And I hope the government sees it as a way to get its own surveillance agenda greenlit and encourages it.
Because you can't stop the future, state actors are going to droneswarm the privacy out of lives in time, so we might as well have cameras pointed both ways.
And, if the militarization of police in the USA is any indication, we'll need to have a huge publicly-available commercial drones market that can be modified to counteract the inevitable militarization of state surveillance drones.
"On the surface, this may seem contridictory to comments Capps made earlier in the year about how $1 games are destroying the games industry. Hopefully, Capps is just seeing the folly of that view point and instead feels as he is expressing now, that console manufacturers need too allow more price flexibility. While they probably don't need to let prices drop to $1, having more available pricing options will only help some games."
Well, it seems that way on the surface, but I agree with him, not you: there are lots of games out there that I'd buy for $30 or $40, but not $60 or $70, and I end up buying a lot of games for PC because they're $10-15 cheaper at launch. I'd rather see the console market be able to support more studios like Goldhawk, who took $30 pre-orders to fund development, and never would have been able to do it if they'd needed $60 a pop, and I'd love to see the world generate fewer companies like Zynga, who - by their founder's own admission - used whatever dirty tricks they needed to get a big enough install base to fund development at $.99 a pop.
In the end, you have a big company like Apple who pushes the $.99 mark and a different big company like Microsoft who pushes a different pricepoint for its library, and, in the end, it's probably the creators and customers who suffer for it.
"These publishers didn't want to dedicate time and resources to preparing these games to run on modern computers. They figured it was a losing strategy."
Hell, most companies didn't want to take the time to release patches to make sure Win98 games would run correctly on WinXP. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, for example, was released in September 1999, and has a set of BINK Video drivers that won't work on an NT kernel. Meaning, a game released in 1999 doesn't work on Windows 2000 - and the publisher never really bothered to fix it.
Came here to say this. There's no interception if the company is initiating and receiving the disgusting, amoral, privacy-invading electronic communication. Which, of course, is the amazing part of the law - attempts to intercept an illegal communication are, themselves, illegal, like how the DMCA's ant-circumvention clause means that even if a company's doing something that flies in the face of established law, your attempt to circumvent that makes you a criminal.
But, of course, if you complain about this or argue against the law, the title alone makes it sound like you're defending child pornography. How nice.
It's all in the phrasing.
"Congressional Rep.s Lamar Smith, Bill Flores, Randy Forbes, Dutch Ruppersberger and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are using Child Pornography to put your personal and financial data into the hands of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec."
Funny, because every time someone uses that "Wild West" metaphor, I picture them being thrown out of the saloon.
Come on, it's such a useless metaphor. "Wild West?" The Wild West was a land populated by a variety of (more) indigenous peoples, whom we dispossessed and/or slaughtered in order to settle, cultivate, and mine precious resources. The initial settlers had a bad reputation because they might be mauled by bears or raided by indians at any time. I've never been mauled by a bear on the internet.
The West was "tamed" as more and more people moved out into the territories, invested time, money and effort, and demanded equal representation and protection under the law.
The MPAA and RIAA aren't doing that; they're trying to double-charge (services and customers) for the same content pushed over other people's pipes and demanding unequal protection far out of proportion to their population or economic stature (remember, if Google's founders could liquidate their assets without losses, they're worth more than the member corporations of the RIAA put together), and not at the expense of the "wild men" who built it, but the modern settlers.
You're talking about an industry using regulatory capture and government lobbying to criminalize the unwanted behaviors of its own customers, that doesn't fit anything I've ever heard or read about the Wild West. It's a lot more like British Colonial Mercantilism, altho' I suppose you'd rather be Wyatt Earp than Robert Clive.
Did anyone else catch that some of the Rochester papers are saying the police chief won't release the results of the internal investigation? I read it this morning but can't find the link. My wife used to date a state trooper; they classify this as an HR issue and the whole thing is swept under the rug as SOP.
It absolutely doesn't matter. I find myself in the bizarre position of being a public scold to thousands of people who are trying to publicly scold a bunch of psuedononymous amoral pranksters.
They were in it for their own amusement, and for publicity. Even if you catch them (I drive past this place on my way to work every day, so if you say the FBI will catch LulzSec: lulz), that's not going to put the genie back in the bottle. The disease of our age is narcissism, and narcissists never think there are real consequences attached to their actions, so once LulzSec makes hacktivism cool (too late) it's going to breed a resurgence of the script-kiddie tomfoolery some of us might remember from the early/mid-90's.
