. The problem with "try before you buy" using the full version of the game is that you really have very little incentive to buy.
That's why playable demos are such a good idea.
Unless your game sucks, of course. I can imagine a world where only good games get a playable demo, and crappy games don't because it'll only turn potential customers away. Of course in that case we can tell from the simple absence of a demo that the game is going to suck, saving everybody a lot of time.
Copyright was originally intended to protect the investment of book printers against competing printers. It's about protecting the potential market. A downloader indeed doesn't deprive the copyright owner of anything, but someone who distributes illegal copies to others actually does deprive him of some potential market.
I guess that's why only uploading copyrighted material is illegal in Netherland. Downloading music and films is legal. For some weird reason there's an exception for games, though.
Of course it inhibits piracy or they wouldn't do it.
Really? Are publishers clairvoyant, or is this just wishful thinking? I'm sure they hope it inhibits piracy. Maybe they even honestly think it inhibits piracy. But I have never seen a shred of evidence that it actually does. I have seen loads of evidence that big publishers have no idea what they're talking about, though. Their estimates of lost sales are completely detached from reality, to name just one example.
My guess is that they don't use DRM because it's proven to work, but only because their misinformed investors believe it works. And they think appeasing investors is more important than appeasing customers. It's a world ruled by marketers and investors, not one ruled by common sense.
Interesting. So if we were to strip away the profit element on my side - maybe only accept donations from customers which would go directly to hosting costs - and offer your game for free downloads on my website, would that be ok?
Most likely the game is already available for free through torrent sites. Yet he still makes money. People who can afford to, who want the official product, and those who want to support the official developer, will all buy from him, rather than go to you or torrents. It's only when you manage to acquire the appearance of being the official publisher by selling cheap copies in retail stores, that you truly hurt him. Suddenly people with money to spare will go to you.
You sound a lot like Brad Wardell. He says similar stuff: pirates don't matter, paying customers do. And I agree. It's an healthy attitude, and I hope you become rich.
They should be, but then people go and freely distribute the game with wild abandon. DRM'd games get pirated too of course, but the purpose of the DRM is inhibit the pirated game in the first days, weeks of release as much as possible. Even if it inhibits piracy by a few days or by 20%, that may still pay for the DRM and justify itself financially. Perhaps the devs could release a patch to disable the DRM later, as happened with The Witcher.
But does it actually inhibit piracy by a few days? Wasn't Spore cracked before release, despite rather ambitious DRM? And who knows how many people would have bought Assassin's Creed 2 if it hadn't been crippled by ridiculous DRM?
It's nice to state the goals of DRM, but I've never seen anything that suggests DRM accomplished those goals. It just seems to hurt honest customers and encourage people to download the cracked version.
And there have been plenty of DRM-free games that sold like crazy, despite their availability on torrents.
Too bad I already posted. Parent needs to be modded up +6 Informative. Everybody knows the quote "property if theft", but nobody knows where it's from. Great to see some background.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like stories in caves, you can also try Colossal Cave. It's a bit old, though.
How do you pay a monthly fee, when it's so easy to come up with the 300-350 million ISK for a PLEX?
Seriously, I played EVE Online for about 10 days, then I realized that it was possible to "win" the game by simply accumulating wealth at an absurd rate and play for free forever. To prove it, I made a brand-new character on a brand-new 14-day trial, bought him a speedy ship, and spent the next 48 hours literally adding digits to my ISK counter.
Is 48 hours of work worth less than the money for a paid subscription? I guess making that amount of money in Eve is a nice challenge, but if you continue doing it, aren't you basically working unpaid in order to do more unpaid work?
Did you also register to every e-mail provider just to get this username before anyone else?
No. I was too late! But I won't make that mistake again.
That's exactly why I think Diaspora is a brilliant name for an open distributed social network. Personally I wouldn't mind if people who don't get it avoid it. A social network without any idiots would only make it more attractive to me.
It's also the name of my favourite new RPG system.
I admit the name is part of the draw for me.
There would be plenty of incentive to join Diaspora if it provides better privacy and security than facebook. Facebook's problems in those areas are widely reported. I wouldn't mind seeing an alternative.
No swords, but I do remember the occasional switchblade and butterfly knife. Cool stuff to kids, but fortunately kids at my school were smart enough to not actually use them.
Acid rain? You don't have to be anywhere near the smokestack for it to have a real effect on your life.
That is more of a problem, although still relatively near the ports, as acid rain tends to form up to 100's km from the source, not so much at 1000's km.
Contrary to what you seem to believe, not all cargo ships sail 1000s of km off the shore. Many busy shipping lanes, like the Channel, the Mediteranian, Suez + Gulf, Panama, Strait of Malaysia, etc, are near land. And even between those, lots of ships don't go all that far away from the shore. Certainly not 1000s of km. Otherwise all cargo ships would have to the middle of the Pacific.
This whole thing is so distorted. The REASON that we don't mandate these ships use strong pollution controls or clean fuels is specifically because pollution is part quantity, part location. If there's nobody to breathe a pollutant before it degrades, it's not hurting anyone. Car exhaust is released at ground level in populated areas.
No, the reason we don't mandate strong pollution controls over these ships is that no country has enough control to do so. Ships can easily sail under the flag of another country with more lax regulations, and nobody is going to ban all ships from less strict countries, because that's bad for trade, bad for the economy, and it's just going to make your port less important as other ports take your place as trading hub.
Of course you're partially right. Soot does way more damage in a high populated, urban environment than out at sea. But that doesn't mean it's okay that these ships pollute so much. The busiest sea lanes are between densely populated countries, and pollution there will effect those countries. The problem is that sea trade is a completely unregulated Wild West. It's not uncommon for ships to dump toxic waste in open sea. Usually, nobody will find out anyway.
