I'd never heard of Brandt before this, but he sounds like an ass. His namebase.org website is ranked low in google, so he starts google-watch.org. He doesn't like his wikipedia bio, so he starts wikipedia-watch.org. Any bets on how long it takes him to start slashdot-watch.com????
The new Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood has been making great use of surveillance cameras. At first I was skeptical that they could track people by camera like that. Then I remembered they were in the UK and cameras really are everywhere. Sad when the creepiest feature of a sci-fi show is the one that already exists.
As a graduate student, whenever I'm grading my student's papers, I almost always mark off for using encyclopedias or dictionaries no matter if they are Britannica, Webster's, Wikipedia, or Wiktionary. Just because anyone with internet access can edit one while another is published by people who are supposed to be professionals is largely irrelevant. Those types of works are general references intended for general audiences and basic information. There are more specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries, but in most cases no matter how accurate Britannica or for that matter wikipedia are, if you are writing an academic paper, there are better and more specialized sources for students to use. Moreover, going to a website and simply typing in the topic of your paper is just lazy. At least show me you've put some amount of effort into this assignment! At least type your paper topic into Google Scholar rather than Britannica.com or Wikipedia.org
On the other hand, academics who complain, "I looked up subject X and it was inaccurate" and don't try to fix it are either ignorant about how wikipedia works, or are snobs who would rather point out the faults in something rather than try to improve them.
I use wikipedia all the time to look up anything I just happen to be curious about and whenever I find a topic that I find an error in or find lacking, I try to help improve the article. I wouldn't dream of using it in a paper in place of a more specialized source.
Jack is such an expert on technology he threatened to sue people who emailed him responses to his comments when gamepolitics was on livejournal....then someone pointed out that in his livejournal account the option to get emailed every time someone responded to him was turned on and all those emails were automated because of his settings...
What about the other side? What about what I should allow people to do with MY ip? What about a service like Turnitin which takes the copyright of a student's paper? What about situations where musicians say, "Sure, do whatever you want with my music" but the record company says, "no, it is ours now?"
What about the situation where, I as an academic am at least partially paid by a university to publish papers? Most academic publishers will take the copyright of my work if they publish it (despite the fact that a lot of academic journals are ran by academic organizations which are created by the academics themselves) then the publishers sell access to my paper (along with all the other papers they have published) to a company like Ebsco which sells access to their database of articles to universities. So my university has paid me to write, but then has to pay a company in order to get access to the article which they paid me to write in the first place. Then there is the fact that if I want to use that article as the basis for a book, I have to ask, "Can I please, please use my own article which you didn't even pay me for?" because I no longer own my own ip. While it is the common practice for journals to allow this, I'd rather not rely on the graciousness of a company to let me the work which I created.
(Of course one may argue that I shouldn't have given them my IP in the first place, but the whole tenure system in most academic institutions favors publishing. So if I want to keep my job, the institution of higher learning is indirectly insisting that I give away my IP to some other company which will then charge them to get access to it again.)
first, it would be good to see what they think about intellectual property. What do they think it is? I would teach the class based on the current topics: file sharing, copyright extension (make sure that they understand the differences between copyright and trademark) public domain, gpl's philosphy. But also bring up issues such as Turnitin.com which has been discussed here (i'm too lazy to look it up) and the fact that this is a business founded on taking student's intellectual property. I wouldn't be afraid to introduce them to copyfighting, copyleft, or creative commons. Ask them who benifits from ownership of intellectual property, who is supposed to benifit and who actually does benifit. Show them one of those commercials that say downloading music is stealing and ask them if copyright infringement is the same as stealing. If they are college students they are undoubtably familiar with downloading music films and programs. A discussion of the ethics of that would be an excellent place to start.
I know they blocked it, but I was under the impression that Real just tweaked it again so it works. Is there something on one of those links that says that Real is no longer selling or supporting ipods?
