While many places do have two choices for Internet/phone/TV etc., as far as I know it's still just one cable provider and one telephone/DSL provider per location, never two of the same connection type (unless it's a 3rd party leasing the line from the main player in town). Even when the big companies are offering competing services, they're both going to be over different connection types (i.e. Shaw's telephone service is VoIP on their cable network, Telus TV is IPTV over their DSL network).
The article claims there were 300,000 songs infringed and the cost per infringement is $20,000. That only comes out to $6 billion. So something somewhere is incorrect. Either the math or the source numbers.
Good catch. Michael Geist sent a tweet about that recently.
Thanks to @niespika for pointing out embarrassing math error - record label liability could exceed $6 billion, not $60B.
The movie has only been out for 5 months! It hasn't even been released for rental or sale on DVD or BlueRay yet. Maybe using "Hollywood accounting" the movie has just broken even, so by buying the rights to it now, you're only going to receive all the profit the movie is ever going to make outside of its first 5 months of existence. This is bad somehow?
I have been to the bar in question in this article, and have to say in theory I have no problem with what they're trying to accomplish. As stated elsewhere, this has nothing to do with avoiding selling booze to minors. A standard ID check is enough for that (current BC drivers licenses are very difficult to forge. I have yet to see a fake one, and would figure the skills and equipment required to produce a fake put it way out of reach of your typical teenager wanting to buy alcohol.)
The procedure for entering these bars is to discourage criminals (i.e. gang members) from entering the premises, and in the case a violent incident does occur, provide an ability to track the perpetrators as efficiently as possible. The execution of these procedures is done very fairly as well. The bouncers are courteous (as long as you are, I'm sure) and treat everyone the same -- no "You're hot, you don't need to participate" bias that I've seen. Everyone lines up. Everyone gets patted down. Everyone scans their ID. Everyone smiles for the camera. It's very quick and smooth if you don't make a big deal out of it.
People who think this reeks of "police state" need to remember this is a private business you can choose to either enter, or not enter. If you want to enter, you have to abide by their rules.
Should anything bad go down in the bar that night, they have an exact record of everyone who was in the bar, as well as current-as-of-that-night photos of them. More then anything, having the patrons all know that acts as a huge deterrent. The bar in question used to have problems with "thugs". I have heard of no problems since they implemented the system. I actually enjoy going there knowing I don't have to worry about some of the violent problems that other bars have.
That being said, there are definitely some changes that could be made to improve the process for everyone. I could definitely see bouncers getting irritated by patrons questioning their policies, but I'm guessing it's mainly because they don't really know the nitty-gritty details as it's just their job to get people through the system as quickly as possible. This would create tension and bad vibes between patrons and the bar, which is probably what leads to complaints and court cases like this.
Creating a fair and acceptable privacy policy, adhering to it (and maybe have an independent audit proving that they do adhere to it), and educating the bouncers to be able to answer questions regarding it would go a long way into gaining users trust of the system. Even have printed copies of the privacy policy available for customers to step aside and read before making a decision to enter the bar to keep the line flowing.
CD-ROMs could have kept the common "Play button" interface from the beginning. Everyone knew this procedure. You insert a VHS into a VCR, you press play. You insert a cassette tape into a Walkman, you press play. CD into a CD player, press play. When the CD-ROM came out, wouldn't it logically follow to insert the CD-ROM, then press the "Play button" to execute any "autorun" functionality? That way it's a user-initiated event, but one that your entire target audience is already going to be familiar with. And the users who weren't intended on "playing" the CD-ROM don't press they play button and can go about, uninterrupted, copying it or navigating the file system as they intended.
It's not a huge deal, but I just find it odd that Microsoft's implementation of "Autorun" was the solution to this "problem" back in the day.
The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought -- including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it -- underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.
Are they trying to insinuate that because this album cost millions of dollars more to develop than most albums should, that pirating it is in some way worse because it will take even longer for them to recuperate such losses?
News flash big business: if you spend 10x as long, and 10x as much money as anyone else in that industry would on creating a product, it is not society's responsibility to compensate you. You deserve to lose money, and probably deserve to go out of business over the project.
