Current court argument, "We can stop, suspend, alter or modify service at anytime since it is a pay per play services. The account is not an object of value and is the property of Blizzard." If money was tied to the account, "The account is an object of value owned by the player who cannot be denied access to it without due process. Blizzard is expected due diligence in maintaining and protecting the object and ensuring all applicable laws are adhered to."
Whether the account has real-world value or not it is still entirely owned by Blizzard who allow the player to access it, according to their terms and conditions, and in exchange for a monthly fee. The account suddenly being worth something doesn't change the fact that all virtual money, items and characters are the property of Blizzard and not the players. The reason Blizzard and other companies running MMOs don't allow the buying and selling of virtual property is because it is not the player's property to buy and sell.
This isn't going to change, it is certainly not in Blizzard's interest to give any kind of ownership to the players partly because of the reasons you mention. Namely that if a character or in-game item is deemed to be owned by the player then they have legal rights to their property. As it stands Blizzard could shut the whole game down tomorrow and no player would have any recourse other than possibly a refund on their monthly subscription.
Good for you. Meanwhile, unlike you, the rest of us who actually have real jobs, making real-world money, and who don't have the 40+ hours/week to spend playing video games
It isn't necessary to play for 40 hours a week, or 20 hours or any more than you want. The game is enjoyable when played at any rate. Just because it isn't possible to hit level 70 after a few hours or get the best gear straight away doesn't mean you can't play the game.
Just because some people choose to play for huge amounts of time doesn't mean everyone has to. I play for a few hours a couple of days a week and don't imagine I will hit lvl 70 for a long time, but as I am enjoying playing why does it matter? The idea of buying a game and then paying to get to the end of it seems ridiculous to me. If you only have time to play for 2 hours a week then thats fine and the game will last you a lot longer.
It isn't like you are competing against all the other players, the fact that someone can play for 40 hours a week has no effect on anyone else unless you view the game as a leveling competition that is only about reaching the finish line. MMOs aren't like that, it is about the journey not the destination.
I wonder if people who buy gold also flick straight to the end of books and fast forward their way through movies to get to the end faster.
Nintendo Wii has been a successful enterprise, and a very good business model, compared with ours...
Oh yes the revolutionary business model of selling a product for a reasonable price while still making a profit. Opposed to Sony's excellent method of selling at a staggeringly high price and *still* making a loss on each unit sold. Genius.
Not a single game mentioned is "more than a year old,"
They may not be a year old yet but the article does not give any release dates for the mac versions of the games they mention.
While EA Sports titles will certainly increase the range of games available on Mac I and will have mass market appeal, they certainly wouldn't have been my first choice to relaunch gaming on the Mac. EA Games are renowned for buggy releases which isn't going to sit well with the Mac user's "It just works" mentality.
That's working out so well in the UK and Austrailia isn't it?
I can't speak for Australia, but in the UK burglaries and robberies involving firearms are in the minority.
There is no reason for a burglar to carry a gun while breaking into someones house as there is virtually no liklihood of the home owner having a gun. Because of this most burglaries result in no injuries or loss of life, and the criminals are still alive to be brought to justice by the police.
Even if criminals do have access to guns then they would be foolhardy to carry or use them during a burglary or robbery as the penalty is, by design, much higher for armed robbery. By a combination of gun control and harsher penalties for crimes involving firearms the UK is a considerably safer place than many other countries, including the US.
Most gun crime in the UK is a result of gangs settling scores with other gangs. A situation that would be considerably worse if gang members could buy a gun legally whenever they wanted.
Trying to defend the deeply flawed gun 'control' stragegy in the USA by pointing at countries who have a civilised view of guns only serves to insult the people from those countries.
This reminds me of when a company sent out a PDF file with a lot of very sensitive information covered in black, but it was done with a black box in Acrobat.
Not a company, 'The Company'. They were declassified CIA documents if I remember rightly.
Video is easier, because our eyes are much less accurate than our ears. They already watermark movies and most people aren't bothered.
