I think that they are working with the current laws in the best way that they can. IANAL but I am related to a few of them who are also judges. My understanding of the way the law works is that arguments are made based on what has been written and what has been tried. Blizzard has a "problem" with people "cheating" and so they hire a few lawyers to look at their problem. The lawyers pour over all of the legalesse out there and they determine that based on what is on the books that "copyright" law most closely applies to the situation that they are dealing with. They then go before the judge and make their arguments based on that.
I don't really think that they are all that far off. The Blizzard programmers have "authored" the code in the question. As an author they are allowed by law to limit the scope in which their works are used. I work in an art museum and there are all sorts of copyright issues with works of art. Sometimes you can only use a reproduction (photo, image, etc) of a work for a certain period of time. Sometimes you can only use it in certain formats (like in a catalogue, or on a website, maybe in both, maybe in neither).
As others have already said, when you "purchase" a game like WoW you are simply purchasing a license to use the software bound by certain conditions. You are entering into a contract. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you do it. When you enter into a contract you are bound by the contract. If you don't like it, don't sign it.
As a casual WoW player, I appreciate that Blizzard is doing what they can to combat botting. I agree that levelling up to 70 sucks. I agree that the grind for honor for pvp gear sucks. There are some aspects of the game that do suck, but they are aspects of the game. Nobody is making me play it. It is just a game.
Verifying source code is somewhat like that: someone else will do it. The great thing about the internet is the crowd is so large that the few people, who would jump in no matter what, are always present.
Of course they are. They stopped ignoring their mom shouting down into the basement that it was dinner time a LONG time ago.;)
If there were truly a way to install software on a computer that prevented people from using hacks and aimbots and the like in FPS games, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately such a thing will never happen, because as long as people can gain access to the memory registers, they can hack whatever software is running on the box. In the past I thought that a bootable CD/DVD with the game on it might be the way to go, but as soon as the game needs to be patched then that concept fails.
Does anyone else out there have any suggestions on how to make a networked/multi-player game truly cheat/hack proof?
I did Windows consulting for a while and used similar naming schemes. We worked in the SMB market and most of our servers were (company name)2k3 (for Windows 2003 boxes). The company I am working for now is a Microsoft shop and we have a couple of sites and names that reflect the sight name and server function. (company acronym)BH(site ID)MAINSERV. 2CP(site ID)MAILSERV. (company acronym)SQLSERV, etc. The front-end Exchange box is simply MAIL. We have about 20 servers.
Yet if we use our recent experience with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as a benchmark, the consolidation of the cyber divisions of multiple agencies is likely to be difficult. Earlier, I spoke about the need for each service to focus on its service-unique requirements, even as we explore collaborative strategies. For now, I believe we must each master our corner of "the sandbox" completely.
First of all, kudos to the guy for answering the questions. The majority of answers weren't really answers though, but in this day and age of "no comment" and disappearing emails from most branches of government, it is great to see a couple of paragraphs devoted to each query.
The fact that each department wants to master its own sandbox is a big fat load of crap. Like the original question stated, an IP packet is an IP packet. There are only so many ways to secure a communication channel. There are only so many ways to setup an ACL. I remember back when I first got into networking there were governmental standards (Orange Book maybe?) that were touted as minimum levels of security required of network operating systems. I heard about that stuff in the early 1990s and I'm sure the concept has been around since long before then. What the government needs is a single entity that comes up with a set of best practices and then works with a couple of vendors to produce milspec hardware and software combinations that meet the practices.
The reality of the situation is that such a thing will never happen because of the budgeting process. Every sandbox is funded seperately and nobody wants to give up their budget for the good of the whole country. Nope, the Army wants to do the Army thing and the Air Force wants to do the Air Force thing and the NSA wants their way, and the DoJ wants their way. As a taxpayer I'm quite frankly sick and tired of all of the duplication. On the other hand, with the economy hemoraging ~65,000 jobs a month, maybe some duplication is good for employment.
