"Kill All Christians And Jews" didn't go over so well with the focus groups, which wanted more positive, upbeat, modern image for their terrorist organization of choice. The runner up, "We Might Be Psychopathic Murderers But At Least We're Not George W Bush" tested very well in Europe, but unfortunately ran into problems with French laws limiting the number of English words which can be used in an organization's name, and also EU regulations governing public depictions of the mentally different.
The company that invented software vulnerability has launched a new AntiVirus application
More FUD. Unix boxes have been rooted since before Bill Gates could even spell PC, and with the increasing popularity of open source and Linux we aim to have an OSS vulnerability solution on every desktop by the year 2009. Ignore pithy embrace-and-extend attempts by Microsoft to introduce vulnerabilities into a new, proprietary extension built on top of the Internet like ActiveX -- instead, you can write your virus into an image file and 0wn every machine ever compiled with libpng by simply causing them to display an image. And best of all, this standards compliant virus will never go out of style just because the company producing the vulnerability goes under. Avoid vendor lock-in with your viruses or you're handing the keys to your botnet to someone else.
OSS vulnerability solutions -- its the wave of the future!
Music is perhaps the only place where product placement is not widespread within the content, since the industry looks down upon those who do not consider themselves 'artists.'
And, when they lose the suit because the overwhelming majority of them are actually guilty of what they're accused of, then the RIAA recovers their court costs. And even if it didn't, the RIAA doesn't care a whit about whether the lawsuit campaign makes or loses them money -- they care that it loses some Average Joes money, and that said Average Joes end up in the paper as much as possible, to encourage the other Average Joes to not download.
Its highly unlikely to do so. The overwhelming majority of lawsuits don't -- they're settled out of court or the opinions are not published. The precedent setting lawsuits are the ones that engage novel legal issues, of which I see none here. IANAL (I just work for them), IANAL in that jurisdiction, IAN your lawyer, etc.
Re:What's sleazy about getting paid?
on
High-Tech RepoMan
·
· Score: 1
While I'm 150% behind your right to get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, and even think protecting your investment is pretty reasonable in this instance, if your business model suffers from a glaring defect like "We keep giving several thousand dollars worth of product to people whom we know in advance have no possible way of paying for it" maybe you could, you know, change the business model? Especially with the Internet, your could put up a Javascript widget on your site saying "Put in your last paycheck here and we'll give you a rough estimate of what car you could be driving tomorrow, and get a firm offer within five minutes or less!" (you can, presumably, have computers handle all of this -- you've presumably got internal metrics saying that somebody with a 700 score can get $X worth of car, right?)
Thats not a monopoly, its an oligopoly (a particular market segment has only a small handful of suppliers often differentiated mostly on features, rather than a large number of undifferentiated suppliers -- see soft drinks or automobiles for classic examples), also described as a (functioning -- most don't) cartel.
Its called Puzzle Pirates. Well, OK, minus the Star Trek parts. You've got a captain/navigator who is in charge of steering the ship, and between 3 and 80 other pirates who are manning the guns, getting the water out of the bilge, keeping your sails up to go at full combat speed, and patching up the holes you keep putting in her by running into the rocks because you're too busy shouting orders for somebody to empty the bloody bilge than to steer around them.
All of these tasks are accomplished by, you guessed it, puzzling. And the sheer destructive power of a 60-man brig crew all puzzling together cooperatively is a wonder to behold, especially when there are fleets of brigs involved in a major attempt to take an island.
But, sadly, no hot alien chicks. Plenty of "dock tarts", though -- although don't get any ideas, this game is PG.
... that Slashdotters are just as succeptible as anyone else to sending money to a random page on the Internet, because the page asked them to and promises they'll get something for free later.
I'm pretty sure the revised EULA allows Microsoft to draw, quarter, and finally vivisect your body in full view of the town square for license violations.
That was the XBox license. 360 mandates vivisection for the first offense.
