This isn't a cash transaction that can't be tracked. Watch the gold. The money has to be transfered, probably more than once. There will be a string of transfers that all go back to just a couple accounts.
Not necessarily. You can run your farming operation in isolated 'cells'. Power levelling a new account is easy and inexpensive, an organization could dump accounts that are over a few months old, or use them as spambots until blizzard terminates them.
Also, if I conduct my transfers as sequences of 998 gold, I'm under the radar. I can write scripts and macros to break up large transfers.
If after farming 100k I buy a bunch of expensive items in the AH, and email those around instead of cash, and then the recipients sell them in AH to convert them back to gold, your 'gold tracking' code is completely bypassed, and I've effectively transferred large sums of gold under the radar...better than under the radar, you are capturing AH transactions between the farmers and 'innocent victims' instead of between farmers. There will be no traceable link between the farmers accounts by simply following the money. Now you have to follow all the items around too... good luck with that.
Plus take a look at the AH some day, your code will flag absolutely everyone selling or buying an item worth more than 1k. Thats a hell of a lot of innocent people to sort through looking for farmers.
But don't ban anybody.
Just delete the gold from the buyer's account.
Guess how many people are going to continue to pay real $$ for gold if the gold is simply deleted.
1) You haven't identified the gold sellers yet, just everybody in the game with more than 1k. There are LOTS of those. And lots of them transfer money between accounts for legit reasons.
2) If the gold-farm org is using cellular organization, and retires and spins up new cells on a regular basis you'll perpetually be behind them; even if you can identify them once they start delivering gold, they'll be done with the cell before you've blacklisted them.
3) You will be taking customer service calls from everyone who finds 'gold' deleted from their account, all claiming to be innocent, that it was part of a larger deal -- where you gave X to Y and now Z was paying you back for it. (This happens all the time in WoW.) And in some cases they will be innocent. Don't expect that to sit well with the community.
I've been running my own mail server for over a decade now, using a DSL connection and a Linux box thrown together from spare parts for most of that time. (I finally bought a cheap refurbished rack server a few months back, but that certainly isn't a requirement.) I ran QMail for several years but have been running Exim for the last three or four. I use Debian but setup of a mail server is trivial on any modern distro for anyone with a geek bent. I don't have hard records but would estimate that my downtime averages a few hours a year. You need an ISP that allows you to run services. I used Speakeasy for awhile but they aren't available where I'm now living, so I use a small local ISP.
I do to, I'm running a scalix community edition in a VM behind a spamassassin/amavisd gateway in a 2nd VM; my outgoing mail is forwarded through my ISP so I don't have to deal with blacklists etc.
The trouble is I'm receiving easily 100,000 spam a day, and I'd like to have deal with less. The gateway does a fabulous job of filtering it, but its just a constant stream that I'd prefer just not to have on my network at all.
So I'm happy running my own mail server, but want to outsource the initial spam filtering, preferably to a company that isn't going to keep copies of my legitimate mail.
Gold farmers aren't just people who farm for gold. This is a misnomer. Gold farmers are organizations that can faithfully and repetitively reproduce effective gold farming patterns in SCALE without being involved in the MM part of the ORPG with the explicit intention of selling online resources (not just gold). Making up convoluted social requirements to pass an automated inspection, effectively breaks this model. That's the goal.
It won't work because a gold farming organization will have no trouble meeting the social requirements if there are any, and it will be difficult to impose more than the most rudimentary of requirements because tons of players spend 99% of their time soloing or playing with a closed group.
Passing an automated social requirement check is just another minor obstacle. It can't become a major obstacle because it would impact far to many legit players.
As far as scale goes, by having more accounts than farmers and rotating them, they can work their staff 24x7 and stay under the radar.
In part, because a big part of what makes the iPhone simple is that they cut out a lot of important functionality.
The Mail application, for example, is easy to use, but it's quite tedious.
Precisely. So why can't a company release a simple device like the iphone, with limited simple apps like the iphone, where the masses will drool over it.
Yet, instead of creating a stupid locked up app store that arbitrarily KEEPS the iphone limited, users who WANT or NEED more features can install them, or even develop custom software to make it do precisely what they want... so the geeks will drool over it too.
Seriously, there is NOTHING wrong with the iphone that opening it up wouldn't fix.
Apple can even keep the app store. I have no problem with a convenient and simple approved way to purchase and install software. I might even use it from time to time to purchase apps.
Or they could block gold transfers between avatars who have never talked previously, never played in the same area for at least 5 minutes, and gold transfers that don't have any in-game reciprocation?
1) Hi there, put a chunk of iron ore up in the auction house for 1,000,000 gold. I will buy it. Pleasure doing business with you.
2) Hi there, head to zone-X and start killing things. Play for 5 minutes. Check your mail. Pleasure doing business with you.... etc...
Even the rules for IRAs say that you can't contribute more than you claim to have earned for the year. How is that a hard concept to implement in a MMO? How about I'm not allowed to transfer any sum that's greater than the total of what I've actually earned in-game?
Ta-da! I fixed it. Even if I'm a little off, since when has "it's hard" been a valid excuse in engineering?
Sure, now define "earned" in a way that actually works in a game where finding one 'blue' item at level 15 can net you 10x what you've "earned" up to that point. Or a game where low level players can have thousands upon thousands of gold just buying low and selling high in the auction house.
I'm also curious on how this limit is going to work. If I've only earned 1k, (however you defined earned), what stops me from sending you 1k, then 1k, then 1k... ?
How will guild banks and bankers work?
If I loan you 1k to buy a sword on the AH that probably won't be there in 30 seconds because its a good deal and you don't have the cash... but your guild offers to pay me on your behalf when so-and-so logs in. So now I've sent you 1k, which is my limit.