The motivation for the retreat doesn't matter, the impression was made.
How do you explain that other than incompetence or corruption?
Unless you define those two words quite broadly, neither. It's the unholy trifecta of ignorance ("The internet is a series of tubes"), arrogance, and contempt (I maintain it's not enough that legacy industry lobbyists are donating a lot of money; the human psyche rejects self-identifying as evil, so even if they're voting in line with what their corporate donors want, they've made a justification for it, and that justification is almost always "they don't know what's best for them").
Can we all agree that, from now on, the phrase "cop-killer" is to be used to denote a police officer who has taken the life of a citizen? It's time for society to start treating cops like barely-controlled thugs and rabid dogs; let the 'good cops' prove that they're good, this is not a profession worthy of respect any more.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. While Reddit just picked this up, this isn't actually new. Gamestop's digital downloads have always been limited; you could only ever re-download after purchase for like 30 days at best.
(As an aside: I'm kind of ok with the $5 "online pass" thing, because GameStop buying a used game from you for $5/$10 store credit, then selling it for $44.95 always cheesed me off - and it made me, and a lot of my friends, just pass around games we were done with instead of throwing them into the churning maw of the beast.)
I don't think that's true; I'm pretty sure you get a window of like 7 days from purchase to download the game. The 'catch' is that once you've downloaded the game, you have to make a backup in case you have a hard drive failure or whatever, whereas better download services (like Steam, Good Old Games, etc) allow you to redownload it free at any future point (and you can always make a local/physical backup of your download if you'd prefer to avoid the bandwidth consumption).
I'm OK with this. Corporations are given rights of persons without any of the responsibilities. If you discard illegal actions, your actions as a private person are limited to, what? Protests and lawsuits.
Becoming? I'd argue that's been happening for quite some time. Over the years we've covered how nearly every super successful book or movie has someone jump out of the woodwork to claim that the idea was "copied."
Flipside that for a second: if you were The Little Guy and someone rides-a-helicopter-to-work famous made a book/movie/whatever that was similar enough to yours: could you publish afterwards without getting sued by the publisher? Even if it's not a copy, even if they didn't steal it, even if the little guy can take the idea and execute it in a new and novel way, how many industries out there have legacy players who wouldn't sue the upstart?
IANAL so I don't know how much different the filing costs are for a declaration of summary judgement vs. that of a plain old lawsuit, but if the projected costs of the two are similar, why not go shoot for the moon?
On the post: Drone Attack: How We Might Willingly Embrace The Surveillance Society
I'm OK with that.
And I hope the government sees it as a way to get its own surveillance agenda greenlit and encourages it.
Because you can't stop the future, state actors are going to droneswarm the privacy out of lives in time, so we might as well have cameras pointed both ways.
And, if the militarization of police in the USA is any indication, we'll need to have a huge publicly-available commercial drones market that can be modified to counteract the inevitable militarization of state surveillance drones.
On the post: Doctors Discover Copyright Law: Cognitive Screening Test Killed Over Infringement Claims
What oath are you talking about? I'm just waiting for my check.
On the post: RIAA Claims It Succeeded In Getting Piracy Under Control Years Ago
Re: This sounds familiar....
On the post: Epic Games On The Future Of Triple-A Game Development Marketing And Pricing
Well, it seems that way on the surface, but I agree with him, not you: there are lots of games out there that I'd buy for $30 or $40, but not $60 or $70, and I end up buying a lot of games for PC because they're $10-15 cheaper at launch. I'd rather see the console market be able to support more studios like Goldhawk, who took $30 pre-orders to fund development, and never would have been able to do it if they'd needed $60 a pop, and I'd love to see the world generate fewer companies like Zynga, who - by their founder's own admission - used whatever dirty tricks they needed to get a big enough install base to fund development at $.99 a pop.
In the end, you have a big company like Apple who pushes the $.99 mark and a different big company like Microsoft who pushes a different pricepoint for its library, and, in the end, it's probably the creators and customers who suffer for it.
On the post: Despite Publisher Apprehension, Good Old Games Proves A Market For Old DRM-Free Games Exists
Hell, most companies didn't want to take the time to release patches to make sure Win98 games would run correctly on WinXP. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, for example, was released in September 1999, and has a set of BINK Video drivers that won't work on an NT kernel. Meaning, a game released in 1999 doesn't work on Windows 2000 - and the publisher never really bothered to fix it.
