why are you running Ubuntu on a server in the first place ?
I'll bite. In my instance, why I have chosen at times Ubuntu over CentOS:
1) specific daemons, libraries (if I'm using certain commercial software that relies up on it) are provided in the distribution's repositories, removing the need for me to package my own versions of the software where CentOS did not offer. This removes the issue of me having to monitor for security vulnerabilities, needing to back port code should the new library be incompatible with the given application that uses it etc.
2) Ubuntu's Apparmor configuration is not as assinine (and in theory, just as secure) as the configuration used in the selinux configuration that centos comes with, I don't want to have to rewrite all the selinux rules because I want to use pppd with a specific VPN protocol handler.
3) More daemons in Ubuntu run as non-root processes, but dedicated usernames for the given processes, reducing the risk of compromises. I am not happy with having the syslog running as root when it's streaming/recieving log data over the network and might be vulnerable to remote vulnerabilities that could compromise the entire system.
4) I generally prefer the speed of apt, it seems to run faster.
I use Gentoo because I have zero patience for binary package "management" and the dependency hell / obsolete libraries that come along with it.
I much rather sticking to LTS versions of Ubuntu-server for server things, I'm not fond of Gentoo's use-latest-anything-source-package-system-with-different-config-files-used-randomly-and-then-use-wiki-to-figure-out-how-to-do-the-rest-of-the-install style just for a random minor security update (the messing about with unstable packages is what drives me away from Gentoo).
I love its creature comforts and Portage, for all its pains, is a godsend when you want to apply your own patches.
I'm quite fond of apt-build for applying my own small patches/optimizations, the automation you can with it to handle apt-get upgrades is pretty nifty in my opinion. That said, source packages on Gentoo have more customizations using the use flags, apt-build doesn't have anything like that yet.
And well, the elitist in me loves the fact that the Gentoo forums are mostly populated by like-minded coders and sysadmins, with a relatively low ratio of attention-whoring noobs.
Since I don't use forums, I didn't even know this was an issue until you pointed it out (I haven't gone out of my way to verify it).
Oh fine, since you asked so nicely, I'll feed you a bit.
It's not normal for an adult to lust after fursuits
Maybe I've been too sheltered in the fandom? -- but as far as I know, that's only a minority in the fandom that people keep focusing on. I socialize on a daily basis online with 'furs' and the majority of them don't appear to have any interest in fursuit sex (Pre-emptive counter argument: if you think it's weird to talk about fetishes and sex in a social situations, you obviously don't go to bars).
Which shows about 18.44% are into "fursuiting", I would find it highly unlikely that each and every person in those statistics is however into sex with "fursuits", but even if they were, 18.44% isn't the majority of "furs" out there. however, feel free to counter with citations of your own.
The crux of it is, if the payment you make via Paypal for anything you buy on Steam doesn't go through for any reason, routine or not, Steam will think you've stolen the game and your account will be banned, along with all the games you've purchased on it. And according to this man's account of events, Steam are not very open to allowing you to rectify the situation.
Actually VALVe are following merchant agreements with payment processors, you're not going to find much different with any service provider.
If a transaction is reversed, you don't give the product for free regardless, it's removed and for non-refundable charges (steam automatically assumes it's not a refund unless you request it from support), the agreement requires them to suspend an account until the balance has been paid and that is exactly what they are doing. If your payment doesn't go through normally on your card or such, it doesn't cause a reversed transaction on payment systems it just fails to pay initially - this is specifically the case with reversed transactions.
It's like reversing a transaction from a real life store, it's going to piss off the store who will refuse to deal with you until you pay the balance owed as you essentially stole back the money you paid them.
How nice of the content creators - when it's piracy they all talk about it like I stole a physical item ("You wouldn't steal a car..."),
That is the concept of copyright however, making something non-tangible into a tangible form via licensing to promote creation of new literature by making it a viable business - So I don't really see the problem with this analogy they use.
but when I buy something it turns out that I only licensed it and actually do not have it.
