Police don't need to overcome reasonable doubt to get a warrant, just probable cause.
And if after the trial there was an acquittal, that's proof that there was no probable cause to begin with.
Ah, I see where your problem is. You don't understand the difference between "probable cause" and "reasonable doubt". These are very different concepts. You are declared guilty or not based on whether they can get the jury to believe beyond "reasonable doubt" that you committed the crime, but they only need "probable cause" to obtain a search warrant. If we put it into numbers, say 50% is needed to justify probable cause but 90% is needed to satisfy beyond reasonable doubt. What you are saying is that since 75% is not greater than 90%, it is therefore not greater than 50%, and if you are a "techie" then you would know that is absurd.
As an example, I woke up this morning late because my alarm clock didn't go off. I set it every night and sometimes I forget to set the AM/PM thing correctly so at first I assumed that was the reason (probably cause). That warranted me looking into it. I noticed all around my house all the clocks flashing 12:00 and my computer was turned off. What really happened was the power went out some time during the night. See, I couldn't prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that my alarm clock didn't go off because of the AM/PM thing, but I did have probable cause to believe that I screwed that up.
In the same way, police while looking into a crime see your IP address, they now have "probable cause" to look further into it. However, while presenting the evidence they then find to a jury, that jury decides that there is some reasonable doubt as to your guilt, and so they declare you not guilty. See, no vitriol, no corruption, no need to bring in SCotUS. If there was corruption in your case, I'm sorry, I hope you get it fixed, but the situation you presented didn't state that assumption.
And Washington and New Hampshire still have hanging as an option. What's your point? How is the chosen method of execution many years in the past in one state in any way related to this article? Did you just find out this bit of information recently and finally found an opportunity to show off your knowledge or what?
Civil disobedience is one thing, hiding in your room smoking pot, then apologizing once people find out is a completely different thing. If all the pot smokers want to show civil disobedience, then by all means get a group together at 4:20pm on April 20 on the steps to the Capitol building and smoke congress out. What Phelps did was not civil disobedience. Had he said he wasn't sorry for what took place then maybe he could qualify.
Disclaimers: I'm not the grandparent poster, I'm mostly for the legalization of drugs, I'm 100% against using "under the influence" as any kind of excuse for crimes committed, and I don't like pickles at all.
Not that I'm in agreement with the grandparent, but to reduce it to that level of triteness is like saying the American Revolution was started over tea.
I'd love to see someone put their neck on the line and try the same stunt somewhere else. Say, in the US Capitol, and when he's arrested try to get Bill Gates to pay for his legal costs.
The distribution might remain the same, but in the developed world, the poor are a whole lot more rich than the poor elsewhere. Also, by taking away from the wealthy you've changed the distribution, but you haven't made any one else richer. In the context of the article, he might have made the wealthy sick like the poor, but he didn't make the poor any healthier. In the context of riches, if you took all the money in the world and distributed it evenly to every person, we'd see massive inflation to where in a very short time, wealthy would emerge and there would be poor people again.
I'm all for bringing people up, but you can't do it by tearing others down. The poor in developed countries are generally much better off than most poor in non-developed countries. Maybe if we developed those countries we would see the poor much better off there too. We can start by getting rid of malaria, but you don't do that by giving wealthy people a mosquito bites.
If the current business model works only if we keep piracy in check then the current business model doesn't work. Piracy is here and it isn't going away. DRM didn't/can't stop it. Lawsuits didn't/can't stop it. Since the RIAA has started their litigation against file sharers piracy has gone through the roof. Since companies started using DRM piracy has risen at amazing rates. Note that I'm not saying it did because of those things, I'm saying it did despite those things. That's because DRM and lawsuits can not and will not be able to stop piracy. So if the business model requires that piracy be checked, then the business model is unstable and will need to be replaced very soon. So it does come down to business models.
It would also be a helluva lot more successful if we could eliminate most of piracy.
Yes it would, but is it the most efficient business model? I don't know, but unless people try other models we'll never know. Oh hey look, people are and they are being successful, and their business models don't rely on checking or curbing piracy, which means they don't have to resort to more expensive litigation and DRM and "educational campaigns" that add to their costs but contribute nothing to their revenues.
I can also say that if we condone piracy, then we have a lot to lose.