I don't know about everyone else but I certainly notice video watermarking. Nothing like paying £6 a ticket at the cinema to be distracted every 15 mins by brown blobs flashing on the screen. The picture quality at most cinemas is bad enough as it is with scratches and dust all over the print without putting more shit on it.
it's not like Microsoft or Netscape or NCSA or Mozilla made money off me downloading it.
Mozilla don't make money from you downloading Firefox but they do make a small amount every time you search using the google search box and then click on an advert.
Microsoft's gains are more complicated, they want as many people using their browser so that they can keep control of their users. If the default browser on Windows is inferior to the default browser on OSX then Joe Public is more likely to switch. Of course they also use IE to leverage their own search engine MSN.
I don't believe Nintendo is ignoring the technology trends, but they are making a smart move in supporting the current status-quo. Make a platform that meets the majority share of the market and you've already beat-out the "next gen" platforms targeted at HD.
You are right, Nintendo are thinking about what is best for most of their potential customers. Currently most people don't have HDTVs and won't be buying one for the next couple of years at least. Especially as the price of a TV that can display 1080p is prohibitive at the moment (in the UK at least). People are hanging on until they can 'proper HD' instead of jumping on the 'HD ready' bandwagon and ending up with a 720p screen that won't display the new content at full quality.
Contrast this to the approach taken with the Xbox 360, yes it supports 1080p content, thats great for people with HDTVs but when they are releasing games like Dead Rising where the text is almost unreadable on an SDTV they are just pissing off a large proportion of their customers.
Up to 8 meg downstream with no limits for £14.99 a month.
Plusnet do have usage limits they just hide them in a 'Sustainable Usage Policy'
On their PLUS package you pay £14.99 a month and are capped at 10gb
On thier Premier package you pay £21.99, £29.99 or £39.99 for 15gb, 22.5gb or 30gb caps.
These caps are on peak time usage, initially this was afternoon/early evening for a 4 hours or so. It is now 4pm until midnight and can be changed on their whim. At one point it was 4pm until 6am.
If you exceed the cap they drop your speed to 256kbps until the end of the month, if you exceed it two months running then your speed is only reset to what you are paying for if you agree to move up to a package with a higher cap.
When I was with them they also had additional caps on certain traffic, for instance only 10gb per month from newsgroups no matter what package you are on or what time you are downloading.
In addition to all of this they also do extensive traffic shaping, so speeds for anything other than email and web browsing drop through the floor most of the day.
All in all plusNet certainly do not allow unlimited usage and have very little tolerance for heavy users and p2p.
I was lucky enough to migrate over to Zen at the point when they were offering a truly uncapped 2MB service. They have now changed their packages to 100gb caps with extra usage charged per gb but existing customers could keep their uncapped accounts if they didn't mind the 2MB speed instead of 8MB.
If you are likely to be using more than 100gb bandwith a month and don't want to pay per gb for extra bandwith then look into business packages as they are almost without exception uncapped with better contention.
"the 8-pending-connection limit is imo a much saner way to limit the damage a contaminated box can do."
I don't agree that the connection limit helps at all to stop the spread of worms/trojans/viruses. I think this quote from speedguide.net sums it up well.
"The forward thinking of Microsoft developers here is that you can only infect 10 new systems per second via TCP/IP ?!?... If you also consider that each of those infected computers will infect 10 others at the same rate:
second 1: 1+10 computers
second 2: 10+10*10 computers (110 new ones)
second 3: 10+100*10 computers ( 1110 new ones)
second 4: 10+1000*10 computers (11110 new ones) ....
all the way to 10*60 + 10^60 computers in a single minute (that's a number with 60 digits, or it would far exceed Earth's population). Even if we consider that 90% of those computers are unreachable/protected, one would still reach ALL of them within a minute."
Although I am sure it wouldn't happen quite as quickly as that you can see that the number of possible connections is hardly a great limitation. Unless you are trying to upload a large number of reasonably large files to a website and then it is positively crippling. Another great example of well meaning but badly thought out 'security measures' reducing functionality. Thank $deity for hacks.