Ownership of works would mean you get exclusive rights to decide what happens with the copyrights, it is highly unlikely someone is going to sell that to you for $15.
These people are arguably not the population ZFS' requirements are intended to satisfy.
I'm not arguing that. I still feel it's relatively useful knowledge for people who are considering ZFS outside of it's specific features. Sometimes you use a specific filesystem because the rest of your organisation's systems use it. I personally find benchmarking for a specific task to determine whether or not you should introduce more filesystem homogeneity into your environment can be beneficial if it reduces maintenence/costs long term. Or even doing the reverse and trying to determine if it's worth switching to filesystem X for some particular feature that other don't support, but still require a certain level of performance on some tasks.
Well, it works well enough for me (and I don't want to cheat) that I did not have to investigate how it works in detail. However, if I ever run into problems with Valve, they can disable/delete my account and I will lose all my games.
If you cheat, you would just get locked out of the anti-cheating enabled servers (VAC protected). You wouldn't lose access to games, although, there are two titles where this is a bit of a gray area. With modern warfare 2 and black ops, they both use a match making system which only has VAC enabled - you have no choice to not use a VAC enabled server and in those instances, it will make multiplayer useless if you're caught on that engine. Oh, I forgot to mention that if you're caught cheating, you're only 'banned' from using that specific engine on anti-cheating servers, so if you were caught on say, counter strike, you would not be banned from half life 2: death match.
They could, in theory, start charging a monthly fee and I would either have to pay it or lose my games.
I would go about suing them if this happened honestly - bait and switch.
I bought those games
In reality, you licensed them.
If I go to a store and buy a CD (with music) I can continue to use it even if the store goes out of business or if the store starts hating me for some reason.
VALVe on a few occasions has hinted on a few occasions that they would 'unlock' games should they ever go out of business. Whether or not they'll live up to that promise I don't know, but I already have enough knowledge to remove the executable wrappers on Steam games, so, even if they fail to do so, I have a feeling 'unlockers' will be available.
my book, is NOT piracy. *) The big games companies don't help them selves these days, often releasing sub-par products with no demo and force companies to only release reviews AFTER game launch (MW2 I'm looking at you).
I'm 99% sure I saw a MW2 demo disc on a PS3 magazine.
If companies in general spent half the time making their games fun and reasonably priced (~70 dollars for a new game which blows) they wouldn't have to worry about pirates.
How about showing some patience instead of pirating? A lot of publishers lower the price on their games after a while.
*COUGH*minecraft*COUGH*
You can only reference one instance of this happening? That tells me that is a fluke rather than the rule.
But what I'm trying to point out is that merely copying data, illegally or not, does not harm the author by itself because they have not been deprived of anything.
But you look at the sales data of DRMed content and you can immediately determine that if they would have been unsucesful being able to casually copy the data as mentioned, then there would have been greater sales, thus they were denied sales. But ignoring that, I believe increasing the supply also has the possibility of devaluing the content, making it more accessible via free forms rather than paid forms. People will use the justification that price X is too expensive, if only it was Y, but then they go pirate it. Once the game is sold at Y, the people don't buy it, because they already own the pirated copy. I can see the harm with these illegitimate copies performed.
However, it would be difficult to determine whether or not it was because of the DRM or because the game merely sold more copies.
Without saying too much due to NDAs, each copy sold was uniquely identifiable and each machine it spread to was uniquely identifaible, the way software was copied/spread from which user was tracable to an initial extent. Usually it started it off with what was believed to be friends giving a friend a copy, after that it gets more shady. As each machine was uniquely identiable, when a piece of software was released with DRM, going through the same machines we identified as friends giving friends, their friends instead bought copies - identified from the the fact they had a unique software id, on their machine identity and were less likely to give those copies out. Said DRM was succesful in preventing pirated copies from being created too due to the service depedency involed (the previous version also had a service depedency, but while we were tracking pirated copies, we never acted on it).