The wealth creation in California is so insanely disproptionate to wealth creation around much of the world that it creates conditions that are very particular to California. I believe it is the wealth creation coupled with the desirable climate that drives people to do things that they might not otherwise do simply to be able to continue living here.
As for going socialistic, all that does it trade one problem for another. Instead of having a small class of ultra greedy assholes, you end up with a large class of lazy, entitled slobs. I'd rather the former than the later. At least those who are driven to succeed have good genetics that will drive the species onward and upward. The Jordan Downs projects aren't too far from Corona del Mar, and they are even closer to Bel Air. You have both extremes of the socio-economic spectrum rather close to each other.
A lot of people are sensative to the overcast weather. My parents eventually left Portland because my mom couldn't deal with the cloudy skies. Interestingly enough my sister went up to visit a couple of months ago and it was cloudy and overcast the whole time. The last day she was there the sun came out and she was really happy all of a sudden. The way she explained it, she didn't realize that she was bummed out until she realized how happy she was to see the sun. On the other hand, I love the rain and the grey skies and the cool temps. I spend a lot of time working out and anything over 90 degrees really makes me cranky.
Amen brother. As a California from the southern half of the state I see everything wrong with American society on a daily basis. My father was raised in Oregon and I have a lot of family up there including an uncle who is a Federal judge. I definitely understand both sides of the argument, and I tend to agree with the non-Californians. The economy in California is so completely out of wack with the rest of the country that when Californians take their money and spend it elsewhere, it screws up other economies. Most of the people who I know in California who are getting ready to retire are selling their property here and buying nice homes elsewhere while putting a huge chunk of change in the bank.
You don't need to look much further than Newport Beach where you see guys on their fourth trophy wife, living in multi-million dollar beach front homes driving Mercedes Benzes with a Porsche in the garage for the weekends to realize how ridiculous life is here. Meanwhile there are small towns all across the nation where people are struggling to put food on the table... hell, fuck the small towns, there are families in Compton about 25 miles away where people are struggling to put food on the table. There is so much wealth and power concentrated in California that people here quickly adapt rather skewed perspectives on what life is all about. They don't even consider that their car/truck/SUV costs as much as what people in 47 other states pay for a house.
For basic web browsing you're really better off using FireFox. If you're an application developer there are a lot of APIs that Microsoft makes available for their software packages (IIS, SQL, SharePortal, etc) that you can only really leverage with IE. If you're developing an intranet application for use within your company then it isn't a big deal whether or not you have a standards compliant browser because you can mandate the tool that your users will be using. I've actually seen some financial institutions take a similar route for their semi-public applications. For example the organization I work with goes through Wells Fargo for a lot of their merchant and financial services. Wells Fargo mandates IE for their web apps. Although I'm not in finance so I don't use the apps, I feel confident guessing that they are probably very ASP intensive and use a lot of Microsoft-centric API behaviors that don't have a W3C certified equivalent.
That is pretty common Microsoft. In my experience with their software it seems like their development tools are usually pretty good and "just work"... so long as you're using their products. You can have your data sitting in SQL Server, and they will provide you with well documented APIs and code that you can plug into Visual Studio to develop a control that will run on IIS and serve up your data beautifully in IE. The problems come in when you want to do something that they haven't provided an API for, or you want to do something a little bit differently than the way they think you should be doing it. In situations like that you have the option to go ahead and write the entire application from scratch and develop your own APIs. For example we are running an application here that has a TomCat front-end but the backend database is SQL Server 2005. Microsoft has a JDBC connector that was a complete PITA to configure, but now that it's configured the TomCat server plays quite nicely with the 2005 backend. The TomCat server serves up a standards compliant Java app and both the Mac and PC users are happy because they can get at it with IE, FireFox or Safari and receive a uniform interface no matter what platform they are on.
So far bigstrats arguments for IE have been things like "I filter out ads in my head," and "I don't mind wasting time waiting for Internet Explorer." Wow, that sounds like a nifty deal. I think I'll switch to IE too.