Stardock released Galactic Civilizations with no copy protection and no requirement to have a cd in the drive. It was a definite success and sold (I've heard) over 100,000 copies.
Galatic Civilizations 2 which has just been released also has no copy protection and that is used as a selling point. Updates are available via Stardocks website if you have a valid copy.
It shouldn't be a matter of how many people copy the game illegally but how many people download it instead of buying the game. It seems enough people are willing to pay for Stardock's products for them to be successful and with none of the expenditure or backlash of slapping on the latest copy protection malware.
Just to troll, here are some typical pro-PC arguments:
You missed:
'I play games'
For some windows users it is just that simple. Until there is another platform supported by all the major (and most of the minor) game studios there isn't another choice of OS for gamers. How ever much better OSX and various Linux distros are there isn't the game support and that is the overiding factor for a large number of people.
If you lose your 'Knockey' I imagine it is a lot more expensive to replace than a simple key or an RFID badge.
Except that if you lose your keys or they are stolen then it is often a case of changing the much more expensive locks in case a less than scrupulous person who finds them and also knows where you live. Of course you shouldn't have anything personally identifiable on your keys but I know many people who do, and don't even get me started on people who have an alarm token on the same ring!
15 Cents a computer. $60,000 in a little over one year......he likely could have been making $100,000 by the time he was 30 working for the other side without the risk.
It is hardly as if he was working 9-5 on this 5 days a week. $60,000 for running automated tools to compromise other peoples machines sounds well worth the short amount of time it would take to set up.
In fact there is nothing in the article to indicate that he wasn't working a day job and doing the rest in his spare time.
There don't seem to be any trademarks pending for the 'Thunderbird' name, most of the existing trademarks are held by the ITC Corporation who own the rights to the Thunderbirds tv show and film. There don't seem to be any covering the same fields as Mozilla Thunderbird though, so it does seem strange that no application has been made.
Digital Tigers have been making multi LCD monitors like these for years. They offer 2, 3, 4 or 6 screens on a single stand
The best option to my eyes is the Tigervista Power Trio, one large LCD flanked by two smaller ones mounted portrait. This neatly gets around the problem of having a 'seam' down the middle of your eyeline where the screens join.
Oh and before the accusations fly I don't work for the company, but I have been lusting after one of their screen setups for a while now.
Of course you do need an extra graphics card to power the third screen, and the screens are by no means cheap.
Dual monitors can be very beneficial to productivity, but from a health and safety point of view they can be a nightmare.
What didn't come up in the article, as LCDs were used, is that if you don't have both screens running exactly the same refresh rate then it can cause appalling eye strain. Trying to focus on screens running different refreshes becomes very difficult and within 20 minutes or so the eyestrain gets very noticeable
I used a dual monitor setup for a week before giving up after developing a very annoying twitch in my left eye. My right eye was fine looking at a 17" screen running at 1280x1024@85hz but the left was trying to focus on a crappier 17" at 75hz.
The lesson being that if you can't afford to go the LCD route then choose your second monitor carefully, as you will want it to match the primary as closely as possible.
The first [buying from non RIAA members] gives them no legal leg to stand on, and sends a clear message, you won't support RIAA, it's member agencies or the artists they retain. That is a clear and succinct message
The problem with sending this clear message is that it shows up as decreased cd sales. If you are downloading independant music and buying cds through other channels than RIAA member label stocked stores. The RIAA then point at the decrease in cd sales and scream piracy, just as thay have been doing for the last few years.
Drop in sales due to end of people replacing vinyl.....PIRACY!
Drop in sales due to downturn in the economy......PIRACY!
Drop in sales due to decline in number of quality acts.....PIRACY
Sense a pattern?
Of course this shouldn't stop you from shifting to purchasing or downloading independant music. I'm just saying that it isn't going to send the message you hoped.