That said, there were far less amounts of the software existing (that we knew of), but had nearly trippled the sales. I look at torrent sites now like thepiratebay and said software still isn't there.
So, I can say quite confidently that the DRM likely had a positive effect, the way it was implemented.
There are far too many pirates and websites that host pirated content to get an accurate statistic on this. Far too many unknowns.
Honestly, it depends how you design the content and if the content can fit some specific requirements to make it unfeasable for piracy (such as how many MMOs do this).
I don't particularly like the idea of entering a trusted computing age, but these "innocent" pirates are pushing us into this corner as a solution for your and the publishers' problems.
Again, merely not giving someone money whilst also not wasting any of their time or resources does not hurt them because they've been deprived of nothing.
But the person has wasted their time and resources, they worked on the product and then someone has essentially just used the time and resources that was put into the work without the legitimate compensation.
No, that would merely introduce more unnecessary artificial scarcity and worsen the situation and flaws that I am speaking of.
As it would help prevent the issue of piracy, there is no issue with piracy anymore. After all, these people don't have a right to obtain people's work for free if these people wish to charge for it. And since there is no piracy, there is no "innocent" pirates to accuse.
it's just that I'm against the notion that piracy somehow equates to theft.
I don't consider it theft, I consider it copyright infringement. Since words, pictures, movies, digital 1s and 0s don't have a physical form, this law introduces the concept to it to make it possible for artists/writers (whatever you want to call them) to have limits on reproduction just like physical items, it's a different thing all together. The idea of introducing artifical scarity resolves the problem you have mentioned, because that is essentially how you enforce people purchasing products in real life. You don't see people duplicating Philips HD TVs, they have to buy them if they want it.
I think in order to fix this problem, the solution is introduce the actual limitations that a physical product has with regards to it's duplication. One of the best ways I can think of doing this is by introducing trusted computing systems that lock down a system substantially to running trusted code (like consoles), depend up on services to be fully functional and unique identitifiers that can be validated. This is what "innocent" pirates seem to pushing the industry to do, to resolve this problem of "innocent" pirates, which in my opinion, resolves your issue of "innocent" pirates being persecuted, since it removes the problem of pirating.
No, it's really not. Not giving someone your money doesn't hurt them because that doesn't deprive anyone of anything that they previously owned. They never had the money in the first place.
I'm going to quote my previous examples:
I'm going to quote some of my previous responses to this sort of argument:
I have been in one of the more interesting unique positions where I have actually seen DRM increase sales due to it actually preventing casual copying, since I take this into account when people are pirating content, it's very obvious people are depriving the copyright holder(s) of rightly earned money. Since they could obviously afford it and considered it worthy of being bought when they were put into the position of buy it or don't have it.
You can crack the DRM to modify files or modify files that are not monitored by the DRM (video drivers for example).
VAC2 in Steam actually does monitor those driver files too, so poor example.
Client-side DRM can be cracked to allow the client to run
Which has been relatively unsuccesful when it comes to VAC2 in Steam.
The protections offered in Steam is actually working, so while there is the possibility, the fact is, they are updating it enough to make it unviable for the majority of cheaters, hence I'm happy with the DRM provided.
For a single player game DRM cannot be used like you describe (since the game is single player) and should be completely removed.
Several single player games I have installed in Steam don't have it, three more just require you to have logged into the account at some point in the past to verify you own it - since I had to do that to download it, it's a none issue. I have a few other single player ones, but I haven't cared enough to check those out. There is three that employ a form of Steam's VAC2 checking to ensure that you aren't cheating to get achievements while online (you can only get the achievements if you play online, even though it's single player) - Personally I have no problem with that, forces fairness.
