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First of all, let me just say that I'm loving this game so far (about 10 hours in). This game has all of the rich storytelling and character development that Bioware are famous for, with an updated graphics and combat system that really works well and is extremely polished.

With that out of the way, let me just say one thing: EA, keep your fucking money grubbing hands off of Bioware! You can see their "mark" on this game in the DLC.

In your party camp, there is a quest-giver that actually tries to sell you DLC! I started chatting him up, since he has a quest ! above his head. He starts talking about how Duncan of the Grey Wardens owes his family a debt, and would you be so kind as to assist him. I get 3 minutes through the conversation about how his family needs help, and just when I'm about to agree to help him, it gives me a menu option that says something like "Help him - Purchase Downloadable Content."

Let that sink in for just a minute... there is an NPC quest giver that tries to sell you content that is available on the day of release! This makes me think even more that EA intentionally stripped content out of the game to try to nickel and dime you. Tycho and Gabe talk about this and have a hilarious comic strip at Penny Arcade.

I'm still enjoying every minute of the game, but it kills the immersion when I have a quest giver try to hawk DRM laden "premium content". What makes it even worse, in order to get a storage chest, you have to purchase this content. No thanks, I'm not going to buy it. You already got my money, and that's all you're going to get.

how about "maybe they'll actually release a complete game and not ask people to buy an addon with the original release".

I'll pass, pass, not buying this for this exact reason. Oh and slashdot's sellout here is disappointing. The more people try to milk a game beyond it's cost the longer before they actually develop something new and interesting.

Nothing is incredibly strong stuff though - witness that it's almost impossible to tear toilet paper or a cheque book along the perforated lines, clearly indicating that less matter means a stronger material. I hypothesize that if we could find a way to remove 99.999999% of the matter from, say, common or garden steel we'd have something as tough as neutronium whilst weighing the same as a dried Mexican Staring Frog.

However, I'm convinced someone has stolen my idea and already incorporated it into modern blister packs.

Obligatory Penny Arcade comic whenever someone brings up McCloud.

from Natal. Here's why: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/5/

Quantum uncertainty. Chaotic emergent systems. The GIFT theory.

The only shocker to me is that it's gotten to the point where I can't hate politicians and large multinational corporations enough.

You may want to ask Gabe for some lessons on hate technique.

They have summed it up wonderfully.

I half wonder if Vista was just a sneaky plan to make anything else look good.

Self righteous PC gamer defending his views on Slashdot... check.

Let the Tycho speak.

But, I'm confused; why aren't you modded as funny? If putting a massively emotional/serious scene (for some) in a game is a ploy, I want every game developer conspiring in their secret lairs, now.

Unlike the rest of the internet, Facebook friends tend to be people who actually know each other in real life. Thus, the only people able to see and/or comment on the dead person's page will be people the dead person considered to be friends or acquaintances at least. Usually these people know each other as well, friend groups tend to be mutual.

Thus, you're far less likely to get the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory taking effect, because there's no anonymity involved.

Ahh.. more data in support of John Gabriel's G.I.F.T.

It happens in the sky:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/25/

The best thing about 3d parties are all the 3d women. All that proprietary "boob-jubbling technology."

Do you have source on this at all? Don't get me wrong, it could be very true, but some Google-fu of 360 sales numbers current gen console sales didn't show anything like this. The closest thing I really found it crazy 360 sale numbers was some estimate from EA and EA isn't really Microsoft so I guess they can say whatever they want there really. I have also never seen huge piles of 360s sitting in stores.

The only really silly sales claim I have seen this gen was a few from Sony http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/2/12/

Expect this to be used in the next Die Hard movie

Yeah, I could easily find several million people in the US who will agree with Mr. Kasperski. Some kind of a psychological analysis would be nice to look at. Or, the conclusions drawn by the psych people, anyway. Any takers?

I agree with what I assume to be Kasperski's motive: without anonymity, we'd know who controls all these spambots or who is involved in identity theft, or who's writing all this malware, or who writes all those racist trolls on Slashdot. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is undeniably true... make someone attach their name to what they write and they're more civil, more reasoned, and they generally tend to take responsibility for their words. Throw anonymity into the mix with an audience and you get a total fuckwad.

Imagine if people could drive a vehicle on the roads and be guaranteed that nobody could ever find out whose vehicle it was or who the driver was? Can you imagine the level of road rage that would result if someone pissed you off and you could simply ram them off the road with no repercussion? Today, the only anonymity we have on the roads is by walking, using a bicycle, or through a proxy such as a bus or taxi where someone else's identity is responsible for the driving.

