And yet the people who blew $2500+ on the first run of apple MacBook Pro's werent crazy or stupid, weren't they? Funny how perception changes based on the product and the vendor...
More like the based on the added value of the product.
When you bought a MacBook Pro at launch, how many of the features were usable right out of the box during the first year after launch? But when you buy a HD-DVD, given the lack of media, for the first year, people will essentially have a really expensive box that will only plan normal commercial DVDs (since you can't buy commercial HD-DVDs yet). Much better to wait a year until the media becomes more available and the bugs get worked out, and buy a usable player at half price.
Even if you need a new DVD player today, it's cheaper to buy a conventional one new, and a year from now throw it away and buy a new HD-DVD one a year from now, than to buy a new HD-DVD one now.
Not everyone who is in prison did that.
Some of them might be there on a drug charge. Or a hacking charge.
Some of them aren't even guilty.
Of course. There are many innocent people in prison, and I am not making that generalization. I am just referring to this person in particular, and people who commit such crimes in general (the people who commit them, rather than the people who are convicted of them. Hopefully the two groups are very similar, but unfortunately, they are not always so.)
If someone thinks it's OK to kill a witness and their entire family just to get them to shut up (or, for that matter, for any reason AT ALL), I find it hard to have any sympathy for him if he gets raped or even murdered in prison. What goes around comes around.
I wish they would make this clearer (or if they do, I wish they did it better in the past). About a year or two ago I got a phishing email pretending to be from eBay. I sent it to abuse@ebay.com but got a form letter telling me to go through their web site (and not only that, the form REQUIRED that I log into my ebay account - so if I didn't have one, I would have no way to report phishing, which is absurd). So I just let it drop. I'm trying to do them a favor, but I don't feel like jumping through a dozen hoops to do so. This is ultimately THEIR problem and should NOT be mine. If they had merely forwarded the message to spoof@ebay.com in the first place, none of this would have been necessary.
She used to help her students get top grades in modern language exams in a week (from scratch). The only problem is that you often forget in less than seven days what was learnt in the previous week! So the solution was to follow one of her crash courses with an extended visit to the appropriate country...
It also means that you have to accept that there are some things that you can no longer do. That's what "incapacitated" means.
This is true, but this is not case of someone going into the store, loking at the box, reading the fine print, taking it home, and it not working to his satisfaction.
This is the case of someone who bought the game, took it home, installed it, played happily for quite some time, and invested a lot of time and effort into the game, but now because of unilateral changes made by the game publisher, his game tha used to work fine for him no longer does so.
Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.
on
P2P Polluter Shuts Down
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The IP blocks they use are widely known and have become ineffective against savvy filesharers.
The real problem isn't from savvy file sharers, but rather clueless ones who download the files, don't care that they are corrupted (or more likely, just download them and never actually listen to them), and keep sharing them forever.
And, uh, no offense at all intended, but how does a guy take pains to watch someone pull a safety belt snug and breathe into a plastic mask?
Well, reading the same safety sheet dozens of times, and watching the flight attendants demonstrate how to fasten a seat belt dozens of times, etc. etc. does seem to be a waste of time after a while.
I also used to find this very annoying about arcade video games - you always had to start at level one, and play the same ridiculously easy and boring levels over and over again just to get to the more interesting higher levels. Some of them sensibly included warps that allowed you to bypass most of the lower levels, if you knew them well enough and didn't want to bother with them.
Yes, and the only question is who that "someone else" is going to be
Once you start having real value involved (in this case, monthly fees), you suddenly have real-world economics being involved, whether or not the game manufacturer wants that or not. This could even be a dynamic in games without monthly fees, but in which much time and effort must be invested. Some companies are getting wise to this and actually offering additional in-game resources to be purchased for real-world currency. Some are even gearing their games to encourage this (and make it hard for players who do not pony up additional money).
It's hard for me to believe that someone who leaps over the early stages will be as competent a party member as someone who has ground their way to the top. What is there then for the level-99 newbie to do?
This makes sense the very first time you play. But once you have worked a character up from the cradle to superhero via months of painstaking play, and you decide to create a new character, should you be required to have to go through all that painful process again?
I used to painstakingly watch every single airplane safety lecture, and read through every plane safety brochure. But after travelling in the same area of the same kind of plane a dozen times, I know it all by heart, so I no longer feel the need to waste my time doing it over and over again.
Because it's a game! The exact same thing could be acomplished with a usergold+=50000 command...
Yes, you could do this in a single-player game running on your own computer. However, in a multi-player game where you can't just go and patch your own character to have godlike powers, this is not a viable option.
it's crazy! What a waste of man-power.
