Nick 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Microsoft's Great Patent Application: Xbox Achievements For Watching Advertising

    Nick ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2013 @ 08:38am

    Gaming the system

    I think I've already figured out how to game the system. See, the Kinect won't be able to tell whether you are watching the commercial or not, just if you are watching the TV or not, right? So what's to keep me from turning it on, unplugging the HDMI cable, and playing something else, such as oh I don't know a PS4? I can play video games all day, and as far as the Kinect will think, is that I am so engrossed in the commercials I am staring at the screen so fixedly. All while holding some strange device.

    Earn rewards, watch no commercials.

    But then, you are still being watched by Big Brother. Hope it's all worth it. And you paid 600+ (likely, and power usage) for the privilege of doing so.

  • On the post: Reports Of Xbox One's Handling Of Used Games Mobilizes Playstation Fans

    Nick ( profile ), 29 May, 2013 @ 02:10pm

    Re: Not quite right...

    I'd like to say that too, except that the PC has already LOST the used game market years ago. Haven't been able to do used games for over 10 years.

  • On the post: Xbox One Release: Tons Of Questions, Very Few Answers

    Nick ( profile ), 25 May, 2013 @ 08:29am

    Yeah, those were all a part of my original rant, all summed up as the fact that we are just losing ownership of our own products we are buying.

    I'd like to point to PCs as a bastion of freedom, but then I realize that my gaming library is still locked down to an account irrevocably tied to a single company. If they were to go out of business or to feel that I broke some arbitrary rule, I could lose well over thousands of dollars worth of video games, all because it is controlled online, electronically.

  • On the post: Xbox One Release: Tons Of Questions, Very Few Answers

    Nick ( profile ), 25 May, 2013 @ 08:25am

    subscription models suck

    Indeed. In a time where a lot of CURRENT video game subscription models are discovering that F2P is more profitable than subscription, we're finding that one-time purchase programs such as Adobe and Office are experimenting (I hope) with subscriptions. It seems they are stuck 10 years behind the video game market. Perhaps in 10 years we will see a F2U (free to use) approach to office programs, where you get the base program and just buy at small prices the parts you use.

    That's actually not too bad an idea... Hmm, I may fire off an email to Microsoft right now.

  • On the post: Xbox One Release: Tons Of Questions, Very Few Answers

    Nick ( profile ), 24 May, 2013 @ 09:00pm

    Re: Re: Dont like it?? DONT BUY IT

    I know, but if I don't let my feelings known then a lost sale is just a lost sale and they don't know if it's because of the recession, betrayal (PS4), apathy, or outright disgust over their choices.

    And honestly, it disgusts me that as people - even people of a corporation - will make such anti consumer choices in their products. That none of their designers would ever stopped and just asked themselves for any of these if it was even necessary.

    Yeah, some of my earlier rants may have been a little petty, such as the non-upgradable hard drive, but that shouldn't even be an issue. I understand you can expand with USB drives, but external will always be slower than internal, not to mention splits storage amongst two places (will I have enough to install to my internal? nope, now to put it on my external). But with advances in technology, why is this even an issue. We should be advancing forwards. Microsoft broke ground by introducing a hard drive in their first Xbox console. Then to take a step backwards by not having it standard in the 360 was... astonishing. And it's still not upgradable.

    My choice on whether to buy this console (and I've bought a lot of them in the past) will be simple: leave in such anti-rental, anti-lending, always-on, always-Kinected decisions... and I simply won't buy it.

  • On the post: Xbox One Release: Tons Of Questions, Very Few Answers

    Nick ( profile ), 24 May, 2013 @ 08:51pm

    Re: Re:

    Heh, yeah, but if you click on profile, you'll notice that mine goes to a different user name. I just use my real name as my display name.

  • On the post: Xbox One Release: Tons Of Questions, Very Few Answers

    Nick ( profile ), 24 May, 2013 @ 08:02pm

    I... honestly can't understand any of the decisions they made so far regarding this console. Focusing so much on a rehashed shooter series that needs to stop for a few years, a focus on sports games that I can't imagine can do more than just be roster and graphics improvements year-to-year, and now all this.

    They are bowing to the publishers who - for the last 20 years - only in the last 3 years suddenly find used game sales an unsustainable business. How about, if you make a game that is worth keeping for more than the 5 hours you make the game last, people will KEEP the game longer than 5 hours? Instead, they are trying their damndest to kill the used game market like they did in the PC market (RIP used PC games).

