"If you've been pulling stuff from PB don't be surprised when you get a letter a year from now with a bill attached. It's been a few years since the Napster hubbub and both new arrivals and recalcitrant veterans need to (re)learn how it works."
Apparently you need to learn how torrents work. It's nothing like Napster. You don't "pull stuff" from PB. They don't serve any content. PB has no idea what content you downloaded, nor do they have any idea who got content from whom, any more than a phone book company knows who you called or what you talked them about.
Since you could download a torrent file from PB and then delete it without ever opening the file with a bittorrent client, data collected from PB about who downloaded torrent files is therefore meaningless and legally useless. You have to collect evidence on the actual transfer of content, which never touches a PB server. And, in case you haven't noticed, the RIAA is turning out to be terribly incompetent at doing that.
We have rats in my condo complex. But they never enter the buildings, because they have a smorgasbord to choose from in the outdoor trash bins. With so much food available outside, there's no reason for them to go to the effort of forcing their way inside.
We know the rat population is rather large. One of the resident's cats recently caught 17 rats in a single week.
You start at geosynchronous orbit over the equator. You spin your cable both down towards earth and up into space at the same time, which balances the cable.
First, look at the "Total Active Subscribers" chart, the one that does not divide things out by MMORPG. It's a relatively smooth curve. If you didn't know when WoW was released, you wouldn't be able to tell by this chart.
Now look at the "Total Active Subscribers - Absolute Contribution" chart. You'll see that the total non-WoW market had about 6.5 million subscribers at the WoW release date, and since then has only dropped by 250,000.
The market has doubled since WoW was released, and shows no signs of slowing down. This is nothing but good news for the development of other MMORPGs.
Because Sigil bought the publishing rights from Microsoft, Sigil is now the publisher instead of just the developer. Sigil now has total control over development and design; SoE just does the distribution and marketing.
The Breakdown In Communications quest in EQ Gates Of Discord was and remains the best quest ever.
It is certainly the most convoluted, complicated, frustrating and nearly impossible quest ever to be introduced within a game. It consists of 14 subquests in all of the zones of an EQ expansion with complicated and difficult requirements just to even enter each zone - some zones can be entered with group work, some require extreme raiding (54 person raids). Once you get into each of these zones, you generally need to obtain multiple items and flags through excessive grouping and raiding efforts (raids needing anywhere from 18 to 54 people).
This quest is so complicated it's difficult to pin an actual amount of time required to complete it, but I would say it would require a typical (if you can call those who complete it typical) player a year or two of *daily* grouping and raiding to complete.
The reason why the game industry is showing such a preference to multiplayer games, and MMOs in particular, is simple: subscription fees.
It's the ultimate response to piracy, and bypasses the need for nasty DRM schemes entirely. Sure, you could pirate the EQ or WoW clients - so what? You still need to be able to log in, and to do that, you need to pay your monthly fees with a credit card or buy game cards with cash. To play illegally, you'd have to resort to credit card fraud or cash theft, and that's an entirely different arena that game pirates simply will not attempt. Which would be dumb anyway, since you need to be able to pay the subscription indefinitely - playing a MMORPG for 5 or more years is common.
You go to the marketplace area of your game and find nothing over 10,000 gold pieces for sale. This is because the moneysellers have accumulated so much game money that any time anything valuable goes up for sale in the marketplace, they instantly buy it for game money... and then put the item up for sale on their web site for real money.
Now let's say that you want a particular item that drops from a rarely spawning mob. In the above scenario, you now have two choices: either camp the mob, or buy it with real cash from a shady 3rd party.
Oops, you only have one choice, because the moneyseller is paying asian kids sweatshop wages to permanently camp that mob on your server.
This isn't a theoretical example; it has occurred in Everquest and FFxi that I know of.
The way the gold farmers also corner the item market explains why you see seemingly contradictory claims that they both inflate and deflate the market. Do not underestimate the pervasiveness and ruthlessness of the goldselling industry. It is a BILLION dollar industry.
When the quality of your gear is limited by the size of your real life wallet, the game is ruined for everyone.
This past week I've been helping one of my friends remove spyware from his computer. All he did was hook up to a relative's cable to download a large update file, and in the space of a couple of hours, his unprotected PC got loaded down with several DOZEN virii including VX2, smartloadb, Virtumundo, etc.
Google believes click fraud to be the most significant threat to the internet. This makes sense because click fraud is what makes all the malware, adware and virii PROFITABLE. What Google and Sun are doing with stopbadware.org is their answer to that. And it's an answer that is needed badly.
Why? As a very recent veteran of attempting to remove malware, I can tell you that the good side of this war is terribly, horribly disorganized. Let me explain:
If you get a massive infection of various kinds of malware, or if you want to protect yourself against all this stuff, you have to:
1. Protect yourself with a firewall (software example: Zonealarm) 2. Run or have available an antitrojan application (example: Trojan Hunter) 3. Run an antivirus program (commercial examples: Norton or McAfee; freeware example: Grisoft AVG Free) 4. Run several antispyware programs (examples: Spybot, Lavasoft Adaware, Microsoft Antispyware) 5. Use something like merijn.org's HiJackThis to find out what your system is infected with that all of the above cannot detect 6. If you're infected with something difficult like VX2 that can't be detected by ANY of the above, you may also need to hunt down very specific helper scripts and applications to deal with it, or even worse figure out how to remove it manually (which is generally VERY technical and difficult).