So in addition to the commentary about the ipod being largely irrelevent to the article, the article is largely a rehash of an earlier story. So in honor of that, I'm going to dupe my comment on that story:
While I can understand how someone might find current political activities so deplorable they might want to leave the USA, I think that is a really big leap. Call me crazy but I would think about moving somewhere withing the USA first. It is a lot easier-no immigration hassle, no learning a new language. While it is all the same country, there is a lot of variation between different parts of the country. There's more to the US than the coasts and cities. According to wikipedia, Europe is 10 400 000 square kilometers in size, while the US is 9,631,420 square kilometers in size. I find it hard to believe that in a country nearly the size of Europe, even if parts of it are largely uninhabited, you couldn't find a place where you could be happy.
Cover art is fine. It can be a nice visual hint if you have the device on shuffle and a song you aren't familiar with plays, you can glance at the cover and maybe figure out who it is a bit quicker than by reading. -- and you have to something to show off that color screen.
However, I agree, if you are listening to music, you aren't really looking at the screen. I think the number one thing that music players need to do is turn off the screen after 30 or something while playing music. There's no need to power that screen if you can't even see it.
Since you don't know if you should do it, I'm assuming no one has specifically given you authority to do it. Therefore, you just do the number one corporate run-around "I'm not authorized to do that." Then if they as who is, tell them you don't know.
Are you in the USA? While I know that other countries have actual laws regarding ratings, I am unaware of any place in the USA which does. If you are in the USA, where? How do such laws apply to unrated films? or selling "unrated editions" of dvds? What if a film theater wanted to show a film from before 1968 when the MPAA ratings were created? Because of things like this, I would be very surprised if there were places in the USA where municipalities are actively enforcing such laws.
While I know that you can right click to access a menu to add a pare as a bookmark, I really really hate the fact that in the bookmark menu the add bookmarks and manage bookmark controls scroll with the rest of the bookmarks. I can't tell how many times I've been at the end of a long list of bookmarks and had to scroll all the way back up to the top of the list to access the "bookmark this page!" In IE6 the manage and add "favorites" menu items stay put. That's teh ONLY thing that IE does better than Firefox!
I found 1602 incredibly incredibly disappointing. Sure there was a great deal of detail that was really well researched and clever, but when it came down to it there wasn't anything more to the story than "Marvel characters in 1602." While some might argue that the journey was the point, I disagree.
However, if the money from 1602 helps get Miracleman back in print, then I won't regret buying 1602 at all.
I agree. I was a huge fan of the Sandman when it came out, and his other works (mostly his collaborations with Dave McKean), but since the end of Sandman, I've not read anything of his I liked. I thought American Gods was interesting, but just not compelling. I thought 1602 was horribly horribly boring. Eternals is better than 1602, but I'm not sold on it yet. It is a horrible feeling when you start to think that maybe the writer, show, or team that you thought was really really good just might turn out to be very average and just had one amazing run. I'm starting to think that Gaiman might be one of those.
Think of Gametap like AOL (or at least what AOL was like during its peak). It is a "portal" that is seperate from the rest of the computer. You start it up and you are in their UI, which isn't too bad, but it is only Gametap, not a little window like Steam. Gametap is a subscriber service, so it is the Napster or Rhapsody of gaming. You stop paying, you stop playing. Look at the game list. There are lots and lots of consol games, but subscribing just for Uru Live would be a bit extreme. Only for the hardest of the hardcore Myst fans. They are going to release a stand alone version, aren't they?
It is unaccurate and, as I understand it, everyone in the industry knows it. Not only do they not measure internet viewing, but they don't measure dorm rooms where hundreds of thousands of college students live, or public viewing like sports bars which are packed full of people watching sports every weekend. Not being able to measure viewing of downloaded shows isn't an entirely new problem, but just makes an existing problem worse.
From the article: "Games are the new frontier, the way to enlighten an audience and immerse them. How can a guy like Chase be so disinterested in that? Well, he's not a gamer, he admits."