Not so, if the business models moved to not only allow but perhaps even encourage piracy then we lose nothing and gain a lot. And that "would make distribution easier, benefiting publishers, the artists working for them, and especially, indie artists who can't survive piracy sapping their few profits." So I guess it does come down to business model issues. There are people out there right now experiment and changing their business models with great success to where they don't care if their stuff gets pirated and some even want their stuff on bittorrent.
Proving what? That pirates buy media?
Again you are missing the point on the piracy buying media thing. Did you read any of those articles? They don't say pirates buy media, they say pirates buy more media than the average media buyer. It might be because of guilt. It might be because they like to support those that create stuff they like. It might be that they pirate because they really like media more than others and thus of course are going to be spending more on that media. Does it matter why they do it? Perhaps, but as of right now, they buy more on average than non-pirates.
Also, it doesn't show guilt is in play. None of those studies showed that was the reason. They only reported on the findings that pirates buy more on average, not the reasons why. You are jumping to that conclusion and so the rest of that paragraph is useless conjecture at this point. I will venture a useless guess as well and say that people pirate because they love music/movies/games and because they love it they buy it, and because they've bought so much they can't afford to buy more, so by pirating they didn't cost any one a sale since they weren't going to buy it anyway. In short, they pirate because they bought so much they couldn't afford any more.
As a final note, I'd like to add that since your first comment in this thread you have not provided one source or link to back up anything you've said. On the other hand, I have given over a dozen links various websites, articles, studies, blog posts, artist forums, etc that backup my claims. I'll
That's a big reason why I like the kids-in-mind website. I go there even for movies I know only I'm going to watch. They have three categories: Sex/Nudity, Violence & Gore, and Profanity and assign them a number 1-10, 1 being the least and 10 being pretty graphic, but then they also have a bullet point list of the things that caused them to give it each category its rating. They also give the bullet points for substance abuse, list discussion topics the movie might raise, and then give a brief summation of a message the movie might have. I think it's great. I wouldn't want it to be mandated by the government, I don't want it to be the only rating around, but for me, it works so I know what's there before I go, either to avoid going or to at least prepare myself for it.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy user of their services.
Not to discredit the sibling post, but typically they are shaped like rectangles. Sometimes squares. I suppose some could be found that are circles. If you wanted to get fancy, maybe you can get them shaped like triangles or heptagons. However, they will typically be a quadrilateral of some type.
Won't someone think of the parallelograms and the innocent rhombi!?!
We already have a business model that works well in practically every situation.
Well, good. Then there is no need to discuss business models at all. If the current one works, then piracy won't be a problem. On the other hand, if piracy became a problem, it becomes a business model issue.
Which shows that the average pirate's taste is similar to the average legitimate media user's taste. What's your point?
You got it nearly all wrong. It's not that the average pirate's taste matches the average legitimate media buyer's taste, it's that the average pirateis the above average media buyer. Those are 4 different studies in 4 different countries.
However if you only look at the plane and the person inside it there is no gravity affecting the person.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in space astronaut's faces get puffy because there is no gravity that the blood flow has to fight like on Earth. But in this scenario, gravity is pulling you down and is thus still working against that blood flow out of the heart. You might not be falling in relation to the plane, but you are still falling and so the sensation is not quite the same. Or have I missed something?
The point of the list of business models certainly was not to be exhaustive. And I never claimed that any of them would work for any/all situations, or that people would even like them. But that's life. I'd prefer the CD key business model to continue to be successful. I'd also prefer single player PC games to be the standard, but that is becoming less common place for just about all but the small web/flash games.
However, all of that is skirting away from the original issue. DRM costs developers/publishers time and money, doesn't work, never has, doesn't look like it ever will, and pisses paying customers off. What is the point? Some people suggest it keeps people from pirating for the first week or something. But if someone was going to pirate the game, they can wait a week for it. Right now, the choice is pirate it now, or wait maybe a month tops, but more like a week or two. If that time was closer to a year, I can see a would-be pirate maybe deciding to pay for it instead, but we're talking a week, maybe two.