Why so? If you actually consider the player's investment in time and money, it starts to make more sense.
If I subscribe to a game and have to pay $10/month, if I can spend 10 hours/day playing it, and it takes a month (300 hours) to create a high-level character, that may be worth my time. But if I can only spend 1 hour/day playing (say, because I have a life), it now takes me 10 months to create such a character, and $100 worth of gaming fees. It would be much more reasonable to pay someone else $100 for a pre-made character, and save myself 300 hours of time when I'm doing nothing but tediously whacking on target dummies and weaving cloth for virtual copper pieces in the market.
I often open files just to look at them, and inadvertently hit a key that modifies the file. I don't WANT such changes to be saved automatically, especially if I am not aware that I made them.
If this mode were to be adopted, I would at least want two kinds of Open commands - Open to view, and Open to edit. Unfortunately given the feature-poor point-and-click interface most people use these days, this becomes more cumbersome, for example double-click = view, shift+double-click = edit. (You can specify an object with your mouse, but are restricted in what verb to apply to it by gestures and shift keys, or less convenient pop-up menus).
I like having programs automatically save temporary changes (useful in case of program crashes), as long as it is understood that such changes are not "official" until explicitly saved. Microsoft Word does this, and now so does Gmail.
In the worst case, you can wire up your own sigma/delta ADC out of a few analog and discrete logic parts and then feed its output over any serial bus (such as USB).
First, the number of us capable of doing this is relatively small. Second, this depends on the availabilty of DAC/ADC chips. How long before the U.S. government makes such devices severely controlled because they can be used to circumvent the DMCA? (Of course, you could always try to wire one up out of transistors or vacuum tubes...)
This can't happen eventually, but just give it 5-10 years. EVERY computer sold by people like Dell (even the cheap ones) will be using whatever chip sets the industry is putting on their motherboards and sound cards. Everybody these days is using AGP video cards. Just TRY to find a PCI one (they exist, but are much rarer and more expensive). Heaven forbid you try to find something made for ISA. Look backwards the same distance. How many people do you know that are using computers made in 1999 or earlier? While they still do exist, the number is dwindling.
Companies like RIAA care about the bottom line. Once they can get 50%, or 75%, or 90% of the people under their thumbs, they won't really worry about some family that is so poor they are running Windows 95 on a 10-year-old computer - such people usually also don't have huge hard disks and broadband to be major piracy threats.
If it can be filtered by our brains (or lies outside the audible ranges), it can be filtered by our software.
Almost all audio codecs already removes most inaudible artefects.
Yes, but how will it get to the software? If the sound card automatically refuses to pass any sounds that contain such artifacts, you won't be able to get them into your computer to do the required audio-post-processing to remove them in the first place. You will need to use a third-party analog (or at least DRM-free digital) sound-processing device. Unfortunately, as more and more devices will start to include "trusted computing" (bleh) hardware, low-tech devices that can easily circumvent such will be harder and harder to come by.
They ALREADY have DRM grain. Monsanto has grain that is genetically altered to resist Roundup pesticides. This is copyrighted so that you must buy new seed grain every year - you are not permitted to reuse any grain from previous years as seed grain (i.e. make copies). This grain has been introduced into Iraq, and the new constitution enshrines American-style copyright restrictions, so Iraqi farmers who have been keeping thier own seed grain for many thousands of years will no longer be permitted to do so. There have been cases in the US and Canada where farmers have had their fields infected by stray Monsanto seeds, and were then (successfully) sued by Monsanto for copyright violation.
There are also concerted international efforts working to create grains that produce edible (but non-viable) seeds, which will truly be enforcing non-copyability via hardware means. Sigh.
The problem is that DRM devices can superimpose a non-detectible (at least to humans without electronic augmentation) watermark carrying the message "do not duplicate" - and that other DRM devices will be mandated to respect this. I remember hearing a story about 10-15 years ago about a CD manufacturer doing this, but abandoning the project at the time because on certain CDs the watermark made a slight audible difference in the sound, causing adiophiles to get up in arms about it.
While that is true, the jump (features/security/etc) from Win 2000 to WinXP wasn't as big as the jump from Win95 to Win 2000.
Considering that Windows XP is really Windows 2002, the fact that there is a 5 year gap between Windows 95 and Windows 2000 but only a 2 year gap between Windows 2000 and Windows XP would suggest less time to develop new features, so yes, this is perfectly reasonable.
Part of Blizzard's argument was that Blizzard's servers authenticate product registration keys, while bnetd's servers do not - so they permit use of pirated software.