So someone who doesn't know much about games can judge them? Fine. I've never seen the Sopranos but I can tell you I think it is boring, lame and cliched. Oh Italian-Americans, they must be in the mafia, right? How original. And I bet there is lots of killing people when they make each other mad. Wow, how ground breaking. Television is a vast wasteland which simply recycles plots and cliches from other television shows and movies.
As I said, I've never seen the Sopranos but I've seen the dvds sitting on the shelves at the store and Goodfellas was on cable the other night. Television shows and movies like the Sopranos have a function. It's a sedentary function. You watch a mobster go from here to there, shoot that, drive this, knock that down, jump up here. That's how the Sopranos works. So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, they can figure in. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn't really what a game was about.
The act of watching a movie or a TV show or reading a book, God forbid, you're seeing someone else's story and you can go through their story and learn from it or feel with it or laugh at it without having to go through any of the pain or the adventures. The game is different: There is accomplishment, really, any emotional sense of accomplishment. You do feel the pain of failure and the feeling of adventure. Where in the Sopranos is the sense of accomplishment that you get at the end of a game? Where is the challenge in playing? Where is the skill?
See how easy it is to criticize something you don't like and don't know anything about?
When A9 first debuted, it used google results, so it didn't really matter. Now it uses msn's search, it isn't nearly as good, but once or twice a week instead of typing in a url, I'll just search A9 for the title of the website. 1.5% may not be much, but it takes so little effort that it is worth it. I just checked and the pi/2 discount is still in effect, so I'm not sure if that actually is going away or if they just aren't promoting it any more.
As I posted on my blog, if you look around the courtv site, you see lots of coverage of Cody Posey's case. During a police interview Posey claimed his father forced him to have sex with his step-mother and during the trial testified that his father has emotionally and physically abused him for years. So Thompson is arguing that playing videogames is more dangerous than child abuse.
Looking at the details of the case,and reading between the lines, it basically seems that the father's side of the family denies all the abuse charges and wanted Cody Posey sentenced as an adult, while the mother(birth mother, not step-mother) and her side believes all the abuse charges and wanted Cody Posey sentenced as a minor. He got sentenced as a minor, so the father's side is basically mad about it.
The lawsuit is a wrongfull death suit against Cody himself as well as Take 2. Therefore, it seems certain that Cody's mother's side of the family will be pushing the abuse angle heavilly. Therefore, I can't imagine that this suit will actually even get to talking about videogames. I imagine that it will be mainly about excrusiating detail about the abuse.
Moreover, Sanders, the lawyer in New Mexico who is actually trying the lawsuit does not seem to be associated with a large law firm, so a) if it does actually focus on videogames, it will be Sander and Thompson against an army of corporate lawyers and b) the research I found about Sanders indicates that he is mainly a contract lawyer which doesn't seem so great of a choice for such a lawsuit.
Jack is in way over his head and is caught in between this battle between the father's family and the mother and her family. I'm really tempted to think that Jack chose this case specifically so that he could get a bunch of publicity and then when the case starts and focuses on the abuse, he can pull a New Orleans move and back away blaming family for not telling him about the abuse and accusing the horrible big law firm of ganging up on little old him.
While it is widely reported that the zune won't work with microsoft's own "Plays For Sure" I haven't heard anything about if it will work with the 360. I don't own a 360, but I'm curious because when the 360 came out they made a big deal about how you could plug an ipod into it and play the songs on it. It would be pretty interesting if they didn't bother giving their own player the same capability.
While I hate clearchannel, they are bad enough there is no need to exagerate. They don't own ALL the radio stations, simply the majority of them. There are a couple of other companies, such as Infinity Broadcasting (which I guess has changed their name to CBS Radio) and Cumulus which are jsut as bland and generic. I only point this out so as not to give those whoare not in the US the impression that the radio situation is any bleaker than it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never heard of Brandt before this, but he sounds like an ass. His namebase.org website is ranked low in google, so he starts google-watch.org. He doesn't like his wikipedia bio, so he starts wikipedia-watch.org. Any bets on how long it takes him to start slashdot-watch.com????