What happens now? If the guild tries to repay me 1k can I accept it? Does that count as having earned another 1k? Can I now loan that 1k out to the same friend? another friend?
This seems like it wouldn't work terribly well to me, or that it could easily be gamed.
To pick an only slightly contrived example, an account playing from out-of-region for 36 solid hours starting at its activation is damn well a gold farmer. Oh, and there are other excessively long playtimes coming out of that same building, and the accounts travel the same paths and trade with each other? That's even MORE out of the range of legitimate normal players.
Apparently you've never been inside a university residence?;)
Also, the ability to reliably ip trace to a building is really a feature of North America, there are places where nearly the entire country is NATed. Pro farmers set up operations there; they get a different IP address every couple days, and even that address is some 10.x thing behind their ISPs NAT. Blizzard can't block the ip or subnets; they'd block everyone in an entire city or even province.
There are a bunch of other damning statistics that would jump right out of the data too, I'm just naming a few for ease of conversation.
Yes, for what its worth I agree that logging usage patterns and profiling them for certain 'farming' patterns and login patterns could yield useful results. However, nothing jumps from the data all by itself, they would have to make a concerted effort to write tools to analyze logs and summarize the data.
A guild can look much like a farmer. Hell, they even power level, farm, dump piles of cash on 'bankers' and 'treasurers' and then from those treasures relay funds to members to make equipment purchases, fund their alts and 2nd box accounts, etc, etc, etc.
And a professional farming op, knowing that they were being profiled could relatively easily slip beneath the radar, by rotating accounts, mixing up farming areas, playing games with proxies, laundering the funds through the in game economy, etc. Running it like a 'terrorist' or spy network, using isolated cells, so if one cell is compromised it can't be traced to others, etc, etc, etc.
Consider this scenario: golf-farmers inc, operating in some place with dynamic dns where their ip changes every few days if not faster... they buy a few accounts, join random levelling guilds of which there are dozens in the game, power level like mad, then break away and farm with it. They rotate between multiple accounts doing the same thing. And transfer no gold), then one day they transfer all the accumulated gold directly to a bunch of other accounts, and then now that its transferred massive amounts of gold to people its never interacted with before, the farmer abandons it and gold-farmers inc uses it to spam ads into the chat-channels until Blizz shuts it down. The recipient accounts were all buyers. The farm account went from being beneath the radar to being practically discarded in 5 minutes flat. How do you profile that?
It would take more effort than you are willing to give credit for to develop tools to hunt them them down and filter them out without hassling a lot innocent players, many of whom power level, farm instances solo, and so on.
If Vista is so popular then why do OEMs still install or offer XP? And why has MS extended service and support for XP?
Because while Vista is moving forward, its not for everybody yet. Its a big change, and there are some backwards compatibility issues.
When OSX came out, there were a lot of holdouts for OS9 for a long time. When apple went intel, there were a lot of holdouts for ppc for a long time... all for the same reason.
We just didn't hear about it because it was 10% of 5% of the PC market, and virtually none of them were big enterprises. With Vista its 10% of 95% of the PC market, and the enterprises are leading the whine-fest... so it makes the IT news headlines.
For instance Dell is still selling PCs preloaded with XP. Of those laptops you see with Vista I wonder how many came with it preinstalled vs how many installed Vista on the laptop.
Most people run the OS that came with their unit. I'd hardly look at upgrade numbers to gauge much of anything.
I haven't looked to see what OS the laptops I see are running but I've been seeing more and more MacBook/ MacBook Pros (which is growing in market share),
Yes it is growing and that's good for the industry as a whole. But even so Vista is still easily outselling OSX at 5 to 1, and probably more like 8 to 1.
the glowing apple is easy to spot but I know of no way to tell what version of Windows is running without looking at the OS.
You can't tell what version of OSX they are running either without looking at the OS. You'd be suprised how many are still running 10.4 or earlier.
As for Vista, its really not -that- hard. A glace at the taskbar will give you a pretty good idea in most cases. Most people using Vista are running the new start menu task bar because its genuinely more usable than previous versions of windows, so going back to the 'classic' look is mostly done out of an obtuse refusal to even consider change rather than on any real merit of the 'classic' look.
Yeah, but it all happens on Blizzard's servers. Couldn't they, say, log all player-to-player gold transfers? Then, after locking on the "free" account, they could trace it back to actual gold farming accounts easily. Every paid accounts is, well, paid for, so if this technique was applied consistently, that should soon put gold farmers out of business.
If only it were that simple.
First, even if Blizzard were to try and do this the famers would resort to 'money laundering' within the game. Buying and selling expensive rares in the AH, funnelling funds through multiple accounts, including the hacked accounts of innocents, etc, etc.
Second, it would be a very labour intensive process to trace where funds came from, especially if the system wasn't designed with tools to facilitate this, tools that themselves would need to constantly updated to keep pace with laundering methods.
Third, if Blizzard is using sting ops, you can expect the gold-sellers to start to proactively "screen customers" - screening for credit cards, and paypal accounts, and ip addresses, and other information to help them avoid dealing with blizz staff. Again driving up the cost for blizzard to continually run stings.
I see your argument that 'it cuts both ways', but i disagree that the price is inflated on ebay, its the fair market value.
The fact that it might be cheaper if your seller has to try to sell it to a tiny audience, and therefore has to lower his price in order to find a buyer is a distortion.
The problem with the log tail with regards to resale is that if you have a small group of very fanatical consumers, it ends up driving up the price of everything at the local shops *simply because* the price is inflated on eBay, not necessarily because of actual local supply and demand.
This is improbable. If there were really MILLIONS of copies up for grabs a 'small group of very fanatical consumers' will be rapidly satisfied and the price will fall. The only rationale for such high prices on ebay for a sustained period is that there are either a very small supply of copies, or that the "small group" of consumers is much larger than you've allowed for. After all, its not like this "small group of fanatics" is buying 100s of copies for themselves.