So, you have firewall, antitrojan, antivirus, antispyware and detection all covered by entirely different industries, most of which don't have much overlap (antivirus programs still do little against antispyware, for example). In the antispyware category, none of the legit programs can detect everything, so you need to run several of them.
You also have the fact that most of these anti-malware companies are commercial; they need to make money doing what they do, because what they do is very difficult, very technical, and has to be done VERY FAST. You see freeware versions, probably because they can't stand to see people who can't afford all these applications get run into the ground by the malware industry.
It doesn't help at all that you've got hundreds - literally, hundreds - of malware installers masquerading as antispyware, antitrojan and antivirus programs. The antispyware industry has had no choice but to put up www.spywarrior.com just so people can sort out the few good ones from the many bad ones. That site is run by one of the legit companies. That company would obviously much rather have nonprofit, noncommercial oversight declaring who is legit and who isn't - it puts a commercial company in an uncomfortable ethical position to be declaring legitimacy of other companies in its industry. But I don't see that they had any choice; to not do it would be even worse.
It looks like that is what badware.org is intended to be, and what is so badly needed - a nonprofit organization that has no base or funding from within the antimalware industries, to oversee and report on those industries.
Do you know what the process for cleaning an infected computer is right now? You post HiJackThis logs to a variety of different forums (just google "HiJackThis Logfile" for a sample) and people voluntarily, out of the goodness of their hearts, help you with incredibly technical removal procedures (google "VX2 removal" to see what I mean). If you want to look up these removal procedures yourself, you google around on various antispyware and antivirus web sites with various descriptions (often vague or assuming you have their commercial product). It's horribly disorganized, with different antivirus companies calling each virus by a different name. A good example: try and find out how to tell the difference between a Lo
Slashdot Mirror
"if some unspoken human rules apply in the virtual world"
Do you know how annoying it is for a ten foot tall neon pink ogre to jump up and down in front of your face and not stop until you log out?
My friends do!
"If you've been pulling stuff from PB don't be surprised when you get a letter a year from now with a bill attached. It's been a few years since the Napster hubbub and both new arrivals and recalcitrant veterans need to (re)learn how it works."
Apparently you need to learn how torrents work. It's nothing like Napster. You don't "pull stuff" from PB. They don't serve any content. PB has no idea what content you downloaded, nor do they have any idea who got content from whom, any more than a phone book company knows who you called or what you talked them about.
Since you could download a torrent file from PB and then delete it without ever opening the file with a bittorrent client, data collected from PB about who downloaded torrent files is therefore meaningless and legally useless. You have to collect evidence on the actual transfer of content, which never touches a PB server. And, in case you haven't noticed, the RIAA is turning out to be terribly incompetent at doing that.
First hit on google: a kit of 100 obscure bits, including a triwing bit: http://www.action-electronics.com/ezpower.htm
We have rats in my condo complex. But they never enter the buildings, because they have a smorgasbord to choose from in the outdoor trash bins. With so much food available outside, there's no reason for them to go to the effort of forcing their way inside. We know the rat population is rather large. One of the resident's cats recently caught 17 rats in a single week.
You start at geosynchronous orbit over the equator. You spin your cable both down towards earth and up into space at the same time, which balances the cable.
That "something" is natural movement which doesn't trigger the Uncanny Valley reaction in viewers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Bingo.
First, look at the "Total Active Subscribers" chart, the one that does not divide things out by MMORPG. It's a relatively smooth curve. If you didn't know when WoW was released, you wouldn't be able to tell by this chart.
Now look at the "Total Active Subscribers - Absolute Contribution" chart. You'll see that the total non-WoW market had about 6.5 million subscribers at the WoW release date, and since then has only dropped by 250,000.
The market has doubled since WoW was released, and shows no signs of slowing down. This is nothing but good news for the development of other MMORPGs.
Because Sigil bought the publishing rights from Microsoft, Sigil is now the publisher instead of just the developer. Sigil now has total control over development and design; SoE just does the distribution and marketing.
The Breakdown In Communications quest in EQ Gates Of Discord was and remains the best quest ever.
s t=2781
t ml
It is certainly the most convoluted, complicated, frustrating and nearly impossible quest ever to be introduced within a game. It consists of 14 subquests in all of the zones of an EQ expansion with complicated and difficult requirements just to even enter each zone - some zones can be entered with group work, some require extreme raiding (54 person raids). Once you get into each of these zones, you generally need to obtain multiple items and flags through excessive grouping and raiding efforts (raids needing anywhere from 18 to 54 people).
This quest is so complicated it's difficult to pin an actual amount of time required to complete it, but I would say it would require a typical (if you can call those who complete it typical) player a year or two of *daily* grouping and raiding to complete.