The new Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood has been making great use of surveillance cameras. At first I was skeptical that they could track people by camera like that. Then I remembered they were in the UK and cameras really are everywhere. Sad when the creepiest feature of a sci-fi show is the one that already exists.
As a graduate student, whenever I'm grading my student's papers, I almost always mark off for using encyclopedias or dictionaries no matter if they are Britannica, Webster's, Wikipedia, or Wiktionary. Just because anyone with internet access can edit one while another is published by people who are supposed to be professionals is largely irrelevant. Those types of works are general references intended for general audiences and basic information. There are more specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries, but in most cases no matter how accurate Britannica or for that matter wikipedia are, if you are writing an academic paper, there are better and more specialized sources for students to use. Moreover, going to a website and simply typing in the topic of your paper is just lazy. At least show me you've put some amount of effort into this assignment! At least type your paper topic into Google Scholar rather than Britannica.com or Wikipedia.org
On the other hand, academics who complain, "I looked up subject X and it was inaccurate" and don't try to fix it are either ignorant about how wikipedia works, or are snobs who would rather point out the faults in something rather than try to improve them.
I use wikipedia all the time to look up anything I just happen to be curious about and whenever I find a topic that I find an error in or find lacking, I try to help improve the article. I wouldn't dream of using it in a paper in place of a more specialized source.
Jack is such an expert on technology he threatened to sue people who emailed him responses to his comments when gamepolitics was on livejournal. ...then someone pointed out that in his livejournal account the option to get emailed every time someone responded to him was turned on and all those emails were automated because of his settings...
What about the other side? What about what I should allow people to do with MY ip? What about a service like Turnitin which takes the copyright of a student's paper? What about situations where musicians say, "Sure, do whatever you want with my music" but the record company says, "no, it is ours now?"
What about the situation where, I as an academic am at least partially paid by a university to publish papers? Most academic publishers will take the copyright of my work if they publish it (despite the fact that a lot of academic journals are ran by academic organizations which are created by the academics themselves) then the publishers sell access to my paper (along with all the other papers they have published) to a company like Ebsco which sells access to their database of articles to universities. So my university has paid me to write, but then has to pay a company in order to get access to the article which they paid me to write in the first place.
Then there is the fact that if I want to use that article as the basis for a book, I have to ask, "Can I please, please use my own article which you didn't even pay me for?" because I no longer own my own ip. While it is the common practice for journals to allow this, I'd rather not rely on the graciousness of a company to let me the work which I created.
(Of course one may argue that I shouldn't have given them my IP in the first place, but the whole tenure system in most academic institutions favors publishing. So if I want to keep my job, the institution of higher learning is indirectly insisting that I give away my IP to some other company which will then charge them to get access to it again.)
first, it would be good to see what they think about intellectual property. What do they think it is?
I would teach the class based on the current topics: file sharing, copyright extension (make sure that they understand the differences between copyright and trademark) public domain, gpl's philosphy. But also bring up issues such as Turnitin.com which has been discussed here (i'm too lazy to look it up) and the fact that this is a business founded on taking student's intellectual property. I wouldn't be afraid to introduce them to copyfighting, copyleft, or creative commons.
Ask them who benifits from ownership of intellectual property, who is supposed to benifit and who actually does benifit.
Show them one of those commercials that say downloading music is stealing and ask them if copyright infringement is the same as stealing.
If they are college students they are undoubtably familiar with downloading music films and programs. A discussion of the ethics of that would be an excellent place to start.
I know they blocked it, but I was under the impression that Real just tweaked it again so it works. Is there something on one of those links that says that Real is no longer selling or supporting ipods?
While I can understand how someone might find current political activities so deplorable they might want to leave the USA, I think that is a really big leap. Call me crazy but I would think about moving somewhere withing the USA first. It is a lot easier-no immigration hassle, no learning a new language. While it is all the same country, there is a lot of variation between different parts of the country. There's more to the US than the coasts and cities. According to wikipedia, Europe is 10 400 000 square kilometers in size, while the US is 9,631,420 square kilometers in size. I find it hard to believe that in a country nearly the size of Europe, even if parts of it are largely uninhabited, you couldn't find a place where you could be happy.