The DRM in Steam is liberal enough to be a none issue in my opinion, there are many good uses for DRM which Steam employs, to the point that I don't really feel that removing all the DRM (as you put it so bluntly and blandly) would deliver the same experiences I have grown to enjoy in Steam. There are things I find a bit annoying, which is the fact that publishers are free to include their own DRM on top of the game it self on Steam, but fortunately the additional DRM is clearly labelled on the store pages.
There is something nagging at me though, I get the feeling that you never really investigated how Steam's DRM really worked, without such invesgiations, why do you feel you can give objective opinions on the matter?
If you think that merely not giving someone money harms them
Of course not. It's the fact a copy of the software was illegitmately obtained AND they were not paid that harms them. I have been in one of the more interesting unique positions where I have actually seen DRM increase sales due to it actually preventing casual copying, since I take this into account when people are pirating content, it's very obvious people are depriving the copyright holder(s) of rightly earned money. Since they could obviously afford it and considered it worthy of being bought when they were put into the position of buy it or don't have it.
Blaming innocent people for the shortcomings of a broken system
You can require a Steam account to play online and require that the game be bought to play it without any client-side DRM.
Client side DRM also ensures that certain files have not been tampered with etc. In a trusted computing environment, it's something that helps against unauthorized code/modifications that could for example, assist in cheating. DRM is not only a technology to prevent copyright infringement. I'm still against it's removal.
Services like Steam (without DRM though) that allow you to play the game on other computers without recording it to DVD or torrenting it again (maybe the ISP does not allow P2P).
Believe it or not, I wouldn't like Steam without DRM, the DRM is what makes it difficult for people to cheat and come back without concequence. With Steam's DRM, they'd have to get a new account and buy the game again, legitimately in order to play on the game servers. If they start cheating, they risk being automatically detected by Steam as a cheater and getting flagged as a cheater on their account and additionally, if you ban a specific steam account from your server, unless they buy the game again and create a new account, they can't come back on your server.
As I already said, I myself do not have a perfect solution to this.
So, what is your less than perfect solution that is supposively better than the current?
However, that does not change the fact that the current system is broken.
Got a better system, I'm all ears.
Don't you think it's a shortcoming when people who logically aren't doing any harm
I disagree here. I have seen the difference in profit based on succesful DRM schemes used, so logically, these people are doing harm if you take the observed difference into account. Perhaps the solution is better DRM schemes the way consoles do it (fully locked down, code signed platforms), but in a way that can verify individual copies too? Wouldn't that fix "the system"?
Looking at the current generation of consoles, it's very visible that the amount of hacks, piracy methods that were previously available on older generations of consoles aren't as rampid as before. With some more trusted computing technology, they could in theory reduce the numbers of people doing "bad" things to insignificant numbers.
I'm not advocating this technology, but I can see this as a viable solution and wanted to know what your viable solution is.
All games on Steam have Steam DRM. It's the way the platform works; as far as I know you can't have a Steam game that doesn't require Steam.
You can, it's just an executable wrapper that launches Steam to get it to verify that the game can launch, it's not included on games like star trek online, doom, heretic etc.
Man, don't get me started. Those are even worst than those US fools bringing so called democracy to Iraq but instead are raping the 14 year olds there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_killings
Only one incident? I'd hardly say they're bringing that to the whole population of Iraq.
They would make for a nice addition to Microsoft's portfolio, don't you think?
Not really, they aren't going to make use of the UNIX trademark and the copyright is pretty worthless, as it's not going to be able to manipulate Linux into anything since the code that was shared was shared under a GPL compatible license already and not illegally copied (as SCO claimed).
Slashdot Mirror
Your link is wrong, it doesn't even mention the .uk TLD.
I'll bite. In my instance, why I have chosen at times Ubuntu over CentOS:
1) specific daemons, libraries (if I'm using certain commercial software that relies up on it) are provided in the distribution's repositories, removing the need for me to package my own versions of the software where CentOS did not offer. This removes the issue of me having to monitor for security vulnerabilities, needing to back port code should the new library be incompatible with the given application that uses it etc.
