Yeah, it isn't class warfare, it's class oppression. Not to mention that the 1% are also fucking the atmosphere in the name of profit, which is the equivalent of class oppression for the next 1000 years.

Ultimately, the service they would provide would be content before any of the knock offs. Plenty of companies have tried to make knockoffs of wow, some even with otherwise very compelling universes in the baggage (lord of the rings online, warhammer online), but no one has come close yet. Star Wars the Old Republic might, but I doubt it. A rose by any other name is still WoW. And right now they have a critical mass of users, which is all they need. They could shit in a shoebox and call it Mist of Pandaria and millions will buy it on the release day.

Sure, there exists private servers of Wow at this point too, and some people like to play on them, but for me? I wouldn't even want to. There's no challenge when everything is possible. I'm certain that even if a joint effort between developers of all sorts banded together to copy and create an MMO like wow, it would likely be crap, because they have no other incentive to make it than "because we can". Design decisions based on that are not good - look at linux. Even Mozilla is a company nowadays. A command structure is essential in creating a massive work of art in a reasonable time.

Making a copy of WoW isn't "just" making a copy of WoW, it's enormous. By the time someone has copied it to the finer details, the game will have moved on to something else; systems change all the time.

A good example of something happening like you say is Vampires: Bloodlines where the community made a huge amount of "community patches" to fix the game, after the developer went bankrupt. I like that, but they could do it because the things they were fixing were straight forward. If they wanted to make entirely new things, who decides which things are good and bad? Like wikipedia, they would need custodians. A private company like Blizzard does not have that problem.

I was certainly a little too broad when I said all intellectual property is bunk. First of all I have a problem with the umbrella term of IP. I don't think it's helpful. Different types of IP have different solutions and problems. Some are more bunk than others. (Wtf is with they way rights to music works? What is it now, 100 years after the artist dies? Crazy.)

Like you I am philosophically on the "you can't own ideas, man"-wagon, but practically I'm more loose with my morals - hell, morals are fluid baby.

I'll say this. I would rather have 50000 people playing my game and 50 people paying for it, than I would have 50 people playing my game and paying for it any day.

>> ^NetRunner:

I think this is the most plausible way I've seen anyone square this circle. I'm just not sure it really holds up to scrutiny.
Philosophically, I'm in the "information isn't property" camp, but I also put food on the table by creating intellectual property.
The confluence of my own philosophical tastes on this topic would be that not only should "making copies" be legalized, it should actually be criminal to withhold any sort of scientific or engineering advance from the broader public, especially for selfish gain.
But, I think that would essentially destroy software companies as we know them. I think Blizzard & WoW would have trouble making the case to people that their service is worth $140/yr. That's especially true in the kind of world in which any content they generate can just be copied by a knockoff service provider just as easily as the original copy of WoW was in the first place.
I have trouble even imagining what sort of service they'd be able to compete on in that world. Uptime? In-game customer service? Best policing of player misbehavior? It can't be bugfixes (copyable), and it can't be content (also copyable).
I think ultimately WoW would have to become something more like an open source project -- the community provides all bugfixes and content gratis. Blizzard ultimately would have to give up any kind of creative or engineering control at that point, and also give up on having a revenue stream of millions of dollars a month, too. They'd just be a glorified hosting company. Companies like Microsoft probably wouldn't even be that.
It'd probably be better for the whole world that way, but not so awesome for incumbents in the industry.
You know, people like you and me.
>> ^gwiz665:
Essentially you couldn't. You would not be able to provide a better service without spending a very very large amount of money and effort into doing it. An MMO is a service, and you have to provide more than just stable servers for it to work, you also have to create new content, bug fixes etc to maintain the integrity of the product.
You can design your way out of it easily. Free to play is one way of doing it, which we have a lot of success with on iOS and the big shots on PC are waking up to as well, finally. Apple in general have their app rejection policy which keeps the most things at bay, but of course there is jailbreaks, which I don't much care for.
I don't have a problem with people copying, although I would of course prefer they give me lots of money. If they corrupt our product however, with map hacks, cheats etc. then it's a much different issue.
I think it's a problem that many different types of media is lumped together under "intellectual property", because I do think things like Art, music etc should be protected from forgeries and that the original artist should be compensated for his time, otherwise we would have no art at all.
The industry is changing to provide a better service still though. Look at music - who buys CDs anymore? We have things like Spotify and Grooveshark who stream just about any music easily supported by commercials.
Any Blizzard game, and all their future games, will need a persistent internet connection, both for piracy issues but also for better service - instant patching, social networking etc. Same with steam.

Since Grooveshark went dark for users from Germany today and Modify Headers hasn't worked properly for me in months, I thought I might as well add Tor-based anonymoX to the discussion. Never bothered with Hulu, but everything else works fine so far -- and it's easily configured to only trigger on a few select pages, like Grooveshark in my case.

In the growing battle for the future of the Web, some of the biggest sites online -- Google, Facebook, and other tech stalwarts -- are considering a coordinated blackout of their sites, some of the web’s most popular destinations.

No Google searches. No Facebook updates. No Tweets. No Amazon.com shopping. Nothing.

On November 15, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to Washington warning of SOPA's dangers. "We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation's cybersecurity," the letter argued

Google co-founder Sergey Brin himself has loudly denounced the bill. “While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don't believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world,” Brin wrote on Google+ social networking site earlier this month.