Real player has worked with the iPod for a while now http://www.real.com/beta/harmony.html http://service.real.com/realplayer/support.html?se ction=iPodRPinstall
It made a lot of news when it was released, but it looks like everyone's more or less forgotten about it.
Of course, I've never used it and I'm not aware of anyone who has, so maybe the geek cred of DVD Jon will make this effort more successful.
Cover art is fine. It can be a nice visual hint if you have the device on shuffle and a song you aren't familiar with plays, you can glance at the cover and maybe figure out who it is a bit quicker than by reading. -- and you have to something to show off that color screen.
However, I agree, if you are listening to music, you aren't really looking at the screen. I think the number one thing that music players need to do is turn off the screen after 30 or something while playing music. There's no need to power that screen if you can't even see it.
Since you don't know if you should do it, I'm assuming no one has specifically given you authority to do it. Therefore, you just do the number one corporate run-around "I'm not authorized to do that." Then if they as who is, tell them you don't know.
Are you in the USA? While I know that other countries have actual laws regarding ratings, I am unaware of any place in the USA which does. If you are in the USA, where? How do such laws apply to unrated films? or selling "unrated editions" of dvds? What if a film theater wanted to show a film from before 1968 when the MPAA ratings were created? Because of things like this, I would be very surprised if there were places in the USA where municipalities are actively enforcing such laws.
It looks like OurMedia.org, which uses archive.org for storage has RSS for its users.
While I know that you can right click to access a menu to add a pare as a bookmark, I really really hate the fact that in the bookmark menu the add bookmarks and manage bookmark controls scroll with the rest of the bookmarks. I can't tell how many times I've been at the end of a long list of bookmarks and had to scroll all the way back up to the top of the list to access the "bookmark this page!" In IE6 the manage and add "favorites" menu items stay put. That's teh ONLY thing that IE does better than Firefox!
I found 1602 incredibly incredibly disappointing. Sure there was a great deal of detail that was really well researched and clever, but when it came down to it there wasn't anything more to the story than "Marvel characters in 1602." While some might argue that the journey was the point, I disagree.
However, if the money from 1602 helps get Miracleman back in print, then I won't regret buying 1602 at all.
I agree. I was a huge fan of the Sandman when it came out, and his other works (mostly his collaborations with Dave McKean), but since the end of Sandman, I've not read anything of his I liked. I thought American Gods was interesting, but just not compelling. I thought 1602 was horribly horribly boring. Eternals is better than 1602, but I'm not sold on it yet.
It is a horrible feeling when you start to think that maybe the writer, show, or team that you thought was really really good just might turn out to be very average and just had one amazing run. I'm starting to think that Gaiman might be one of those.
Think of Gametap like AOL (or at least what AOL was like during its peak). It is a "portal" that is seperate from the rest of the computer. You start it up and you are in their UI, which isn't too bad, but it is only Gametap, not a little window like Steam.
Gametap is a subscriber service, so it is the Napster or Rhapsody of gaming. You stop paying, you stop playing. Look at the game list. There are lots and lots of consol games, but subscribing just for Uru Live would be a bit extreme. Only for the hardest of the hardcore Myst fans. They are going to release a stand alone version, aren't they?
It is unaccurate and, as I understand it, everyone in the industry knows it.
Not only do they not measure internet viewing, but they don't measure dorm rooms where hundreds of thousands of college students live, or public viewing like sports bars which are packed full of people watching sports every weekend.
Not being able to measure viewing of downloaded shows isn't an entirely new problem, but just makes an existing problem worse.
Basically, I don't see why you'd spend money on these titles unless you're a more of a collector than a player.
I think you answered your own question. The article is about collecting, not playing.