2) Ubuntu's Apparmor configuration is not as assinine (and in theory, just as secure) as the configuration used in the selinux configuration that centos comes with, I don't want to have to rewrite all the selinux rules because I want to use pppd with a specific VPN protocol handler.
3) More daemons in Ubuntu run as non-root processes, but dedicated usernames for the given processes, reducing the risk of compromises. I am not happy with having the syslog running as root when it's streaming/recieving log data over the network and might be vulnerable to remote vulnerabilities that could compromise the entire system.
4) I generally prefer the speed of apt, it seems to run faster.
I much rather sticking to LTS versions of Ubuntu-server for server things, I'm not fond of Gentoo's use-latest-anything-source-package-system-with-different-config-files-used-randomly-and-then-use-wiki-to-figure-out-how-to-do-the-rest-of-the-install style just for a random minor security update (the messing about with unstable packages is what drives me away from Gentoo).
I'm quite fond of apt-build for applying my own small patches/optimizations, the automation you can with it to handle apt-get upgrades is pretty nifty in my opinion. That said, source packages on Gentoo have more customizations using the use flags, apt-build doesn't have anything like that yet.
Since I don't use forums, I didn't even know this was an issue until you pointed it out (I haven't gone out of my way to verify it).
English, motherfucker - Do you speak it?
Oh fine, since you asked so nicely, I'll feed you a bit.
Maybe I've been too sheltered in the fandom? -- but as far as I know, that's only a minority in the fandom that people keep focusing on. I socialize on a daily basis online with 'furs' and the majority of them don't appear to have any interest in fursuit sex (Pre-emptive counter argument: if you think it's weird to talk about fetishes and sex in a social situations, you obviously don't go to bars).
Anyway, if you're satisfied with my personal view, you can take a look at the furry survey results, http://www.klisoura.com/ot_furrysurvey.php
Which shows about 18.44% are into "fursuiting", I would find it highly unlikely that each and every person in those statistics is however into sex with "fursuits", but even if they were, 18.44% isn't the majority of "furs" out there. however, feel free to counter with citations of your own.
Actually VALVe are following merchant agreements with payment processors, you're not going to find much different with any service provider.
If a transaction is reversed, you don't give the product for free regardless, it's removed and for non-refundable charges (steam automatically assumes it's not a refund unless you request it from support), the agreement requires them to suspend an account until the balance has been paid and that is exactly what they are doing. If your payment doesn't go through normally on your card or such, it doesn't cause a reversed transaction on payment systems it just fails to pay initially - this is specifically the case with reversed transactions.
It's like reversing a transaction from a real life store, it's going to piss off the store who will refuse to deal with you until you pay the balance owed as you essentially stole back the money you paid them.
That is the concept of copyright however, making something non-tangible into a tangible form via licensing to promote creation of new literature by making it a viable business - So I don't really see the problem with this analogy they use.
Ownership of works would mean you get exclusive rights to decide what happens with the copyrights, it is highly unlikely someone is going to sell that to you for $15.
I'm not arguing that. I still feel it's relatively useful knowledge for people who are considering ZFS outside of it's specific features. Sometimes you use a specific filesystem because the rest of your organisation's systems use it. I personally find benchmarking for a specific task to determine whether or not you should introduce more filesystem homogeneity into your environment can be beneficial if it reduces maintenence/costs long term. Or even doing the reverse and trying to determine if it's worth switching to filesystem X for some particular feature that other don't support, but still require a certain level of performance on some tasks.
If you cheat, you would just get locked out of the anti-cheating enabled servers (VAC protected). You wouldn't lose access to games, although, there are two titles where this is a bit of a gray area. With modern warfare 2 and black ops, they both use a match making system which only has VAC enabled - you have no choice to not use a VAC enabled server and in those instances, it will make multiplayer useless if you're caught on that engine. Oh, I forgot to mention that if you're caught cheating, you're only 'banned' from using that specific engine on anti-cheating servers, so if you were caught on say, counter strike, you would not be banned from half life 2: death match.