I may be wrong, their may be an AntiVirus product out there that deals with SpyWare. If there is, please let me know!
Norton AV 2004 has integrated spyware detection. Works pretty well, it detects spyware inside archives which Spybot S&D doesn't. It is bloatware though, and of course you have to pay for a license and the subscription for updated definitions.
Is that a Terry Prachett reference? From Lords and Ladies?
In Lords and Ladies the dancers (big rocks containing meteorite iron) were made into a henge to stop travel between the two universes. Not to form a gateway but as the door that seals it.
The elves (the Lords and Ladies from the title) couldn't pass through the ring of stones because they couldn't stand the iron. The area the stones surrounded was a particularly 'thin' area where the two worlds were close enough together to allow things to pass from one to another.
So maybe the parent did get the idea from 'Lords and Ladies', conciously or not. But if they did, they should go back and read it again and get the facts straight.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether the account has real-world value or not it is still entirely owned by Blizzard who allow the player to access it, according to their terms and conditions, and in exchange for a monthly fee. The account suddenly being worth something doesn't change the fact that all virtual money, items and characters are the property of Blizzard and not the players. The reason Blizzard and other companies running MMOs don't allow the buying and selling of virtual property is because it is not the player's property to buy and sell.
This isn't going to change, it is certainly not in Blizzard's interest to give any kind of ownership to the players partly because of the reasons you mention. Namely that if a character or in-game item is deemed to be owned by the player then they have legal rights to their property. As it stands Blizzard could shut the whole game down tomorrow and no player would have any recourse other than possibly a refund on their monthly subscription.
It isn't necessary to play for 40 hours a week, or 20 hours or any more than you want. The game is enjoyable when played at any rate. Just because it isn't possible to hit level 70 after a few hours or get the best gear straight away doesn't mean you can't play the game.
Just because some people choose to play for huge amounts of time doesn't mean everyone has to. I play for a few hours a couple of days a week and don't imagine I will hit lvl 70 for a long time, but as I am enjoying playing why does it matter? The idea of buying a game and then paying to get to the end of it seems ridiculous to me. If you only have time to play for 2 hours a week then thats fine and the game will last you a lot longer.
It isn't like you are competing against all the other players, the fact that someone can play for 40 hours a week has no effect on anyone else unless you view the game as a leveling competition that is only about reaching the finish line. MMOs aren't like that, it is about the journey not the destination.
I wonder if people who buy gold also flick straight to the end of books and fast forward their way through movies to get to the end faster.
Oh yes the revolutionary business model of selling a product for a reasonable price while still making a profit. Opposed to Sony's excellent method of selling at a staggeringly high price and *still* making a loss on each unit sold. Genius.
They may not be a year old yet but the article does not give any release dates for the mac versions of the games they mention.
While EA Sports titles will certainly increase the range of games available on Mac I and will have mass market appeal, they certainly wouldn't have been my first choice to relaunch gaming on the Mac. EA Games are renowned for buggy releases which isn't going to sit well with the Mac user's "It just works" mentality.
I can't speak for Australia, but in the UK burglaries and robberies involving firearms are in the minority.
There is no reason for a burglar to carry a gun while breaking into someones house as there is virtually no liklihood of the home owner having a gun. Because of this most burglaries result in no injuries or loss of life, and the criminals are still alive to be brought to justice by the police.
Even if criminals do have access to guns then they would be foolhardy to carry or use them during a burglary or robbery as the penalty is, by design, much higher for armed robbery. By a combination of gun control and harsher penalties for crimes involving firearms the UK is a considerably safer place than many other countries, including the US.
Most gun crime in the UK is a result of gangs settling scores with other gangs. A situation that would be considerably worse if gang members could buy a gun legally whenever they wanted.
Trying to defend the deeply flawed gun 'control' stragegy in the USA by pointing at countries who have a civilised view of guns only serves to insult the people from those countries.
I think you are referring to the Road of Bones. The Road of Tears is an album by the Battlefield Band..