From the article: "Games are the new frontier, the way to enlighten an audience and immerse them. How can a guy like Chase be so disinterested in that?
Well, he's not a gamer, he admits."
So someone who doesn't know much about games can judge them? Fine. I've never seen the Sopranos but I can tell you I think it is boring, lame and cliched. Oh Italian-Americans, they must be in the mafia, right? How original. And I bet there is lots of killing people when they make each other mad. Wow, how ground breaking. Television is a vast wasteland which simply recycles plots and cliches from other television shows and movies.
As I said, I've never seen the Sopranos but I've seen the dvds sitting on the shelves at the store and Goodfellas was on cable the other night. Television shows and movies like the Sopranos have a function. It's a sedentary function. You watch a mobster go from here to there, shoot that, drive this, knock that down, jump up here. That's how the Sopranos works. So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, they can figure in. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn't really what a game was about.
The act of watching a movie or a TV show or reading a book, God forbid, you're seeing someone else's story and you can go through their story and learn from it or feel with it or laugh at it without having to go through any of the pain or the adventures. The game is different: There is accomplishment, really, any emotional sense of accomplishment. You do feel the pain of failure and the feeling of adventure. Where in the Sopranos is the sense of accomplishment that you get at the end of a game? Where is the challenge in playing? Where is the skill?
See how easy it is to criticize something you don't like and don't know anything about?
When A9 first debuted, it used google results, so it didn't really matter. Now it uses msn's search, it isn't nearly as good, but once or twice a week instead of typing in a url, I'll just search A9 for the title of the website.
1.5% may not be much, but it takes so little effort that it is worth it.
I just checked and the pi/2 discount is still in effect, so I'm not sure if that actually is going away or if they just aren't promoting it any more.
As I posted on my blog, if you look around the courtv site, you see lots of coverage of Cody Posey's case. During a police interview Posey claimed his father forced him to have sex with his step-mother and during the trial testified that his father has emotionally and physically abused him for years. So Thompson is arguing that playing videogames is more dangerous than child abuse.
Looking at the details of the case,and reading between the lines, it basically seems that the father's side of the family denies all the abuse charges and wanted Cody Posey sentenced as an adult, while the mother(birth mother, not step-mother) and her side believes all the abuse charges and wanted Cody Posey sentenced as a minor. He got sentenced as a minor, so the father's side is basically mad about it.
The lawsuit is a wrongfull death suit against Cody himself as well as Take 2. Therefore, it seems certain that Cody's mother's side of the family will be pushing the abuse angle heavilly. Therefore, I can't imagine that this suit will actually even get to talking about videogames. I imagine that it will be mainly about excrusiating detail about the abuse.
Moreover, Sanders, the lawyer in New Mexico who is actually trying the lawsuit does not seem to be associated with a large law firm, so a) if it does actually focus on videogames, it will be Sander and Thompson against an army of corporate lawyers and b) the research I found about Sanders indicates that he is mainly a contract lawyer which doesn't seem so great of a choice for such a lawsuit.
Jack is in way over his head and is caught in between this battle between the father's family and the mother and her family. I'm really tempted to think that Jack chose this case specifically so that he could get a bunch of publicity and then when the case starts and focuses on the abuse, he can pull a New Orleans move and back away blaming family for not telling him about the abuse and accusing the horrible big law firm of ganging up on little old him.
While it is widely reported that the zune won't work with microsoft's own "Plays For Sure" I haven't heard anything about if it will work with the 360. I don't own a 360, but I'm curious because when the 360 came out they made a big deal about how you could plug an ipod into it and play the songs on it. It would be pretty interesting if they didn't bother giving their own player the same capability.
While I hate clearchannel, they are bad enough there is no need to exagerate. They don't own ALL the radio stations, simply the majority of them. There are a couple of other companies, such as Infinity Broadcasting (which I guess has changed their name to CBS Radio) and Cumulus which are jsut as bland and generic. I only point this out so as not to give those whoare not in the US the impression that the radio situation is any bleaker than it is.