I would go about suing them if this happened honestly - bait and switch.
In reality, you licensed them.
VALVe on a few occasions has hinted on a few occasions that they would 'unlock' games should they ever go out of business. Whether or not they'll live up to that promise I don't know, but I already have enough knowledge to remove the executable wrappers on Steam games, so, even if they fail to do so, I have a feeling 'unlockers' will be available.
I'm 99% sure I saw a MW2 demo disc on a PS3 magazine.
How about showing some patience instead of pirating? A lot of publishers lower the price on their games after a while.
You can only reference one instance of this happening? That tells me that is a fluke rather than the rule.
But you look at the sales data of DRMed content and you can immediately determine that if they would have been unsucesful being able to casually copy the data as mentioned, then there would have been greater sales, thus they were denied sales. But ignoring that, I believe increasing the supply also has the possibility of devaluing the content, making it more accessible via free forms rather than paid forms. People will use the justification that price X is too expensive, if only it was Y, but then they go pirate it. Once the game is sold at Y, the people don't buy it, because they already own the pirated copy. I can see the harm with these illegitimate copies performed.
Without saying too much due to NDAs, each copy sold was uniquely identifiable and each machine it spread to was uniquely identifaible, the way software was copied/spread from which user was tracable to an initial extent. Usually it started it off with what was believed to be friends giving a friend a copy, after that it gets more shady. As each machine was uniquely identiable, when a piece of software was released with DRM, going through the same machines we identified as friends giving friends, their friends instead bought copies - identified from the the fact they had a unique software id, on their machine identity and were less likely to give those copies out. Said DRM was succesful in preventing pirated copies from being created too due to the service depedency involed (the previous version also had a service depedency, but while we were tracking pirated copies, we never acted on it).
That said, there were far less amounts of the software existing (that we knew of), but had nearly trippled the sales. I look at torrent sites now like thepiratebay and said software still isn't there.
So, I can say quite confidently that the DRM likely had a positive effect, the way it was implemented.
Honestly, it depends how you design the content and if the content can fit some specific requirements to make it unfeasable for piracy (such as how many MMOs do this).
I don't particularly like the idea of entering a trusted computing age, but these "innocent" pirates are pushing us into this corner as a solution for your and the publishers' problems.
But the person has wasted their time and resources, they worked on the product and then someone has essentially just used the time and resources that was put into the work without the legitimate compensation.
As it would help prevent the issue of piracy, there is no issue with piracy anymore. After all, these people don't have a right to obtain people's work for free if these people wish to charge for it. And since there is no piracy, there is no "innocent" pirates to accuse.
I don't consider it theft, I consider it copyright infringement. Since words, pictures, movies, digital 1s and 0s don't have a physical form, this law introduces the concept to it to make it possible for artists/writers (whatever you want to call them) to have limits on reproduction just like physical items, it's a different thing all together. The idea of introducing artifical scarity resolves the problem you have mentioned, because that is essentially how you enforce people purchasing products in real life. You don't see people duplicating Philips HD TVs, they have to buy them if they want it.
I think in order to fix this problem, the solution is introduce the actual limitations that a physical product has with regards to it's duplication. One of the best ways I can think of doing this is by introducing trusted computing systems that lock down a system substantially to running trusted code (like consoles), depend up on services to be fully functional and unique identitifiers that can be validated. This is what "innocent" pirates seem to pushing the industry to do, to resolve this problem of "innocent" pirates, which in my opinion, resolves your issue of "innocent" pirates being persecuted, since it removes the problem of pirating.
Am I the only one who doesn't buy the claim of "innocent" pirates?