Not a company, 'The Company'. They were declassified CIA documents if I remember rightly.
I don't know about everyone else but I certainly notice video watermarking. Nothing like paying £6 a ticket at the cinema to be distracted every 15 mins by brown blobs flashing on the screen. The picture quality at most cinemas is bad enough as it is with scratches and dust all over the print without putting more shit on it.
Mozilla don't make money from you downloading Firefox but they do make a small amount every time you search using the google search box and then click on an advert.
Microsoft's gains are more complicated, they want as many people using their browser so that they can keep control of their users. If the default browser on Windows is inferior to the default browser on OSX then Joe Public is more likely to switch. Of course they also use IE to leverage their own search engine MSN.
You are right, Nintendo are thinking about what is best for most of their potential customers. Currently most people don't have HDTVs and won't be buying one for the next couple of years at least. Especially as the price of a TV that can display 1080p is prohibitive at the moment (in the UK at least). People are hanging on until they can 'proper HD' instead of jumping on the 'HD ready' bandwagon and ending up with a 720p screen that won't display the new content at full quality.
Contrast this to the approach taken with the Xbox 360, yes it supports 1080p content, thats great for people with HDTVs but when they are releasing games like Dead Rising where the text is almost unreadable on an SDTV they are just pissing off a large proportion of their customers.
Plusnet do have usage limits they just hide them in a 'Sustainable Usage Policy'
On their PLUS package you pay £14.99 a month and are capped at 10gb
On thier Premier package you pay £21.99, £29.99 or £39.99 for 15gb, 22.5gb or 30gb caps.
These caps are on peak time usage, initially this was afternoon/early evening for a 4 hours or so. It is now 4pm until midnight and can be changed on their whim. At one point it was 4pm until 6am. If you exceed the cap they drop your speed to 256kbps until the end of the month, if you exceed it two months running then your speed is only reset to what you are paying for if you agree to move up to a package with a higher cap.
When I was with them they also had additional caps on certain traffic, for instance only 10gb per month from newsgroups no matter what package you are on or what time you are downloading.
In addition to all of this they also do extensive traffic shaping, so speeds for anything other than email and web browsing drop through the floor most of the day.
All in all plusNet certainly do not allow unlimited usage and have very little tolerance for heavy users and p2p.
I was lucky enough to migrate over to Zen at the point when they were offering a truly uncapped 2MB service. They have now changed their packages to 100gb caps with extra usage charged per gb but existing customers could keep their uncapped accounts if they didn't mind the 2MB speed instead of 8MB.
If you are likely to be using more than 100gb bandwith a month and don't want to pay per gb for extra bandwith then look into business packages as they are almost without exception uncapped with better contention.
I don't agree that the connection limit helps at all to stop the spread of worms/trojans/viruses. I think this quote from speedguide.net sums it up well.
Although I am sure it wouldn't happen quite as quickly as that you can see that the number of possible connections is hardly a great limitation. Unless you are trying to upload a large number of reasonably large files to a website and then it is positively crippling. Another great example of well meaning but badly thought out 'security measures' reducing functionality. Thank $deity for hacks.
It's here
Stardock released Galactic Civilizations with no copy protection and no requirement to have a cd in the drive. It was a definite success and sold (I've heard) over 100,000 copies.
Galatic Civilizations 2 which has just been released also has no copy protection and that is used as a selling point. Updates are available via Stardocks website if you have a valid copy.
It shouldn't be a matter of how many people copy the game illegally but how many people download it instead of buying the game. It seems enough people are willing to pay for Stardock's products for them to be successful and with none of the expenditure or backlash of slapping on the latest copy protection malware.
You missed :
For some windows users it is just that simple. Until there is another platform supported by all the major (and most of the minor) game studios there isn't another choice of OS for gamers. How ever much better OSX and various Linux distros are there isn't the game support and that is the overiding factor for a large number of people.
