Giving money to pirates is about as useful in combating poverty as is allowing drug trade and gang warfare in ghetto areas.
Crime and terror always creates poverty. Poverty in turn sometimes creates crime and terror, but not always, there are enough poor but peaceful areas around the world.
Fattening warlord's armies is not going to change anything for the better. Money and lawlessness is the fuel that drives these crimes.
As a German, I say thank you America for removing the crazy Austrian and rebuilding the whole goddamn continent.
I'm pretty sure the South Koreans think along similar lines, because they'd only had political speeches to listen to in re-education camps, no rice, no kimchi and certainly no StarCraft championships without the GIs back then.
But no, the US is responsible for everything, yep. Especially the bad things.
The more I read about "pacifist", "liberal", "leftist", "multiculturalist" opinions, the more I think they're here to kill all White guys in the end. I think I now know remotely how a black guy must have felt back in the fifties, when the roles were reversed. But in 2009, all things Whitey does or ever did are considered incredible atrocities while everyone else gets a guilt-free genocide every now and then. A million dead in Darfur or Ruanda is an inconvenience only caused by Whitey not giving enough of its money. Ten cases of torture in Abu Ghraib are a catastrophe and should be redeemed in giving more money.
If all these politically correct traitors would just start mass suicides, we could go back to actually helping somewhere and winning wars against the bad guys, instead of prolonging every situation because clearly identified bad guys must be respected.
If the United States had been politically correct back in 1942, all you people would be speaking Deutsch.
Are we responsible for the situation? No. Somalia was a hellhole before, during and after those 6 weeks in 1993.
Can we make a difference without armed intervention, with any amount of money? No. We did try in 1993, which made Mohammed Farrah Aidid simply stronger because he could just rob the UN of all that food and medical aid and sell it wholesale.
Can we make a difference with armed intervention? Maybe, but we're not willing to, because we pee our pants thinking of all those poor poor irregular fighters getting killed, who are soo innocent and only fighting because they are so poor. (On the other hand, I would not want any Marine to even bruise his hand trying to help that hellhole of a country.)
So what to do then?
Doing nothing reaches nothing with the warlords in place, who are really in charge of keeping everyone else down. Pouring in large amounts of money and aid doesn't help but only fattens the warlords. Going in with troops and armor costs American lives, brings civilian deaths and pacifists will whine about killed warlord fighters as well, demanding an instant pull-out.
So what do you want? Pouring in money is what we do, giving millions to pirates, helping no one but the warlords. Doing nothing makes you enraged, killing bad guys makes you enraged and paying millions is insane.
The Germany equivalent of the ACLU should post several large ads including a TinyURL leading to a stop sign, where millions of people are - logged - made to ask themselves if they really KNOW what has been hidden from them, if it was legit or not and how they'd tell right from wrong then.
Well said. Lenient stance on DRM doesn't need to mean no serial key protection for online play.
What people do offline is lost revenue at max and therefore largely an academic question - most of the time not even that because many "pirates" cannot or do not want to buy it for more than a dollar. It doesn't increase costs for the publisher/programmer.
What people do online matters much much more: it is servers and infrastructure that they are using. These things increase the costs for the publisher/programmer and can very well bankrupt them or alienate the paying customers. Even more, you cannot for the sake of God shut out and ban individuals harming the fun of the game, like the usual cheaters, crackers and griefers that predate virtual game worlds.
To leniently forgo some revenue to increase customer satisfaction is a viable business plan - losing money on freeloaders harming your paying customers on the other hand is pretty foolish.
Wide open areas with a huge lot of nothing in the middle is perfect for (wait for it)
air travel.
Really: why lay down several *billion* metric tons of expensive high quality steel as railway tracks in the middle of nowheere?
We have several large airports in operation, building another large airport only consumes valuable square kilometers, other than that only some million tons of concrete. Concrete and construction for runways is expensive, but overall still orders of magnitude cheaper than construction, concrete AND steel for thousands of railway kilometers.
Traffic control is needed for both, air and rail - and it's dirt cheap compared to the needed for maintenance of (otherwise dangerous) high speed track lines in the middle of nowhere.
