Law, not request, contract or court order. Telling Thompson to STFU is not passing a law. Any individual has the right to tell another individual to shut the fuck up. If JT keeps pestering the politicians he can be subject to many laws that cover person to person behaviours like harassment.
I think one point that must also be kept in mind is the appropriate means. Petitioning the government is not done by building a brick wall around the exits of their building with your demands written on it, petitioning is not done by barging into the room and screaming at the top of your lung, petitioning is not done by flooding someone with emails he has specifically requested not to receive anymore. You can convey your petition with appropriate means and spamming is not one of them. By being prevented from spamming you are not prevented from petitioning, just from using some means to petition. You still have the option of using reasonable means instead.
Cost and retail price have nothing to do with each other for videogames. The dev cost is fixed, the only way to compensate for it is to make as much money as possible and that's always your goal. The price you pick is dependent on how many people are willing to buy it at each price so that the price times the sales is maximized. Whether your game cost $3 or 25 million USD to make does not matter, you'll try to maximize your revenue anyway. Of course your product itself can affect your sales at the different prices but this is only weakly linked to the dev costs (and more strongly to how well you can utilize them). A product that looks like a better value to the customer will of course be able to sell well at a higher price but the value to the customer is not necessarily tied to the dev costs. Look at Wii Fit, I'm pretty certain its dev costs were nothing like those of GTA4. There are more ways to increase the value than just throwing more money at the development.
Careful pointing at WZ2100, that one was commercial before it got opened up so they had professionals doing the work for money before it was given to the community. Spring's biggest mods operate on pirated content too (yes, there are legal mods but they're getting little attention from the playerbase as the primary sales pitch is still "we stole TA"). Organizing free contributors into anything that can produce a coherent game is extremely difficult and so far the results tend to be mostly coder art or just verbatim ripoffs of commercial games.
But the country may very well inclined to arrest you once you come into range. There are many countries with laws that allow you to be punished for actions that happened outside the country's jurisdiction, should you ever get close enough to their law enforcement.
To some extent a limited price scale can hurt your revenue as you may be locked out of the optimum price. Not sure the optimum price is above the price ceiling for many indie games though.
So, how are you going to responsibly buy from the right company when there IS ONLY ONE? Do you say "I won't use Windows"? Okay, time to move all your applications over to Linux... Wait, half of them don't work there and must be replaced with inferior clones that fail to interoperate with some of your important data? Better hope all of it can be replaced before any deadlines hit you. Some application has no alternative on Linux? Good luck doing business then.
The applications are specifically engineered to maximize the damage that scenario causes. A switch can very well cause a lot more damage than the higher costs you incur by letting a monopoly continue to do business. You can easily end up needing them more than they need you.
Perfectly free markets only work with zero friction, where people always make the most logical choice. Real life markets are geared around increasing friction, tricking people into making suboptimal choices, etc. Expecting a person to research everything and still have enough time left to actually have a job is insane, it takes too much time especially with the intentional obfuscation.
Finally, corporations don't need full individual rights, they are tools created to serve the human race, not equals to it. When the concerns of the race require it the corporation must yield.
You own a COPY, a physical medium containing data that acts as the software. Note how any other piece of copyrighted media works just fine without any "licensed, not sold" bullshit.
It is not a matter of "economic theory" but of individual rights. For it to be any other case would mean that the ends justify the means. No ethical system is possible if you are to be judged on the results of your actions rather than the actions themselves (given your knowledge at the time of the actions). It is not possible to answer the question, "What should I do in this situation?" if you must account for unknowable future events and unforeseen consequences.
How does that relate to antitrust laws? You realize they don't punish you for having a monopoly, right? They punish you for abusing it, actions that are clearly defined and the only way you could claim you didn't know it would violate the law would be to claim ignorance of the law (which is not a defense). You aren't automatically punished for outcomes you couldn't predict, you're punished for taking specific actions in a situation that is known beforehand. No guesswork here. Once you're a monopoly you simply don't do those things and you're clear.
I think a "vice tax" on violent games has already been found an obstruction to free speech (how is it free speech if you're taxed depending on what you say?) and thus unconstitutional.
Letting that aside, "vice taxes" are a terrible idea, it basically means the richer you are the more vices you're allowed to have. To someone with a 200000$/year income the tax carries a completely different weight than to someone who earns 20000$/year. If vice taxes are supposed to make people use something less then they should be adjusted to the income (e.g. if every pack of cigarettes was taxed 1/2000th of your monthly income) so they don't vary between a huge barrier and a mere blip between different social classes. Not gonna reduce someone's use of something if the additional cost is so minor it doesn't matter while making it a significant bump for the upper classes will completely block it from the lower classes. Oh and hey, there we've got another abridgement to the freedom of speech, having the proles locked out of your speech if you talk about the wrong things.
