Ok... The highest reading is still 53.5 on the map, and it's within the 20km circle. Are you sure you aren't confusing the station numbers with the readings?

Really? I clicked the link and the highest reading was 53, from a site 20km away...

Not always. If you are doing a long term overseas stint you would not be a "resident for tax purposes" and do not have to pay income tax on your salary (dividends and capital gains on Australian investments still attract some tax). This page sums it up nicely...

Apparently the government made it a bit tougher for short term overseas postings (where you would still be considered a resident for tax purposes) though. But you can get a living away from home allowance which probably soothes the pain a little bit.

It doesn't, but the normal use case would probably be to do nothing (or as little as possible) directly in the host OS, but have separate images for different activities (e.g. one for online banking, one for everything else) - an infection inside one VM can't get out to the host, or to any of the other images.

"I tried to pay through PayPal but it didn't work, here's the error message I got. Not that it inconvenienced you in any way, Mr. Seller, because you wouldn't send an item without receiving payment first." Doesn't sound all that troubling.

I've never heard of these limits, but it sounds like the kind of dirty trick PayPal would do. Not that opening an unverified account to buy things costs you anything, as long as all you ever link to it is a credit card and not a transaction account.

I made the numbers behind the bars up, but see my other post for a discussion of the issue you raise.

It was a genuine question for the parent of my post - if Ubisoft have a measurement of how well Prince of Persia sold compared to other titles with DRM (and if they can say it's "pirated ... more so than any of the previous Prince of Persia games", that implies that they do), I'd like to know what the real chart looks like.

Because really, showing that chart (well, a slightly more complex version with the cost side of DRM taken into account) would pretty much end the debate about whether DRM works or not, one way or another.

Of course you can't know for sure, but statistics says you can have a pretty good idea based on other titles. At some point you have to make a decision, but that doesn't mean you shut your eyes and plunge in - you still have to look at the results and analyse what happened so you can make a more informed decision next time. It's the same problem as setting the release price of a game (or any other product) - you only get to launch it once, and how do you know how many units you would have sold had you priced it differently? At the end of the day, you have to pick a number and run with it. But that doesn't mean you don't bother to look at how your $60 launch of this title compared to the $80 launch of another title last year.

So, just like management at Ubisoft must be looking at sales from varying price points where they can, they should also be looking at the chart I posted (but the version with real numbers). The thing that doesn't make sense for me is, if the real numbers show conclusively that DRM works, why not just show it once to the
press? Then BAM, debate over. If they show it doesn't work, why waste any more money on it?

I'm amazed the shareholders have let them get away with not showing it for so long, when they are making such big investments for it.

For kicks, I looked at the 2009 annual report and there is not a mention of DRM there. Nowhere in notes to the financial statements do they say "we've adjusted Goodwill by this much due to vehement DRM backlash from PC gamers". (Actually, they have written down their 100m euros of goodwill by 95k - they don't say why but one would assume to represent all the Slashdotters boycotting Assassin's Creed 2). Piracy gets a mention in one paragraph in an appendix, under disclosure of the risks inherent to making video games.

It looks like they spent 258m euros on R&D, and another 63m on IT and admin expenses. Their gross profit off a (roughly) 400m expenditure was 111m. So, if not doing any DRM would shace just 10m euros off the IT and R&D costs (it's feasible - running enough servers to support a scheme like this for the volume of games they sold isn't free), they could increase their ROI by 2.5 percentage points (that's very significant).

So, who is making the decision to invest what is probably millions in servers to support this DRM program, and based on what data? Inquiring minds want to know.

I think the major gripe was that with CD albums, someone else decides the way in which songs are packaged together. So you are paying the cost of a full album for potentially only one or two songs that you like, and a dozen you probably won't listen to. But because many songs were only released on the album CD you had no (legal) choice.

In the new world, this has been addressed - just buy the songs you like for 99c. In the rare case that you actually want every single song on an album, yes it's the same price, but then again, if you like every single song, that's actually not such bad value for money.

I've never used Steam, but what is the advantage to having everything in one account, compared to starting up a new account per game?

I assume you can't link large numbers of accounts to one credit card number - but I just read they accept PayPal so starting up a few of those is certainly a non-issue...

How much did the number of legit customers reduce, as opposed to the number of pirates increasing? Or is it more like this?

International wire transfers cost $20 or $25 depending on the bank. Sometimes there's a SWIFT fee (USD20) on top of that too. I think that's the relevant comparison, since the Indian PayPal mechants in question would probably be receiving most of their payments from overseas.

Using VOIP over 3G while on roaming in another country would be by far the most expensive way to make a call... data roaming charges are typically so high the iPhone even has a specific option to disable 3G data on roaming connections.

In case anyone who can't read Russian was wondering... There's nothing useful whatsoever on that site - just the name and contact details of the company (in case you want to phone them or send them a letter), a copyright notice and a link to the site of another company which sells construction materials.

If that's true, how do Optus get away with charging for unlocking access to tethering?