Here in Germany, we have thousands of high speed rail tracks, but we have 80 million people are only some hundred kilometers apart, not some four thousand with incredible stretches of basically nothing AND the Rocky Mountains in between like the US. And even we do use airplanes increasingly, because the high speed rail is almost as expensive as air travel, but magnitudes slower.
Trains still need energy to move and that means Diesel, which incidentally is pretty much similar to Kerosene. Putting electric lines above all these planned rail tracks would be twice as expensive, even without all the energy lost in transit because railway power lines must have much lower voltages than regular interstate connections.
In short: there are good and efficient alternatives for rail for large stretches of land. Burning thousands of tons of Kerosene in take-off is a very very visible loss of energy and resources, but it's really only a fraction, a tiny glimpse of what has to be expended to cover the US with rail and train service.
It's true the US expends the most energy per capita worldwide. But constructing rail infrastructure will raise, not lower that for at least two decades. This is ridiculous to attempt when there's so many, so much easier gains to be had in lowering energy expenditures in automobiles, aircraft, heating, commercial operations/processes and recycling opportunities.
Mandating a reduced cruise speed for airliners could save billions, I think building rail is a publicity move and a bad one at that. And I certainly remember a politician who started extreme infrastructure projects to recover from a crisis. It really ended the economic downturn, but it also ended everything else, back then in 1933...
My ad-hominem is stronger than your ad-hominem. And you don't even have a single fact to back it up.
Please deliver at least a decent strawman factoid before engaging in political discourse, everything else irritates the hell out of your opponents. I mean, even a worn-out Chewbacca defense would make believe you're one percent more informed than just opinionated. Wait, even your opinion is missing.
If you've read both linked Wikipedia entries, you would have noticed a stark contrast in the first paragraph:
"George W. Bush used this power only to eliminate the collateral effects of conviction (e.g., prohibitions on felons voting or owning a gun). He did NOT pardon anyone who had NOT SERVED A FULL SENTENCE pursuant to a conviction."
(emphasis mine)
I didn't like George W. OR Billy Cigar Clinton more than anyone else, but on the singular issue of pardoning criminals as presented in really really well cited Wikipedia entries, Clinton and you are dead wrong.
Just look at the conviction dates of people pardoned by Bush, he pardoned seasoned, tough criminals who accepted a bribe of 50 Dollars or made Moonshine, both back in the Sixties, come on.
Well, how many wars exactly have the US won with un-overwhelming force?
One? In Panama? And where else?
War with an adequately sized force is foolish, you want the war to be over as fast as possible and as complete as possible, everything else creates a quagmire, if you excuse the word.
Aluminium-hulled tanks in Vietnam, conscript 17yo footsoldiers in the jungle patrolling 3rd-World villages of a totally different culture, I mean, what were they thinking?
Thank God they learnt so much, even through the hard way, in Iraq the first time and then in Somalia - otherwise we'd have a situation much worse than the current and we'd probably all playing Fallujah, but again as conscripts in the real world.
In a Hyper-Capitalist society, every capitalist with enough capital could come riding with a white horse and shiny armor and start laying out some cable.
Competition is the hallmark of Capitalism. Hyper-Capitalism as a stronger, overdosed form of it would mean that all company activities are stretched out to deliver diminishing returns, because each and every one is trying to undercut each others prices.
Hypo-Capitalism, a pathologic lack of a free market and a lack of freedom to employ one's capital would bring no competition, monopolies and with it high prices.
Kill off the Invisible Hand and nothing gets done anymore, supplies plummet and the prices for everything soar. Like in, well, Feudalism and Socialism. Except for that in Socialism, prices are usually fixed, bankrupting the society some decades sooner or later.
Executive summary: hyper-capitalism has stiff competition where you cannot really cash in on your work or company. Hypo-capitalism or Feudalism is where you can have all the cash you want, but you cannot enter several or all markets without bribing officials or buying expensive official paperwork (read: licenses).
A state-protected oligo-/monopoly is hardly capitalism, let alone Hyper-Capitalism.
Having The State and The Authorities protect a certain market sector from the activities of all but one trusted supplier is called Feudalism. Has been for centuries.
The King giveth and the King taketh away a limited monopoly to one corporation which in turn pays a large recurring premium for this right. The East-India corporation springs to mind, but the Italians and the French had similar models, back in the 17th century.