The game designer and the graphics/sound artists are different people (and without a designer you don't even get a pen & paper design). The game designer is pretty much the first member you need on the team, he can have multiple roles but he must have game design skill, you can't just tell one of your coders to go and design a game, just as you can't tell a coder to make pretty art.
I think a harder part for a designer in an FOSS game is to keep the other devs in line. They'll always have their own ideas and sometimes be pretty vocal about them, in a worst case you risk a fork with your talented devs running off to pursue their own ideas. Game designs can rarely be designed by commitee, especially when most of the commitee has no game design ability (because that's not an inability you'll notice without seeing your projects fail repeatedly, everyone fancies himself a designer).
When we asked the FSF they were pretty specific on interpreted code (our specific case was Lua) being infected by the engine's GPL so QVM code would have to be GPL.
The engine-and-mod approach works I think (at least we've got some decent looking material in Spring). I dont think you can get a single team for the engine and game though, that'll net you too many people who want to decide where to take the project while a separate engine/mod approach lets the engine coders focus on making their engine a good tool for game development while the game devs can focus on getting their gameplay and assets in.
Well, it's going to be tried again soon, we've got one fool who's trying to make his Spring mod commercial (I think he has about a snowball's chance in hell if he ever goes through with it).
That's because they don't want to encounter a new basic experience but a new specific experience. They want something that feels like it could have been additional content for the original game (along with maybe a few general improvements) while still providing an experience the content of the original game didn't provide. Usually every distinct area of the original game comes with a few ideas of its own (e.g. one may involve jumping betweeen spider webs, another may involve teleporters), the new material needs new ideas in that department (e.g. not another level about teleporters but this time in the jungle instead of the city) but overall it must still create an experience similar to the old material (e.g. a sneaky game should remain sneaky, an all-out shoot-everything game should not get sneaky or tactical).
There's a lot more bad innovation than just interface tweaks. I call it feature katamari syndrome when a game design feels like they threw everything in there with no regard for its usefulness for the game design. Everybody has ideas but the ability to tell good ideas from bad ones is rare. Many people (especially those who don't have a dedicated game designer on their team who has experience with this kind of thing) see innovation as some kind of holy grail and will even throw garbage into their design just to attain that. Often a bad design can doom a game from the start, no matter how well implemented it is, if the design is faulty the result is not salvageable.
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Gonna be noticed much quicker if they keep using your WUs. Botnets persist in part because people don't realize their computers are infected.
Law, not request, contract or court order. Telling Thompson to STFU is not passing a law. Any individual has the right to tell another individual to shut the fuck up. If JT keeps pestering the politicians he can be subject to many laws that cover person to person behaviours like harassment.
I think one point that must also be kept in mind is the appropriate means. Petitioning the government is not done by building a brick wall around the exits of their building with your demands written on it, petitioning is not done by barging into the room and screaming at the top of your lung, petitioning is not done by flooding someone with emails he has specifically requested not to receive anymore. You can convey your petition with appropriate means and spamming is not one of them. By being prevented from spamming you are not prevented from petitioning, just from using some means to petition. You still have the option of using reasonable means instead.
Lawyers are snakes and follow the hivemind.
I do assume that a court record describes things that actually happened and you should try reading the record of his disbarrment trial.
Doesn't that only apply to accusing someone of a crime? Last I checked homosexuality is not illegal.
But you have the supply of equivalent products to deal with.
Cost and retail price have nothing to do with each other for videogames. The dev cost is fixed, the only way to compensate for it is to make as much money as possible and that's always your goal. The price you pick is dependent on how many people are willing to buy it at each price so that the price times the sales is maximized. Whether your game cost $3 or 25 million USD to make does not matter, you'll try to maximize your revenue anyway. Of course your product itself can affect your sales at the different prices but this is only weakly linked to the dev costs (and more strongly to how well you can utilize them). A product that looks like a better value to the customer will of course be able to sell well at a higher price but the value to the customer is not necessarily tied to the dev costs. Look at Wii Fit, I'm pretty certain its dev costs were nothing like those of GTA4. There are more ways to increase the value than just throwing more money at the development.
Careful pointing at WZ2100, that one was commercial before it got opened up so they had professionals doing the work for money before it was given to the community. Spring's biggest mods operate on pirated content too (yes, there are legal mods but they're getting little attention from the playerbase as the primary sales pitch is still "we stole TA"). Organizing free contributors into anything that can produce a coherent game is extremely difficult and so far the results tend to be mostly coder art or just verbatim ripoffs of commercial games.
But the country may very well inclined to arrest you once you come into range. There are many countries with laws that allow you to be punished for actions that happened outside the country's jurisdiction, should you ever get close enough to their law enforcement.
Yeah and since light is visible that means all radiation is visible, right?
To some extent a limited price scale can hurt your revenue as you may be locked out of the optimum price. Not sure the optimum price is above the price ceiling for many indie games though.
