And just to be lame and reply to myself, my other major complaint about Darksiders is the completely out-of-whack difficulty curve. Combat in the beginning of the game is brutally difficult because enemies can take out half your health in one hit. Each major "dungeon" you clear nets you another full life bar, basically their version of the Zelda heart containers. By the time you get to the final dungeon, you've got about 10 life bars and the enemies are still doing the same amount of damage. It's been a little while since I played it, but I'm pretty sure the health potions restored a ton of life too, even at the end of the game. The difficulty curve basically goes in reverse as a result. I died numerous times in the first dungeon during combat sequences (also due in part to the overly complex control scheme) but never came close to dying at the end of the game. I liked the game overall, but it wasn't tuned properly at all. I hope they fix that if there's a sequel.
That's actually one of the downsides to it. I enjoyed Darksiders overall, but it's trying to have a combat system the size of God of War mixed with the item-based puzzle solving of Zelda all at once. There are simply far too many controls in that game. It takes three button presses to fire the gorram boomerang weapon even when you have it equipped. When clicking the analog stick (you know, L3/R3, remember those?) is one of your primary action buttons, I think you need to look at simplifying your control scheme just a tad...
"Akin" to espionage? Sorry, that doesn't cut it in a court of law. What laws has he broken exactly? He's a citizen of Australia, not the US. He didn't procure any of the information they released; it was given to him by concerned whistleblowers. We have public officials and mass media calling for his arrest, and even assassination in some cases, and yet nobody has said anything about what laws he's broken.
This is true of Harper, but it's also true of pretty much every politician, especially at the federal level. The higher up the chain you go, the worse it gets. The good thing about this issue is that it's something the public can easily understand and get behind, at least on a fundamental level. Copyright law reform intricacies? They don't understand that. Massive increase to their Internet bill for stuff they're already doing today? That's something Joe Public understands.
I'm all for hating on Harper, but to be fair on this particular issue, it was the CRTC and not Harper who made the decision. I honestly don't believe that Harper was specifically aware of this until it became a PR nightmare. The main problem in this case is that the CRTC is appointed and not elected, and it's made up mostly of former telecom employees. Their recent decisions have shown that they either a) have no understanding of Internet issues at all, or b) simply favour major telecoms by default and are corrupt asshats. Or maybe both.
You seriously think Harper is doing this because it's in the best interests of the public? Hell no. This has become a political hot potato because of public outrage. None of the parties want to back Bell on this issue. The CRTC is a fucking joke, and it should be completely dissolved on the basis of recent decisions like this.
Fair enough, but if you want to truly meter Internet bandwidth usage, you damn well do it at a point that is fair in line with the actual costs of delivering it. When it costs pennies per GB to deliver, you don't charge $2-$3 for it. I would accept something like $0.10 per GB, but that would mean my current 200 GB cap from TekSavvy would cost $20 a month, and that's assuming I use it all. I can't see Bell thinking that's a good plan.
It has nothing to do with demonizing the "enemy". It's just people killing themselves in dumb ways, like the Darwin awards. I can always applaud stupid people eliminating themselves from the gene pool.
That's why I use TekSavvy's cable service instead of Rogers. Rogers has bandwidth caps so ridiculously low that there's literally no point to having a connection that fast. It's obscene how broken Internet service is in North America across the board. Both the FCC and the CRTC seem disinclined to do anything about it, however the whole usage-based billing thing is gaining quite a bit of attention in Canada right now. I'm glad to see people actually getting upset about it. Maybe it will have some impact after all.
Geohot was the one who threw the first punch, he broke through the hypervisior using "other OS" and "bus glitching", Sony removed "other OS" in response.
Geohot announced his intention to hack the PS3 in December of 2009 after the PS3 slim came out without the Other OS feature. This was the reason he started hacking it in the first place. Sony was the one who "threw the first punch" by removing an advertised feature from the newer PS3 models. Once he started finding cracks in their armour, they proceeded to forcibly remove it entirely via a firmware update for all PS3 models.
I'm just going to quote the Extra Credits guys here, because they hit the nail on the head: Sony? Do not tangle with the kind of people who install Linux on their PlayStations.
