dan5981 - Slashdot User

An In-Depth Look At Game Piracy 504

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 20, 2008 @02:15PM from the share-and-share-alike dept.

TweakGuides is running a detailed examination of PC game piracy. The author begins with a look at the legal, moral, and monetary issues behind copyright infringement, and goes on to measure the scale of game piracy and how it affects developers and publishers. He also discusses some of the intended solutions to piracy. He provides examples of copy protection and DRM schemes that have perhaps done more harm than good, as well as less intrusive measures which are enjoying more success. The author criticizes the "culture of piracy" that has developed, saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a 'revolution.' What an absolute farce. ... Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."

Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves 10x 869

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday April 09, 2008 @12:18AM from the swimming-in-it dept.

HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.

Comment You Can Compete. (Score 1) 658

by dan5981 on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @02:41PM (#22224530) Attached to: U2's Manager Calls For Mandatory Disconnects For Music Downloaders

You cannot compete with billions of illegal files free on P2P networks.

I hear this all the time. It's dead wrong.

It would be easy to compete with P2P. How? By adding value. Right now there's no incentive to buy music, even DRM free music. You pay, download, and end up with a decent quality recording. With P2P? The same thing, except you don't pay. Why would anyone pay? Because it's the right thing to do? We've already seen that an entire generation doesn't think so.

Instead of suing people or pressing for ISP surveillance, compete. Add value. If there's real value, people will pay.

How could a music distributor add value to an online music store?

Speed. Provide blazing fast servers or even use a P2P model. Guarantee fast downloads.
Permanent availability of purchases. Once you buy a track it becomes a part of your online library. You can download it again, as many times as you want, forever.
Format versatility. You can choose your container format and bitrate. Provide anything from 128k to FLAC.
Streaming. Stream the user's purchased music so they don't need to download it.
Playlists. Manage your music online. Download entire playlists. Share playlists with friends.
Online Community. Provide amazing community tools. Forums, chat, profiles, ratings, reviews, points, scores, avatars. People love this stuff. Think WoW, Gamertags, Facebook, etc. Make it clean and unobtrusive.
Recommendations. Use a database to make suggestions about similar music based on purchased music, browsed music, friends' music, etc.

The price also needs to be minuscule per song. Precisely low enough that it feels like "nothing" when you purchase. Somewhere around $0.10/song and $1/album. At this price point no one will hesitate to buy something they're unfamiliar with, and people will gladly re-purchase their entire CD collection for a few hundred dollars because of the sheer convenience.

That's competition.

Optimus OLED Keyboard Pre-Orders Start Dec. 12 289

Posted by kdawson on Sunday November 19, 2006 @03:46PM from the every-key-a-function-key dept.

Jupix writes, "After almost a year and a half of public development, the Optimus OLED keyboard is nearing completion. According to the project blog, pre-orders for the Optimus-103 will start on December 12. The price is unspecified at this time, but Art Lebedev has said the keyboard will cost 'less than a good mobile phone' (probably about $400). Don't expect to see those 10 programmable function keys on the left on this first version, though, as they will not make their debut until the Optimus-113, released later."

Can the Web Survive v3.0 217

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday November 19, 2006 @12:46PM from the still-waiting-on-the-2.0-bugfixes dept.

robotsrule writes "The battle lines between skeptic and evangelist are already drawn. Either way, Web 3.0 will either be the new face of the Web that launched a thousand empty business plans, or the tipping point into a vastly more exciting phase of the Web. This Web 3.0 article asserts that the marraige of artificial intelligence to the infrastructure of Web 3.0 will dramatically accelerate our capacity for distributed problem solving. However, it also issues dire warnings on the potential hyper-euphoria that will accompany it."

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