Quote Wikipedia on this: "Every man was the vassal, or servant, of his lord. The man swore fealty to his lord, and in return the lord promised to protect him and to see that he received justice."
I did. But I didn't blame someone else because of what stupid things I did myself.
Everyone makes mistakes and you just made the one blaming others for your own. If I can't care for my stuff enough to not lose a CD and a simple number written on it with a Sharpie, I either have money to buy the thing again or I'm SOL.
They even announced a Patch v1.50 for BATTLEFIELD 2, a 3-year old game. They didn't deliver yet for several months, but hey, even the intention is much more than I've expected from them for years.
No it doesn't - and hasn't for all those decades that serial protection has been THE gold standard of "DRM".
There's a large amount of wiggle room between three close friends trying to play online simultaneously with the same key and the serial posted on warez boards for millions to use.
If the server encounters a handful of instances of the same key, they're just denying entry to those instances that connected last. If the server encounters thousands of instances of one key, it disables the key entirely.
This has been standard procedure for decades and you claim you don't know?
And then they're whining about losing a serial key which can be written on the CD itself, dead-tree notebooks and in dozens of textfiles dispersed in backup drives and USB sticks.
How these people manage their lives without losing AND forgetting the phone number of their parents, friends and kids, the phone itself, their workstation passwords and their social security number is beyond my imagination.
Well, you take a Sharpie, write the serial ON the disc itself and put the disc in one of those fancy empty jewel cases that can be bought for ten cents apiece on Ebay.
Don't tell us you haven't figured this out earlier. You work in Sector 7-G by any chance?
Oh, and write on the printed side of the disc, not the shiny mirrory underside.
Every game money can buy uses disc-based copy-protection nowadays. Everyone and their dog finds a no-cd patch, mounts an ISO file or uses a detachable optical drive.
Disc-based protection is pretty vulnerable to scratches and the discs themselves are not really scratch-resistant, so I'd rather see them employing USB-dongle based authentication. But whining about disc-based protection is soo 90's, really.
You have one optical drive, but several USB ports right from the start in all machines powerful enough to play games. You can add up to 128 additional USB ports for about ONE dollar each in 4 USD increments - el-cheapo USB-hubs.
Scratching a disc is much easier than losing or destroying a USB stick. I mean, there are sticks available that can be driven over with a truck without losing functionality. How hard can it be to attach several sticks to a keyring and protect them? It's your money and USB sticks aren't breaking easily, so you either care for your stuff or you'll pay for a new copy. Even as a player, I feel little sympathy for people who constantly lose or destroy expensive items that aren't insanely fragile.
Dongle checks present pretty much the same downsides as optical-media based copy protection and is probably worked-around as easily.
Unfortunately, companies complain about these dongles to be too expensive. But I like the idea of these, simply because USB-sticks are pretty tough.
You could also contain the entire game AND the copy protection ready-to-boot on a write-protected USB stick, making the game easy to re-sale, play, legitimately loan out etc. - if you have the USB stick, you have the game, the serial key and the means to run it in an instant.
Losing a USB-stick attached with a keychain is much harder than accidentally scratching the surface of a delicate optical disk, where every bad sector is an important input to the copy-protection mechanism. I personally bought two or three copies of Starcraft-Brood War because the copy-protection used there is non-standard and incredibly vulnerable to even the tiniest scratches.
Now that 4GB USB sticks cost less than 10USD retail, I'd thought we finally get ready-to-play sticks which include all and everything.
Serial keys with an activation server are bad. Serial keys with an offline-verification and an activation server for online play are pretty reasonable.
If the game still has online value, the online servers are still around. By the time the activation servers are deactivated, either no one cares to play the thing online (10 years from now) OR no one cares if everyone hosts cracked servers for cracked clients (if the company goes bust before that).
Slashdot Mirror
Giving money to pirates is about as useful in combating poverty as is allowing drug trade and gang warfare in ghetto areas.
Crime and terror always creates poverty. Poverty in turn sometimes creates crime and terror, but not always, there are enough poor but peaceful areas around the world.
Fattening warlord's armies is not going to change anything for the better. Money and lawlessness is the fuel that drives these crimes.
As a German, I say thank you America for removing the crazy Austrian and rebuilding the whole goddamn continent.