This is just the kind of thing that they put into Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The effects were done very well, and, in many cases, totally unexpected.
Just as other game elements are translated from game to player and vice versa - moods are translated via theme music, graphics, etc. - this mechanism actually transfers insanity from the game to the player, NOT an easy task.
Some of the effects were entirely in-game - weird camera angles, eerie screaming effects, entering a room to be dismembered by a monster, and then after you die, you show up outside the same room and realize it was just a nightmare.
Some of the effects pretend to show non-existent hardware problems, such as popup error messages saying that the controller is missing, the screen going black as if the power is going out, the color on the screen bleaching out causing a black-and-white display, and in one case, the system rebooting to a DOS prompt. The first time I saw most of these, I thought I was going nuts.
Several people I know use random non-essential chunks of data as identifiers to track where such information comes from, most often, a middle initial. So if you get junk mail for John A. Public, it was leaked from company 1; mail to John B. Public was leaked from company 2, etc. It gives a good idea of whom to go after if you decide to sue (or whom to stop doing business with if you don't).
I've heard of the same technique being used by people who aggregate and publish public-domain information; their competitors have the right to publish the same information from the raw sources, but not from their copyrighted compliation. They can track such plagarism by introducing subtle errors; if these errors are copied, they must have been plagarized. This is used by dictionaries, which introduce typos or fake words, or mapmakers, who may missppell a place name, or move a place slightly to the wrong location.
Admin rights are a bit problematic. On systems like Unix, a user would have to be a reckless fool to run as root. Unfortunately, under Windows, so many programs require administrator access to install (and some even to run), and don't work properly if installed by one account and used for another, that most Windows users actually use accounts with administrator privileges day to day. Should this mean that Unix users are entitled to greater levels of legal protection than Windows users?
A homeless man living in a cardboard box in Central Park is entitled to privacy, even though the technology he is using (i.e. cardbord) does not give him the ability to put a lock on his front door (even if he does, in fact, have one).
Slashdot Mirror
And yet the people who blew $2500+ on the first run of apple MacBook Pro's werent crazy or stupid, weren't they? Funny how perception changes based on the product and the vendor...
More like the based on the added value of the product.
When you bought a MacBook Pro at launch, how many of the features were usable right out of the box during the first year after launch? But when you buy a HD-DVD, given the lack of media, for the first year, people will essentially have a really expensive box that will only plan normal commercial DVDs (since you can't buy commercial HD-DVDs yet). Much better to wait a year until the media becomes more available and the bugs get worked out, and buy a usable player at half price.
Even if you need a new DVD player today, it's cheaper to buy a conventional one new, and a year from now throw it away and buy a new HD-DVD one a year from now, than to buy a new HD-DVD one now.
Not everyone who is in prison did that.
Some of them might be there on a drug charge. Or a hacking charge.
Some of them aren't even guilty.
Of course. There are many innocent people in prison, and I am not making that generalization. I am just referring to this person in particular, and people who commit such crimes in general (the people who commit them, rather than the people who are convicted of them. Hopefully the two groups are very similar, but unfortunately, they are not always so.)
If someone thinks it's OK to kill a witness and their entire family just to get them to shut up (or, for that matter, for any reason AT ALL), I find it hard to have any sympathy for him if he gets raped or even murdered in prison. What goes around comes around.
Ditto for eBay--spoof@ebay.com.
I wish they would make this clearer (or if they do, I wish they did it better in the past). About a year or two ago I got a phishing email pretending to be from eBay. I sent it to abuse@ebay.com but got a form letter telling me to go through their web site (and not only that, the form REQUIRED that I log into my ebay account - so if I didn't have one, I would have no way to report phishing, which is absurd). So I just let it drop. I'm trying to do them a favor, but I don't feel like jumping through a dozen hoops to do so. This is ultimately THEIR problem and should NOT be mine. If they had merely forwarded the message to spoof@ebay.com in the first place, none of this would have been necessary.
She used to help her students get top grades in modern language exams in a week (from scratch). The only problem is that you often forget in less than seven days what was learnt in the previous week! So the solution was to follow one of her crash courses with an extended visit to the appropriate country...
How much is a round-trip ticket to Esperantia?
It also means that you have to accept that there are some things that you can no longer do. That's what "incapacitated" means.
This is true, but this is not case of someone going into the store, loking at the box, reading the fine print, taking it home, and it not working to his satisfaction.
This is the case of someone who bought the game, took it home, installed it, played happily for quite some time, and invested a lot of time and effort into the game, but now because of unilateral changes made by the game publisher, his game tha used to work fine for him no longer does so.