Well said. I do exactly this myself. I do use my name on there just so my friends know who I am, but that is literally the only piece of information you will get off Facebook, and you can't even find me on the search unless you know one of my friends. I'm also taking pains to restrict who I actually add, even if I do know them IRL. If it's somebody I haven't talked to in years and I have no intention of keeping up with in meatspace, forget it. I keep a small circle of close friends and that's it. I was just tired of not finding out about anything myself and relying on other people to tell me "Oh yeah, we're meeting up with so-and-so. You're not on Facebook so you didn't see it." I was impressed with how pushy they get for you to "complete" your account, though. Probably gets them lots of juicy info from less privacy-minded individuals.
Which is precisely why my first response to this was "Well, that's nice, but you still took a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality in the first place." If this is "standard procedure", then what they should be doing is apologizing for the procedure in the first place and changing that.
Personally, that fact alone is enough to make me like them. I know the vast majority of people will have no idea about this, but it's good to know there's at least one shining example of a company going FOS.
Well the DS does indeed have a comparably weak copy protection scheme. It's been cracked to all hell and piracy is pretty rampant on it from what I understand. You don't even need custom firmware like the PSP, just a flash card. Anyway, the thing I was trying to refute was that it took a full four years to do this, ergo the PS3 was more secure than any other system out there, and that their reason for doing it was piracy. The guys who cracked it wide open said that it didn't, it isn't, and they don't care about piracy. Their mod doesn't actually enable it; only running your own code. The only argument against this I've heard so far is "Well, I don't believe them".
I'm not even talking about whether it's right or wrong of them to do it in the first place. Of course they're not the only people that could have, but they were the only people who actually did. Did anybody else make any major announcements about progress on PS3 hacking? I'm not aware of any. Sure, pirate groups may have been trying, but they seem to lack the capabilities of the black hats in question here. Geohot and the fail0verflow team are the only notable ones I'm aware of, and their progress was spurred by the removal of the Other OS feature by their own admission and certainly did not take four years to accomplish. Their presentation on how they bypassed the security features makes it pretty clear that if these kinds of people were working on the PS3 since launch day, it would not have taken nearly as long as it did. The argument that it took four years of real work to accomplish this level of owning the system is simply false. It didn't take any more effort than other comparable consoles, such as the 360.
And I'm tired of people not bothering to read up on anything before commenting on it. The hacks that Geohot and the fail0verflow team performed were done on a similar timeframe to hacking the Wii/360, i.e. 12 months max. The reason it didn't show up for 4 years was because nobody was trying very hard, thanks to the Other OS feature allowing you to run your own code out of the box. The fail0verflow team very clearly made this point during their CCC presentation, which is in the link to their original story in the summary.
I agree it's one of the greatest things since sliced bread, but it's important to keep the "fun" context of Guitar Hero/Rock Band as well. People don't play it because they want to play a real guitar; they play it because it's fun. Now, I happen to think that learning some real skills from the game is insanely awesome. I started working on the easy difficulty levels having never touched a guitar before. Three weeks later, I can play power chords, and I've borrowed an acoustic from my father-in-law and I'm playing along with simple songs using open chords, while trying to learn to barre properly. I think this is awesome, but a lot of people look at that and go "I just want to play five buttons and have fun." That's perfectly fine too.
What I find most interesting about this is that people naturally think it's the least efficient method. It's been obvious to me for years now that it's clearly the most efficient method, whenever I've seen it employed.
According to New York Times Co. v. United States, I don't think that matters. The freedom of the press overrules the classified status of the government documents. Providing a means to submit the documents to them is not illegal.
Okay, if an EMP hit and everybody was affected, yes. We'd adapt. But if everybody else is online and using the Internet for everything that we do today, and you're the only one who isn't because you don't like the only provider you have available to you, then you're screwed.
Actually, no, you can't. Cable and cell phone, okay. But try living without Internet access for a few weeks and see how much it affects you. Internet access is almost as essential a service as water and electricity, and certainly as essential as local phone service.