Radioshack and (if you're on the West coast) Frys still sell niche components, but from the looks of it Radioshack has been in a painfully long losing battle with oblivion since the early nineties.
In Canada, Radioshack was actually bought out by Circuit City a few years ago. They're now all named The Source by Circuit City. I wonder how this news it going to affect them. I'm guessing it won't be good because, by my accounts, they had been closing down many of the stores since CC bought them anyway.
I'd say Starcraft 2, an RTS, is one of the most anticipated releases of 2009. Not to mention the original Starcraft still has a huge following, and it is still one of the only games you could make a reasonable living off of if you were good enough, especially in Korea or China. Some matches are even broadcast on TV over there. I've watched some online and it's actually relatively entertaining with a good commentator/colour commentator duo.
No version of the PS3 currently in production provides backwards compatibility with the PS2 (They all, however, can play PSOne games) but it's only been that way since August. You may still be able to find some new old stock that can play PS2 games, but it should be easy to find one on Ebay or Craiglist. From what I've seen, those sellers that know their PS2-compatible PS3s are one of a dying breed are indeed asking for a bit of a premium over an equivalent non-PS2-compatible model.
America's Army might run on your hardware. It ran fine on my PC back when I played it, and all my hardware is at least 6 years old now (PIII, GeForce 4, etc.) I was playing back when it was in the 1.x versions however, and now it's in the 2.x's. I believe they're using a newer generation of the Unreal Tournament engine since I last played. I don't know if you can still play the 1.x engine online.
It was a very polished game for being free. Being released by the US army as a recruitment tool, it was obviously quite realistic. You went through basic training first, and could only become a sniper if you passed with really high scores, etc. Combat is very team oriented (limited number of each player class available per level, etc.) and realistic (when you die, you have to wait until the mission is over to come back, etc.)
I had a landline & DSL package with Telus and canceled the landline. I then tried to upgrade my Internet package to one with a static IP address, and they informed me that I could only have dry/dark/naked DSL with them if I used them as my cellphone provider. I could understand if it was technically not possible, but I hate "artificial" barriers pseudo-monopolies try to impose to simply milk more money out of you.
After some searching around, I found a local company that provides naked DSL, no catches. On top of that, all their packages include a static IP, so I only needed their base package which is significantly cheaper then what Telus tries to charge for their cheapest static IP package.
So in the beginning I was perfectly willing to pay $90/month to Telus. Not happy with that, they tried to bully me into paying for more services I did not want. Now they will never get another cent from me, meanwhile a local company that is actually happy to provide a reasonably priced service that their customers want, no strings attached, will now get $65/month indefinitely. A win-win situation, me thinks.
Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens.
Sounds like a true statement, only is this really unique to Open Source at all?
Companies have long hoped to make money from ______________________. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens.
What a bold statement! Now how many other business ideas does this ring true for? Almost all of them?
Realistically, the only way they would be able to stop this majority would be extreme DRM (call home every 5 minutes, requiring internet even for single player games)
Then the crack will just consist of a local proxy that redirects traffic intended for the DRM's Internet address to a local server app that spoofs the real one. Or it may be simpler to just crack the game so that failing the "call home" doesn't halt it from running.
If something is coded in software, and you have possession of that software and the neccessary know-how, it can be reverse engineered -- period. Heck, even hardware can be reverse engineered and cracked on the hardware level if it gets down to that. If you build it, someone else can unbuild it... and then rebuild it slightly different to suit their needs.
My bad. Your post had already been modded down into the nether regions. Sorry for that.
Although I was weary that slashdotters would care to be educated on any technology that isn't Linux-based, I found the mental image of a person in a ballpark pulling the bullet off a casing to retrieve the miniature pretzels contained within even more humorous than what the initial poster had probably intended, so I took a chance to share this. Hopefully the mod-Gods will be gentle.