Seriously, though, they're never going to go after anyone for homebrewing unless that person is also a pirate. Unfortunately, anything which enables homebrewing also enables wide-scale piracy, so there you go.
Props to the parent -- if the purchasing decision is being made by someone not intimately familiar with what the game will contain (i.e. your average parent or holiday giftgiver), then the more easily available information the better. It also helps because people generally have a fairly personal definition of what unacceptable violence is -- most people think stomping Goombas into plates is a bit different than Manhunt, for example, but there are many people who would be willing to accept socially appropriate violence (Medal of Honor: I am killing you because my nation commands it, LotR: I am killing you because otherwise Evil Wins) over socially inappropriate violence (Fifty Cent: I am killing you because I can, b****), violence with redeeming factors (see Passion of the Christ or Schindler's List for movie examples), violence in a clearly fantastic setting (there is a heck of a lot of difference between seeing an obviously 13 year old hit in the head with a projectile travelling at 100+ mph and watching Harry Potter play quidditch), etc etc.
For my part, when I have kids and they're in the early teen years I will tolerate war FPSes provided they abstract the consequences of being shot and will not allow Fifty Cent within 10,000 yards of my children in any form. Although he'll probably be worth four cents by then, inflation being what it is.
He's the CIO of Massachusetts. A real stand-up guy, I translated for him for three days when he came to Japan. Committed to open source, very concerned about open document formats specifically because he thinks governmental organizations need access to documents in perpetuity and shouldn't lock-in to a vendor.
I'm a fairly hardcore gamer with a 20 hour a week WoW habit. My last three game purchases were WoW (one year ago -- that sure sucks the life out of your gaming time budget, saved me a lot of money though), Civ4 (played it compulsively for a week, great for days I don't feel like playing WoW), and... Pizza Frenzy. Its a really simple arcade-style game, which involves mindless clicking... and its just hilariously fun. I blew through two hours before I even knew what I was doing. $20 for mindless brain candy? Sign me up. And this is the sort of game that could keep my father busy forever (he's one of those crazy Freecell players who does it like its his job).
Gamers shouldn't condescend so much to the casual gaming market, and certainly not their developers. These guys are living the dream, after all (and realizing the dream means coding down in the trenches). Power to you, Linux-supporting casual gamer guy.
Minors are citizens of the United States, actually, and do enjoy constitutional rights (you can no more execute a 60 day old without a trial than you can a 60 year old). Minors also enjoy First Amendment protection, subject to some narrow restrictions in a few settings like education (see, e.g., Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 89 S.Ct. 733, 21 L.Ed.2d. 731 (1969)). You might find the following instructive:
Interactive Digital Software Association, et al. v. St. Louis County, Missouri, et al., 329 F.3d 954(8th Cir. 2003)
St. Louis County passed an ordinance banned selling or renting violent video games to minors, or permitting them to play such games, without parental consent, and video game dealers sued to overturn the law. The Court of Appeals found the ordinance unconstitutional, holding that depictions of violence alone cannot fall within the legal definition of obscenity for either minors or adults, and that a government cannot silence protected speech for children by wrapping itself in the cloak of parental authority. The Court ordered the lower court to enter an injunction barring enforcement of the law, citing the Supreme Court's recognition in Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 213-14, 45 L. Ed. 2d 125, 95 S. Ct. 2268 (1975) that "speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them. In most circumstances, the values protected by the First Amendment are no less applicable when the government seeks to control the flow of information to minors."
The posting links to an ad-supported blog that links to the actual content...You don't get that impression at all from the "blog", which actually looks like something machine-generated by stealing copy from other sites.
And this is distinguishable from Slashdot how, exactly? They only post the article once?
For a technologically unsophisticated user the Google "I'm feeling lucky" button *IS* the URL. Heck, I practically grew up with the Internet (cost my family a $100 Compuserve bill back in middle school and haven't looked back since) and I use Google as a substitute location bar myself -- why bookmark or remember the obscure URL for the best Japanese dictionary ever when "Jim Breen" tab tab enter gets me unfailingly to the right page?