On the post: How Cisco & The Justice Department Conspired To Try To Destroy One Man's Life For Daring To Sue Cisco
On the post: Court Refuses To Issue Injunction Stopping Secret Web Spycams From Running On Rental Laptops
Re: Interception
On the post: Belgian Newspapers 'Give Permission' To Google To Return Them To Search Results
On the post: Congress Tries To Hide Massive Data Retention Law By Pretending It's An Anti-Child Porn Law
It's all in the phrasing.
"Congressional Rep.s Lamar Smith, Bill Flores, Randy Forbes, Dutch Ruppersberger and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are using Child Pornography to put your personal and financial data into the hands of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec."
On the post: RIAA Accounting: How To Sell 1 Million Albums And Still Owe $500,000
On the post: Major US ISPs Agree To Five Strikes Plan, Rather Than Three
Re:
Come on, it's such a useless metaphor. "Wild West?" The Wild West was a land populated by a variety of (more) indigenous peoples, whom we dispossessed and/or slaughtered in order to settle, cultivate, and mine precious resources. The initial settlers had a bad reputation because they might be mauled by bears or raided by indians at any time. I've never been mauled by a bear on the internet.
The West was "tamed" as more and more people moved out into the territories, invested time, money and effort, and demanded equal representation and protection under the law.
The MPAA and RIAA aren't doing that; they're trying to double-charge (services and customers) for the same content pushed over other people's pipes and demanding unequal protection far out of proportion to their population or economic stature (remember, if Google's founders could liquidate their assets without losses, they're worth more than the member corporations of the RIAA put together), and not at the expense of the "wild men" who built it, but the modern settlers.
You're talking about an industry using regulatory capture and government lobbying to criminalize the unwanted behaviors of its own customers, that doesn't fit anything I've ever heard or read about the Wild West. It's a lot more like British Colonial Mercantilism, altho' I suppose you'd rather be Wyatt Earp than Robert Clive.
On the post: District Attorney Dismisses Charges Against Woman Who Filmed Cops
This isn't going away just yet. =)
On the post: The End Of LulzSec Is Not The End Of Hactivism
It absolutely doesn't matter. I find myself in the bizarre position of being a public scold to thousands of people who are trying to publicly scold a bunch of psuedononymous amoral pranksters.
They were in it for their own amusement, and for publicity. Even if you catch them (I drive past this place on my way to work every day, so if you say the FBI will catch LulzSec: lulz), that's not going to put the genie back in the bottle. The disease of our age is narcissism, and narcissists never think there are real consequences attached to their actions, so once LulzSec makes hacktivism cool (too late) it's going to breed a resurgence of the script-kiddie tomfoolery some of us might remember from the early/mid-90's.
The motivation for the retreat doesn't matter, the impression was made.
On the post: Senators Unconcerned About Massive Unintended Consequences Of Criminalizing People For Embedding YouTube Videos
Unless you define those two words quite broadly, neither. It's the unholy trifecta of ignorance ("The internet is a series of tubes"), arrogance, and contempt (I maintain it's not enough that legacy industry lobbyists are donating a lot of money; the human psyche rejects self-identifying as evil, so even if they're voting in line with what their corporate donors want, they've made a justification for it, and that justification is almost always "they don't know what's best for them").
On the post: Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love...Get Bodyslammed Tonight (At The Jefferson Memorial)
Style Guide Update
On the post: Another Artificial Market Created Thanks To Copyright: Download Insurance?
Re: This article is forgetting something!
(As an aside: I'm kind of ok with the $5 "online pass" thing, because GameStop buying a used game from you for $5/$10 store credit, then selling it for $44.95 always cheesed me off - and it made me, and a lot of my friends, just pass around games we were done with instead of throwing them into the churning maw of the beast.)
On the post: Another Artificial Market Created Thanks To Copyright: Download Insurance?
Re: Fraud?
On the post: Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos
On the post: Cisco Sued For Helping China Repress Falun Gong
On the post: From Tasini To The Winklevi: Greed, Retroactively Breaking Deals And Feeling Entitled To What's Not Yours
Flipside that for a second: if you were The Little Guy and someone rides-a-helicopter-to-work famous made a book/movie/whatever that was similar enough to yours: could you publish afterwards without getting sued by the publisher? Even if it's not a copy, even if they didn't steal it, even if the little guy can take the idea and execute it in a new and novel way, how many industries out there have legacy players who wouldn't sue the upstart?
IANAL so I don't know how much different the filing costs are for a declaration of summary judgement vs. that of a plain old lawsuit, but if the projected costs of the two are similar, why not go shoot for the moon?
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