Doh. bloody filter choked on 'less than symbol' $30 and clipped off most my post...
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Then you haven't thought about it.
Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)
Well duh!
1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?
2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost less than $30 bucks and gets them a free month. If they make at least 100% markup (and they do) than all they need is to sell $60 worth of gold before getting banned to break even. That's exceedingly easy to do. Hell, even if they get 'stung' by an employee, as long as they set it up so that they log in and fulfill all their orders at once, by the time the employee identifies the account, a couple hundred bucks worth of gold will have been moved and the farmer is ahead of the game.
3) Even banning a credit card isn't effective. These guys all pay by prepaid game card at best, or have prepaid visa debit cards etc, which can be obtained en masse trivially, never mind the potential for using stolen card numbers.
4) What mythic is doing by banning the spammer accounts is just stopping in-game advertising, not gold farming, or gold-sales. To do THAT is much harder, and there is little they can do to stop THAT, without very careful game design with that as a goal.
5) The gold farmers also are known to use hacked accounts. (where they've guessed or stolen user names and passwords of a legitimate customer, and use those accounts to move gold between farmer accounts and seller accounts, part of an in-game 'laundering' scheme). The 'victim' never even knows he's been hacked, because they just login for a few seconds to move THEIR gold around and don't otherwise interfere with the account at all.
This makes it difficult for the game-devs to act, because when they ban people suspected of being part of the gold-trade, they have to deal with the 'collateral damage'.
6) Of course, gold sellers also use hacked accounts for spamming sales.
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Then you haven't thought about it.
Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)
Well duh!
1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?
2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.
How much of the cut would they get for the advertising? I suspect that they might be better off overall by the attraction of providing a free service and also getting revenue to cover at least part of the costs.
Yawn. I don't want adware on my phone. I don't want it at all. And the last company I want to give more information to is Google. They need more competition.
Good luck competing against the iPhone though... the world is held in awe by Steve Job's line of shiny products, never mind the monopolistic policy of banning apps that "compete" with its own services.
Amen. Seriously, why the hell can't another company put out a product that beats the iphone? I don't even care if it costs more, just do everything the iphone does, do it just as well (meaning the clean intuitive ui, and smooth performance (all the other phones in its class lag and jerk and otherwise just clunk around), and dump the Apple lock-in and ridiculous restrictions.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many people continue to waste their time using eBay. What exactly is the appeal of going through a bidding process to end up paying over retail prices on stuff that may not ever even get shipped by whatever douche happens to be scamming at the moment?
Ebay was, is, and will continue to be for the foreeable future a good place to purchase difficult to find collectibles at reasonable prices.
This includes used books, board games / table top games / role playing games / collectible card games, used toys (lego, playmobil, fisher price, construx, action figures, etc...), console video games and systems, etc.
Its not so much that you get them 'cheap', but you do get them for a fair market price, instead of either not being able to find them at all, or paying the monopolistic pricing that a local collector shop will charge. (I've seen used out of print paperbacks books listed at $50-$100 in local bookstores... they know they've got the only copy easily found for sale within 1000 miles... but you can often get the same book for $10-15 on ebay, if you search regularly.
Another example would be the famous lego "Yellow Castle" or "Galaxy Explorer" sets. There's often a couple up for auction on ebay, and finding them elsewhere can be downright impossible unless you are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of cash.
The other area ebay is alright is getting small new items with high retail markup. They tend to go on ebay for much lower markup and you can get good deals even after S&H and fees. (Although you can generally get them for the same price online elsewhere.)
eBay needs to be split into a marketplace where you can go to buy new things (like Amazon), and the good old auctioning of used personal stuff. Until they do that, they won't see me again.
Ebay IS split into a "market place" (ebay stores) and an "auction". The trouble is the marketplace people want visibility in the auction side and so flood the auctions with their stuff.
And then on top of that there are the boatloads of garbage sellers, who just stuff the auctions with worthless crap that never sells... 'guides' and crap like that. And the people with scammy sounding auctions...
"I will randomly pack a few valueable items into one of 500 lots of near worthless items" buy a lot of lots and hope you get lucky!
Of course there is no accountability that any of the 500 lots ever had the valuable item in the first place...
Well, maybe Valve. They've claimed if Steam ever shuts down they'll issue unlock codes for all the stuff you've purchased, which is a leg up on anyone else.
That promise is virtually worthless. Why isn't it part of the EULA and your subscription contract? In the majority of scenarios where Valve would shut down Steam they will not be in a position to honor that 'promise'. This includes bankruptcy, and aquisition by another company.
And valve won't let you transfer your property to another person (except in a single limited instance that doesn't count for shit).
Valve also won't even let you use two titles on your account online at the same time. (You know, if you and your wife or kids want to play -different- games on your steam account at the same time.
Bottom line, the best way to use Steam is to have a separate account for each title you own. I had a lengthy conversation with their support team, and they eventually grudgingly agreed that the ONLY way to be able to actually simultaneously use multiple online titles that you have purchased is for them to be in separate steam accounts.
Doing this also lets you lend, or even give a away a steam game if you get tired of it. Because you can just transfer the user/password for that steam account. (Admittedly this last is strictly against the EULA, but that's a separate argument.)
Your mirrors, dishes, vases, etc would turn into shrapnel so fast & with such energy that you needn't worry about any reflections.
Oh good, so I don't have to worry about laser reflections!
What's that about the shrapnel though?
Seriously, that sounds even worse than bullets in terms of killing innocent people in the area. (I won't stoop to dehumanizing them into 'collateral damage'.)
So if you buy something from a store, and then throw it away, the store is obligated to give you another item?