    Then the non-upgradable hard drive, which was a feature the freaking PS2 had. It'd be a SHAME if people didn't buy your arbitrarily overpriced "official" high speed add-on USB drives, wouldn't it? Just like with the 360, which you stupidly decided to make as a baseline have NO hard-drive, so developers had to develop expecting one not to be installed.

    And now we have the Kinect. An always-on, always watching and listening camera and microphone with the same company which has patents for figuring out the number of people in a room and charging an account based on the number of viewers. It can't possibly go bad. Must make it mandatory. Nobody could possibly NOT want to participate in motion controls or voice activation, huh.

    And while we're at it, why are we so insistent on so much control over the devices WE purchase? Why do you insist on having the product phone home every damned day? You are treating every customer as if they are a dirty pirate in order to stop the 1% who actually are (console security was pretty good last generation, most didn't bother), and it won't even stop them! Instead, since the infrastructure in our country is still a joke, what with near monopolies in many cities, it is possible to not have internet. What's worse, you can not have internet after having NOT turned on your console on for 3 days. Maybe you just got back from vacation. Turn it on, no internet. Well, since you didn't phone home for 2 days, you must be a DIRTY PIRATE, NO VIDEO GAMES FOR YOU!

    Console about to check in, and you disconnect it to take to your brother's LAN party across town? Don't bother to hook it up to his internet, just LANing them together is hard enough? well TOUGH YOU DIRTY PIRATE! NO HALO FOR YOU! DON'T YOU KNOW THAT SUDDENLY HAVING TO NEED MORE PORTS ON A ROUTER IS PROOF THAT YOU ARE A PIRATE?

    *sighs* And the sad part about all of this? Is that my mother is actually interested in this. All she heard was a local news channel report about it talking about the cool gestures and hand waving about controlling your TV and cable box. Which I guess is EXACTLY who Microsoft cares about now. Not us gamers, but our mothers and fathers.

  • On the post: AT&T Says You Can Use Any Video Streaming App You Want… Just As Soon As It Can Get The Meter Running

    Nick ( profile ), 22 May, 2013 @ 01:00pm

    Why... Doesn't google and apple just release a non pre-loaded app that is identical to the main app to get around the "pre-loaded app traffic must be paid for" rule?

    Which, by the way, seems the complete opposite of what you'd think: Pre-loaded apps on a phone indicate that the cellular provider was ok with the app being on the phone in the first place (since the provider has some control over the OS that is installed, such as their logo plastered all over the boot screen). If an app WASN'T pre-approved, such as added on after the purchase, then you'd expect the cellular provider could MAYBE have a little bit of a gripe if their customers start using that app for a lot of traffic.

    Which is all bogus, of course, as all of this is just absurd. Traffic whether from a video app, VOIP app, or other, is all the same bandwidth. I wish they'd just come out and state that what they hate is not that people use their bandwidth limits, but that people ACTUALLY use the speed they were given. It frustrates me that, similar to ISPs, they actually feel threatened when their customers use the speeds they pay for, and feel they have to punish them as a result.

  • On the post: A New Hope: How Going Free To Play Brought Redemption To Star Wars MMO

    Nick ( profile ), 20 May, 2013 @ 07:20am

    About Sim City

    It's a shame they haven't tried a similar strategy with other EA games like SimCity, instead choosing to lock the game up tighter than Han Solo trapped in carbonite with an always-online requirement nobody wants.

    Umm... I hated just about everything they put out about Sim City, especially the online-only DRM and the social aspects of it but... You can't really say that what happened here with SWTOR is the solution to Sim City's woes.

    All SWTOR did was remove the money investment that people needed, both in buying it and the monthly subscription. Nobody was complaining about Sim City's cost (aside from the people angry that PC games are costing $60, which was only that price for console games because of the massive license fee they pay to console makers), and it had no subscription.

    In fact, SWTOR still has "online-only" requirements, and unlike Sim City a lot of the game's calculations are done on servers. In addition, it is arbitrarily locking up a LOT of content behind their "optional" monthly subscription pay wall, meaning that free loaders can't even use it as much as they can or get the same items, unlike in Sim City which, after its initial investment everything is available.

    Long story short, I am not trying to defend Sim City's horrible choices. All I am saying is that F2P makes sense in situations, but what going F2P changed in this case would not apply to fix what was wrong with Sim City.