There is no point to DRM. We can talk business model issues, we can talk about the harm pirates cause to cultural evolution and the arts, but all of that is ancillary to the fact that we are discussing DRM as a complete and utter failure on an article about how paying customers, people who are Epic's lifeblood, people who are the reason Epic can still make games, people who paid for the game, cannot play that game because of DRM. DRM which I might remind you didn't stop the game from being pirated, DRM which was easily circumvented, DRM which cost Epic a lot of money to add, DRM which added to the release time, DRM which reduced the margins on the game. Instead, the people who pirated the game, the people who didn't buy it, the people who "stole" it, the people who are Epic's "enemies", the people who are going to drive Epic into bankruptcy, are the people who are still playing the game. That is utterly asinine.
You can have DRM:
Costs more
Hurts your paying customers
doesn't stop piracy
Or you can have no DRM:
Costs less
Doesn't hurt your paying customers
doesn't stop piracy
Both scenarios contain that "doesn't stop piracy" line. That is the problem. If DRM actually worked, I could maybe understand companies throwing their money at it. But it doesn't work. It doesn't get rid of that line, so it should be obvious to anyone that the non-DRM route is the better one. It costs less and makes your customers happy. The DRM route costs more and makes your customers angry. It's silly, it's folly, it's absolutely ridiculous that we even have to have this discussion. Epic epically failed here. But to single them out is stupid. Every developer/publisher/copyright-holder etc. that uses DRM has to have seen the writing on the wall by now.
And as just a side note, I will add that Spore, the most pirated game last year, and the Dark Knight, the most pirated movie last year, were also the most successful in their respective media last year.
He didn't imply, he stated outright that Steam as a DRM system fails at its task. He even gave the link. Steam as a content delivery platform is a phenomenal success. As a DRM system, it is a failure simply because it's been cracked.
Yes, it is a business model issue, and no, figurines are not the only way to make money. I made a quick list of other business models, it's not exhaustive, it's not necessarily desirable in all cases, and none of them are guaranteed to work in any/all cases, but they are options. Again, you might not like it, but that's the way life works. Musicians used to make all their work from performances, then record music came along and some made most (if not all) of their money from the sale of records. Now, they are again making most of their money from concerts. However, even that is different. Mozart didn't make his money by selling lots of tickets, instead he had a few people who gave him endowments because they recognized the quality of his work. Times change, business models change. Not changing is the surest way to stagnation and as a company that means death.
Free market rational only works under several assumptions, one of which that consumers are rational, and will purchase the product with the lowest cost. This principle we teach in schools for crying out loud - that's how ingrained it is into our psyche. Lower cost to you = better for you.
And one assumption is that goods aren't infinite. And while I recognize that the cost to produce a game is greater than 0 (I was a game developer), the cost of the copy that you and I received is practically 0 making it practically infinite. Many of the models I listed in the link above got people specifically to buy the scarce good of the production (music in that case) and then gave away the unlimited resource (copies of the music). You cannot sell an infinite good.
That might mean that the means of production is dwindled and the revenue drops. That doesn't necessarily mean worse quality. As examples, I give you Water World and The Blair Witch Project. You can I could come up with more examples of movies/games/music/etc. that cost a lot to produce but were critical and financial bombs, some that cost little money but were critical and financial successes. Not that I'm saying that The Dark Knight could have been made on the same budget as the Blair Witch Project, but that just might be the end of an era of many - not all - big budget productions. However, we are also in an era where music/movies/games/etc can be made cheaper than ever. I'm interested to see where we are headed.
Basically, if pirates want to have their little entertainment orgy, then they need to be the ones to provide it. It's not fair or plausible to expect companies to provide it, and at the same time, tell them it's their responsibility to come up with a way of cleaning up the mess.
Exactly right. If someone wants entertainment, it must be paid for by someone. You can't actually be proposing the end of entertainment? There are still plenty of people with enough money to ensure that entertainers are paid. Or did you think Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim Helu, et al don't care for entertainment? And they don't have to be billionaires. I doubt Maria Schneider's fans are even mostly millionaires.
However, what you are really asking is for someone who is complaining to do the job of the business department of the video game companies. It is their job to figure out how to make money, not the legal departments, not their customers. It wouldn't matter if piracy were never an issue, sitting around hoping that the previous generation's business model will work for you is the most certain way to be a dying company.
I would suggest that any game company that resorts to DRM really needs to fire their business people. It fails miserably in its intended purpose, pisses off paying customers, and costs more money (thus less profit) to implement. It is an abject failure, yet some brain dead idiots think they'll get it right "this time."
