Gambling is not a basic part of the game, it's done entirely through third-party websites.
Gambling is a basic part of the game: you need to buy keys and they open a box with random contents. If I open a box with a Dragon Lore AWP skin, I may be able to sell it on the community market for $800 dollar, which after paying a commission to Valve is deposited straight in my Steam account by Valve, which I can then turn into $800 dollars in my paypal account by visiting a site they support. It's gambling for real money and they know they're dealing with kids doing the gambling.
And if your kid is buying CS:GO skins then you're part of the same group of parents that complain when their children spend $1000 on farmville; it's your own fault for giving them credit card info.
I don't complain about this happening without my knowledge: he is free to buy skins out of his own pocket money - I deposit his pocket money in his steam account (within reason) and he had to save for months to save up this much. I'd much prefer him to find out how worthless pixels are now, rather than when he is 30. I don't start a lawsuit and I haven't even complained about the gambling to Valve because my kid doesn't do it. It's not *my* problem. But if we can agree that marketing a game to kids and then including paid gambling in it *could* be an issue somewhere, then yes, Valve has that issue.
I've heard that in CS 1.6. And in CS:S. True both times, for that specific version:) And now I'll return to a casual round of CS:GO. With the rest of the millions of players.
Valve runs a game where you buy keys to boxes for 5 dollar or more. The box can give you a skin that is worth up to a 1000 dollar in cash. And the sites where you can convert it into cash are supported by Valve.
This is nothing like eBay or an auction house. The point is that I have to buy tickets in order to have a chance at a nice payout. It's a lottery, and Valve made the very serious error of supporting sites that convert in-game items into real cash. Suddenly, we're talking tax evasion, running a lottery without a permit, and selling lottery tickets to minors. I dunno about where you live, but in my jurisdiction these are highly problematic behaviours for a company to display if they want to keep doing business.
The USA claims jurisdiction if I sell drugs to a US citizen, even though it is legally allowed here. There is no reason why the Dutch judiciary could not claim jurisdiction over Valve in this matter. Especially since they sell the game to Dutch citizens knowingly, tying into a paying system that is tied to Dutch banks (IDEAL).
Funny enough, I had a very similar conversation last year with a friend of mine who is a lawyer and he was wondering why Valve got away with selling a game that includes gambling as a basic part of the game after my kid bought a skin for 30 euro. I agreed - I don't know why they weren't sued before now.
Well, Oracle did recently sue Mars, although not over upgrades but over how to count licenses. So you're right: to my knowledge they didn't sue over upgrades.
They do seem to sue clients over a lot of other issues though. But the two cases I've been involved in directly with Oracle never got to court. They just lead to customers ditching Oracle ASAP.
The giveaway tickets are not part of the scalped tickets anyway, so no need for a solution there. Yes, these could be sold by anyone, but that's not the issue - they were off the market for normal sales in the first place, so resales for more money have zero impact on the sale of the remaining tickets. The issue is bots quickly buying up all tickets, not resale of tickets that were never going to be sold in the first place.
The only real fix I see to this is to associate a CC or ID with the ticket purchase and require it to be presented with the ticket for admission. This creates a whole host of other issues, such as inability to resale or gift easily, plus longer, slower lines at venues.
- Inability of resale: the ticketing venue could easily buy your ticket back at salesprice minus a small fee, or auction it off through their website - with a deadline, of course. Some already do. - Gift: just say it's a gift when you purchase it. Gift tickets are limited to 1 per creditcard, but don't have to be accompanied by creditcard. Alternatively, you declare who it is meant for at purchase, and an ID or CC has to be brought when converting the gift certificate into a ticket.
Longer, slower lines at venues could be an issue. Easily solved by having pre-check checkpoints in a larger area outside the entrance. If you're pre-checked, you can get in faster. Or skip the purchase of physical tickets altogether: if you purchase tickets on a creditcard, the creditcard *is* your ticket. Just scan it and you get in - this should actually be faster.
Yes, it might create issues. But I don't think they are very difficult to overcome.