The IP blocks they use are widely known and have become ineffective against savvy filesharers.
The real problem isn't from savvy file sharers, but rather clueless ones who download the files, don't care that they are corrupted (or more likely, just download them and never actually listen to them), and keep sharing them forever.
And, uh, no offense at all intended, but how does a guy take pains to watch someone pull a safety belt snug and breathe into a plastic mask?
Well, reading the same safety sheet dozens of times, and watching the flight attendants demonstrate how to fasten a seat belt dozens of times, etc. etc. does seem to be a waste of time after a while.
I also used to find this very annoying about arcade video games - you always had to start at level one, and play the same ridiculously easy and boring levels over and over again just to get to the more interesting higher levels. Some of them sensibly included warps that allowed you to bypass most of the lower levels, if you knew them well enough and didn't want to bother with them.
Yes, and the only question is who that "someone else" is going to be
Once you start having real value involved (in this case, monthly fees), you suddenly have real-world economics being involved, whether or not the game manufacturer wants that or not. This could even be a dynamic in games without monthly fees, but in which much time and effort must be invested. Some companies are getting wise to this and actually offering additional in-game resources to be purchased for real-world currency. Some are even gearing their games to encourage this (and make it hard for players who do not pony up additional money).
It's hard for me to believe that someone who leaps over the early stages will be as competent a party member as someone who has ground their way to the top. What is there then for the level-99 newbie to do?
This makes sense the very first time you play. But once you have worked a character up from the cradle to superhero via months of painstaking play, and you decide to create a new character, should you be required to have to go through all that painful process again?
I used to painstakingly watch every single airplane safety lecture, and read through every plane safety brochure. But after travelling in the same area of the same kind of plane a dozen times, I know it all by heart, so I no longer feel the need to waste my time doing it over and over again.
Because it's a game! The exact same thing could be acomplished with a usergold+=50000 command...
Yes, you could do this in a single-player game running on your own computer. However, in a multi-player game where you can't just go and patch your own character to have godlike powers, this is not a viable option.
it's crazy! What a waste of man-power.
Why so? If you actually consider the player's investment in time and money, it starts to make more sense.
If I subscribe to a game and have to pay $10/month, if I can spend 10 hours/day playing it, and it takes a month (300 hours) to create a high-level character, that may be worth my time. But if I can only spend 1 hour/day playing (say, because I have a life), it now takes me 10 months to create such a character, and $100 worth of gaming fees. It would be much more reasonable to pay someone else $100 for a pre-made character, and save myself 300 hours of time when I'm doing nothing but tediously whacking on target dummies and weaving cloth for virtual copper pieces in the market.
I often open files just to look at them, and inadvertently hit a key that modifies the file. I don't WANT such changes to be saved automatically, especially if I am not aware that I made them. If this mode were to be adopted, I would at least want two kinds of Open commands - Open to view, and Open to edit. Unfortunately given the feature-poor point-and-click interface most people use these days, this becomes more cumbersome, for example double-click = view, shift+double-click = edit. (You can specify an object with your mouse, but are restricted in what verb to apply to it by gestures and shift keys, or less convenient pop-up menus). I like having programs automatically save temporary changes (useful in case of program crashes), as long as it is understood that such changes are not "official" until explicitly saved. Microsoft Word does this, and now so does Gmail.
RE: The city of Sapporo of Sapporo
So good, they named it twice?
Yes, just like the people of New York, New York.
In the worst case, you can wire up your own sigma/delta ADC out of a few analog and discrete logic parts and then feed its output over any serial bus (such as USB).
First, the number of us capable of doing this is relatively small. Second, this depends on the availabilty of DAC/ADC chips. How long before the U.S. government makes such devices severely controlled because they can be used to circumvent the DMCA? (Of course, you could always try to wire one up out of transistors or vacuum tubes...)
This can't happen eventually, but just give it 5-10 years. EVERY computer sold by people like Dell (even the cheap ones) will be using whatever chip sets the industry is putting on their motherboards and sound cards. Everybody these days is using AGP video cards. Just TRY to find a PCI one (they exist, but are much rarer and more expensive). Heaven forbid you try to find something made for ISA. Look backwards the same distance. How many people do you know that are using computers made in 1999 or earlier? While they still do exist, the number is dwindling.
Companies like RIAA care about the bottom line. Once they can get 50%, or 75%, or 90% of the people under their thumbs, they won't really worry about some family that is so poor they are running Windows 95 on a 10-year-old computer - such people usually also don't have huge hard disks and broadband to be major piracy threats.