  • On the post: How Not To Email Constituents: The Brian Nieves Story

    Nick ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2013 @ 06:52am

    Re:

    Hmm, actually, I'd now like to see someone do that. Take every spam email you get, and sign up that address for every mailing list on the internet.

    Not that I expect that to work, what with every spam email most likely being not only unmonitored, but also a throwaway one-time deal.

  • On the post: Former DHS Official Says Boston Bombing Proves ACLU & EFF Are Wrong About Surveillance And CISPA

    Nick ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2013 @ 03:59pm

    Re: Re:

    Ok, not quite vigilanteism, I really meant just let people go about their lives, filming events to keep for their records. Eventually, someone will accidentally get bits and pieces here and there of people, such as a video of the finish line with in the distance a guy dropping a bag and walking away. in another video, the same guy is walking with the bag, and they get the face.

    I'm not at all asking people to now film things and pan the cameras to try to capture everyone doing everything in case later something happens and provide it to police, but I see how what I said could be interpreted that way.

    And yeah, this fascination corporations seem to have with monitoring us disturbs me. They may do it to get our reactions to an ad, so they can better try to brainwash us into buying their products even if we didn't want it and ignore it (thank you Axe bodyspray, but please go the f*** away). And how the government is, via acts like CISPA, is simply demanding companies who gather this info for their own records now pass it to the government for uses we CERTAINLY did not authorize when we signed up for that Netflix account.

  • On the post: Attention Game Developers And Console Manufacturers: 'Always On' Is NOT The Same As 'Always Connectable'

    Nick ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2013 @ 03:18pm

    Re: Attention 14-year-olds: quit playing games, leave the basement.

    I can picture it now:

    Scene - Daycare center, full of crying 6 year olds

    6 YO 1: Wahh, I don't like Barnie, I wanna watch Teletubbies!
    6 YO 2: The big scary purple dinosaur scares me! Waaa!

    Enter OOTB stage right, furious

    Hey, babies, if you don't like the show, LEAVE! I don't understand why you are sticking around in this childish environment!

    Looking satisfied with himself, OOTB strides pridefully out of the room. The babies look at eachother, realize he is right, instantly grow out of it, and demand the TV be changed over to Game of Thrones

  • On the post: Former DHS Official Says Boston Bombing Proves ACLU & EFF Are Wrong About Surveillance And CISPA

    Nick ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2013 @ 03:42pm

    They need to crowdsource law enforcement. I'm sure if they requested politely from civilians that were there to give up the phones (temporarily) to access videos and pictures people took, they could have identified the victims just as if we had governmental cameras watching our every move.

    The difference? With civilians incidentally filming me, I know they won't watch my every move as it happens to ensure I'm not breaking some silly law that nobody follows (jaywalking in suburban areas), aren't freaking out because I look middle eastern (well, some may), and won't keep the footage once there was no attack.

    I'm fine being caught on random film because I know I'm too ugly for anyone to want to keep a picture of, and aren't keeping it (like the government may) to watch my every move.

  • On the post: You've Got (No) Mail! Major Law Firm Blocks Employee Email Access

    Nick ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2013 @ 03:36pm

    Isn't this normal? Most big companies don't trust their employees not to goof off or use facebook, so block all internet access. Accessing personal emails seems like a normal deal to me (if being real strict jerks to their employees) and a company has every right.

    Heck, I've worked at 4 jobs in my life, one which had no computers, two blocked everything but the intranet or the company website, and one that let me use the internet at will (which I.... promptly abused, watching a few too many cat videos on youtube).

    And, well, even good computer users can be tripped up and introduce a virus. If a virus wants to get in, it will, and only staying off the internet is a good way to prevent a virus 100% of the time.

  • On the post: Andy Baio On The New Prohibition Created By Copyright

    Nick ( profile ), 16 Apr, 2013 @ 02:54pm

    A little story about patents

    I started work interning for a software company, who makes programs designed to help a central force (IT) manage up to thousands of computers. It can send software updates, or re-image computers entirely from backups, including all kinds of alterations to the hard drive structure. Specifically, I worked on the imaging part of the program.

    On that program, you can choose to image an entire drive, or image a specific partition. You can then re-deliver the image to that computer (or any other, for that matter) by, say, taking a single partition of a couple on a drive and making it the ONLY partition on the drive. One such use of this would be to remove the 5GB recovery partition some pre-built computers come with (or add it back in).