Existing fiat currency systems are surprisingly robust in the face of many problems, of which fraud is a minor one - and much more so than gold standards or bitcoin, IMO.
National companies and multi-national companies *do* belong to a nation-state. It doesn't show much, until they need someone to get their potatoes out of some hot fire somewhere. They can't just move and up, since they need ties on a personal level when you get into the big leagues. Not to mention the fact that if they have a lot of infrastructure somewhere, it's also physically difficult to move.
Let's assume corporations don't belong to a particular nation state. Like Disney. Could be Chinese, right? Mi Lao Shu and security guards with pink rifles. Works quite well in Shanghai - they are a minority shareholder though because, for some reason or another, the local company *does* belong to their nation state and the nation state knows it. Or take Coca Cola. Wouldn't hurt the brand at all if it incorporated as a Nigerian company tomorrow, I think. Or Mercedes. It could easily become an Italian brand. Would do wonders for its design, probably. Volkswagen could move to Rumania - their cars have the same amount of pollution as the old cars they have there so they wouldn't stand out so much.
But seriously: no company can do without the protection of a nation state because in the final analysis, a tug of war between competing business interests will eventually be decided with weapons. And that is the job of the nation state. And it will only defend it's *own* companies. Companies that don't have a protector will be at a severe disadvantage. Just consider what the support of the CIA meant for Boeing when it sank lucrative trade deals in the Middle East for Airbus because they had been tapping the trade negotiations and were able to provide tapes that proved corruption. Do you think that would have happened if it had been Airbus versus Dassault? Not a chance.
Most Dutch citizens already have this service and churn is pretty low. I have seen an ISP fold precisely once over the last decade, and ISPs without customer service do indeed see migration of existing customers to better service providers. The excellent staff on the helpdesk is actually one of the things my current ISP advertizes and also one of the reasons I'm their customer.
So the ISP's formed a cartel and made sure they extorted the local co-op? Somehow that sounds like a clear trade violation. I'm pretty sure ISP's stupid enough to try that over here would be facing courts pretty quickly.
We're having both municipal networks and local co-ops, and most ISP's are pretty happy to just provide internet and leave the last mile to the co-op.
Nope. The method works by doing this operation encrypted. So if A is a-encrypted and B is b-encrypted, it can do A*B and give you an encrypted result C that, when decrypted, gives you the result of a *b.
Exactly this. If you don't control the bare metal, then the VM isn't fully trustworthy. Even before the details of the attack were worked out, this should have been an obvious conclusion.
That doesn't have to be the case. I know that at the very least two very large companies are working on fully encrypted computing, where nothing is ever decrypted on the server and all operations remain encrypted. *ALL* operations. One solution is apparently still slow as molasses (1 second for a multiplication or something in that order), but the one from ah... the other company, is a great deal faster. And it enables you to run fully secure in situations where you *know* the VM is untrusted.
I've actually had to deal with this procedure as it is quite standard in the Netherlands - at least for my job which usually involves handling financial and/or confidential information.
The employer has to describe the function and add some additional information about whether the person involved has to handle money, or works with kids, or vulnerable minors, or with confidential information. This is detailed in a number of boxes and you'd better not hand in a form with false answers as this is fraud. The police will then determine, based on the records of the person involved, if there have been crimes or misdemeanors related to the job and the specifics given on the form. If yes, you will get a statement on watermarked paper called a "declaration about behaviour". If there are issues, you don't get one.
If you are convicted of fraud, but want to work with children, and don't get to work handling financial information, you will get a declaration. If you want to work in finance and you've been convicted of rape, no problem. But getting a job as a nurse or pediatrician would probably be difficult.
I rarely watch television or any series any more and if I do, it's probably a recorded one. Software is either open source or paid for.
However, I do download stuff from time to time and I don't feel bad about it. Especially music. Musicians are currently petitioning for harsher laws in the EU. They think that if you create a song that sounds remotely like another song, it entitles them to a share of the proceeds. They even managed to copyright silence. Basically, musicians seem to think they're entitled to an annuity for their grandchildren because they made a single popular song. Well, not from my money they won't.