If it can be filtered by our brains (or lies outside the audible ranges), it can be filtered by our software. Almost all audio codecs already removes most inaudible artefects.
Yes, but how will it get to the software? If the sound card automatically refuses to pass any sounds that contain such artifacts, you won't be able to get them into your computer to do the required audio-post-processing to remove them in the first place. You will need to use a third-party analog (or at least DRM-free digital) sound-processing device. Unfortunately, as more and more devices will start to include "trusted computing" (bleh) hardware, low-tech devices that can easily circumvent such will be harder and harder to come by.
They ALREADY have DRM grain. Monsanto has grain that is genetically altered to resist Roundup pesticides. This is copyrighted so that you must buy new seed grain every year - you are not permitted to reuse any grain from previous years as seed grain (i.e. make copies). This grain has been introduced into Iraq, and the new constitution enshrines American-style copyright restrictions, so Iraqi farmers who have been keeping thier own seed grain for many thousands of years will no longer be permitted to do so. There have been cases in the US and Canada where farmers have had their fields infected by stray Monsanto seeds, and were then (successfully) sued by Monsanto for copyright violation.
There are also concerted international efforts working to create grains that produce edible (but non-viable) seeds, which will truly be enforcing non-copyability via hardware means. Sigh.
The problem is that DRM devices can superimpose a non-detectible (at least to humans without electronic augmentation) watermark carrying the message "do not duplicate" - and that other DRM devices will be mandated to respect this. I remember hearing a story about 10-15 years ago about a CD manufacturer doing this, but abandoning the project at the time because on certain CDs the watermark made a slight audible difference in the sound, causing adiophiles to get up in arms about it.
I've had three calls after my do-not-call request was officially enabled.
The first one I let slide (because I didn't realize that enough time had passed since I signed up for the request to become active).
The second one I tried to report, but was told that the request could not be processed (presumably the server was having problems).
The third one I let slide because it was altogether too much work, based on my previous experience. I can live with one call every 2 months.
This will be perfect once you download LibraryOfCongess.zip from Kazaa.
While that is true, the jump (features/security/etc) from Win 2000 to WinXP wasn't as big as the jump from Win95 to Win 2000.
Considering that Windows XP is really Windows 2002, the fact that there is a 5 year gap between Windows 95 and Windows 2000 but only a 2 year gap between Windows 2000 and Windows XP would suggest less time to develop new features, so yes, this is perfectly reasonable.
Part of Blizzard's argument was that Blizzard's servers authenticate product registration keys, while bnetd's servers do not - so they permit use of pirated software.
This is just the kind of thing that they put into Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The effects were done very well, and, in many cases, totally unexpected.
Just as other game elements are translated from game to player and vice versa - moods are translated via theme music, graphics, etc. - this mechanism actually transfers insanity from the game to the player, NOT an easy task.
Some of the effects were entirely in-game - weird camera angles, eerie screaming effects, entering a room to be dismembered by a monster, and then after you die, you show up outside the same room and realize it was just a nightmare.
Some of the effects pretend to show non-existent hardware problems, such as popup error messages saying that the controller is missing, the screen going black as if the power is going out, the color on the screen bleaching out causing a black-and-white display, and in one case, the system rebooting to a DOS prompt. The first time I saw most of these, I thought I was going nuts.
Several people I know use random non-essential chunks of data as identifiers to track where such information comes from, most often, a middle initial. So if you get junk mail for John A. Public, it was leaked from company 1; mail to John B. Public was leaked from company 2, etc. It gives a good idea of whom to go after if you decide to sue (or whom to stop doing business with if you don't).
I've heard of the same technique being used by people who aggregate and publish public-domain information; their competitors have the right to publish the same information from the raw sources, but not from their copyrighted compliation. They can track such plagarism by introducing subtle errors; if these errors are copied, they must have been plagarized. This is used by dictionaries, which introduce typos or fake words, or mapmakers, who may missppell a place name, or move a place slightly to the wrong location.
Admin rights are a bit problematic. On systems like Unix, a user would have to be a reckless fool to run as root. Unfortunately, under Windows, so many programs require administrator access to install (and some even to run), and don't work properly if installed by one account and used for another, that most Windows users actually use accounts with administrator privileges day to day. Should this mean that Unix users are entitled to greater levels of legal protection than Windows users?
A homeless man living in a cardboard box in Central Park is entitled to privacy, even though the technology he is using (i.e. cardbord) does not give him the ability to put a lock on his front door (even if he does, in fact, have one).