Those would be some very small pretzels if they fit into the cartridge(s). Filling the magazine would offer more room, and would probably be sufficient enough to conceal it from the security personnel.;-)
Navigate to the page that interests you to have available offline, select "Favorites" -> "Add to Favorites..." -> Check "Make Available Offline" -> Click the "Customize..." button -> Choose how many pages deep you want to download.
That's for IE, but I'm sure most competing browsers have the ability.
The pirate-themed casino in Las Vegas is Treasure Island. Pirates of the Caribbean is a ride at Disneyland/Disney World, which has also had a movie (or two) based off of it.
The ceremony in pirate-talk would have sealed the deal for me, Vegas or not.
The real scary thing here is that all the best games from the mid-eighties were released for a Nintendo system, whereas all the best games released today are for a Microsoft system.:O... Of course this has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft is the only company that has a next-gen console on the market right now, but still.
Too bad they can't easily compare the emotions felt by the end-user the first time they got their hands on such a system back in the 80's to now.
You're thinking Rogers Cable, which is only a subsiduary of Rogers Communications (the company mentioned in TFA). Rogers Wireless and Rogers Video both operate in BC, and Rogers Media owns a few radio stations there as well.
Bell Canada also offers their wireless service and satellite TV in BC.
I'm guessing it's mainly their wireless services that are involved in this venture anyway.
A lot of places won't card people trying to buy video games, it's true. That is why a M rating isn't that effective. But the reason companies want to avoid the AO rating (18+) is because some major retailers simply do not stock video games with this rating, period. So that doesn't even give the cashiers a chance to sell it to under age customers. That is an effective means of keeping it out of some childrens' hands.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2122746/
Slashdot Mirror
Because for certain keywords, especially made up ones like "chocomize", there is very little competition to get on the top of the first page.
While many places do have two choices for Internet/phone/TV etc., as far as I know it's still just one cable provider and one telephone/DSL provider per location, never two of the same connection type (unless it's a 3rd party leasing the line from the main player in town). Even when the big companies are offering competing services, they're both going to be over different connection types (i.e. Shaw's telephone service is VoIP on their cable network, Telus TV is IPTV over their DSL network).
The article claims there were 300,000 songs infringed and the cost per infringement is $20,000. That only comes out to $6 billion. So something somewhere is incorrect. Either the math or the source numbers.
Good catch. Michael Geist sent a tweet about that recently.
Thanks to @niespika for pointing out embarrassing math error - record label liability could exceed $6 billion, not $60B.
He's updated the article on his main site with the correct figure of $6 billion:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4596/135/
The movie has only been out for 5 months! It hasn't even been released for rental or sale on DVD or BlueRay yet. Maybe using "Hollywood accounting" the movie has just broken even, so by buying the rights to it now, you're only going to receive all the profit the movie is ever going to make outside of its first 5 months of existence. This is bad somehow?
I have been to the bar in question in this article, and have to say in theory I have no problem with what they're trying to accomplish. As stated elsewhere, this has nothing to do with avoiding selling booze to minors. A standard ID check is enough for that (current BC drivers licenses are very difficult to forge. I have yet to see a fake one, and would figure the skills and equipment required to produce a fake put it way out of reach of your typical teenager wanting to buy alcohol.)
The procedure for entering these bars is to discourage criminals (i.e. gang members) from entering the premises, and in the case a violent incident does occur, provide an ability to track the perpetrators as efficiently as possible. The execution of these procedures is done very fairly as well. The bouncers are courteous (as long as you are, I'm sure) and treat everyone the same -- no "You're hot, you don't need to participate" bias that I've seen. Everyone lines up. Everyone gets patted down. Everyone scans their ID. Everyone smiles for the camera. It's very quick and smooth if you don't make a big deal out of it.
People who think this reeks of "police state" need to remember this is a private business you can choose to either enter, or not enter. If you want to enter, you have to abide by their rules.
Should anything bad go down in the bar that night, they have an exact record of everyone who was in the bar, as well as current-as-of-that-night photos of them. More then anything, having the patrons all know that acts as a huge deterrent. The bar in question used to have problems with "thugs". I have heard of no problems since they implemented the system. I actually enjoy going there knowing I don't have to worry about some of the violent problems that other bars have.