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And just to be lame and reply to myself, my other major complaint about Darksiders is the completely out-of-whack difficulty curve. Combat in the beginning of the game is brutally difficult because enemies can take out half your health in one hit. Each major "dungeon" you clear nets you another full life bar, basically their version of the Zelda heart containers. By the time you get to the final dungeon, you've got about 10 life bars and the enemies are still doing the same amount of damage. It's been a little while since I played it, but I'm pretty sure the health potions restored a ton of life too, even at the end of the game. The difficulty curve basically goes in reverse as a result. I died numerous times in the first dungeon during combat sequences (also due in part to the overly complex control scheme) but never came close to dying at the end of the game. I liked the game overall, but it wasn't tuned properly at all. I hope they fix that if there's a sequel.
That's actually one of the downsides to it. I enjoyed Darksiders overall, but it's trying to have a combat system the size of God of War mixed with the item-based puzzle solving of Zelda all at once. There are simply far too many controls in that game. It takes three button presses to fire the gorram boomerang weapon even when you have it equipped. When clicking the analog stick (you know, L3/R3, remember those?) is one of your primary action buttons, I think you need to look at simplifying your control scheme just a tad...
Seriously. Fuck HDMI and all it stands for. You'll pry my analog component cables from my cold, dead hands.
"Akin" to espionage? Sorry, that doesn't cut it in a court of law. What laws has he broken exactly? He's a citizen of Australia, not the US. He didn't procure any of the information they released; it was given to him by concerned whistleblowers. We have public officials and mass media calling for his arrest, and even assassination in some cases, and yet nobody has said anything about what laws he's broken.
This is true of Harper, but it's also true of pretty much every politician, especially at the federal level. The higher up the chain you go, the worse it gets. The good thing about this issue is that it's something the public can easily understand and get behind, at least on a fundamental level. Copyright law reform intricacies? They don't understand that. Massive increase to their Internet bill for stuff they're already doing today? That's something Joe Public understands.
I'm all for hating on Harper, but to be fair on this particular issue, it was the CRTC and not Harper who made the decision. I honestly don't believe that Harper was specifically aware of this until it became a PR nightmare. The main problem in this case is that the CRTC is appointed and not elected, and it's made up mostly of former telecom employees. Their recent decisions have shown that they either a) have no understanding of Internet issues at all, or b) simply favour major telecoms by default and are corrupt asshats. Or maybe both.
You seriously think Harper is doing this because it's in the best interests of the public? Hell no. This has become a political hot potato because of public outrage. None of the parties want to back Bell on this issue. The CRTC is a fucking joke, and it should be completely dissolved on the basis of recent decisions like this.
Fair enough, but if you want to truly meter Internet bandwidth usage, you damn well do it at a point that is fair in line with the actual costs of delivering it. When it costs pennies per GB to deliver, you don't charge $2-$3 for it. I would accept something like $0.10 per GB, but that would mean my current 200 GB cap from TekSavvy would cost $20 a month, and that's assuming I use it all. I can't see Bell thinking that's a good plan.
They're not getting "gunned down by a firing squad". They're dying from their own stupidity. Completely different scenario.
It has nothing to do with demonizing the "enemy". It's just people killing themselves in dumb ways, like the Darwin awards. I can always applaud stupid people eliminating themselves from the gene pool.
I've never met anyone, even those who were religious, who didn't except the idea of evolution.
It seems the English instruction in the country also needs work to achieve acceptable levels.
Believing in reincarnation doesn't affect their beliefs of the scientific process and well-established scientific theories such as evolution.
That's why I use TekSavvy's cable service instead of Rogers. Rogers has bandwidth caps so ridiculously low that there's literally no point to having a connection that fast. It's obscene how broken Internet service is in North America across the board. Both the FCC and the CRTC seem disinclined to do anything about it, however the whole usage-based billing thing is gaining quite a bit of attention in Canada right now. I'm glad to see people actually getting upset about it. Maybe it will have some impact after all.
Let's get something straight.
Geohot was the one who threw the first punch, he broke through the hypervisior using "other OS" and "bus glitching", Sony removed "other OS" in response.
Geohot announced his intention to hack the PS3 in December of 2009 after the PS3 slim came out without the Other OS feature. This was the reason he started hacking it in the first place. Sony was the one who "threw the first punch" by removing an advertised feature from the newer PS3 models. Once he started finding cracks in their armour, they proceeded to forcibly remove it entirely via a firmware update for all PS3 models.