I'm pretty sure the South Koreans think along similar lines, because they'd only had political speeches to listen to in re-education camps, no rice, no kimchi and certainly no StarCraft championships without the GIs back then.
But no, the US is responsible for everything, yep. Especially the bad things.
The more I read about "pacifist", "liberal", "leftist", "multiculturalist" opinions, the more I think they're here to kill all White guys in the end. I think I now know remotely how a black guy must have felt back in the fifties, when the roles were reversed. But in 2009, all things Whitey does or ever did are considered incredible atrocities while everyone else gets a guilt-free genocide every now and then. A million dead in Darfur or Ruanda is an inconvenience only caused by Whitey not giving enough of its money. Ten cases of torture in Abu Ghraib are a catastrophe and should be redeemed in giving more money.
If all these politically correct traitors would just start mass suicides, we could go back to actually helping somewhere and winning wars against the bad guys, instead of prolonging every situation because clearly identified bad guys must be respected.
If the United States had been politically correct back in 1942, all you people would be speaking Deutsch.
Are we responsible for the situation? No. Somalia was a hellhole before, during and after those 6 weeks in 1993.
Can we make a difference without armed intervention, with any amount of money? No. We did try in 1993, which made Mohammed Farrah Aidid simply stronger because he could just rob the UN of all that food and medical aid and sell it wholesale.
Can we make a difference with armed intervention? Maybe, but we're not willing to, because we pee our pants thinking of all those poor poor irregular fighters getting killed, who are soo innocent and only fighting because they are so poor. (On the other hand, I would not want any Marine to even bruise his hand trying to help that hellhole of a country.)
So what to do then?
Doing nothing reaches nothing with the warlords in place, who are really in charge of keeping everyone else down. Pouring in large amounts of money and aid doesn't help but only fattens the warlords. Going in with troops and armor costs American lives, brings civilian deaths and pacifists will whine about killed warlord fighters as well, demanding an instant pull-out.
So what do you want? Pouring in money is what we do, giving millions to pirates, helping no one but the warlords. Doing nothing makes you enraged, killing bad guys makes you enraged and paying millions is insane.
The Germany equivalent of the ACLU should post several large ads including a TinyURL leading to a stop sign, where millions of people are
- logged
- made to ask themselves if they really KNOW what has been hidden from them, if it was legit or not and how they'd tell right from wrong then.
by 2012 at the very latest, the first politically incorrect forum is on the list
by 2014 all not officially sanctioned are forbidden by default
2020 all internet is white-list only, registry is by request of The Party only.
Well said. Lenient stance on DRM doesn't need to mean no serial key protection for online play.
What people do offline is lost revenue at max and therefore largely an academic question - most of the time not even that because many "pirates" cannot or do not want to buy it for more than a dollar. It doesn't increase costs for the publisher/programmer.
What people do online matters much much more: it is servers and infrastructure that they are using. These things increase the costs for the publisher/programmer and can very well bankrupt them or alienate the paying customers. Even more, you cannot for the sake of God shut out and ban individuals harming the fun of the game, like the usual cheaters, crackers and griefers that predate virtual game worlds.
To leniently forgo some revenue to increase customer satisfaction is a viable business plan - losing money on freeloaders harming your paying customers on the other hand is pretty foolish.
Wide open areas with a huge lot of nothing in the middle is perfect for (wait for it)
air travel.
Really: why lay down several *billion* metric tons of expensive high quality steel as railway tracks in the middle of nowheere?
We have several large airports in operation, building another large airport only consumes valuable square kilometers, other than that only some million tons of concrete. Concrete and construction for runways is expensive, but overall still orders of magnitude cheaper than construction, concrete AND steel for thousands of railway kilometers.
Traffic control is needed for both, air and rail - and it's dirt cheap compared to the needed for maintenance of (otherwise dangerous) high speed track lines in the middle of nowhere.
Here in Germany, we have thousands of high speed rail tracks, but we have 80 million people are only some hundred kilometers apart, not some four thousand with incredible stretches of basically nothing AND the Rocky Mountains in between like the US. And even we do use airplanes increasingly, because the high speed rail is almost as expensive as air travel, but magnitudes slower.