A year ago I made my mother and father's start page Google. Now, instead of having to diagnose the "http colon slash slash, no no, the slash that goes from top right to bottom left, dubya dubya dubya, yes mom, three of them..." problems over the phone all the time, its "Mom, I have some new photos up on my web page. Its in the usual place, Google me. See, isn't that a wonderful shot of the mountains?"
There is ZERO incentive for NCSoft to deactivate the *paying* account even if it was created using a keygen. They're paying you money now, why tell them "Take your money and leave, we don't work with pirates!" You should just tell the legitimate customer "Sorry sir, technical difficulties, your new CD key is $GENERATE_RESERVED_KEY." Fundamentally, their business model doesn't even really rely on the box sales (and certainly not for a 5+ year old game, where they see pennies on the dollar from retail): the box is only the delivery vehicle to get people signed up for the service. Its like razor handles and razorblades -- the only reason you put boxes at BestBuy/Gamestop is because it vastly increases your reach over all-Internet distribution, at least currently, and BestBuy/Gamestop expect you to charge a price that will make *them* money for new computer games (otherwise your shelf space gets given to $FPS, which will get the retailer 75% of $50 when it sells). If I was their CS manager I'd have a standing directive that we hand out keys to ANYONE who calls, no questions asked (other than the usual credit-card verification we'll do on signup, which will keep the fraud to a minimum). Whats the worst that happens? We just gave out a month-long "free trial" to someone who didn't pay their money to BestBuy... shucks, sucks to be BestBuy. If the person pays even one month worth of bills we've made money on the transaction *and the next 30 like it*.
As a former customer service droid, this was just a massive failure from a business perspective. Look at the business case here: They just spent two support phone calls (thats ~$6 an incident if they were less than 10 minutes and handled in the USA, once you add in all the costs associated with running a CS operation), lost a prospective account ($12-15 a month for an average of 3-6 months, 95% of that is profit, cost of aquisition is generally high and this was a bird already in hand), and over what? Over checking whether the person had or had not bought a box of Lineage, a game which retails for $10 (of which NCSoft will see, literally, pennies) because its older than the hills, and which they HAPPILY give away for free. For the love of little apples, CS droid, this is the sort of circumstance where you say "Sorry sir, let me clear that up for you. *alt-F6* Your new code is $RAND. Is there anything else I can help you with today?" Then you're done with the phone call in a minute, your customer walks away happy, and you GET THEIR MONEY.
This is what I get for posting at 2 AM -- I was *positive* that comment had read "God has just built a Lego Castle." Oops, sorry guys. You can take back your Funny mods:)
Its closer to "we can find out if the cat is dead without accidentally killing him in the process" (or, even freakier, "we can find out if the cat is dead without accidentally bringing him back to life in the process").
And these are viewable in-game, by default? I'm flabbergasted that Nintendo would take that risk -- do they just trust their customer base or have they never been on a public Counterstrike server with sprays enabled?
See, after the movies came out Tolkien is now not just a cult hit but genuinely *popular*, and whats the point of listing him if we can't look down our noses at those not in the geek club?
I evangelize for Puzzle Pirates so much I should really get paid by the company, but they're worth it because they do more thinking than most of the rest of the industry put together (I keep my subscription current for odd bouts of play when WoW has bored me for the day -- and I have had as much fun on a sloop pillage as I've had on an Onyxia raid before, and was actually meaningfully engaged in the success of the pillage to boot).
The Doubloons can be purchased using in-game gold (pieces of eight -- poe) from other players, or from Three Rings directly. All Doubloons eventually come from Three Rings, so on a Doubloon server (they have standard servers which work on a traditional $10 a month subscription model) you can essentially buy money by buying doubloons and then selling them in-game for money. It works out so the cat-asses pay hundreds of dollars to bankroll a massive Flag (think alliance of guilds) to fight for world domination, while casual people can get through for free or close to it. I started as a subscriber (when they locked out my free trial after a week I was reaching for my credit card before I had even seen the price they were asking) but if I had done my first month on the micropayment system it would have cost, oh, about five bucks (I play PP very, very casually -- in thirty minute or two hour chunks, perhaps 3-4 times a month -- and its STILL worth the $10, the game is just that good).