I'll start with the disclaimer. I like the idea of copyright law, I think the current implementation is ridiculous, I write software for a living, in fact, I use to write game software and plan on doing it again in the future, etc. Having said that...
It's a business model issue. If piracy is rampant, games will have to come up with new models. Valve and Blizzard seem to be able to do so while piracy is rampant. In fact, Blizzard is making more money each year with World of Warcraft than Epic will likely ever make with Gears of War. Maybe Epic should have been thinking about new business models instead of new DRM which didn't stop piracy at all, has now thoroughly pissed off their paying customers, consequently will increase piracy rates in the future for their games or others with DRM. So in their desire to stop pirates, they not only failed miserably, they've also now pissed off their fans and paying customers. I'm guessing now that this has happened, many (I'm not saying most, just many) of the people who have given them money, wouldn't buy Gears of War 2 for the PC even if they did release it, which they won't because their DRM failed so miserably.
Yet here you are saying its necessary. Why? What did it give them? People who pirate still got it through piracy, people who paid for it got a worse experience than those who pirated it, and Epic had to pay time and money adding and testing it, which either decreased their profit or increased the costs to customers, which likely decreased their revenue, which would again decrease their profit. Apparently they didn't spend enough time testing the DRM. Should they have spent more time and money? No, as we see, it was already a waste of effort. Instead, they could have spent some time thinking up a new business model. They could have used it as an indication that there are customers out there that are under-served, perhaps it was an indication they were charging too much, they could have used it as free advertising, they could have found some other scarcity to sell, but instead they chose to go the more costly and annoying route which has been shown time and time again to be an utter and complete absolute dismal failure.
True, I shouldn't have mentioned a telephoto lens. As far as I am aware, no camera phone has that capability yet. But even if they never did, a camera from a distance with a telephoto lens could do the same thing as a clicking nearby camera phone could, but silently, even if it did make a clicking noise, and the camera would be far enough away that you'd be hard pressed to know what it's taking a picture of.
How will you hear your phone ring, or hear someone talking on the phone?
My phone has two speakers; one for the ear, and one for speaker phone capabilities. I never use the speaker phone. My phone is always on vibrate. I could cut that speaker and lose no functionality whatsoever.
Most phones do not have provisions for consumer written firmware to be installed.
Neither does the iPhone, but people have jail broken it. Most (if not all) phones do have this capability whether they explicitly allow it or not, and as another poster mentioned, just because you can't do it, doesn't mean someone else won't.
Phones do not come with interchangeable lenses. You get a "one size fits all" generic lens, and that's it.
True, for the most part, camera phones don't have interchangeable lenses. But this does bring up a counter point to the law. If they are trying to stop pervs from taking pictures of that teenage girl bending over to tie her shoe, the guy could still do so from far away. This law can't even begin to address that issue. So it tries to address the issue of the perv standing right behind her, but as I've pointed out, he's already gotten around the sound issue.
Besides, if you just mv silence.mp3 shutterclick.mp3, then you are in full compliance of the law.
Thanks for adding to the list yet another easy workaround to the law. It's totally pointless. It doesn't stop its intended target, but does hamper legitimate uses. It's a stupid law.
I don't think this law is aimed at stopping people you think it is, an audible noise is probably intended to discourage people who are presented with a situation where they might consider taking a picture that is inappropriate.
That is exactly why I thought this law is being put into place. In other words, it's to try to keep some guy from taking upskirt pictures without the lady knowing about it. But what I'm saying is that if he really wants to do it, there are so many ways of getting around this law that it's like putting your fingers in the cracks of a dam when half the dam has already washed away. This law would utterly pointless. But there are times when you would like to take a legitimate picture, but the sound of the phone would be annoying to those around you, like at a concert, opera, ballet, wedding, funeral, etc. This law would do nothing to stop what ever its intended to stop, and harm those who are doing nothing wrong. In that way, it's more than completely pointless, it's also harmful.
It's ridiculous until one of your kids ends up with pics on the net that weren't authorized.
As the father of a daughter with another coming very soon, I have to say this is ridiculous. There are so many ways around it that it becomes pointless.
Snip the wire going to the speaker
Break the speaker
Rewrite the firmware
Take a picture when there is a loud noise (car honking, cough, sneeze, etc whether from you or an accomplice)
Take a video instead of a picture
Use a telephoto lens
Do you get the idea yet? This is only for politicians to look like they're doing something when they aren't actually doing anything. Perhaps the intention is to throw another crime at someone when this happens. That's the intention now, but eventually it'll be abused. Also, it ignores when you might want to have a silent photo for legitimate purposes.