I'm just going to quote the Extra Credits guys here, because they hit the nail on the head: Sony? Do not tangle with the kind of people who install Linux on their PlayStations.
Well said. I do exactly this myself. I do use my name on there just so my friends know who I am, but that is literally the only piece of information you will get off Facebook, and you can't even find me on the search unless you know one of my friends. I'm also taking pains to restrict who I actually add, even if I do know them IRL. If it's somebody I haven't talked to in years and I have no intention of keeping up with in meatspace, forget it. I keep a small circle of close friends and that's it. I was just tired of not finding out about anything myself and relying on other people to tell me "Oh yeah, we're meeting up with so-and-so. You're not on Facebook so you didn't see it." I was impressed with how pushy they get for you to "complete" your account, though. Probably gets them lots of juicy info from less privacy-minded individuals.
Which is precisely why my first response to this was "Well, that's nice, but you still took a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality in the first place." If this is "standard procedure", then what they should be doing is apologizing for the procedure in the first place and changing that.
Personally, that fact alone is enough to make me like them. I know the vast majority of people will have no idea about this, but it's good to know there's at least one shining example of a company going FOS.
Well the DS does indeed have a comparably weak copy protection scheme. It's been cracked to all hell and piracy is pretty rampant on it from what I understand. You don't even need custom firmware like the PSP, just a flash card. Anyway, the thing I was trying to refute was that it took a full four years to do this, ergo the PS3 was more secure than any other system out there, and that their reason for doing it was piracy. The guys who cracked it wide open said that it didn't, it isn't, and they don't care about piracy. Their mod doesn't actually enable it; only running your own code. The only argument against this I've heard so far is "Well, I don't believe them".
I'm not even talking about whether it's right or wrong of them to do it in the first place. Of course they're not the only people that could have, but they were the only people who actually did. Did anybody else make any major announcements about progress on PS3 hacking? I'm not aware of any. Sure, pirate groups may have been trying, but they seem to lack the capabilities of the black hats in question here. Geohot and the fail0verflow team are the only notable ones I'm aware of, and their progress was spurred by the removal of the Other OS feature by their own admission and certainly did not take four years to accomplish. Their presentation on how they bypassed the security features makes it pretty clear that if these kinds of people were working on the PS3 since launch day, it would not have taken nearly as long as it did. The argument that it took four years of real work to accomplish this level of owning the system is simply false. It didn't take any more effort than other comparable consoles, such as the 360.
And I'm tired of people not bothering to read up on anything before commenting on it. The hacks that Geohot and the fail0verflow team performed were done on a similar timeframe to hacking the Wii/360, i.e. 12 months max. The reason it didn't show up for 4 years was because nobody was trying very hard, thanks to the Other OS feature allowing you to run your own code out of the box. The fail0verflow team very clearly made this point during their CCC presentation, which is in the link to their original story in the summary.
I agree it's one of the greatest things since sliced bread, but it's important to keep the "fun" context of Guitar Hero/Rock Band as well. People don't play it because they want to play a real guitar; they play it because it's fun. Now, I happen to think that learning some real skills from the game is insanely awesome. I started working on the easy difficulty levels having never touched a guitar before. Three weeks later, I can play power chords, and I've borrowed an acoustic from my father-in-law and I'm playing along with simple songs using open chords, while trying to learn to barre properly. I think this is awesome, but a lot of people look at that and go "I just want to play five buttons and have fun." That's perfectly fine too.
What I find most interesting about this is that people naturally think it's the least efficient method. It's been obvious to me for years now that it's clearly the most efficient method, whenever I've seen it employed.
According to New York Times Co. v. United States, I don't think that matters. The freedom of the press overrules the classified status of the government documents. Providing a means to submit the documents to them is not illegal.
Okay, if an EMP hit and everybody was affected, yes. We'd adapt. But if everybody else is online and using the Internet for everything that we do today, and you're the only one who isn't because you don't like the only provider you have available to you, then you're screwed.
Actually, no, you can't. Cable and cell phone, okay. But try living without Internet access for a few weeks and see how much it affects you. Internet access is almost as essential a service as water and electricity, and certainly as essential as local phone service.