Slashdot Mirror
"Kill All Christians And Jews" didn't go over so well with the focus groups, which wanted more positive, upbeat, modern image for their terrorist organization of choice. The runner up, "We Might Be Psychopathic Murderers But At Least We're Not George W Bush" tested very well in Europe, but unfortunately ran into problems with French laws limiting the number of English words which can be used in an organization's name, and also EU regulations governing public depictions of the mentally different.
More FUD. Unix boxes have been rooted since before Bill Gates could even spell PC, and with the increasing popularity of open source and Linux we aim to have an OSS vulnerability solution on every desktop by the year 2009. Ignore pithy embrace-and-extend attempts by Microsoft to introduce vulnerabilities into a new, proprietary extension built on top of the Internet like ActiveX -- instead, you can write your virus into an image file and 0wn every machine ever compiled with libpng by simply causing them to display an image. And best of all, this standards compliant virus will never go out of style just because the company producing the vulnerability goes under. Avoid vendor lock-in with your viruses or you're handing the keys to your botnet to someone else.
OSS vulnerability solutions -- its the wave of the future!
Not a hip-hop fan, are you?
And, when they lose the suit because the overwhelming majority of them are actually guilty of what they're accused of, then the RIAA recovers their court costs. And even if it didn't, the RIAA doesn't care a whit about whether the lawsuit campaign makes or loses them money -- they care that it loses some Average Joes money, and that said Average Joes end up in the paper as much as possible, to encourage the other Average Joes to not download.
Its highly unlikely to do so. The overwhelming majority of lawsuits don't -- they're settled out of court or the opinions are not published. The precedent setting lawsuits are the ones that engage novel legal issues, of which I see none here. IANAL (I just work for them), IANAL in that jurisdiction, IAN your lawyer, etc.
While I'm 150% behind your right to get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, and even think protecting your investment is pretty reasonable in this instance, if your business model suffers from a glaring defect like "We keep giving several thousand dollars worth of product to people whom we know in advance have no possible way of paying for it" maybe you could, you know, change the business model? Especially with the Internet, your could put up a Javascript widget on your site saying "Put in your last paycheck here and we'll give you a rough estimate of what car you could be driving tomorrow, and get a firm offer within five minutes or less!" (you can, presumably, have computers handle all of this -- you've presumably got internal metrics saying that somebody with a 700 score can get $X worth of car, right?)
Thats not a monopoly, its an oligopoly (a particular market segment has only a small handful of suppliers often differentiated mostly on features, rather than a large number of undifferentiated suppliers -- see soft drinks or automobiles for classic examples), also described as a (functioning -- most don't) cartel.
All of these tasks are accomplished by, you guessed it, puzzling. And the sheer destructive power of a 60-man brig crew all puzzling together cooperatively is a wonder to behold, especially when there are fleets of brigs involved in a major attempt to take an island.
But, sadly, no hot alien chicks. Plenty of "dock tarts", though -- although don't get any ideas, this game is PG.
... that Slashdotters are just as succeptible as anyone else to sending money to a random page on the Internet, because the page asked them to and promises they'll get something for free later.
That was the XBox license. 360 mandates vivisection for the first offense.
Seriously, though, they're never going to go after anyone for homebrewing unless that person is also a pirate. Unfortunately, anything which enables homebrewing also enables wide-scale piracy, so there you go.
For my part, when I have kids and they're in the early teen years I will tolerate war FPSes provided they abstract the consequences of being shot and will not allow Fifty Cent within 10,000 yards of my children in any form. Although he'll probably be worth four cents by then, inflation being what it is.