If I buy something from a store; for example, a CD, I expect it to work both in my car and in my home. In fact I expect it to work in my laptop too, and if I take it to a friends house and he wants to hear it I expect to work in his car/home and laptop too.
I understand your point a little better, but I still disagree. I don't know the breakdown between rich vs. poor vs. middle class and their relative levels of charitable giving, so I can't either concede or refute your point about the poor Repubs giving and the rich Repubs not giving.
According to the study the biggest predictor for charity was religion. And there are numerous studies that show a strong negative correlation between wealth and religion. So I can't prove my numbers, but I think if a study were done, my assertion would be shown correct.
The flip side of that coin is that I hear other people lament that the Bible Belt has hijacked the GOP with their anti-gay agenda. So which way does the control really flow?
Yeah, I think that's a fair comment. But still I don't feel most bible-belters are "real republicans", and that under a better system, they would be in a separate party that actually fully represented them. I guess its a question of semantics whether the wealthy capitalists or the fundamentalist christians are the one's that don't belong, but to me, the 'traditional' republican is more about the interests of wealthy capitalists.
As for the banking crisis / housing crises, yeah I don't put it all at Bush's feet. However the war is a big part of our current debt problems, and as for the anti-discrimination thing, I don't think that was really responsible for the collapse. It wasn't that the banks were lending money with high risk and that they were lending money with high risk, and then reselling that debt as AAA graded investment mortage backed securities (so other people were buying them thinking there were nearly as good as T-bills when they were almost toxic with risk.) And that they were lending money with no money down, and essentially no credit check with terms that would ensure that if house prices didn't rise continually the mortage would rapidly become greater than the value of the home... that's not "risky" that's "retarded".
And -that- all was the largely the result, in my opinion, of banking deregulation, which while not a 'Bush' deal, was put through by a republican congress -- although ultimately signed by Clinton.
Crud, I quoted an older version (that Google listed higher than the one you linked at that moment, go figure). The current version is:
Ah. Ok.
The principle is the same: you are not allowed to modify it in certain ways, even if you do not plan to distribute copies of it.
Sorry. I'm not seeing that in the "current version".
"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph."
Lets simplify that down a bit:
If you make a change, and your modified version is available for users to interact with over a network, then you must make the source of your modified version available to those people in a reasonable way.
I can't see how you can possibly construe that to mean that there is a situation in which you aren't allowed to modify the source. You are always allowed to modify the source.
The AGPL is designed for 'web servers' and 'web services', where, typically lots of people might use your customized software over the network, but none of them is are actaully given a copy. The AGPL says, "Hey, if its licencend with the AGPL, these users can have the source too."
If I set up a terminal server and load a customized office suite with GPL license, and you remote in and use it. Under the GPL I don't have to make my modified source available to you, because you are remoting in to my cusomized copy, rather than me distributing a customized copy to you. Under the AGPL, remoting in also triggers the 'you must make source available'.
That's really the only difference that I can see. And I fail to see how it prevents you from making changes.
Who cares what part of the country they are from, or what church they worship at, if any? Are you saying that their charity should be counted as coming from Democrats, because the only reason you think someone would vote Repub is because you "feel" they were "duped"?
No, but I am saying that they shouldn't be counted as 'rich republicans', because they aren't. They are decidedly middle class, and they aren't particularly wealthy. Its them that's pulling nearly all the weight charity-wise.
And the bible-belt is being duped by the republican party, who uses them as free votes, because as long as the dem's advocate gay marriage and so forth, the republicans can keep them all in line to vote for the republican canditate, but in reality, the real republicans, the ones with the money calling the shots... most of them couldn't really care less. But they want to be in power, to effect their monetary policies - and if banging the religious drum brings in the voters, they'll happily bang away.
Doesn't represent their economic interests? Yeah, I know, everyone loves to hate Bush, but the fact is that under Bush, the little guy has gotten a better deal on his 1040 form than he did at any point under Clinton.
If by better deal you mean his "take home income in number in dollars" has gone up sure. But only the 'little guy' would duped by that load of crap. In real terms 'the little guy is worth less than he was, is deeper in debt, and his take home income in terms of real purchasing power has gone DOWN.
Printing more money doesn't make you more wealthy. Giving you more dollars while simultaneously devaluing them doesn't represent a 'better deal'. Its a scam.
Too bad republicans are known to give more to charity than democrats.
That would be predominantly by bible-belt republicans who I feel are effectively duped into voting republican due to religious intolerance without real regard for the fact that their grand old party doesn't represent their ecomonic interests at all.
Ok, when? When does it ever suggest that even nerdy petty cubicle dwellers would do well to buy a PC?
What? Are you serious? In most of the ads in the series.
Or did you mean for me to provide you a particular quote where it was explicitly verbalized?
"Suggest" from Merriam Webster:
2 a: to call to mind by thought or association b: to serve as a motive or inspiration for
But I'm sure you already knew that and are just deliberately being obtuse. Now that you've reduced this to a silly dispute on the interpretation of common words, there is nothing more to say.
US laws are wrong, and we, Canonical users from the rest of the world should not suffer from these pay-$90-for-what-should-work-for-everyone-but-americans-out-of-the-box options. I support you.
I can't figure out why its $90. If I can buy a cheap standalone DVD player, complete with drive electronics, rca outputs, and a remote control, and all the codecs to decode dvds, mp3s, aacs, kodak picture discs, and a string of other formats all for $20.00... why exactly does it cost $90 to add just the small software piece to linux??
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This isn't a cash transaction that can't be tracked. Watch the gold. The money has to be transfered, probably more than once. There will be a string of transfers that all go back to just a couple accounts.