I'm going to quote some of my previous responses to this sort of argument:
VAC2 in Steam actually does monitor those driver files too, so poor example.
Which has been relatively unsuccesful when it comes to VAC2 in Steam.
The protections offered in Steam is actually working, so while there is the possibility, the fact is, they are updating it enough to make it unviable for the majority of cheaters, hence I'm happy with the DRM provided.
Several single player games I have installed in Steam don't have it, three more just require you to have logged into the account at some point in the past to verify you own it - since I had to do that to download it, it's a none issue. I have a few other single player ones, but I haven't cared enough to check those out. There is three that employ a form of Steam's VAC2 checking to ensure that you aren't cheating to get achievements while online (you can only get the achievements if you play online, even though it's single player) - Personally I have no problem with that, forces fairness.
The DRM in Steam is liberal enough to be a none issue in my opinion, there are many good uses for DRM which Steam employs, to the point that I don't really feel that removing all the DRM (as you put it so bluntly and blandly) would deliver the same experiences I have grown to enjoy in Steam. There are things I find a bit annoying, which is the fact that publishers are free to include their own DRM on top of the game it self on Steam, but fortunately the additional DRM is clearly labelled on the store pages.
There is something nagging at me though, I get the feeling that you never really investigated how Steam's DRM really worked, without such invesgiations, why do you feel you can give objective opinions on the matter?
Of course not. It's the fact a copy of the software was illegitmately obtained AND they were not paid that harms them. I have been in one of the more interesting unique positions where I have actually seen DRM increase sales due to it actually preventing casual copying, since I take this into account when people are pirating content, it's very obvious people are depriving the copyright holder(s) of rightly earned money. Since they could obviously afford it and considered it worthy of being bought when they were put into the position of buy it or don't have it.
Innocent pirates, they didn't do nothin'
Client side DRM also ensures that certain files have not been tampered with etc. In a trusted computing environment, it's something that helps against unauthorized code/modifications that could for example, assist in cheating. DRM is not only a technology to prevent copyright infringement. I'm still against it's removal.
I didn't think "Oracle" was a suitable response, since this was a "who" rather than a "which company" question honestly.
Believe it or not, I wouldn't like Steam without DRM, the DRM is what makes it difficult for people to cheat and come back without concequence. With Steam's DRM, they'd have to get a new account and buy the game again, legitimately in order to play on the game servers. If they start cheating, they risk being automatically detected by Steam as a cheater and getting flagged as a cheater on their account and additionally, if you ban a specific steam account from your server, unless they buy the game again and create a new account, they can't come back on your server.
So, what is your less than perfect solution that is supposively better than the current?
Got a better system, I'm all ears.
I disagree here. I have seen the difference in profit based on succesful DRM schemes used, so logically, these people are doing harm if you take the observed difference into account. Perhaps the solution is better DRM schemes the way consoles do it (fully locked down, code signed platforms), but in a way that can verify individual copies too? Wouldn't that fix "the system"?
Looking at the current generation of consoles, it's very visible that the amount of hacks, piracy methods that were previously available on older generations of consoles aren't as rampid as before. With some more trusted computing technology, they could in theory reduce the numbers of people doing "bad" things to insignificant numbers.
I'm not advocating this technology, but I can see this as a viable solution and wanted to know what your viable solution is.
Like bittorent!!! Many other people will back it up for me too!!!
You can, it's just an executable wrapper that launches Steam to get it to verify that the game can launch, it's not included on games like star trek online, doom, heretic etc.
Only one incident? I'd hardly say they're bringing that to the whole population of Iraq.
Not really, they aren't going to make use of the UNIX trademark and the copyright is pretty worthless, as it's not going to be able to manipulate Linux into anything since the code that was shared was shared under a GPL compatible license already and not illegally copied (as SCO claimed).
The monkies will continue to fling poop as usual.
Apparently Linden lab are. Although, I guess the fact their primary core business being a virtual world platform might not seem sane.