He's the CIO of Massachusetts. A real stand-up guy, I translated for him for three days when he came to Japan. Committed to open source, very concerned about open document formats specifically because he thinks governmental organizations need access to documents in perpetuity and shouldn't lock-in to a vendor.
Gamers shouldn't condescend so much to the casual gaming market, and certainly not their developers. These guys are living the dream, after all (and realizing the dream means coding down in the trenches). Power to you, Linux-supporting casual gamer guy.
And this is distinguishable from Slashdot how, exactly? They only post the article once?
A year ago I made my mother and father's start page Google. Now, instead of having to diagnose the "http colon slash slash, no no, the slash that goes from top right to bottom left, dubya dubya dubya, yes mom, three of them..." problems over the phone all the time, its "Mom, I have some new photos up on my web page. Its in the usual place, Google me. See, isn't that a wonderful shot of the mountains?"
There is ZERO incentive for NCSoft to deactivate the *paying* account even if it was created using a keygen. They're paying you money now, why tell them "Take your money and leave, we don't work with pirates!" You should just tell the legitimate customer "Sorry sir, technical difficulties, your new CD key is $GENERATE_RESERVED_KEY." Fundamentally, their business model doesn't even really rely on the box sales (and certainly not for a 5+ year old game, where they see pennies on the dollar from retail): the box is only the delivery vehicle to get people signed up for the service. Its like razor handles and razorblades -- the only reason you put boxes at BestBuy/Gamestop is because it vastly increases your reach over all-Internet distribution, at least currently, and BestBuy/Gamestop expect you to charge a price that will make *them* money for new computer games (otherwise your shelf space gets given to $FPS, which will get the retailer 75% of $50 when it sells). If I was their CS manager I'd have a standing directive that we hand out keys to ANYONE who calls, no questions asked (other than the usual credit-card verification we'll do on signup, which will keep the fraud to a minimum). Whats the worst that happens? We just gave out a month-long "free trial" to someone who didn't pay their money to BestBuy... shucks, sucks to be BestBuy. If the person pays even one month worth of bills we've made money on the transaction *and the next 30 like it*.
Wipe the hard drive, install Windows 98, connect to the Internet, and go get a cup of coffee. Better make it instant.
This is what I get for posting at 2 AM -- I was *positive* that comment had read "God has just built a Lego Castle." Oops, sorry guys. You can take back your Funny mods :)
Its closer to "we can find out if the cat is dead without accidentally killing him in the process" (or, even freakier, "we can find out if the cat is dead without accidentally bringing him back to life in the process").
And on the seventh day, He rested.
And these are viewable in-game, by default? I'm flabbergasted that Nintendo would take that risk -- do they just trust their customer base or have they never been on a public Counterstrike server with sprays enabled?
See, after the movies came out Tolkien is now not just a cult hit but genuinely *popular*, and whats the point of listing him if we can't look down our noses at those not in the geek club?
I evangelize for Puzzle Pirates so much I should really get paid by the company, but they're worth it because they do more thinking than most of the rest of the industry put together (I keep my subscription current for odd bouts of play when WoW has bored me for the day -- and I have had as much fun on a sloop pillage as I've had on an Onyxia raid before, and was actually meaningfully engaged in the success of the pillage to boot).
The Doubloons can be purchased using in-game gold (pieces of eight -- poe) from other players, or from Three Rings directly. All Doubloons eventually come from Three Rings, so on a Doubloon server (they have standard servers which work on a traditional $10 a month subscription model) you can essentially buy money by buying doubloons and then selling them in-game for money. It works out so the cat-asses pay hundreds of dollars to bankroll a massive Flag (think alliance of guilds) to fight for world domination, while casual people can get through for free or close to it. I started as a subscriber (when they locked out my free trial after a week I was reaching for my credit card before I had even seen the price they were asking) but if I had done my first month on the micropayment system it would have cost, oh, about five bucks (I play PP very, very casually -- in thirty minute or two hour chunks, perhaps 3-4 times a month -- and its STILL worth the $10, the game is just that good).