That being said, there are definitely some changes that could be made to improve the process for everyone. I could definitely see bouncers getting irritated by patrons questioning their policies, but I'm guessing it's mainly because they don't really know the nitty-gritty details as it's just their job to get people through the system as quickly as possible. This would create tension and bad vibes between patrons and the bar, which is probably what leads to complaints and court cases like this.
Creating a fair and acceptable privacy policy, adhering to it (and maybe have an independent audit proving that they do adhere to it), and educating the bouncers to be able to answer questions regarding it would go a long way into gaining users trust of the system. Even have printed copies of the privacy policy available for customers to step aside and read before making a decision to enter the bar to keep the line flowing.
TFA links to a photo tour of Opera's in-house data center, which Google can translate pretty well for some extra information:
Translated photo gallery: http://72.14.213.132/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=no&tl=en&u=http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini%26bid%3D3&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&usg=ALkJrhi9EJIJDyjFQXWO9b78y47p_hBSaQ
CD-ROMs could have kept the common "Play button" interface from the beginning. Everyone knew this procedure. You insert a VHS into a VCR, you press play. You insert a cassette tape into a Walkman, you press play. CD into a CD player, press play. When the CD-ROM came out, wouldn't it logically follow to insert the CD-ROM, then press the "Play button" to execute any "autorun" functionality? That way it's a user-initiated event, but one that your entire target audience is already going to be familiar with. And the users who weren't intended on "playing" the CD-ROM don't press they play button and can go about, uninterrupted, copying it or navigating the file system as they intended. It's not a huge deal, but I just find it odd that Microsoft's implementation of "Autorun" was the solution to this "problem" back in the day.
The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought -- including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it -- underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.
Are they trying to insinuate that because this album cost millions of dollars more to develop than most albums should, that pirating it is in some way worse because it will take even longer for them to recuperate such losses?
News flash big business: if you spend 10x as long, and 10x as much money as anyone else in that industry would on creating a product, it is not society's responsibility to compensate you. You deserve to lose money, and probably deserve to go out of business over the project.
Besides the ridiculous cost and timeline for developing the album, it seems the primary stakeholders were determined to tank this project regardless (see: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/axl-rose-blamed-for-band-missing-no-1-album_100126311.html/). Blaming piracy for any financial difficulties this album has suffered is more ridiculous than usual.
Radioshack and (if you're on the West coast) Frys still sell niche components, but from the looks of it Radioshack has been in a painfully long losing battle with oblivion since the early nineties.
In Canada, Radioshack was actually bought out by Circuit City a few years ago. They're now all named The Source by Circuit City. I wonder how this news it going to affect them. I'm guessing it won't be good because, by my accounts, they had been closing down many of the stores since CC bought them anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack#Operations_in_Canada
RTS is pretty much a dead genre.
I'd say Starcraft 2, an RTS, is one of the most anticipated releases of 2009. Not to mention the original Starcraft still has a huge following, and it is still one of the only games you could make a reasonable living off of if you were good enough, especially in Korea or China. Some matches are even broadcast on TV over there. I've watched some online and it's actually relatively entertaining with a good commentator/colour commentator duo.
No version of the PS3 currently in production provides backwards compatibility with the PS2 (They all, however, can play PSOne games) but it's only been that way since August. You may still be able to find some new old stock that can play PS2 games, but it should be easy to find one on Ebay or Craiglist. From what I've seen, those sellers that know their PS2-compatible PS3s are one of a dying breed are indeed asking for a bit of a premium over an equivalent non-PS2-compatible model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Retail_configurations
America's Army might run on your hardware. It ran fine on my PC back when I played it, and all my hardware is at least 6 years old now (PIII, GeForce 4, etc.) I was playing back when it was in the 1.x versions however, and now it's in the 2.x's. I believe they're using a newer generation of the Unreal Tournament engine since I last played. I don't know if you can still play the 1.x engine online.