The problem with Kasperski's approach is that it's completely impossible to retrofit the entire Internet for this kind of identification. Not only that, but there's no technical way to guarantee that it's unhackable. Your computer gets compromised somehow and now someone has the ability to do anything using your identity. And it fails to take into account a family computer, for example. Did John Smith really write that, or was it one of his kids fooling around?

So unless we want to turn the Internet into a place as highly regulated and enforced as the average Western nation's public roads, mostly anonymous it is.

Theres a cartoon with an equation:

It was titled the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" by Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/ (and yes, I just added 'Fuckwad' to my spellcheck dictionary)

But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.

Here are a few things that are done, frequently, under the cover of pseudo-anonymity on the Internet:

• Spamming
• Phishing and identity theft
• Malware distribution
• Botnet management and extortion

Please explain to me how a typical victim of these crimes deserves the consequences.

Obviously there are many more illegal acts committed routinely under cover of on-line anonymity, particularly those to do with infringing intellectual property rights and defamation, but I'm omitting those because there is at least the potential for another side to many of those stories, while the examples I've given above are pretty much black-and-white bad things.

Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things.

That's your opinion, and of course you're entitled to it. Still, I'd bet that you have never been on the wrong side of these "nuisances" to the point where they seriously screw up your life for months at a time. Not everyone is so lucky. Been there, done that, consoled the friends, been the guy who called the police.

The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.

There are much better solutions to those things than hiding behind anonymity: for a start, they include enforcing a healthy degree of responsibility and oversight within government, punishing harshly those who would harass others for their own benefit, and setting and openly enforcing (in both directions) a sensible legal framework for the relationships between producers and consumers.

Part of the concern I have with on-line anonymity is that in the cases where it has legitimate merits—and I don't for an instant dispute that anonymity can be a force for good under some circumstances—it tends to be more of a sticking plaster that treats symptoms rather than a fix for the underlying causes of problems. As I've noted before, if you need to rely on on-line anonymity to fight against a government so corrupt that the people cannot openly challenge it, then there are much more important rights than on-line anonymity to protect, and the time for the use of words alone has probably passed. For threats below the level of corrupt government, any good legal system should protect the right of its citizens to speak openly and honestly on matters of importance without fear of reprisal, just as it should balance such rights with the protection of innocents from defamation and invasion of privacy. In short, anonymity shouldn't be necessary, and where it seems to be, I believe the benefits are often illusory.

Meanwhile, the basic downside of anonymity remains: if freedom comes with responsibility, then how do you hold someone accountable for their actions if you can't identify them? The combined cost of the acts I listed at the start of this post, both to society in general and to effective use of the Internet in particular, is not trivial, and that's before you even get into less tangible damage as evidenced by the GIFT.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/14/

Of course! That's what Nintendo fans want.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/9/15/

"I can't wait to buy Zelda again."
"Which one?"
"All of them. Over and over."

I'm a huge Nintendo fanboy, and I don't dare count how many copies of Zelda and Metroid I've purchased over the years.

You asked for it.

Except for Gabriel's Law of Internet Fuckwad.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

Wrong.

A golf handicap works to change the game. At the top levels (about 5 or below) it's primarily about skill. Competition between low-handicappers is amazing to watch.

Between other players, the handicap isn't about "leveling" the playing field, it's about rewarding improvement. The same is true in bowling, which uses a similarly designed handicap system. Your overall team wins not by merely playing the same game at the same level every time, but by getting better consistently. It's not even close to a "rubberband."

Tennis ladders and beginner/expert/pro leagues are the alternative, they deliberately try to stratify the game so that players of approximately-even skill can play together. Also true of this point is chess point rankings, which again reward improvement - you can't gain points by going around just defeating people way below you, you have to play people who are either near your level, or above your level. You have to challenge yourself and improve your skills.

Rubber-banding is about "snapping back" the leader. Handicaps, organized-skill-tier leagues, and numeric skill rankings are about determining who the best opponent is to teach you something to improve your skills, while not overwhelming you so much that you feel the game is hopeless.

Rubberbanding is horrible because it either teaches bad sportsmanship to those in the lead, or it makes people give up the game in disgust, and it does nothing to improve the skills of those receiving the dubious "benefit" of the rubberband mechanic.

penny-arcade

Your mom is a classy lady! Or at least that's what this decision reminds me of.

Has Nintendo legally gone after anyone for homebrew?

Naw, last I heard they keep their lawyers super busy going after people who mention their favorite Nintendo games in their online profiles.

Has Nintendo legally gone after anyone for homebrew?

Naw, last I heard they keep their lawyers super busy going after people who mention their favorite Nintendo games in their online profiles.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/2/11/

Actually... My GF's kid found out what DRM means.