Trains still need energy to move and that means Diesel, which incidentally is pretty much similar to Kerosene. Putting electric lines above all these planned rail tracks would be twice as expensive, even without all the energy lost in transit because railway power lines must have much lower voltages than regular interstate connections.
In short: there are good and efficient alternatives for rail for large stretches of land. Burning thousands of tons of Kerosene in take-off is a very very visible loss of energy and resources, but it's really only a fraction, a tiny glimpse of what has to be expended to cover the US with rail and train service.
It's true the US expends the most energy per capita worldwide. But constructing rail infrastructure will raise, not lower that for at least two decades. This is ridiculous to attempt when there's so many, so much easier gains to be had in lowering energy expenditures in automobiles, aircraft, heating, commercial operations/processes and recycling opportunities.
Mandating a reduced cruise speed for airliners could save billions, I think building rail is a publicity move and a bad one at that. And I certainly remember a politician who started extreme infrastructure projects to recover from a crisis. It really ended the economic downturn, but it also ended everything else, back then in 1933...
My ad-hominem is stronger than your ad-hominem. And you don't even have a single fact to back it up.
Please deliver at least a decent strawman factoid before engaging in political discourse, everything else irritates the hell out of your opponents. I mean, even a worn-out Chewbacca defense would make believe you're one percent more informed than just opinionated. Wait, even your opinion is missing.
What was your point, then?
If you've read both linked Wikipedia entries, you would have noticed a stark contrast in the first paragraph:
"George W. Bush used this power only to eliminate the collateral effects of conviction (e.g., prohibitions on felons voting or owning a gun). He did NOT pardon anyone who had NOT SERVED A FULL SENTENCE pursuant to a conviction."
(emphasis mine)
I didn't like George W. OR Billy Cigar Clinton more than anyone else, but on the singular issue of pardoning criminals as presented in really really well cited Wikipedia entries, Clinton and you are dead wrong.
Just look at the conviction dates of people pardoned by Bush, he pardoned seasoned, tough criminals who accepted a bribe of 50 Dollars or made Moonshine, both back in the Sixties, come on.
Well, how many wars exactly have the US won with un-overwhelming force?
One? In Panama? And where else?
War with an adequately sized force is foolish, you want the war to be over as fast as possible and as complete as possible, everything else creates a quagmire, if you excuse the word.
Aluminium-hulled tanks in Vietnam, conscript 17yo footsoldiers in the jungle patrolling 3rd-World villages of a totally different culture, I mean, what were they thinking?
Thank God they learnt so much, even through the hard way, in Iraq the first time and then in Somalia - otherwise we'd have a situation much worse than the current and we'd probably all playing Fallujah, but again as conscripts in the real world.
In a Hyper-Capitalist society, every capitalist with enough capital could come riding with a white horse and shiny armor and start laying out some cable.
Competition is the hallmark of Capitalism. Hyper-Capitalism as a stronger, overdosed form of it would mean that all company activities are stretched out to deliver diminishing returns, because each and every one is trying to undercut each others prices.
Hypo-Capitalism, a pathologic lack of a free market and a lack of freedom to employ one's capital would bring no competition, monopolies and with it high prices.
Kill off the Invisible Hand and nothing gets done anymore, supplies plummet and the prices for everything soar. Like in, well, Feudalism and Socialism. Except for that in Socialism, prices are usually fixed, bankrupting the society some decades sooner or later.
Executive summary: hyper-capitalism has stiff competition where you cannot really cash in on your work or company. Hypo-capitalism or Feudalism is where you can have all the cash you want, but you cannot enter several or all markets without bribing officials or buying expensive official paperwork (read: licenses).
A state-protected oligo-/monopoly is hardly capitalism, let alone Hyper-Capitalism.
Having The State and The Authorities protect a certain market sector from the activities of all but one trusted supplier is called Feudalism. Has been for centuries.
The King giveth and the King taketh away a limited monopoly to one corporation which in turn pays a large recurring premium for this right. The East-India corporation springs to mind, but the Italians and the French had similar models, back in the 17th century.
Quote Wikipedia on this: "Every man was the vassal, or servant, of his lord. The man swore fealty to his lord, and in return the lord promised to protect him and to see that he received justice."
It's been caught on video many times before - and sold.