It was a very polished game for being free. Being released by the US army as a recruitment tool, it was obviously quite realistic. You went through basic training first, and could only become a sniper if you passed with really high scores, etc. Combat is very team oriented (limited number of each player class available per level, etc.) and realistic (when you die, you have to wait until the mission is over to come back, etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Army
Between that and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, I didn't have to buy a PC game for at least a couple years... back when I still had time to play them.
I had a landline & DSL package with Telus and canceled the landline. I then tried to upgrade my Internet package to one with a static IP address, and they informed me that I could only have dry/dark/naked DSL with them if I used them as my cellphone provider. I could understand if it was technically not possible, but I hate "artificial" barriers pseudo-monopolies try to impose to simply milk more money out of you.
After some searching around, I found a local company that provides naked DSL, no catches. On top of that, all their packages include a static IP, so I only needed their base package which is significantly cheaper then what Telus tries to charge for their cheapest static IP package.
So in the beginning I was perfectly willing to pay $90/month to Telus. Not happy with that, they tried to bully me into paying for more services I did not want. Now they will never get another cent from me, meanwhile a local company that is actually happy to provide a reasonably priced service that their customers want, no strings attached, will now get $65/month indefinitely. A win-win situation, me thinks.
Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens.
Sounds like a true statement, only is this really unique to Open Source at all?
Companies have long hoped to make money from ______________________. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens.
What a bold statement! Now how many other business ideas does this ring true for? Almost all of them?
Realistically, the only way they would be able to stop this majority would be extreme DRM (call home every 5 minutes, requiring internet even for single player games)
Then the crack will just consist of a local proxy that redirects traffic intended for the DRM's Internet address to a local server app that spoofs the real one. Or it may be simpler to just crack the game so that failing the "call home" doesn't halt it from running.
If something is coded in software, and you have possession of that software and the neccessary know-how, it can be reverse engineered -- period. Heck, even hardware can be reverse engineered and cracked on the hardware level if it gets down to that. If you build it, someone else can unbuild it... and then rebuild it slightly different to suit their needs.
My bad. Your post had already been modded down into the nether regions. Sorry for that.
Although I was weary that slashdotters would care to be educated on any technology that isn't Linux-based, I found the mental image of a person in a ballpark pulling the bullet off a casing to retrieve the miniature pretzels contained within even more humorous than what the initial poster had probably intended, so I took a chance to share this. Hopefully the mod-Gods will be gentle.
Those would be some very small pretzels if they fit into the cartridge(s). Filling the magazine would offer more room, and would probably be sufficient enough to conceal it from the security personnel. ;-)
Navigate to the page that interests you to have available offline, select "Favorites" -> "Add to Favorites..." -> Check "Make Available Offline" -> Click the "Customize..." button -> Choose how many pages deep you want to download.
That's for IE, but I'm sure most competing browsers have the ability.
The pirate-themed casino in Las Vegas is Treasure Island. Pirates of the Caribbean is a ride at Disneyland/Disney World, which has also had a movie (or two) based off of it. The ceremony in pirate-talk would have sealed the deal for me, Vegas or not.
The real scary thing here is that all the best games from the mid-eighties were released for a Nintendo system, whereas all the best games released today are for a Microsoft system. :O ... Of course this has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft is the only company that has a next-gen console on the market right now, but still.
Too bad they can't easily compare the emotions felt by the end-user the first time they got their hands on such a system back in the 80's to now.
You're thinking Rogers Cable, which is only a subsiduary of Rogers Communications (the company mentioned in TFA). Rogers Wireless and Rogers Video both operate in BC, and Rogers Media owns a few radio stations there as well. Bell Canada also offers their wireless service and satellite TV in BC. I'm guessing it's mainly their wireless services that are involved in this venture anyway.
A lot of places won't card people trying to buy video games, it's true. That is why a M rating isn't that effective. But the reason companies want to avoid the AO rating (18+) is because some major retailers simply do not stock video games with this rating, period. So that doesn't even give the cashiers a chance to sell it to under age customers. That is an effective means of keeping it out of some childrens' hands. http://slate.msn.com/id/2122746/