So, how are you going to responsibly buy from the right company when there IS ONLY ONE? Do you say "I won't use Windows"? Okay, time to move all your applications over to Linux... Wait, half of them don't work there and must be replaced with inferior clones that fail to interoperate with some of your important data? Better hope all of it can be replaced before any deadlines hit you. Some application has no alternative on Linux? Good luck doing business then.
The applications are specifically engineered to maximize the damage that scenario causes. A switch can very well cause a lot more damage than the higher costs you incur by letting a monopoly continue to do business. You can easily end up needing them more than they need you.
Perfectly free markets only work with zero friction, where people always make the most logical choice. Real life markets are geared around increasing friction, tricking people into making suboptimal choices, etc. Expecting a person to research everything and still have enough time left to actually have a job is insane, it takes too much time especially with the intentional obfuscation.
Finally, corporations don't need full individual rights, they are tools created to serve the human race, not equals to it. When the concerns of the race require it the corporation must yield.
You own a COPY, a physical medium containing data that acts as the software. Note how any other piece of copyrighted media works just fine without any "licensed, not sold" bullshit.
It is not a matter of "economic theory" but of individual rights. For it to be any other case would mean that the ends justify the means. No ethical system is possible if you are to be judged on the results of your actions rather than the actions themselves (given your knowledge at the time of the actions). It is not possible to answer the question, "What should I do in this situation?" if you must account for unknowable future events and unforeseen consequences.
How does that relate to antitrust laws? You realize they don't punish you for having a monopoly, right? They punish you for abusing it, actions that are clearly defined and the only way you could claim you didn't know it would violate the law would be to claim ignorance of the law (which is not a defense). You aren't automatically punished for outcomes you couldn't predict, you're punished for taking specific actions in a situation that is known beforehand. No guesswork here. Once you're a monopoly you simply don't do those things and you're clear.
I think it applies to some goods (medicine, books) but not all.
Does the military have to pay any taxes?
I think a "vice tax" on violent games has already been found an obstruction to free speech (how is it free speech if you're taxed depending on what you say?) and thus unconstitutional.
Letting that aside, "vice taxes" are a terrible idea, it basically means the richer you are the more vices you're allowed to have. To someone with a 200000$/year income the tax carries a completely different weight than to someone who earns 20000$/year. If vice taxes are supposed to make people use something less then they should be adjusted to the income (e.g. if every pack of cigarettes was taxed 1/2000th of your monthly income) so they don't vary between a huge barrier and a mere blip between different social classes. Not gonna reduce someone's use of something if the additional cost is so minor it doesn't matter while making it a significant bump for the upper classes will completely block it from the lower classes. Oh and hey, there we've got another abridgement to the freedom of speech, having the proles locked out of your speech if you talk about the wrong things.
The game designer and the graphics/sound artists are different people (and without a designer you don't even get a pen & paper design). The game designer is pretty much the first member you need on the team, he can have multiple roles but he must have game design skill, you can't just tell one of your coders to go and design a game, just as you can't tell a coder to make pretty art.
I think a harder part for a designer in an FOSS game is to keep the other devs in line. They'll always have their own ideas and sometimes be pretty vocal about them, in a worst case you risk a fork with your talented devs running off to pursue their own ideas. Game designs can rarely be designed by commitee, especially when most of the commitee has no game design ability (because that's not an inability you'll notice without seeing your projects fail repeatedly, everyone fancies himself a designer).
When we asked the FSF they were pretty specific on interpreted code (our specific case was Lua) being infected by the engine's GPL so QVM code would have to be GPL.
The engine-and-mod approach works I think (at least we've got some decent looking material in Spring). I dont think you can get a single team for the engine and game though, that'll net you too many people who want to decide where to take the project while a separate engine/mod approach lets the engine coders focus on making their engine a good tool for game development while the game devs can focus on getting their gameplay and assets in.
Well, it's going to be tried again soon, we've got one fool who's trying to make his Spring mod commercial (I think he has about a snowball's chance in hell if he ever goes through with it).
That's because they don't want to encounter a new basic experience but a new specific experience. They want something that feels like it could have been additional content for the original game (along with maybe a few general improvements) while still providing an experience the content of the original game didn't provide. Usually every distinct area of the original game comes with a few ideas of its own (e.g. one may involve jumping betweeen spider webs, another may involve teleporters), the new material needs new ideas in that department (e.g. not another level about teleporters but this time in the jungle instead of the city) but overall it must still create an experience similar to the old material (e.g. a sneaky game should remain sneaky, an all-out shoot-everything game should not get sneaky or tactical).
There's a lot more bad innovation than just interface tweaks. I call it feature katamari syndrome when a game design feels like they threw everything in there with no regard for its usefulness for the game design. Everybody has ideas but the ability to tell good ideas from bad ones is rare. Many people (especially those who don't have a dedicated game designer on their team who has experience with this kind of thing) see innovation as some kind of holy grail and will even throw garbage into their design just to attain that. Often a bad design can doom a game from the start, no matter how well implemented it is, if the design is faulty the result is not salvageable.
But it can point them towards the stairs.