Cargo ships are the most efficient way, from a fuel and CO2 perspective, to move a given mass of freight (even more than trains), at nearly 500 miles per gallon per ton.
True, but that doesn't mean that these ships are actually as clean as they could be. And should be. There's lots of room to make these ships a lot cleaner. And some people are honestly working on that. But as long as there's no world-wide regulations forcing ships to be cleaner, it's going to be a drop in a bucket.
Wiping the email and Exchange credentials makes sense. But why wipe the entire phone? Why would you even want a email app that can do that?
Does anyone know of a good Android Exchange app that doesn't honour these wipe requests?
Or perhaps they're worried they might distract the government from destroying the country.
Exactly. I think the terrorists have already won. The US (and most of Europe too) has been working pretty hard to undermine the rights and freedom of their people. How can terrorists possibly top that? They can just focus on stuff closer to home, and occasionally say or do something vaguely threatening, and we'll send ourselves down the abyss.
It's not like it's being forced on you. You can always choose not to fly.
The most informative article on the uselessness and stupidity of the TSA was linked to from TFA. Very informative read, written by someone who really knows what she's talking about.
Sometimes I think they don't allow you to take your own drink with you just to force you to buy more expensive drinks at the airport.
An armed guard on the plane is probably a lot more effective than all the invasive security procedures. Won't help against explosives of course, so add sniffer dogs at the airport. That's all the security you'll need.
That's nothing. They let me take a glass bottle of duty-free whisky onto the plane. One swing and that jagged glass is a lot scarier than your silly box-cutter or leatherman.
I asked one of the goons about this seeming paradox, and she said "If I had my way, you wouldn't be able to take that either.". I was tempted to ask her about all the terrorist glassing attacks, but I kinda wanted to get on the flight.
Of course you have to be able to take bottles of alcohol on the plane. People make a lot of money selling those!
I'm not just joking either. I'm convinced that security takes a backseat to profit. Harsh, inconvenient, invasive, even ineffective security is perfectly acceptable, as long as it doesn't cut into the profits of commercial interests.
Explain to me, how do you download from a torrent of copyrighted material without committing copyright infringement?
When you download, you don't make a copy. It's the uploaders who make the copy. Well, that's what Dutch law says anyway. Only not in the case of games, for some odd reason.
Let's apply this principle to something less contentious. Say, like many people, you have a bank account with your life savings in it. You willingly gave the bank money, and they kept track of the amount of money owed via some kind of digitally stored number. Let's say I then managed to somehow reduce that number to 0 and increase my number by exactly the same amount. By your characterisation of theft, this is certainly not theft. If anything, the bank is the one guilty of theft, because, by refusing to pay you money from an empty balance, they are depriving you of something you previously owned (even though you gave it to them willingly).
I think this might count as fraud rather than theft.
A lot of people say that. The problem with "try before you buy" using the full version of the game is that you really have very little incentive to buy.
That's why playable demos are such a good idea.
Unless your game sucks, of course. I can imagine a world where only good games get a playable demo, and crappy games don't because it'll only turn potential customers away. Of course in that case we can tell from the simple absence of a demo that the game is going to suck, saving everybody a lot of time.
Copyright was originally intended to protect the investment of book printers against competing printers. It's about protecting the potential market. A downloader indeed doesn't deprive the copyright owner of anything, but someone who distributes illegal copies to others actually does deprive him of some potential market.
I guess that's why only uploading copyrighted material is illegal in Netherland. Downloading music and films is legal. For some weird reason there's an exception for games, though.
Of course it inhibits piracy or they wouldn't do it.
Really? Are publishers clairvoyant, or is this just wishful thinking? I'm sure they hope it inhibits piracy. Maybe they even honestly think it inhibits piracy. But I have never seen a shred of evidence that it actually does. I have seen loads of evidence that big publishers have no idea what they're talking about, though. Their estimates of lost sales are completely detached from reality, to name just one example.
My guess is that they don't use DRM because it's proven to work, but only because their misinformed investors believe it works. And they think appeasing investors is more important than appeasing customers. It's a world ruled by marketers and investors, not one ruled by common sense.
Interesting. So if we were to strip away the profit element on my side - maybe only accept donations from customers which would go directly to hosting costs - and offer your game for free downloads on my website, would that be ok?
Most likely the game is already available for free through torrent sites. Yet he still makes money. People who can afford to, who want the official product, and those who want to support the official developer, will all buy from him, rather than go to you or torrents. It's only when you manage to acquire the appearance of being the official publisher by selling cheap copies in retail stores, that you truly hurt him. Suddenly people with money to spare will go to you.
You sound a lot like Brad Wardell. He says similar stuff: pirates don't matter, paying customers do. And I agree. It's an healthy attitude, and I hope you become rich.
They should be, but then people go and freely distribute the game with wild abandon. DRM'd games get pirated too of course, but the purpose of the DRM is inhibit the pirated game in the first days, weeks of release as much as possible. Even if it inhibits piracy by a few days or by 20%, that may still pay for the DRM and justify itself financially. Perhaps the devs could release a patch to disable the DRM later, as happened with The Witcher.
But does it actually inhibit piracy by a few days? Wasn't Spore cracked before release, despite rather ambitious DRM? And who knows how many people would have bought Assassin's Creed 2 if it hadn't been crippled by ridiculous DRM?
It's nice to state the goals of DRM, but I've never seen anything that suggests DRM accomplished those goals. It just seems to hurt honest customers and encourage people to download the cracked version.
And there have been plenty of DRM-free games that sold like crazy, despite their availability on torrents.
Too bad I already posted. Parent needs to be modded up +6 Informative. Everybody knows the quote "property if theft", but nobody knows where it's from. Great to see some background.