The more money they get, the more money they have for lawsuits. Not paying them is just sensible long-term strategy in the fight against copyright extensions.
Ever since that one was signed into law, I've tried very hard to avoid ever paying for the items that benefited from this copyright. I pay for software (as needed). I never pay for music, movies or books unless I buy directly from the author to support him or her. Which is pretty rare.
Roll back copyright to something more reasonable and I'll start paying again.
Good idea - an employer should not be prying into whether someone has ever been convicted for something unrelated to their current job. They should, however, be able to ask the police if there was any record that had bearing on the job at hand. A simple "yes" or "no" would be pretty helpful without sacrificing privacy.
Sorry, but this is why criminal background checks, credit checks, and deposits exist. I highly doubt social media sleuthing is going to flush out a meth dealer. Regardless, the answer here isn't to treat everyone like a criminal. The answer here is harsher punishments against actual criminals.
Not sure about GB, but criminal background checks are inaccessible to any but law enforcement, over here. Credit checks? Only if you're a bank and it is your customer. Otherwise, not a chance. Deposits are limited by law to at most three months of rent.
A co-worker's girlfriend moved in with him and rented out her appartment at first because you never know. After a year it turned out the renter had installed a weed plantation. She was liable for criminal charges, damages, stolen electricity, etc. etc. - totalling around 30.000 euro. She's still trying to pay it back, about a decade later.
In a situation such as in Amsterdam, where there are a lot more customers than houses and appartments, combined with criminals trying to rent houses to turn into weed plantations, this *will* be used.
Slashdot Mirror
Gambling is not a basic part of the game, it's done entirely through third-party websites.
Gambling is a basic part of the game: you need to buy keys and they open a box with random contents. If I open a box with a Dragon Lore AWP skin, I may be able to sell it on the community market for $800 dollar, which after paying a commission to Valve is deposited straight in my Steam account by Valve, which I can then turn into $800 dollars in my paypal account by visiting a site they support. It's gambling for real money and they know they're dealing with kids doing the gambling.
And if your kid is buying CS:GO skins then you're part of the same group of parents that complain when their children spend $1000 on farmville; it's your own fault for giving them credit card info.
I don't complain about this happening without my knowledge: he is free to buy skins out of his own pocket money - I deposit his pocket money in his steam account (within reason) and he had to save for months to save up this much. I'd much prefer him to find out how worthless pixels are now, rather than when he is 30. I don't start a lawsuit and I haven't even complained about the gambling to Valve because my kid doesn't do it. It's not *my* problem. But if we can agree that marketing a game to kids and then including paid gambling in it *could* be an issue somewhere, then yes, Valve has that issue.
I've heard that in CS 1.6. And in CS:S. True both times, for that specific version :) And now I'll return to a casual round of CS:GO. With the rest of the millions of players.
Valve runs a game where you buy keys to boxes for 5 dollar or more. The box can give you a skin that is worth up to a 1000 dollar in cash. And the sites where you can convert it into cash are supported by Valve.
This is nothing like eBay or an auction house. The point is that I have to buy tickets in order to have a chance at a nice payout. It's a lottery, and Valve made the very serious error of supporting sites that convert in-game items into real cash. Suddenly, we're talking tax evasion, running a lottery without a permit, and selling lottery tickets to minors. I dunno about where you live, but in my jurisdiction these are highly problematic behaviours for a company to display if they want to keep doing business.
The USA claims jurisdiction if I sell drugs to a US citizen, even though it is legally allowed here. There is no reason why the Dutch judiciary could not claim jurisdiction over Valve in this matter. Especially since they sell the game to Dutch citizens knowingly, tying into a paying system that is tied to Dutch banks (IDEAL).
Funny enough, I had a very similar conversation last year with a friend of mine who is a lawyer and he was wondering why Valve got away with selling a game that includes gambling as a basic part of the game after my kid bought a skin for 30 euro. I agreed - I don't know why they weren't sued before now.
Well, Oracle did recently sue Mars, although not over upgrades but over how to count licenses. So you're right: to my knowledge they didn't sue over upgrades.