If you want to read up on it, read about it here:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?que
For an alternative writeup see:
http://robbiem01.tripod.com/everquest/Breakdown.h
Just think of the possibilities for the porn industry! That would give a whole new meaning to "sticky fingers"...
The reason why the game industry is showing such a preference to multiplayer games, and MMOs in particular, is simple: subscription fees. It's the ultimate response to piracy, and bypasses the need for nasty DRM schemes entirely. Sure, you could pirate the EQ or WoW clients - so what? You still need to be able to log in, and to do that, you need to pay your monthly fees with a credit card or buy game cards with cash. To play illegally, you'd have to resort to credit card fraud or cash theft, and that's an entirely different arena that game pirates simply will not attempt. Which would be dumb anyway, since you need to be able to pay the subscription indefinitely - playing a MMORPG for 5 or more years is common.
You go to the marketplace area of your game and find nothing over 10,000 gold pieces for sale. This is because the moneysellers have accumulated so much game money that any time anything valuable goes up for sale in the marketplace, they instantly buy it for game money... and then put the item up for sale on their web site for real money. Now let's say that you want a particular item that drops from a rarely spawning mob. In the above scenario, you now have two choices: either camp the mob, or buy it with real cash from a shady 3rd party. Oops, you only have one choice, because the moneyseller is paying asian kids sweatshop wages to permanently camp that mob on your server. This isn't a theoretical example; it has occurred in Everquest and FFxi that I know of. The way the gold farmers also corner the item market explains why you see seemingly contradictory claims that they both inflate and deflate the market. Do not underestimate the pervasiveness and ruthlessness of the goldselling industry. It is a BILLION dollar industry. When the quality of your gear is limited by the size of your real life wallet, the game is ruined for everyone.
Th lens on yor pen scamer is dirty and you OCR softwane sncks. Either hat or your thunbs re too biq for your Plackberrg.
Oops. That should be www.spywarewarrior.com, not www.spywarrior.com. My apologies!
This past week I've been helping one of my friends remove spyware from his computer. All he did was hook up to a relative's cable to download a large update file, and in the space of a couple of hours, his unprotected PC got loaded down with several DOZEN virii including VX2, smartloadb, Virtumundo, etc.
Google believes click fraud to be the most significant threat to the internet. This makes sense because click fraud is what makes all the malware, adware and virii PROFITABLE. What Google and Sun are doing with stopbadware.org is their answer to that. And it's an answer that is needed badly.
Why? As a very recent veteran of attempting to remove malware, I can tell you that the good side of this war is terribly, horribly disorganized. Let me explain:
If you get a massive infection of various kinds of malware, or if you want to protect yourself against all this stuff, you have to:
1. Protect yourself with a firewall (software example: Zonealarm)
2. Run or have available an antitrojan application (example: Trojan Hunter)
3. Run an antivirus program (commercial examples: Norton or McAfee; freeware example: Grisoft AVG Free)
4. Run several antispyware programs (examples: Spybot, Lavasoft Adaware, Microsoft Antispyware)
5. Use something like merijn.org's HiJackThis to find out what your system is infected with that all of the above cannot detect
6. If you're infected with something difficult like VX2 that can't be detected by ANY of the above, you may also need to hunt down very specific helper scripts and applications to deal with it, or even worse figure out how to remove it manually (which is generally VERY technical and difficult).
So, you have firewall, antitrojan, antivirus, antispyware and detection all covered by entirely different industries, most of which don't have much overlap (antivirus programs still do little against antispyware, for example). In the antispyware category, none of the legit programs can detect everything, so you need to run several of them.
You also have the fact that most of these anti-malware companies are commercial; they need to make money doing what they do, because what they do is very difficult, very technical, and has to be done VERY FAST. You see freeware versions, probably because they can't stand to see people who can't afford all these applications get run into the ground by the malware industry.
It doesn't help at all that you've got hundreds - literally, hundreds - of malware installers masquerading as antispyware, antitrojan and antivirus programs. The antispyware industry has had no choice but to put up www.spywarrior.com just so people can sort out the few good ones from the many bad ones. That site is run by one of the legit companies. That company would obviously much rather have nonprofit, noncommercial oversight declaring who is legit and who isn't - it puts a commercial company in an uncomfortable ethical position to be declaring legitimacy of other companies in its industry. But I don't see that they had any choice; to not do it would be even worse.
It looks like that is what badware.org is intended to be, and what is so badly needed - a nonprofit organization that has no base or funding from within the antimalware industries, to oversee and report on those industries.
Do you know what the process for cleaning an infected computer is right now? You post HiJackThis logs to a variety of different forums (just google "HiJackThis Logfile" for a sample) and people voluntarily, out of the goodness of their hearts, help you with incredibly technical removal procedures (google "VX2 removal" to see what I mean). If you want to look up these removal procedures yourself, you google around on various antispyware and antivirus web sites with various descriptions (often vague or assuming you have their commercial product). It's horribly disorganized, with different antivirus companies calling each virus by a different name. A good example: try and find out how to tell the difference between a Lo
If you are reading this thread:
The good news is, you have no UV damage because you never go outside!
The bad news is, if you ever did go outside, your pasty white "monitor tan" would get UV damage in 1.5 minutes!