I gave him a new computer. He took an Ubuntu install at my suggestion on the same. As he was moving his music over to the new machine, he discovered that he couldn't play some of his tracks he'd ripped from his CD collection (He has quite a bit of music...) on the new PC's media player. There was a one-to-one correspondence to tracks he had that wouldn't play right on all of his players. He put two and two together on this...

Windows had "protected" his music he'd ripped and unless you have all the right license keys on the device you're playing it on- no music from those files.

We're in the process of remastering his music to MP3 so it'll play on everything and not impede his use of what he legally has copies of. He's not a geek like this crowd- and he's telling his friends and showing them. DRM is defective by design and eventually everyone runs afoul of it, even the non-techies. All it takes is explaining to them that the "broken" they just encountered is DRM and not something that putting in a new Blu-Ray or similar will fix, they won't be very happy about it. It's already happening. It just takes a bit of time as the media companies don't seem to want to leave it at where they had it or have it now- they want absolute control a' la EA and Spore.

This has been a pretty poor "covert battle" since the belligerents manage to sneak it into international headlines on an almost weekly basis without any combat engagements.

Like this?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

It will be interesting to see if they do any better.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/17/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/11/19/

This goes to prove the importance of 'anonymity' in the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

That's a very good point. So you can't get your programming on the machine? So what? Don't buy it. It's not for you.

You already have access to netbooks, laptops, cell phones (if you were mad enough to do your programming work on one).

This seems to be a stab at what the PDA originally was - a personal organizer that can blend seamlessly with work space. A majority of the people in the working world who would see a device like this as practical are exactly the sort of people who have to maintain calendars, make meetings, find locations, and just generally keep their world organized.

When I was working as a spotter for a utility locating company I could certainly have used something like this. Naturally, the computer maps were terrible back then (1997 or so) however, and an always-on internet connection was unheard of. Somebody who works for a living on the road and needs to find unfamiliar places on tight time schedules would love a device that worked as demonstrated.

This is also not to say that there'd be only one mode. They're showing the applications which are likely to catch the attention (and maybe pre-orders) of big business.

For consumers, how about some sort of fully integrated painting application using some of the physically-simulated painting research that has been done at the UW and Microsoft Research? How about taking that notebook metaphor along with tablet sketching and selling it to math majors? How about integrating Microsoft Visio and some sort of commercial drafting software with drawn shape recognition and intelligent snap settings to produce the ultimate portable CAD device for architects, landscapers, network specialists who need to sketch up a quick organizational chart, etc?

Students and professionals of virtually every kind could come up (with a little imagination) with a way that a device like this could be handy. Does hat mean it WILL be handy in those ways? No, but we're talking about the potential of a device and some rough interface concepts that MS has put out, not Microsoft's actual implementation once the marketers have gotten through with it.

If they found some alternate way to monetize it (as with the Amazon Kindle and its bundled store), they might even decide to subsidize some sort of cellular data service (like the Kindle). Would you see value in it then? I don't think it's likely that Microsoft would do something like that, but then again, I'm not that sure they could monetize the use of the device to the extent that Amazon has the Kindle.

I think Penny Arcade got this one right.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/20/ Suspended in a perpetual nightmare

I go into a Microsoft store, and what I can expect is... a store of people vastly familiar with the Mac but with little Windows experience.

Genius.

No no, they're not geniuses anymore, they're metaminds!

this rather succinctly http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/02/09/

Aren't you a little old for Pokemon?

According to Penny Arcade, he gets "hand jobs from Steve Jobs". http://www.penny-arcade.com/docs/7-2-07b.jpg

Not to reply to myself, but...

There's more.

Or the garage.

Don't go into Power Dome A.

You place multiplayer capabilities at #374? Seriously?

Given the lame state of games on most servers, I don't place multiplayer very high either.

See The More Things Change for an example among many...

You place multiplayer capabilities at #374? Seriously?

Yeah, totally. Half-life, Zelda, Splinter Cell, and Super Mario Bros. would have been so much better as MMOs.

(/me stops typing before I start to sound like Gabe.)

Heh... Yeah, it's negative. But it's merely an annoyance to the pirates; and a disaster (Warning: Volumes of Coarse Language...) for the end-users and a financial drag on the company that deploys it.

As negative impacts go, EA's starting to figure out that draconian measures don't quite sit well with people and had to relent on the DRM at least a bit.

And it is crunch time!

If you want a t-shirt and you went to PAX, someone is selling these.

This definitely qualifies as the worst swag ever, though. (I'm fairly sure I have it, though I haven't been to a doctor to have it confirmed.)

The symptoms don't seem that bad compared to a regular flu, except the fact that I'd rather lie down in bed and sleep than even play video games most of the time.

Only person who should be legitimately worried is Tycho and Brenna what with their new daughter.