The only viable reason I've ever had for using IE is for Microsoft specific applications, like Outlook Web Access. There is a night and day difference with that app between IE and FireFox. Other than that, I use IE because it's the browser that comes with the OS and FF isn't nifty enough to make a difference. If I didn't have a content filter running on the network, I'd probably run AdBlock, but at this point SurfControl takes care of the ads just fine.
1) Whilst you have marked some packets high, medium and low pririty, your ISP and every other Telco/ISP on the Internet may completely ignore those markings (preferences) of yours.
This is right on the money. The only time I've dealt with QoS was configuring it on our Verizon MPLS links. The engineer and I had to hash out the QoS tagging over the phone. He configured his end and I configured mine. There aren't any default QoS mechanisms built into the routers at the ISP that are going to tell them how to deal with your packets. Unless you're paying extra money for private circuits, the ISP is just going to at best ignore, and possibly strip your QoS tags when they pass the packets along.
Have you looked into the Sonicwall TZ line? I have a TZ-170 that will do QoS tagging. The TZ-170 is a few years old at this point. They offer a wireless version of it. You're probably looking at ~$500 once you include the advanced firmware. It might be overkill for your situation.
State your source and some concrete figures. Assertions like that need proof.
The source is myself and my experience with fellow guildies and people I know IRL who play WoW. Alcohol is freely available to anyone over 21. Pot is the most common "illegal" drug. Given that alcoholism is a pretty common occurance in broad swaths of the population it isn't so off the wall to suggest that with WoW having what... millions of subscribers (?) that there are a statistically similar number of alcoholics and pot smokers among the subscribers. Is it really so hard to fathom that the same personalities who twenty years ago might have come home and had a six pack while watching TV would in this day and age, come home and have a six pack while playing WoW?
That is what I was implying but I haven't run into any tweakers who play WoW. My experience with tweakers is that they are usually pretty secretive about their habits. Pot and booze are more or less socially acceptable so people don't feel stigmatized when they talk about being under the influence of them.
Everything is available to everyone, so know one is going to get something no one else can get, with a few very rare exceptions.
That isn't really true in the case of WoW. Most of the good gear requires a good sized group of people... either 10 or 25 people. It also requires a significant investment of time, and by significant I mean three plus hours. To get into end game content in WoW almost requires making it a second job, or at least a serious hobby. I know that between work, martial arts training, a girl friend and WoW I had to make some adjustments. The girl friend plays WoW with me and started training as well. Despite that I still had to cut back on WoW to make room for what is important. There are a lot of parts of the game that I will never see and gear that I will never get simply because I can't set aside 6 hours of my life and coordinate my schedule with 23 other random internet people I've never met face to face.
On the other hand, there are a signficant number of WoW players who do have substance abuse habits. For the most part it seems to be alcohol and marijuana, but the game also caters to those who like to stay up for extended periods of time. I think that the two (WoW and substances) attract very similar personalities. Although sitting in front of the computer for hours and hours at a time might not be as physically destructive as crack, it isn't exactly good for you either. The human body needs exercise.
But that is no reason to impose any kind of rules or restrictions on them. It is simply a reason to educate people. "Hey, you might want to watch yourself if you play video games, and just make sure they aren't taking over your life to the detriment of your job, health and relationships."
You're on point right there. I play WoW and I had to modify my WoW habits to keep it from impacting my life. I realized that I couldn't play on weeknights because it interupted my sleeping schedules... even if I only played for an hour before bed, the stimulation was too much and my brain just wouldn't shut off. Another issue I had was that I'm in a raiding guild, but I can't stay up or dedicate my life to raiding like those people do. Because of it I "miss out" on a lot of raids. On the other hand, I have a life outside of WoW that seems to offset the lack of purple text on the computer screen when I mouse-over the gear on my toon.
I definitely do not understand how futures contracts work so all of this is speculation on my part. Having said that, if there are 10 contracts available and there are 9 speculators willing to bid $150 for the contracts, then the 10th person who really wants the oil is going to have to pay $150 for his contract as well. It doesn't matter if the other 9 people default on their contracts two months down the line, the guy who really needed the oil still really needs the oil and he agreed to pay $150 for it, so he's stuck paying $150 for it.