Not necessarily. You can run your farming operation in isolated 'cells'. Power levelling a new account is easy and inexpensive, an organization could dump accounts that are over a few months old, or use them as spambots until blizzard terminates them.
Also, if I conduct my transfers as sequences of 998 gold, I'm under the radar. I can write scripts and macros to break up large transfers.
If after farming 100k I buy a bunch of expensive items in the AH, and email those around instead of cash, and then the recipients sell them in AH to convert them back to gold, your 'gold tracking' code is completely bypassed, and I've effectively transferred large sums of gold under the radar...better than under the radar, you are capturing AH transactions between the farmers and 'innocent victims' instead of between farmers. There will be no traceable link between the farmers accounts by simply following the money. Now you have to follow all the items around too... good luck with that.
Plus take a look at the AH some day, your code will flag absolutely everyone selling or buying an item worth more than 1k. Thats a hell of a lot of innocent people to sort through looking for farmers.
But don't ban anybody.
Just delete the gold from the buyer's account.
Guess how many people are going to continue to pay real $$ for gold if the gold is simply deleted.
1) You haven't identified the gold sellers yet, just everybody in the game with more than 1k. There are LOTS of those. And lots of them transfer money between accounts for legit reasons.
2) If the gold-farm org is using cellular organization, and retires and spins up new cells on a regular basis you'll perpetually be behind them; even if you can identify them once they start delivering gold, they'll be done with the cell before you've blacklisted them.
3) You will be taking customer service calls from everyone who finds 'gold' deleted from their account, all claiming to be innocent, that it was part of a larger deal -- where you gave X to Y and now Z was paying you back for it. (This happens all the time in WoW.) And in some cases they will be innocent. Don't expect that to sit well with the community.
Call me oldfashioned, but I still use XP with the Win2000 interface. Much cleaner and faster to me.
Vista's aero is hardware accelerated. Aero is noticeably smoother and faster than running it in 'classic'.
I've been running my own mail server for over a decade now, using a DSL connection and a Linux box thrown together from spare parts for most of that time. (I finally bought a cheap refurbished rack server a few months back, but that certainly isn't a requirement.) I ran QMail for several years but have been running Exim for the last three or four. I use Debian but setup of a mail server is trivial on any modern distro for anyone with a geek bent. I don't have hard records but would estimate that my downtime averages a few hours a year. You need an ISP that allows you to run services. I used Speakeasy for awhile but they aren't available where I'm now living, so I use a small local ISP.
I do to, I'm running a scalix community edition in a VM behind a spamassassin/amavisd gateway in a 2nd VM; my outgoing mail is forwarded through my ISP so I don't have to deal with blacklists etc.
The trouble is I'm receiving easily 100,000 spam a day, and I'd like to have deal with less. The gateway does a fabulous job of filtering it, but its just a constant stream that I'd prefer just not to have on my network at all.
So I'm happy running my own mail server, but want to outsource the initial spam filtering, preferably to a company that isn't going to keep copies of my legitimate mail.
Gold farmers aren't just people who farm for gold. This is a misnomer. Gold farmers are organizations that can faithfully and repetitively reproduce effective gold farming patterns in SCALE without being involved in the MM part of the ORPG with the explicit intention of selling online resources (not just gold). Making up convoluted social requirements to pass an automated inspection, effectively breaks this model. That's the goal.
It won't work because a gold farming organization will have no trouble meeting the social requirements if there are any, and it will be difficult to impose more than the most rudimentary of requirements because tons of players spend 99% of their time soloing or playing with a closed group.
Passing an automated social requirement check is just another minor obstacle. It can't become a major obstacle because it would impact far to many legit players.
As far as scale goes, by having more accounts than farmers and rotating them, they can work their staff 24x7 and stay under the radar.
In part, because a big part of what makes the iPhone simple is that they cut out a lot of important functionality.
The Mail application, for example, is easy to use, but it's quite tedious.
Precisely. So why can't a company release a simple device like the iphone, with limited simple apps like the iphone, where the masses will drool over it.
Yet, instead of creating a stupid locked up app store that arbitrarily KEEPS the iphone limited, users who WANT or NEED more features can install them, or even develop custom software to make it do precisely what they want... so the geeks will drool over it too.
Seriously, there is NOTHING wrong with the iphone that opening it up wouldn't fix.
Apple can even keep the app store. I have no problem with a convenient and simple approved way to purchase and install software. I might even use it from time to time to purchase apps.
Or they could block gold transfers between avatars who have never talked previously, never played in the same area for at least 5 minutes, and gold transfers that don't have any in-game reciprocation?
1) Hi there, put a chunk of iron ore up in the auction house for 1,000,000 gold. I will buy it. Pleasure doing business with you.
2) Hi there, head to zone-X and start killing things. Play for 5 minutes. Check your mail. Pleasure doing business with you. ... etc ...
Even the rules for IRAs say that you can't contribute more than you claim to have earned for the year. How is that a hard concept to implement in a MMO? How about I'm not allowed to transfer any sum that's greater than the total of what I've actually earned in-game?
Ta-da! I fixed it. Even if I'm a little off, since when has "it's hard" been a valid excuse in engineering?
Sure, now define "earned" in a way that actually works in a game where finding one 'blue' item at level 15 can net you 10x what you've "earned" up to that point. Or a game where low level players can have thousands upon thousands of gold just buying low and selling high in the auction house.
I'm also curious on how this limit is going to work. If I've only earned 1k, (however you defined earned), what stops me from sending you 1k, then 1k, then 1k ... ?
How will guild banks and bankers work?
If I loan you 1k to buy a sword on the AH that probably won't be there in 30 seconds because its a good deal and you don't have the cash... but your guild offers to pay me on your behalf when so-and-so logs in. So now I've sent you 1k, which is my limit.