    The way the company does this is it essentially copies every single file off into a single folder-type file (.img), wipes the drive of its contents, then rebuilds the partition table to have the right number and then copies it back in.

    This massive waste of space (having up to the entirety of the old drive minus the small partition) copied to another computer while you wipe it seemed like a waste to me. I asked the developer of the program if it was possible to simply go into the small part of the drive where it says the partition 1 goes from, say, block 0 to block 65000 and partition 2 goes from block 65000 to 69000 and just make part 1 go all the way across. You can leave the data as it is, just change where you are allowed to store files.

    No, he said. Someone already patented it. A big corporation has the patent on being able to rewrite the partition table to delete or add partitions at will, so no other company can develop it themselves. I, not even a programmer, had figured out the simple steps to do it, yet if we were to implement said technique, we'd get sued because we couldn't PROVE we independently developed such technology. We couldn't PROVE that we didn't just copy their code. We couldn't PROVE that we weren't "inspired" by their hard work and the patent they made.

    And so, we have to do 2+ hours of work for a single computer, tied up gigabytes of information, just because I didn't think of the idea first. I didn't KNOW I wasn't first, or that someone else did it, or how they did it, but that doesn't matter. Just like in copyright, even though YOU can do all the work yourself (making a remix isn't as simple as copying someone's mp3 and posting it on the internet), you are not allowed to profit from the work you did on something.

  • On the post: Indian Parliamentary Committee Tells The Government To Protect Intermediary Liability

    Nick ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2013 @ 06:08pm

    Re: Re:

    I understand your point, but while guns are designed to kill people, it is still up to the end user who voluntarily purchased the item to use it in a responsible fashion. To use another product... Ornamental swords and various "ninja items". Throughout time they had been used to more easily kill other people, yet you shouldn't blame the sword maker if someone buys it and uses it against people.

    Guns come with all kinds of safety measures. By themselves, they cannot injure anyone (fingers caught in the action not counting), and must take an additional step of purchasing another item and loading it into the device. As well, most guns come with safety catches, some with multiple (grip safety, trigger safety, etc) to try to minimize accidents as much as possible.

    Not to mention the many MANY warnings in the manual stating to never point a device at another person (which means they intend these devices for other than killing, such as for entertainment at a shooting range or for hunting) whether loaded or not, whether the action is open or not.

    I still feel that even devices designed to be hazardous and deadly, if surrounded with enough warnings, instructions, and safety measures, should not cause the maker to be liable. If they were negligent in advertisement ("GUARANTEED NEVER TO MISFIRE!") or instructions, then sure, blame them. But don't do it just to add another name to the inevitable mass party lawsuit that comes from the persons own negligence ("I thought I had blanks in it when I pointed it at my friends face and fired!")

  • On the post: Indian Parliamentary Committee Tells The Government To Protect Intermediary Liability

    Nick ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2013 @ 04:24pm

    I have never felt like we should blame the makers of a product for the misuse of it by its customers. Especially guns. I think it is just wrong for people to want to sue bushmaster for, say, a guy going on a shooting spree.

    We need more of this here.

  • On the post: Lawyer Suggests That Prenda Law May Have Only 'Released' Movies It Sued Over As A Honeypot For Lawsuits

    Nick ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2013 @ 03:17pm

    Re: Re: Maybe he used it as a filelocker!

    But he is being stopped. See, he wants to get their real names based off their IPs so he can personalize the computer death screen message, but courts are refusing to allow the names to be released. If only he came clean about wanting to blow up their computers instead of take their names to shake down for cash, then this would all not have happened.

  • On the post: Lawyer Suggests That Prenda Law May Have Only 'Released' Movies It Sued Over As A Honeypot For Lawsuits

    Nick ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2013 @ 02:51pm

    Re: Re: Re: Comment all in the tag:

    Then wouldn't he reply to other comments, rather than shoot a comment and leave?

  • On the post: Lawyer Suggests That Prenda Law May Have Only 'Released' Movies It Sued Over As A Honeypot For Lawsuits

    Nick ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2013 @ 02:54pm

    Maybe he used it as a filelocker!

    Or... I know! He just wanted to send the file to his friend and bit-torrent was the only way! So he posted it on a site fully expecting that ONLY his friend who is the only other user authorized to download it would download it. It is NOT his fault that everyone else connected to his computer and accessed the movie stream pouring out of his house. In fact, they must have been guilty of the CFAA because they accessed the information on his computer without his permission! Expect them to be sued for a violation of the CFAA next.

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