Another facet of the equation is those 9 speculators paid $150 for their contracts two months prior. If price of a future contract is more than $150 when their two month old contracts come due, then they can still cash in on their contracts given that they are entitled to oil for less than the going rate.
What am I missing here? I guess I don't see how there are two markets. My understanding is that the demand is simply so high that it doesn't matter what the cost is because there will always be someone who needs it and is willing to pay the price for it. My perception is that it is simple inflation... there is simply too much money chasing too few resources.
What I took away from the paper is that the unregulated trading of futures contracts that only require a very small initial cost has enabled speculation. My understanding is that the initial cost is something like 1/8th of the cost of the contract. The fact that the cost is so low allows people to walk away from bad bets because they aren't putting up anywhere near the full cost of contract.
I agree that their customer service isn't the best, but it isn't the worst either. I've had DSL service at first with GTE, and then with Verizon when they bought out GTE. Since about 1998 when I had a 384k DSL line, I've experienced less than a week of down time... and that's counting being offline for a couple of hours as an entire day. In terms of actual hours of no service, I'd say maybe 50-60 hours in ten years.
Good question! Sadly, that's what it'll come down to - deciding which candidate is less dangerous for the country. And that is difficult to determine. You've got professed widespread altruism and its corresponding rights violations on one side, and on the other side you have claimed "free market" proposals that will fail and dissuade the public away from the phrase "free market" in the future, combined with a zealous religious party.
Given that they're both endorsed by the CFR you can be sure that no matter who gets elected they will continue to pursue policies designed to bring about a single world government.
If you're so inclined to go http://www.house.gov/ and use the applet in the upper left hand corner to find your representative. Let them know how you feel about their vote. I told guy who picked up the phone at the office of the bastard who represents the 46th Congressional district that I'm exceptionally disappointed in his support of a blatant violation of my 4th amendment rights. I told him that everyone in that office should be ashamed for supporting such an unconstitutional piece of legislation.
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I don't really think that they are all that far off. The Blizzard programmers have "authored" the code in the question. As an author they are allowed by law to limit the scope in which their works are used. I work in an art museum and there are all sorts of copyright issues with works of art. Sometimes you can only use a reproduction (photo, image, etc) of a work for a certain period of time. Sometimes you can only use it in certain formats (like in a catalogue, or on a website, maybe in both, maybe in neither).
As others have already said, when you "purchase" a game like WoW you are simply purchasing a license to use the software bound by certain conditions. You are entering into a contract. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you do it. When you enter into a contract you are bound by the contract. If you don't like it, don't sign it.
As a casual WoW player, I appreciate that Blizzard is doing what they can to combat botting. I agree that levelling up to 70 sucks. I agree that the grind for honor for pvp gear sucks. There are some aspects of the game that do suck, but they are aspects of the game. Nobody is making me play it. It is just a game.
Of course they are. They stopped ignoring their mom shouting down into the basement that it was dinner time a LONG time ago. ;)
Doh! Intel already beat me to it.
Does anyone else out there have any suggestions on how to make a networked/multi-player game truly cheat/hack proof?
I did Windows consulting for a while and used similar naming schemes. We worked in the SMB market and most of our servers were (company name)2k3 (for Windows 2003 boxes). The company I am working for now is a Microsoft shop and we have a couple of sites and names that reflect the sight name and server function. (company acronym)BH(site ID)MAINSERV. 2CP(site ID)MAILSERV. (company acronym)SQLSERV, etc. The front-end Exchange box is simply MAIL. We have about 20 servers.
First of all, kudos to the guy for answering the questions. The majority of answers weren't really answers though, but in this day and age of "no comment" and disappearing emails from most branches of government, it is great to see a couple of paragraphs devoted to each query.
The fact that each department wants to master its own sandbox is a big fat load of crap. Like the original question stated, an IP packet is an IP packet. There are only so many ways to secure a communication channel. There are only so many ways to setup an ACL. I remember back when I first got into networking there were governmental standards (Orange Book maybe?) that were touted as minimum levels of security required of network operating systems. I heard about that stuff in the early 1990s and I'm sure the concept has been around since long before then. What the government needs is a single entity that comes up with a set of best practices and then works with a couple of vendors to produce milspec hardware and software combinations that meet the practices.