What happens now? If the guild tries to repay me 1k can I accept it? Does that count as having earned another 1k? Can I now loan that 1k out to the same friend? another friend?
This seems like it wouldn't work terribly well to me, or that it could easily be gamed.
To pick an only slightly contrived example, an account playing from out-of-region for 36 solid hours starting at its activation is damn well a gold farmer. Oh, and there are other excessively long playtimes coming out of that same building, and the accounts travel the same paths and trade with each other? That's even MORE out of the range of legitimate normal players.
Apparently you've never been inside a university residence? ;)
Also, the ability to reliably ip trace to a building is really a feature of North America, there are places where nearly the entire country is NATed. Pro farmers set up operations there; they get a different IP address every couple days, and even that address is some 10.x thing behind their ISPs NAT. Blizzard can't block the ip or subnets; they'd block everyone in an entire city or even province.
There are a bunch of other damning statistics that would jump right out of the data too, I'm just naming a few for ease of conversation.
Yes, for what its worth I agree that logging usage patterns and profiling them for certain 'farming' patterns and login patterns could yield useful results. However, nothing jumps from the data all by itself, they would have to make a concerted effort to write tools to analyze logs and summarize the data.
A guild can look much like a farmer. Hell, they even power level, farm, dump piles of cash on 'bankers' and 'treasurers' and then from those treasures relay funds to members to make equipment purchases, fund their alts and 2nd box accounts, etc, etc, etc.
And a professional farming op, knowing that they were being profiled could relatively easily slip beneath the radar, by rotating accounts, mixing up farming areas, playing games with proxies, laundering the funds through the in game economy, etc. Running it like a 'terrorist' or spy network, using isolated cells, so if one cell is compromised it can't be traced to others, etc, etc, etc.
Consider this scenario: golf-farmers inc, operating in some place with dynamic dns where their ip changes every few days if not faster... they buy a few accounts, join random levelling guilds of which there are dozens in the game, power level like mad, then break away and farm with it. They rotate between multiple accounts doing the same thing. And transfer no gold), then one day they transfer all the accumulated gold directly to a bunch of other accounts, and then now that its transferred massive amounts of gold to people its never interacted with before, the farmer abandons it and gold-farmers inc uses it to spam ads into the chat-channels until Blizz shuts it down. The recipient accounts were all buyers. The farm account went from being beneath the radar to being practically discarded in 5 minutes flat. How do you profile that?
It would take more effort than you are willing to give credit for to develop tools to hunt them them down and filter them out without hassling a lot innocent players, many of whom power level, farm instances solo, and so on.
If Vista is so popular then why do OEMs still install or offer XP? And why has MS extended service and support for XP?
Because while Vista is moving forward, its not for everybody yet. Its a big change, and there are some backwards compatibility issues.
When OSX came out, there were a lot of holdouts for OS9 for a long time. When apple went intel, there were a lot of holdouts for ppc for a long time... all for the same reason.
We just didn't hear about it because it was 10% of 5% of the PC market, and virtually none of them were big enterprises. With Vista its 10% of 95% of the PC market, and the enterprises are leading the whine-fest... so it makes the IT news headlines.
For instance Dell is still selling PCs preloaded with XP. Of those laptops you see with Vista I wonder how many came with it preinstalled vs how many installed Vista on the laptop.
Most people run the OS that came with their unit. I'd hardly look at upgrade numbers to gauge much of anything.
I haven't looked to see what OS the laptops I see are running but I've been seeing more and more MacBook/ MacBook Pros (which is growing in market share),
Yes it is growing and that's good for the industry as a whole. But even so Vista is still easily outselling OSX at 5 to 1, and probably more like 8 to 1.
the glowing apple is easy to spot but I know of no way to tell what version of Windows is running without looking at the OS.
You can't tell what version of OSX they are running either without looking at the OS. You'd be suprised how many are still running 10.4 or earlier.
As for Vista, its really not -that- hard. A glace at the taskbar will give you a pretty good idea in most cases. Most people using Vista are running the new start menu task bar because its genuinely more usable than previous versions of windows, so going back to the 'classic' look is mostly done out of an obtuse refusal to even consider change rather than on any real merit of the 'classic' look.
Yeah, but it all happens on Blizzard's servers. Couldn't they, say, log all player-to-player gold transfers? Then, after locking on the "free" account, they could trace it back to actual gold farming accounts easily. Every paid accounts is, well, paid for, so if this technique was applied consistently, that should soon put gold farmers out of business.
If only it were that simple.
First, even if Blizzard were to try and do this the famers would resort to 'money laundering' within the game. Buying and selling expensive rares in the AH, funnelling funds through multiple accounts, including the hacked accounts of innocents, etc, etc.
Second, it would be a very labour intensive process to trace where funds came from, especially if the system wasn't designed with tools to facilitate this, tools that themselves would need to constantly updated to keep pace with laundering methods.
Third, if Blizzard is using sting ops, you can expect the gold-sellers to start to proactively "screen customers" - screening for credit cards, and paypal accounts, and ip addresses, and other information to help them avoid dealing with blizz staff. Again driving up the cost for blizzard to continually run stings.
I see your argument that 'it cuts both ways', but i disagree that the price is inflated on ebay, its the fair market value.
The fact that it might be cheaper if your seller has to try to sell it to a tiny audience, and therefore has to lower his price in order to find a buyer is a distortion.
The problem with the log tail with regards to resale is that if you have a small group of very fanatical consumers, it ends up driving up the price of everything at the local shops *simply because* the price is inflated on eBay, not necessarily because of actual local supply and demand.
This is improbable. If there were really MILLIONS of copies up for grabs a 'small group of very fanatical consumers' will be rapidly satisfied and the price will fall. The only rationale for such high prices on ebay for a sustained period is that there are either a very small supply of copies, or that the "small group" of consumers is much larger than you've allowed for. After all, its not like this "small group of fanatics" is buying 100s of copies for themselves.