Except that if you lose your keys or they are stolen then it is often a case of changing the much more expensive locks in case a less than scrupulous person who finds them and also knows where you live. Of course you shouldn't have anything personally identifiable on your keys but I know many people who do, and don't even get me started on people who have an alarm token on the same ring!
It is hardly as if he was working 9-5 on this 5 days a week. $60,000 for running automated tools to compromise other peoples machines sounds well worth the short amount of time it would take to set up.
In fact there is nothing in the article to indicate that he wasn't working a day job and doing the rest in his spare time.
I think you will find that they do.
As far as already having been taken in the UK goes here is the list of trademarks on 'Firefox' and here is the Mozilla Foundation's application for a trademark.
There don't seem to be any trademarks pending for the 'Thunderbird' name, most of the existing trademarks are held by the ITC Corporation who own the rights to the Thunderbirds tv show and film. There don't seem to be any covering the same fields as Mozilla Thunderbird though, so it does seem strange that no application has been made.
Digital Tigers have been making multi LCD monitors like these for years. They offer 2, 3, 4 or 6 screens on a single stand
The best option to my eyes is the Tigervista Power Trio, one large LCD flanked by two smaller ones mounted portrait. This neatly gets around the problem of having a 'seam' down the middle of your eyeline where the screens join.
Oh and before the accusations fly I don't work for the company, but I have been lusting after one of their screen setups for a while now.
Of course you do need an extra graphics card to power the third screen, and the screens are by no means cheap.
Not a food per se but a friend of mine has destroyed several keyboards when late night post-pub gaming has turned into uncontrolled vomiting.
(And yes an actual friend opposed to a scapegoat alter ego.)
I'm sure google are having a whip round for bandwith money as we speak.
Dual monitors can be very beneficial to productivity, but from a health and safety point of view they can be a nightmare.
What didn't come up in the article, as LCDs were used, is that if you don't have both screens running exactly the same refresh rate then it can cause appalling eye strain. Trying to focus on screens running different refreshes becomes very difficult and within 20 minutes or so the eyestrain gets very noticeable
I used a dual monitor setup for a week before giving up after developing a very annoying twitch in my left eye. My right eye was fine looking at a 17" screen running at 1280x1024@85hz but the left was trying to focus on a crappier 17" at 75hz.
The lesson being that if you can't afford to go the LCD route then choose your second monitor carefully, as you will want it to match the primary as closely as possible.
The first [buying from non RIAA members] gives them no legal leg to stand on, and sends a clear message, you won't support RIAA, it's member agencies or the artists they retain. That is a clear and succinct message
The problem with sending this clear message is that it shows up as decreased cd sales. If you are downloading independant music and buying cds through other channels than RIAA member label stocked stores. The RIAA then point at the decrease in cd sales and scream piracy, just as thay have been doing for the last few years.
Drop in sales due to end of people replacing vinyl .....PIRACY!
Drop in sales due to downturn in the economy......PIRACY! Drop in sales due to decline in number of quality acts.....PIRACY
Sense a pattern?
Of course this shouldn't stop you from shifting to purchasing or downloading independant music. I'm just saying that it isn't going to send the message you hoped.
I may be wrong, their may be an AntiVirus product out there that deals with SpyWare. If there is, please let me know!
Norton AV 2004 has integrated spyware detection. Works pretty well, it detects spyware inside archives which Spybot S&D doesn't. It is bloatware though, and of course you have to pay for a license and the subscription for updated definitions.
Is that a Terry Prachett reference? From Lords and Ladies?
In Lords and Ladies the dancers (big rocks containing meteorite iron) were made into a henge to stop travel between the two universes. Not to form a gateway but as the door that seals it.
The elves (the Lords and Ladies from the title) couldn't pass through the ring of stones because they couldn't stand the iron. The area the stones surrounded was a particularly 'thin' area where the two worlds were close enough together to allow things to pass from one to another.
So maybe the parent did get the idea from 'Lords and Ladies', conciously or not. But if they did, they should go back and read it again and get the facts straight.