Insurance for my family (me, wife, 2 kids) through my employer would cost $1,200/month. I make 30k/yr. Do the math. That's half my salary BEFORE taxes. I don't qualify for Medicaid. That's with the employer paying a chunk and that's a plan with a $2,000 deductible.
How about you do the math? Get another job. At my current job I pay ~$260/month for myself, my wife and two daughters. And that's with a plan with a $1500 deductible. Before this job, I was paying ~$280, and that was a small company with 40 employees. Before that, I was paying for my own insurance with no company help and that was ~$230/month. Either your company is bilking you, or you have one heckuva sick family.
Where do people get this idea? You bought the movie. A little collection of laws you may have heard of called Copyright Law keeps you from distributing the content without the copyright owners permission. That's it. There isn't any kind of fancy license or whatnot. The copy you bought was distributed by some store who had been authorized by the copyright holder to distribute the copy you bought (assuming you didn't buy it from the guy with the large coat in the subway station). You bought it. You own it. You can do whatever you want with it barring violation of copyright law. It's the same kind of thing as when I buy a car. There was no contract I signed at that time that was a license to use the car but not to go over the speed limit or run over people with the white sticks crossing the street. No, I bought the car and can do whatever I want with it so long as I'm not breaking some law. I buy the movie and can do whatever I want with it so long as I'm not breaking some law. It's not licensed to me, it's purchased. A copy of the movie, not the copyright. I bought the movie, not the copyright. Do I have to repeat this again for you to understand? There is no license, only a purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see where your problem is. You don't understand the difference between "probable cause" and "reasonable doubt". These are very different concepts. You are declared guilty or not based on whether they can get the jury to believe beyond "reasonable doubt" that you committed the crime, but they only need "probable cause" to obtain a search warrant. If we put it into numbers, say 50% is needed to justify probable cause but 90% is needed to satisfy beyond reasonable doubt. What you are saying is that since 75% is not greater than 90%, it is therefore not greater than 50%, and if you are a "techie" then you would know that is absurd.
As an example, I woke up this morning late because my alarm clock didn't go off. I set it every night and sometimes I forget to set the AM/PM thing correctly so at first I assumed that was the reason (probably cause). That warranted me looking into it. I noticed all around my house all the clocks flashing 12:00 and my computer was turned off. What really happened was the power went out some time during the night. See, I couldn't prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that my alarm clock didn't go off because of the AM/PM thing, but I did have probable cause to believe that I screwed that up.
In the same way, police while looking into a crime see your IP address, they now have "probable cause" to look further into it. However, while presenting the evidence they then find to a jury, that jury decides that there is some reasonable doubt as to your guilt, and so they declare you not guilty. See, no vitriol, no corruption, no need to bring in SCotUS. If there was corruption in your case, I'm sorry, I hope you get it fixed, but the situation you presented didn't state that assumption.
And Washington and New Hampshire still have hanging as an option. What's your point? How is the chosen method of execution many years in the past in one state in any way related to this article? Did you just find out this bit of information recently and finally found an opportunity to show off your knowledge or what?
Civil disobedience is one thing, hiding in your room smoking pot, then apologizing once people find out is a completely different thing. If all the pot smokers want to show civil disobedience, then by all means get a group together at 4:20pm on April 20 on the steps to the Capitol building and smoke congress out. What Phelps did was not civil disobedience. Had he said he wasn't sorry for what took place then maybe he could qualify.
Disclaimers: I'm not the grandparent poster, I'm mostly for the legalization of drugs, I'm 100% against using "under the influence" as any kind of excuse for crimes committed, and I don't like pickles at all.
Not that I'm in agreement with the grandparent, but to reduce it to that level of triteness is like saying the American Revolution was started over tea.
Actually I voted for myself and I'm not even 100% lockstep with the guy I voted for.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
I'd love to see someone put their neck on the line and try the same stunt somewhere else. Say, in the US Capitol, and when he's arrested try to get Bill Gates to pay for his legal costs.