Doh. bloody filter choked on 'less than symbol' $30 and clipped off most my post...
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Then you haven't thought about it.
Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)
Well duh!
1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?
2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost less than $30 bucks and gets them a free month. If they make at least 100% markup (and they do) than all they need is to sell $60 worth of gold before getting banned to break even. That's exceedingly easy to do. Hell, even if they get 'stung' by an employee, as long as they set it up so that they log in and fulfill all their orders at once, by the time the employee identifies the account, a couple hundred bucks worth of gold will have been moved and the farmer is ahead of the game.
3) Even banning a credit card isn't effective. These guys all pay by prepaid game card at best, or have prepaid visa debit cards etc, which can be obtained en masse trivially, never mind the potential for using stolen card numbers.
4) What mythic is doing by banning the spammer accounts is just stopping in-game advertising, not gold farming, or gold-sales. To do THAT is much harder, and there is little they can do to stop THAT, without very careful game design with that as a goal.
5) The gold farmers also are known to use hacked accounts. (where they've guessed or stolen user names and passwords of a legitimate customer, and use those accounts to move gold between farmer accounts and seller accounts, part of an in-game 'laundering' scheme). The 'victim' never even knows he's been hacked, because they just login for a few seconds to move THEIR gold around and don't otherwise interfere with the account at all.
This makes it difficult for the game-devs to act, because when they ban people suspected of being part of the gold-trade, they have to deal with the 'collateral damage'.
6) Of course, gold sellers also use hacked accounts for spamming sales.
Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.
Its FAR harder than it sounds.
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Then you haven't thought about it.
Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)
Well duh!
1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?
2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.
Its FAR harder than it sounds.
How much of the cut would they get for the advertising? I suspect that they might be better off overall by the attraction of providing a free service and also getting revenue to cover at least part of the costs.
Yawn. I don't want adware on my phone. I don't want it at all. And the last company I want to give more information to is Google. They need more competition.
Good luck competing against the iPhone though... the world is held in awe by Steve Job's line of shiny products, never mind the monopolistic policy of banning apps that "compete" with its own services.
Amen. Seriously, why the hell can't another company put out a product that beats the iphone?
I don't even care if it costs more, just do everything the iphone does, do it just as well (meaning the clean intuitive ui, and smooth performance (all the other phones in its class lag and jerk and otherwise just clunk around), and dump the Apple lock-in and ridiculous restrictions.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many people continue to waste their time using eBay. What exactly is the appeal of going through a bidding process to end up paying over retail prices on stuff that may not ever even get shipped by whatever douche happens to be scamming at the moment?
Ebay was, is, and will continue to be for the foreeable future a good place to purchase difficult to find collectibles at reasonable prices.
This includes used books, board games / table top games / role playing games / collectible card games, used toys (lego, playmobil, fisher price, construx, action figures, etc...), console video games and systems, etc.
Its not so much that you get them 'cheap', but you do get them for a fair market price, instead of either not being able to find them at all, or paying the monopolistic pricing that a local collector shop will charge. (I've seen used out of print paperbacks books listed at $50-$100 in local bookstores... they know they've got the only copy easily found for sale within 1000 miles... but you can often get the same book for $10-15 on ebay, if you search regularly.
Another example would be the famous lego "Yellow Castle" or "Galaxy Explorer" sets. There's often a couple up for auction on ebay, and finding them elsewhere can be downright impossible unless you are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of cash.
The other area ebay is alright is getting small new items with high retail markup. They tend to go on ebay for much lower markup and you can get good deals even after S&H and fees. (Although you can generally get them for the same price online elsewhere.)
eBay needs to be split into a marketplace where you can go to buy new things (like Amazon), and the good old auctioning of used personal stuff. Until they do that, they won't see me again.
Ebay IS split into a "market place" (ebay stores) and an "auction". The trouble is the marketplace people want visibility in the auction side and so flood the auctions with their stuff.
And then on top of that there are the boatloads of garbage sellers, who just stuff the auctions with worthless crap that never sells... 'guides' and crap like that. And the people with scammy sounding auctions...
"I will randomly pack a few valueable items into one of 500 lots of near worthless items" buy a lot of lots and hope you get lucky!
Of course there is no accountability that any of the 500 lots ever had the valuable item in the first place...
Well, maybe Valve. They've claimed if Steam ever shuts down they'll issue unlock codes for all the stuff you've purchased, which is a leg up on anyone else.
That promise is virtually worthless. Why isn't it part of the EULA and your subscription contract? In the majority of scenarios where Valve would shut down Steam they will not be in a position to honor that 'promise'. This includes bankruptcy, and aquisition by another company.
And valve won't let you transfer your property to another person (except in a single limited instance that doesn't count for shit).
Valve also won't even let you use two titles on your account online at the same time. (You know, if you and your wife or kids want to play -different- games on your steam account at the same time.
Bottom line, the best way to use Steam is to have a separate account for each title you own. I had a lengthy conversation with their support team, and they eventually grudgingly agreed that the ONLY way to be able to actually simultaneously use multiple online titles that you have purchased is for them to be in separate steam accounts.
Doing this also lets you lend, or even give a away a steam game if you get tired of it. Because you can just transfer the user/password for that steam account. (Admittedly this last is strictly against the EULA, but that's a separate argument.)
Your mirrors, dishes, vases, etc would turn into shrapnel so fast & with such energy that you needn't worry about any reflections.
Oh good, so I don't have to worry about laser reflections!
What's that about the shrapnel though?
Seriously, that sounds even worse than bullets in terms of killing innocent people in the area. (I won't stoop to dehumanizing them into 'collateral damage'.)