More: Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/30/will-google-amazon-and-facebook-blackout-net/#ixzz1jNPe7gdV

Yes, really. I went to the website and the problem persists. I don't know what settings would affect it either, but it happens, whether I use Chrome (my default) or Mozilla (firefox) or IE...



In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
Really? You're the first one I've ever heard say that.
Have you gone to the website? There are some sample vids to check with.

http://www.tubechop.com/

I don't know what settings would affect these vids--and no others.

In reply to this comment by Trancecoach:
tubechops don't load for me...

Uh, I can't click on any of the hedgehogs in this embedded YouTube video in both my Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 and IE8 web browsers? Am I the only one? I CAN click if I watch this same video on youtube.com web site though!

Yes, it turned out to be a corrupted profile, which is really weird. I followed the instructions here:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles

and the new profile worked. I did have to go back and switch profiles so that I could export my bookmarks and AdBlock settings, but other than re-entering a lot of passwords (due to no cookies) everything is better now.

Thanks all!

Thanks, I am going to try that tonight.

That is what I love about the Sift; everyone just wants to help.

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
marinara's suggestion of a corrupt ff profile is certainly a possibility. Starting a new profile and seeing if that works is a fairly easy thing to do, and you can switch back to your existing one easily enough later:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles
In reply to this comment by CrushBug:
Yeah, I had everything disabled and I even tried safe mode. Nothing plays. I know it is just my setup because I can watch on 3 other computers with Firefox, I just wish I knew what the issue was.

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
Just looking at my own config, there are four tabs on the add-ons config, and any of the add-ons, extensions, themes, or plugins (due to the way ff works) could potentially do this.

A corrupt profile is, of course, always an option too... I'd start with running it in safe mode though:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe%20Mode

marinara's suggestion of a corrupt ff profile is certainly a possibility. Starting a new profile and seeing if that works is a fairly easy thing to do, and you can switch back to your existing one easily enough later:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles
In reply to this comment by CrushBug:
Yeah, I had everything disabled and I even tried safe mode. Nothing plays. I know it is just my setup because I can watch on 3 other computers with Firefox, I just wish I knew what the issue was.

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
Just looking at my own config, there are four tabs on the add-ons config, and any of the add-ons, extensions, themes, or plugins (due to the way ff works) could potentially do this.

A corrupt profile is, of course, always an option too... I'd start with running it in safe mode though:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe%20Mode

Just looking at my own config, there are four tabs on the add-ons config, and any of the add-ons, extensions, themes, or plugins (due to the way ff works) could potentially do this.

A corrupt profile is, of course, always an option too... I'd start with running it in safe mode though:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe%20Mode

In reply to this comment by CrushBug:
Yeah, I tried that. I only have one add-on in Firefox and it is AdBlock Plus. I have tried with it disabled and no luck. It is so weird to have a main video unplayable, but an embedded video in comments work perfectly fine. It does seem to be only YouTube embeds, though, as I have tried 3 other players and they all work. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
Try disabling your add-ons, and if this fixes it, re-enable them one at a time until it breaks again... then you have your culprit. Then you can see if there is an update that fixes it, or if you can live without it, or if you just need to turn it off for vs :

I had a similar issue with adblock and vimeo iframes, but lucky pointed out that it would be an add-on, and fortunately the next update fixed it.
In reply to this comment by CrushBug:
Sorry for hijacking this sift, but it is a perfect example of the technical problem I am having with Firefox and VideoSift right now. I cannot play the main video. Clicking on the embed does nothing at all, whereas I was able to play the video posted in comment by Barseps. For the second video, I actually saw the control bar at the bottom of the video, but I don't get the control bar for the main video. IE on the sift works fine, I can watch YouTube videos on the YouTube site just fine, and I can watch non-YouTube videos on the Sift just fine.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have tried reinstalling all kids of software, but nothing has fixed it.

Care to elaborate, or point me somewhere that does?
edit: NVM - got it!

In reply to this comment by notarobot:
pssst... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/modify-headers/>> ^Hybrid:

blocked

pssst... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/modify-headers/>> ^Hybrid:

blocked

>> ^Opus_Moderandi:

Because they're made by people.
>> ^ant:
>> ^carneval:
>> ^ant:
>> ^Porksandwich:
I see no video being displayed for this......I don't want to mark it inappropriately, so just mentioning and hoping someone else sees the same issue. I see nothing to indicate that an embed exists here.

No video here too in both IE7 and Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web browsers. Nothing in the source code too!
dead

Very odd. I swear it was working this AM! Fixed, now. =)

Computers are weird and unpredictable.



But my Apple 2, TI-944A, etc. didn't this bad!

Because they're made by people.
>> ^ant:

>> ^carneval:
>> ^ant:
>> ^Porksandwich:
I see no video being displayed for this......I don't want to mark it inappropriately, so just mentioning and hoping someone else sees the same issue. I see nothing to indicate that an embed exists here.

No video here too in both IE7 and Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web browsers. Nothing in the source code too!
dead

Very odd. I swear it was working this AM! Fixed, now. =)

Computers are weird and unpredictable.

>> ^carneval:

>> ^ant:
>> ^Porksandwich:
I see no video being displayed for this......I don't want to mark it inappropriately, so just mentioning and hoping someone else sees the same issue. I see nothing to indicate that an embed exists here.

No video here too in both IE7 and Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web browsers. Nothing in the source code too!
dead

Very odd. I swear it was working this AM! Fixed, now. =)


Computers are weird and unpredictable.