They do seem to sue clients over a lot of other issues though. But the two cases I've been involved in directly with Oracle never got to court. They just lead to customers ditching Oracle ASAP.
The giveaway tickets are not part of the scalped tickets anyway, so no need for a solution there. Yes, these could be sold by anyone, but that's not the issue - they were off the market for normal sales in the first place, so resales for more money have zero impact on the sale of the remaining tickets. The issue is bots quickly buying up all tickets, not resale of tickets that were never going to be sold in the first place.
The only real fix I see to this is to associate a CC or ID with the ticket purchase and require it to be presented with the ticket for admission. This creates a whole host of other issues, such as inability to resale or gift easily, plus longer, slower lines at venues.
- Inability of resale: the ticketing venue could easily buy your ticket back at salesprice minus a small fee, or auction it off through their website - with a deadline, of course. Some already do.
- Gift: just say it's a gift when you purchase it. Gift tickets are limited to 1 per creditcard, but don't have to be accompanied by creditcard. Alternatively, you declare who it is meant for at purchase, and an ID or CC has to be brought when converting the gift certificate into a ticket.
Longer, slower lines at venues could be an issue. Easily solved by having pre-check checkpoints in a larger area outside the entrance. If you're pre-checked, you can get in faster. Or skip the purchase of physical tickets altogether: if you purchase tickets on a creditcard, the creditcard *is* your ticket. Just scan it and you get in - this should actually be faster.
Yes, it might create issues. But I don't think they are very difficult to overcome.
Do you really need your payment processor to be potentially sapient?
Well... yes, yes I do.
Existing fiat currency systems are surprisingly robust in the face of many problems, of which fraud is a minor one - and much more so than gold standards or bitcoin, IMO.
Yep. They make Microsoft look like the good guys. If you can manage that you know you're in deep trouble.
It works for Oracle...
Where you there? No? Then how do you know it wasn't a Moot? :)
National companies and multi-national companies *do* belong to a nation-state. It doesn't show much, until they need someone to get their potatoes out of some hot fire somewhere. They can't just move and up, since they need ties on a personal level when you get into the big leagues. Not to mention the fact that if they have a lot of infrastructure somewhere, it's also physically difficult to move.
Let's assume corporations don't belong to a particular nation state. Like Disney. Could be Chinese, right? Mi Lao Shu and security guards with pink rifles. Works quite well in Shanghai - they are a minority shareholder though because, for some reason or another, the local company *does* belong to their nation state and the nation state knows it. Or take Coca Cola. Wouldn't hurt the brand at all if it incorporated as a Nigerian company tomorrow, I think. Or Mercedes. It could easily become an Italian brand. Would do wonders for its design, probably. Volkswagen could move to Rumania - their cars have the same amount of pollution as the old cars they have there so they wouldn't stand out so much.
But seriously: no company can do without the protection of a nation state because in the final analysis, a tug of war between competing business interests will eventually be decided with weapons. And that is the job of the nation state. And it will only defend it's *own* companies. Companies that don't have a protector will be at a severe disadvantage. Just consider what the support of the CIA meant for Boeing when it sank lucrative trade deals in the Middle East for Airbus because they had been tapping the trade negotiations and were able to provide tapes that proved corruption. Do you think that would have happened if it had been Airbus versus Dassault? Not a chance.
Who cares? I mean, would you care if you were convicted in Russia? Or Thailand? Nope, you'd just avoid going on holiday there.
This case was tried in Finland. No one goes on holiday in Finland unless they really like reindeers. I mean, like, a lot. Very, very much.
So I think it's a Moot issue.
Most Dutch citizens already have this service and churn is pretty low. I have seen an ISP fold precisely once over the last decade, and ISPs without customer service do indeed see migration of existing customers to better service providers. The excellent staff on the helpdesk is actually one of the things my current ISP advertizes and also one of the reasons I'm their customer.
So the ISP's formed a cartel and made sure they extorted the local co-op? Somehow that sounds like a clear trade violation. I'm pretty sure ISP's stupid enough to try that over here would be facing courts pretty quickly.
