I don't know that I would call it an outright failure, but the PC game "Starsiege: Tribes" from Dynamix certainly got walloped by piracy. I chatted with one of the engineers after the game's launch, and he sadly reported their server stats showing 300k+ people playing the game, with just 70-80k or so sales. They had a complete and utter lack of any DRM (not even a simple disk check), making the game wildly easy to copy. Hell, the install process was just a straightup file copy from CD to HD.

No two ways about it, the game sold poorly, but was quite successful with players. I certainly don't mean to imply be any stretch that every player represented a lost sale, but I definitely believe that the complete ease with which the game could be copied (ie, right click on the install folder, and select "ICQ this to my buddy") led to very disappointing sales.

Most games that sell poorly are poorly made games: the market is the final judge of quality. However, I also firmly believe that had Tribes had some basic form of copy protection, the sales would have been much much stronger. I hate that I am now sounding like I advocate loads of DRM, but Tribes represented an almost pathological case with its utter lack of any protection, and I think this wound up hurting sales very markedly.

Mod parent up.

and so it does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color

Neat snippet from the article:
"At Walt Disney World, Kodak engineered Epcot's pavement to be a certain hue of pink so that the grass would look greener through the reverse of this effect."

Sneaky!

The Hoover dam paid back all its loans, with interest ( took 50 years and a relatively low interest rate but they did), and is now operating at a profit.
And that doesn't count all the salaries of all the employees that make the dam run, and all the employees that aid in the administration/distribution of the electricity.
And that doesn't count all the wealth/jobs, created with the aid of the electricity, by the consumers of the electricity..
Government enterprises never work, except when they do....

pdf2ps ships with ghostscript which is on pretty much any Linux distro with printing support installed. It's acutally how most pdfs are printed in linux.

Your *raw* data? Bullshit. None of my astronomy papers has raw data in it; for one, I have to do minimal processing just to get something *I* understand. Nor do I doubt that you publish your method — you certainly have to describe it, but no one wants to see your crappy code in the pages of the Astronomical Journal.

Mind you, the raw Hubble data *is* publicly available (after a one-year embargo). And what do you know, so is most of the climate data.

Either way, the largest Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields are each about two orders of magnitude larger than the field under discussion. And I was talking about Alberta/BC's conventional oilfields, which are about twice the size of the field under discussion. There are also many, many other verified fields that are larger, so the assertion that the Atlantis field is "one of the largest ever discovered" is false.

Or were you hijacking the thread to flog a horse of your own?

PS: the Alberta tarsands are estimated to hold somewhere around 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, more than all the world's known conventional reserves put together.

This "mud" wasn't created by the denialists, but by the CRU themselves. The same way you can't cheat an honest man, you can't smear someone with their own words.

Exactly. It's like actively seeking a rock of crack and then blaming the dealer for your being hooked. The pusher didn't force that crackipipe into anybody's mouth, and nobody stole 300 bucks from anyone's wallet while shoving an iPhone in their hand.

As a layman, I'm puzzled why regulators are just now going after Apple's app dev process instead of something like their requiring* iTunes to interface with their stuff*. There's a car analogy above that says that one loses support for aftermarket parts. Fair enough, but at least they still allow the "owner" to change the battery.

* So iTunes isn't the only solution now, after hacks and reverse-engineering, but would it have been so hard to just support mass-storage protocol like everybody else does? That would be a good example of Just Works(TM)

+1 funny AND +1 insightful. There's actually a lot of interesting potential truth in your comedic comment.

It is a technical requirement except for the PC and even modern consoles. PC, PS3, XBOX360, and Wii, all allow you to install games on the system. It's not like they couldn't let you install all games on the system and throw/give the disc away -- they just won't.

I'm seeing a lot of semantics in your post and little reason. DRM, copy protection, call it what you like, the purpose is the same. I have to have my disc in my drive to play a game despite it being installed. The disc doesn't spin except on app start up.

We temporarily lost 15 pcs yet company productivity went up. Less pron so they might as well work,eh? I've got no problem if McAfee would reissue that botched update now and then...

Do you know any geographical features that are 32 km in the vertical? So there is NO usable 3D information. So it would not be a 3D map. It is a really low resolution flat globe.

I don't see that "destruction" necessarily follows from unwavering belief in something. Yes, plenty of religious people do bad things. Some may be well intentioned and unintentionally do harm, and there are plenty of wolves in sheep's clothing - people who manipulate others for their personal benefit. But plenty of good is done by religious people (and I'm not saying EXCLUSIVELY by religious people). Whenever there is a disaster, look at all the church groups who go to help rebuild. Missionaries go all over the world to preach a message of peace and joy and hope to hurting people, and generally they also try to help them physically as well. I know people who do these things and they do them because they love people and want to help them. Yes there are bad religious people out there, but don't judge all of us by their actions.

> Honestly - I don't know what the right answer for a corporate entity is...

Sophos is another good choice. But really any choice is better than Norton or McAfee. Avoid these at all costs.