The distribution might remain the same, but in the developed world, the poor are a whole lot more rich than the poor elsewhere. Also, by taking away from the wealthy you've changed the distribution, but you haven't made any one else richer. In the context of the article, he might have made the wealthy sick like the poor, but he didn't make the poor any healthier. In the context of riches, if you took all the money in the world and distributed it evenly to every person, we'd see massive inflation to where in a very short time, wealthy would emerge and there would be poor people again.
I'm all for bringing people up, but you can't do it by tearing others down. The poor in developed countries are generally much better off than most poor in non-developed countries. Maybe if we developed those countries we would see the poor much better off there too. We can start by getting rid of malaria, but you don't do that by giving wealthy people a mosquito bites.
Here you go.
Yes it would, but is it the most efficient business model? I don't know, but unless people try other models we'll never know. Oh hey look, people are and they are being successful, and their business models don't rely on checking or curbing piracy, which means they don't have to resort to more expensive litigation and DRM and "educational campaigns" that add to their costs but contribute nothing to their revenues.
Not so, if the business models moved to not only allow but perhaps even encourage piracy then we lose nothing and gain a lot. And that "would make distribution easier, benefiting publishers, the artists working for them, and especially, indie artists who can't survive piracy sapping their few profits." So I guess it does come down to business model issues. There are people out there right now experiment and changing their business models with great success to where they don't care if their stuff gets pirated and some even want their stuff on bittorrent.
Again you are missing the point on the piracy buying media thing. Did you read any of those articles? They don't say pirates buy media, they say pirates buy more media than the average media buyer. It might be because of guilt. It might be because they like to support those that create stuff they like. It might be that they pirate because they really like media more than others and thus of course are going to be spending more on that media. Does it matter why they do it? Perhaps, but as of right now, they buy more on average than non-pirates.
Also, it doesn't show guilt is in play. None of those studies showed that was the reason. They only reported on the findings that pirates buy more on average, not the reasons why. You are jumping to that conclusion and so the rest of that paragraph is useless conjecture at this point. I will venture a useless guess as well and say that people pirate because they love music/movies/games and because they love it they buy it, and because they've bought so much they can't afford to buy more, so by pirating they didn't cost any one a sale since they weren't going to buy it anyway. In short, they pirate because they bought so much they couldn't afford any more.
As a final note, I'd like to add that since your first comment in this thread you have not provided one source or link to back up anything you've said. On the other hand, I have given over a dozen links various websites, articles, studies, blog posts, artist forums, etc that backup my claims. I'll
That's a big reason why I like the kids-in-mind website. I go there even for movies I know only I'm going to watch. They have three categories: Sex/Nudity, Violence & Gore, and Profanity and assign them a number 1-10, 1 being the least and 10 being pretty graphic, but then they also have a bullet point list of the things that caused them to give it each category its rating. They also give the bullet points for substance abuse, list discussion topics the movie might raise, and then give a brief summation of a message the movie might have. I think it's great. I wouldn't want it to be mandated by the government, I don't want it to be the only rating around, but for me, it works so I know what's there before I go, either to avoid going or to at least prepare myself for it.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy user of their services.
Not to discredit the sibling post, but typically they are shaped like rectangles. Sometimes squares. I suppose some could be found that are circles. If you wanted to get fancy, maybe you can get them shaped like triangles or heptagons. However, they will typically be a quadrilateral of some type.
Won't someone think of the parallelograms and the innocent rhombi!?!
Well, good. Then there is no need to discuss business models at all. If the current one works, then piracy won't be a problem. On the other hand, if piracy became a problem, it becomes a business model issue.
You got it nearly all wrong. It's not that the average pirate's taste matches the average legitimate media buyer's taste, it's that the average pirate is the above average media buyer. Those are 4 different studies in 4 different countries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in space astronaut's faces get puffy because there is no gravity that the blood flow has to fight like on Earth. But in this scenario, gravity is pulling you down and is thus still working against that blood flow out of the heart. You might not be falling in relation to the plane, but you are still falling and so the sensation is not quite the same. Or have I missed something?
However, all of that is skirting away from the original issue. DRM costs developers/publishers time and money, doesn't work, never has, doesn't look like it ever will, and pisses paying customers off. What is the point? Some people suggest it keeps people from pirating for the first week or something. But if someone was going to pirate the game, they can wait a week for it. Right now, the choice is pirate it now, or wait maybe a month tops, but more like a week or two. If that time was closer to a year, I can see a would-be pirate maybe deciding to pay for it instead, but we're talking a week, maybe two.