We're having both municipal networks and local co-ops, and most ISP's are pretty happy to just provide internet and leave the last mile to the co-op.
Nope. The method works by doing this operation encrypted. So if A is a-encrypted and B is b-encrypted, it can do A*B and give you an encrypted result C that, when decrypted, gives you the result of a *b.
Mathematically, it's feasible but very hard.
Exactly this. If you don't control the bare metal, then the VM isn't fully trustworthy. Even before the details of the attack were worked out, this should have been an obvious conclusion.
That doesn't have to be the case. I know that at the very least two very large companies are working on fully encrypted computing, where nothing is ever decrypted on the server and all operations remain encrypted. *ALL* operations. One solution is apparently still slow as molasses (1 second for a multiplication or something in that order), but the one from ah... the other company, is a great deal faster. And it enables you to run fully secure in situations where you *know* the VM is untrusted.
Either that, or "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" :)
I've actually had to deal with this procedure as it is quite standard in the Netherlands - at least for my job which usually involves handling financial and/or confidential information.
The employer has to describe the function and add some additional information about whether the person involved has to handle money, or works with kids, or vulnerable minors, or with confidential information. This is detailed in a number of boxes and you'd better not hand in a form with false answers as this is fraud. The police will then determine, based on the records of the person involved, if there have been crimes or misdemeanors related to the job and the specifics given on the form. If yes, you will get a statement on watermarked paper called a "declaration about behaviour". If there are issues, you don't get one.
If you are convicted of fraud, but want to work with children, and don't get to work handling financial information, you will get a declaration. If you want to work in finance and you've been convicted of rape, no problem. But getting a job as a nurse or pediatrician would probably be difficult.
I rarely watch television or any series any more and if I do, it's probably a recorded one. Software is either open source or paid for.
However, I do download stuff from time to time and I don't feel bad about it. Especially music. Musicians are currently petitioning for harsher laws in the EU. They think that if you create a song that sounds remotely like another song, it entitles them to a share of the proceeds. They even managed to copyright silence. Basically, musicians seem to think they're entitled to an annuity for their grandchildren because they made a single popular song. Well, not from my money they won't.
The more money they get, the more money they have for lawsuits. Not paying them is just sensible long-term strategy in the fight against copyright extensions.
Three words: Mickey Mouse Extension.
Ever since that one was signed into law, I've tried very hard to avoid ever paying for the items that benefited from this copyright. I pay for software (as needed). I never pay for music, movies or books unless I buy directly from the author to support him or her. Which is pretty rare.
Roll back copyright to something more reasonable and I'll start paying again.
Good idea - an employer should not be prying into whether someone has ever been convicted for something unrelated to their current job. They should, however, be able to ask the police if there was any record that had bearing on the job at hand. A simple "yes" or "no" would be pretty helpful without sacrificing privacy.
Sorry, but this is why criminal background checks, credit checks, and deposits exist. I highly doubt social media sleuthing is going to flush out a meth dealer. Regardless, the answer here isn't to treat everyone like a criminal. The answer here is harsher punishments against actual criminals.
Not sure about GB, but criminal background checks are inaccessible to any but law enforcement, over here. Credit checks? Only if you're a bank and it is your customer. Otherwise, not a chance. Deposits are limited by law to at most three months of rent.
A co-worker's girlfriend moved in with him and rented out her appartment at first because you never know. After a year it turned out the renter had installed a weed plantation. She was liable for criminal charges, damages, stolen electricity, etc. etc. - totalling around 30.000 euro. She's still trying to pay it back, about a decade later.
In a situation such as in Amsterdam, where there are a lot more customers than houses and appartments, combined with criminals trying to rent houses to turn into weed plantations, this *will* be used.
Who are these people with multiple penises?
They're called Elon Musk, Richard Branson and John Carmack and they're having contest to see who can launch the most penises the highest.
What do they do with the second penis? Is it beside or above below?
It starts at the same level, then quickly rises, but after a while it droops again and usually ends below.