Scary stuff, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Roxx
http://www.adultfilmdatabase.com/video.cfm?videoid=61710
On a side note:
Did you honestly complain about a physical item being lost or destroyed when you physically lose or destroy it?
Thanks for pointing that out little Neo. Can you now call God's helpline at 777-WHATISTHEMATRIX for an update?
I did. But I didn't blame someone else because of what stupid things I did myself.
Everyone makes mistakes and you just made the one blaming others for your own. If I can't care for my stuff enough to not lose a CD and a simple number written on it with a Sharpie, I either have money to buy the thing again or I'm SOL.
They even announced a Patch v1.50 for BATTLEFIELD 2, a 3-year old game. They didn't deliver yet for several months, but hey, even the intention is much more than I've expected from them for years.
That's 5 dollars well spent for quality, hands-on education in the black art of Caveat Emptor and one meal less at McDonalds.
If you paid more than 5 USD for a used copy of Windows 2000, you were out of your mind anyway.
No it doesn't - and hasn't for all those decades that serial protection has been THE gold standard of "DRM".
There's a large amount of wiggle room between three close friends trying to play online simultaneously with the same key and the serial posted on warez boards for millions to use.
If the server encounters a handful of instances of the same key, they're just denying entry to those instances that connected last. If the server encounters thousands of instances of one key, it disables the key entirely.
This has been standard procedure for decades and you claim you don't know?
And then they're whining about losing a serial key which can be written on the CD itself, dead-tree notebooks and in dozens of textfiles dispersed in backup drives and USB sticks.
How these people manage their lives without losing AND forgetting the phone number of their parents, friends and kids, the phone itself, their workstation passwords and their social security number is beyond my imagination.
Sharpie meet disc, disc, meet Sharpie.
Then: Owner has key when he has disc. Now please report to work safety instruction in Sector-7G.
Well, you take a Sharpie, write the serial ON the disc itself and put the disc in one of those fancy empty jewel cases that can be bought for ten cents apiece on Ebay.
Don't tell us you haven't figured this out earlier. You work in Sector 7-G by any chance?
Oh, and write on the printed side of the disc, not the shiny mirrory underside.
Every game money can buy uses disc-based copy-protection nowadays. Everyone and their dog finds a no-cd patch, mounts an ISO file or uses a detachable optical drive.
Disc-based protection is pretty vulnerable to scratches and the discs themselves are not really scratch-resistant, so I'd rather see them employing USB-dongle based authentication. But whining about disc-based protection is soo 90's, really.
You have one optical drive, but several USB ports right from the start in all machines powerful enough to play games. You can add up to 128 additional USB ports for about ONE dollar each in 4 USD increments - el-cheapo USB-hubs.
Scratching a disc is much easier than losing or destroying a USB stick. I mean, there are sticks available that can be driven over with a truck without losing functionality. How hard can it be to attach several sticks to a keyring and protect them? It's your money and USB sticks aren't breaking easily, so you either care for your stuff or you'll pay for a new copy. Even as a player, I feel little sympathy for people who constantly lose or destroy expensive items that aren't insanely fragile.
Dongle checks present pretty much the same downsides as optical-media based copy protection and is probably worked-around as easily.
Unfortunately, companies complain about these dongles to be too expensive. But I like the idea of these, simply because USB-sticks are pretty tough.
You could also contain the entire game AND the copy protection ready-to-boot on a write-protected USB stick, making the game easy to re-sale, play, legitimately loan out etc. - if you have the USB stick, you have the game, the serial key and the means to run it in an instant.
Losing a USB-stick attached with a keychain is much harder than accidentally scratching the surface of a delicate optical disk, where every bad sector is an important input to the copy-protection mechanism. I personally bought two or three copies of Starcraft-Brood War because the copy-protection used there is non-standard and incredibly vulnerable to even the tiniest scratches.
Now that 4GB USB sticks cost less than 10USD retail, I'd thought we finally get ready-to-play sticks which include all and everything.
Serial keys with an activation server are bad. Serial keys with an offline-verification and an activation server for online play are pretty reasonable.
If the game still has online value, the online servers are still around. By the time the activation servers are deactivated, either no one cares to play the thing online (10 years from now) OR no one cares if everyone hosts cracked servers for cracked clients (if the company goes bust before that).