There is no point to DRM. We can talk business model issues, we can talk about the harm pirates cause to cultural evolution and the arts, but all of that is ancillary to the fact that we are discussing DRM as a complete and utter failure on an article about how paying customers, people who are Epic's lifeblood, people who are the reason Epic can still make games, people who paid for the game, cannot play that game because of DRM. DRM which I might remind you didn't stop the game from being pirated, DRM which was easily circumvented, DRM which cost Epic a lot of money to add, DRM which added to the release time, DRM which reduced the margins on the game. Instead, the people who pirated the game, the people who didn't buy it, the people who "stole" it, the people who are Epic's "enemies", the people who are going to drive Epic into bankruptcy, are the people who are still playing the game. That is utterly asinine.
You can have DRM:
Or you can have no DRM:
Both scenarios contain that "doesn't stop piracy" line. That is the problem. If DRM actually worked, I could maybe understand companies throwing their money at it. But it doesn't work. It doesn't get rid of that line, so it should be obvious to anyone that the non-DRM route is the better one. It costs less and makes your customers happy. The DRM route costs more and makes your customers angry. It's silly, it's folly, it's absolutely ridiculous that we even have to have this discussion. Epic epically failed here. But to single them out is stupid. Every developer/publisher/copyright-holder etc. that uses DRM has to have seen the writing on the wall by now.
And as just a side note, I will add that Spore, the most pirated game last year, and the Dark Knight, the most pirated movie last year, were also the most successful in their respective media last year.
He didn't imply, he stated outright that Steam as a DRM system fails at its task. He even gave the link. Steam as a content delivery platform is a phenomenal success. As a DRM system, it is a failure simply because it's been cracked.
And one assumption is that goods aren't infinite. And while I recognize that the cost to produce a game is greater than 0 (I was a game developer), the cost of the copy that you and I received is practically 0 making it practically infinite. Many of the models I listed in the link above got people specifically to buy the scarce good of the production (music in that case) and then gave away the unlimited resource (copies of the music). You cannot sell an infinite good.
That might mean that the means of production is dwindled and the revenue drops. That doesn't necessarily mean worse quality. As examples, I give you Water World and The Blair Witch Project. You can I could come up with more examples of movies/games/music/etc. that cost a lot to produce but were critical and financial bombs, some that cost little money but were critical and financial successes. Not that I'm saying that The Dark Knight could have been made on the same budget as the Blair Witch Project, but that just might be the end of an era of many - not all - big budget productions. However, we are also in an era where music/movies/games/etc can be made cheaper than ever. I'm interested to see where we are headed.
Exactly right. If someone wants entertainment, it must be paid for by someone. You can't actually be proposing the end of entertainment? There are still plenty of people with enough money to ensure that entertainers are paid. Or did you think Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim Helu, et al don't care for entertainment? And they don't have to be billionaires. I doubt Maria Schneider's fans are even mostly millionaires.
However, what you are really asking is for someone who is complaining to do the job of the business department of the video game companies. It is their job to figure out how to make money, not the legal departments, not their customers. It wouldn't matter if piracy were never an issue, sitting around hoping that the previous generation's business model will work for you is the most certain way to be a dying company.
I would suggest that any game company that resorts to DRM really needs to fire their business people. It fails miserably in its intended purpose, pisses off paying customers, and costs more money (thus less profit) to implement. It is an abject failure, yet some brain dead idiots think they'll get it right "this time."
I'll start with the disclaimer. I like the idea of copyright law, I think the current implementation is ridiculous, I write software for a living, in fact, I use to write game software and plan on doing it again in the future, etc. Having said that...
It's a business model issue. If piracy is rampant, games will have to come up with new models. Valve and Blizzard seem to be able to do so while piracy is rampant. In fact, Blizzard is making more money each year with World of Warcraft than Epic will likely ever make with Gears of War. Maybe Epic should have been thinking about new business models instead of new DRM which didn't stop piracy at all, has now thoroughly pissed off their paying customers, consequently will increase piracy rates in the future for their games or others with DRM. So in their desire to stop pirates, they not only failed miserably, they've also now pissed off their fans and paying customers. I'm guessing now that this has happened, many (I'm not saying most, just many) of the people who have given them money, wouldn't buy Gears of War 2 for the PC even if they did release it, which they won't because their DRM failed so miserably.