So if you buy something from a store, and then throw it away, the store is obligated to give you another item?
If I buy something from a store; for example, a CD, I expect it to work both in my car and in my home. In fact I expect it to work in my laptop too, and if I take it to a friends house and he wants to hear it I expect to work in his car/home and laptop too.
I understand your point a little better, but I still disagree. I don't know the breakdown between rich vs. poor vs. middle class and their relative levels of charitable giving, so I can't either concede or refute your point about the poor Repubs giving and the rich Repubs not giving.
According to the study the biggest predictor for charity was religion. And there are numerous studies that show a strong negative correlation between wealth and religion. So I can't prove my numbers, but I think if a study were done, my assertion would be shown correct.
The flip side of that coin is that I hear other people lament that the Bible Belt has hijacked the GOP with their anti-gay agenda. So which way does the control really flow?
Yeah, I think that's a fair comment. But still I don't feel most bible-belters are "real republicans", and that under a better system, they would be in a separate party that actually fully represented them. I guess its a question of semantics whether the wealthy capitalists or the fundamentalist christians are the one's that don't belong, but to me, the 'traditional' republican is more about the interests of wealthy capitalists.
As for the banking crisis / housing crises, yeah I don't put it all at Bush's feet. However the war is a big part of our current debt problems, and as for the anti-discrimination thing, I don't think that was really responsible for the collapse. It wasn't that the banks were lending money with high risk and that they were lending money with high risk, and then reselling that debt as AAA graded investment mortage backed securities (so other people were buying them thinking there were nearly as good as T-bills when they were almost toxic with risk.) And that they were lending money with no money down, and essentially no credit check with terms that would ensure that if house prices didn't rise continually the mortage would rapidly become greater than the value of the home... that's not "risky" that's "retarded".
And -that- all was the largely the result, in my opinion, of banking deregulation, which while not a 'Bush' deal, was put through by a republican congress -- although ultimately signed by Clinton.
Crud, I quoted an older version (that Google listed higher than the one you linked at that moment, go figure). The current version is:
Ah. Ok.
The principle is the same: you are not allowed to modify it in certain ways, even if you do not plan to distribute copies of it.
Sorry. I'm not seeing that in the "current version".
"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph."
Lets simplify that down a bit:
If you make a change, and your modified version is available for users to interact with over a network, then you must make the source of your modified version available to those people in a reasonable way.
I can't see how you can possibly construe that to mean that there is a situation in which you aren't allowed to modify the source. You are always allowed to modify the source.
The AGPL is designed for 'web servers' and 'web services', where, typically lots of people might use your customized software over the network, but none of them is are actaully given a copy. The AGPL says, "Hey, if its licencend with the AGPL, these users can have the source too."
If I set up a terminal server and load a customized office suite with GPL license, and you remote in and use it. Under the GPL I don't have to make my modified source available to you, because you are remoting in to my cusomized copy, rather than me distributing a customized copy to you. Under the AGPL, remoting in also triggers the 'you must make source available'.
That's really the only difference that I can see.
And I fail to see how it prevents you from making changes.
Who cares what part of the country they are from, or what church they worship at, if any? Are you saying that their charity should be counted as coming from Democrats, because the only reason you think someone would vote Repub is because you "feel" they were "duped"? No, but I am saying that they shouldn't be counted as 'rich republicans', because they aren't. They are decidedly middle class, and they aren't particularly wealthy. Its them that's pulling nearly all the weight charity-wise. And the bible-belt is being duped by the republican party, who uses them as free votes, because as long as the dem's advocate gay marriage and so forth, the republicans can keep them all in line to vote for the republican canditate, but in reality, the real republicans, the ones with the money calling the shots... most of them couldn't really care less. But they want to be in power, to effect their monetary policies - and if banging the religious drum brings in the voters, they'll happily bang away. Doesn't represent their economic interests? Yeah, I know, everyone loves to hate Bush, but the fact is that under Bush, the little guy has gotten a better deal on his 1040 form than he did at any point under Clinton. If by better deal you mean his "take home income in number in dollars" has gone up sure. But only the 'little guy' would duped by that load of crap. In real terms 'the little guy is worth less than he was, is deeper in debt, and his take home income in terms of real purchasing power has gone DOWN. Printing more money doesn't make you more wealthy. Giving you more dollars while simultaneously devaluing them doesn't represent a 'better deal'. Its a scam.
I'm looking at:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
And I can't find the snippet you quoted as part of AGPL3, including the part you bolded. Please clarify.
Too bad republicans are known to give more to charity than democrats.
That would be predominantly by bible-belt republicans who I feel are effectively duped into voting republican due to religious intolerance without real regard for the fact that their grand old party doesn't represent their ecomonic interests at all.
Damn those pesky facts...
Not as bad as the half-truth you tried to spread.
Ok, when? When does it ever suggest that even nerdy petty cubicle dwellers would do well to buy a PC?
What? Are you serious? In most of the ads in the series.
Or did you mean for me to provide you a particular quote where it was explicitly verbalized?
"Suggest" from Merriam Webster:
2 a: to call to mind by thought or association b: to serve as a motive or inspiration for
But I'm sure you already knew that and are just deliberately being obtuse. Now that you've reduced this to a silly dispute on the interpretation of common words, there is nothing more to say.
US laws are wrong, and we, Canonical users from the rest of the world should not suffer from these pay-$90-for-what-should-work-for-everyone-but-americans-out-of-the-box options. I support you.
I can't figure out why its $90. If I can buy a cheap standalone DVD player, complete with drive electronics, rca outputs, and a remote control, and all the codecs to decode dvds, mp3s, aacs, kodak picture discs, and a string of other formats all for $20.00... why exactly does it cost $90 to add just the small software piece to linux??