The reality of the situation is that such a thing will never happen because of the budgeting process. Every sandbox is funded seperately and nobody wants to give up their budget for the good of the whole country. Nope, the Army wants to do the Army thing and the Air Force wants to do the Air Force thing and the NSA wants their way, and the DoJ wants their way. As a taxpayer I'm quite frankly sick and tired of all of the duplication. On the other hand, with the economy hemoraging ~65,000 jobs a month, maybe some duplication is good for employment.
As for going socialistic, all that does it trade one problem for another. Instead of having a small class of ultra greedy assholes, you end up with a large class of lazy, entitled slobs. I'd rather the former than the later. At least those who are driven to succeed have good genetics that will drive the species onward and upward. The Jordan Downs projects aren't too far from Corona del Mar, and they are even closer to Bel Air. You have both extremes of the socio-economic spectrum rather close to each other.
A lot of people are sensative to the overcast weather. My parents eventually left Portland because my mom couldn't deal with the cloudy skies. Interestingly enough my sister went up to visit a couple of months ago and it was cloudy and overcast the whole time. The last day she was there the sun came out and she was really happy all of a sudden. The way she explained it, she didn't realize that she was bummed out until she realized how happy she was to see the sun. On the other hand, I love the rain and the grey skies and the cool temps. I spend a lot of time working out and anything over 90 degrees really makes me cranky.
You don't need to look much further than Newport Beach where you see guys on their fourth trophy wife, living in multi-million dollar beach front homes driving Mercedes Benzes with a Porsche in the garage for the weekends to realize how ridiculous life is here. Meanwhile there are small towns all across the nation where people are struggling to put food on the table... hell, fuck the small towns, there are families in Compton about 25 miles away where people are struggling to put food on the table. There is so much wealth and power concentrated in California that people here quickly adapt rather skewed perspectives on what life is all about. They don't even consider that their car/truck/SUV costs as much as what people in 47 other states pay for a house.
That is pretty common Microsoft. In my experience with their software it seems like their development tools are usually pretty good and "just work" ... so long as you're using their products. You can have your data sitting in SQL Server, and they will provide you with well documented APIs and code that you can plug into Visual Studio to develop a control that will run on IIS and serve up your data beautifully in IE. The problems come in when you want to do something that they haven't provided an API for, or you want to do something a little bit differently than the way they think you should be doing it. In situations like that you have the option to go ahead and write the entire application from scratch and develop your own APIs. For example we are running an application here that has a TomCat front-end but the backend database is SQL Server 2005. Microsoft has a JDBC connector that was a complete PITA to configure, but now that it's configured the TomCat server plays quite nicely with the 2005 backend. The TomCat server serves up a standards compliant Java app and both the Mac and PC users are happy because they can get at it with IE, FireFox or Safari and receive a uniform interface no matter what platform they are on.
If you don't take the five minutes required to find your Senator's office number and give it a call, you don't deserve to complain about the bill.
The only viable reason I've ever had for using IE is for Microsoft specific applications, like Outlook Web Access. There is a night and day difference with that app between IE and FireFox. Other than that, I use IE because it's the browser that comes with the OS and FF isn't nifty enough to make a difference. If I didn't have a content filter running on the network, I'd probably run AdBlock, but at this point SurfControl takes care of the ads just fine.
This is right on the money. The only time I've dealt with QoS was configuring it on our Verizon MPLS links. The engineer and I had to hash out the QoS tagging over the phone. He configured his end and I configured mine. There aren't any default QoS mechanisms built into the routers at the ISP that are going to tell them how to deal with your packets. Unless you're paying extra money for private circuits, the ISP is just going to at best ignore, and possibly strip your QoS tags when they pass the packets along.
Have you looked into the Sonicwall TZ line? I have a TZ-170 that will do QoS tagging. The TZ-170 is a few years old at this point. They offer a wireless version of it. You're probably looking at ~$500 once you include the advanced firmware. It might be overkill for your situation.