Yet here you are saying its necessary. Why? What did it give them? People who pirate still got it through piracy, people who paid for it got a worse experience than those who pirated it, and Epic had to pay time and money adding and testing it, which either decreased their profit or increased the costs to customers, which likely decreased their revenue, which would again decrease their profit. Apparently they didn't spend enough time testing the DRM. Should they have spent more time and money? No, as we see, it was already a waste of effort. Instead, they could have spent some time thinking up a new business model. They could have used it as an indication that there are customers out there that are under-served, perhaps it was an indication they were charging too much, they could have used it as free advertising, they could have found some other scarcity to sell, but instead they chose to go the more costly and annoying route which has been shown time and time again to be an utter and complete absolute dismal failure.
They don't even have me on /. A bunch of results, but only one of them actually applies to me. All thanks to Dave Grohl.
True, I shouldn't have mentioned a telephoto lens. As far as I am aware, no camera phone has that capability yet. But even if they never did, a camera from a distance with a telephoto lens could do the same thing as a clicking nearby camera phone could, but silently, even if it did make a clicking noise, and the camera would be far enough away that you'd be hard pressed to know what it's taking a picture of.
My phone has two speakers; one for the ear, and one for speaker phone capabilities. I never use the speaker phone. My phone is always on vibrate. I could cut that speaker and lose no functionality whatsoever.
Neither does the iPhone, but people have jail broken it. Most (if not all) phones do have this capability whether they explicitly allow it or not, and as another poster mentioned, just because you can't do it, doesn't mean someone else won't.
True, for the most part, camera phones don't have interchangeable lenses. But this does bring up a counter point to the law. If they are trying to stop pervs from taking pictures of that teenage girl bending over to tie her shoe, the guy could still do so from far away. This law can't even begin to address that issue. So it tries to address the issue of the perv standing right behind her, but as I've pointed out, he's already gotten around the sound issue.
Thanks for adding to the list yet another easy workaround to the law. It's totally pointless. It doesn't stop its intended target, but does hamper legitimate uses. It's a stupid law.
That is exactly why I thought this law is being put into place. In other words, it's to try to keep some guy from taking upskirt pictures without the lady knowing about it. But what I'm saying is that if he really wants to do it, there are so many ways of getting around this law that it's like putting your fingers in the cracks of a dam when half the dam has already washed away. This law would utterly pointless. But there are times when you would like to take a legitimate picture, but the sound of the phone would be annoying to those around you, like at a concert, opera, ballet, wedding, funeral, etc. This law would do nothing to stop what ever its intended to stop, and harm those who are doing nothing wrong. In that way, it's more than completely pointless, it's also harmful.
As the father of a daughter with another coming very soon, I have to say this is ridiculous. There are so many ways around it that it becomes pointless.
Do you get the idea yet? This is only for politicians to look like they're doing something when they aren't actually doing anything. Perhaps the intention is to throw another crime at someone when this happens. That's the intention now, but eventually it'll be abused. Also, it ignores when you might want to have a silent photo for legitimate purposes.
How about you do the math? Get another job. At my current job I pay ~$260/month for myself, my wife and two daughters. And that's with a plan with a $1500 deductible. Before this job, I was paying ~$280, and that was a small company with 40 employees. Before that, I was paying for my own insurance with no company help and that was ~$230/month. Either your company is bilking you, or you have one heckuva sick family.
Where do people get this idea? You bought the movie. A little collection of laws you may have heard of called Copyright Law keeps you from distributing the content without the copyright owners permission. That's it. There isn't any kind of fancy license or whatnot. The copy you bought was distributed by some store who had been authorized by the copyright holder to distribute the copy you bought (assuming you didn't buy it from the guy with the large coat in the subway station). You bought it. You own it. You can do whatever you want with it barring violation of copyright law. It's the same kind of thing as when I buy a car. There was no contract I signed at that time that was a license to use the car but not to go over the speed limit or run over people with the white sticks crossing the street. No, I bought the car and can do whatever I want with it so long as I'm not breaking some law. I buy the movie and can do whatever I want with it so long as I'm not breaking some law. It's not licensed to me, it's purchased. A copy of the movie, not the copyright. I bought the movie, not the copyright. Do I have to repeat this again for you to understand? There is no license, only a purchase.