The source is myself and my experience with fellow guildies and people I know IRL who play WoW. Alcohol is freely available to anyone over 21. Pot is the most common "illegal" drug. Given that alcoholism is a pretty common occurance in broad swaths of the population it isn't so off the wall to suggest that with WoW having what... millions of subscribers (?) that there are a statistically similar number of alcoholics and pot smokers among the subscribers. Is it really so hard to fathom that the same personalities who twenty years ago might have come home and had a six pack while watching TV would in this day and age, come home and have a six pack while playing WoW?
That is what I was implying but I haven't run into any tweakers who play WoW. My experience with tweakers is that they are usually pretty secretive about their habits. Pot and booze are more or less socially acceptable so people don't feel stigmatized when they talk about being under the influence of them.
That isn't really true in the case of WoW. Most of the good gear requires a good sized group of people... either 10 or 25 people. It also requires a significant investment of time, and by significant I mean three plus hours. To get into end game content in WoW almost requires making it a second job, or at least a serious hobby. I know that between work, martial arts training, a girl friend and WoW I had to make some adjustments. The girl friend plays WoW with me and started training as well. Despite that I still had to cut back on WoW to make room for what is important. There are a lot of parts of the game that I will never see and gear that I will never get simply because I can't set aside 6 hours of my life and coordinate my schedule with 23 other random internet people I've never met face to face.
On the other hand, there are a signficant number of WoW players who do have substance abuse habits. For the most part it seems to be alcohol and marijuana, but the game also caters to those who like to stay up for extended periods of time. I think that the two (WoW and substances) attract very similar personalities. Although sitting in front of the computer for hours and hours at a time might not be as physically destructive as crack, it isn't exactly good for you either. The human body needs exercise.
You're on point right there. I play WoW and I had to modify my WoW habits to keep it from impacting my life. I realized that I couldn't play on weeknights because it interupted my sleeping schedules... even if I only played for an hour before bed, the stimulation was too much and my brain just wouldn't shut off. Another issue I had was that I'm in a raiding guild, but I can't stay up or dedicate my life to raiding like those people do. Because of it I "miss out" on a lot of raids. On the other hand, I have a life outside of WoW that seems to offset the lack of purple text on the computer screen when I mouse-over the gear on my toon.
Another facet of the equation is those 9 speculators paid $150 for their contracts two months prior. If price of a future contract is more than $150 when their two month old contracts come due, then they can still cash in on their contracts given that they are entitled to oil for less than the going rate.
What am I missing here? I guess I don't see how there are two markets. My understanding is that the demand is simply so high that it doesn't matter what the cost is because there will always be someone who needs it and is willing to pay the price for it. My perception is that it is simple inflation... there is simply too much money chasing too few resources.
What I took away from the paper is that the unregulated trading of futures contracts that only require a very small initial cost has enabled speculation. My understanding is that the initial cost is something like 1/8th of the cost of the contract. The fact that the cost is so low allows people to walk away from bad bets because they aren't putting up anywhere near the full cost of contract.
About 60% of the current cost of oil is pure speculation. Check out the following URL for a detailed analysis of that 60% figure.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878
I agree that their customer service isn't the best, but it isn't the worst either. I've had DSL service at first with GTE, and then with Verizon when they bought out GTE. Since about 1998 when I had a 384k DSL line, I've experienced less than a week of down time... and that's counting being offline for a couple of hours as an entire day. In terms of actual hours of no service, I'd say maybe 50-60 hours in ten years.
Given that they're both endorsed by the CFR you can be sure that no matter who gets elected they will continue to pursue policies designed to bring about a single world government.
If you're so inclined to go http://www.house.gov/ and use the applet in the upper left hand corner to find your representative. Let them know how you feel about their vote. I told guy who picked up the phone at the office of the bastard who represents the 46th Congressional district that I'm exceptionally disappointed in his support of a blatant violation of my 4th amendment rights. I told him that everyone in that office should be ashamed for supporting such an unconstitutional piece of legislation.