WHen I saw the headline, I was afrad that someone had stumbled on Henry Jenkins "Video Game Myths Debunked" had been rediscovered once again and posted. (Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the article, but it just gets discovered every once in a while as if it were a new article).
I would counter that with DVDs you get higher quality and bonus features that you don't get with itunes as well as the ability to resell the dvd's if you don't want them any more. Each purchase has positives and negatives. My ipod is an old generation 3 one that doesn't have a color screen, let alone the ability to play video, and I'd rather watch show son my tv than computer, so there isn't much call for me to buy shows on itunes. If I had a mediaceter computer or an ipod that played video I might have a different opinion.
or you could use something like emusic or audio lunchbox which sell mp3s and not files with drm on them. Microsoft and Apple are not the only choices. They are the most popular choices for music with DRM
except if i were to buy as many programs on itunes as i watch in a month, it would probably cost me more than my cable bill does for an entire year. 99 cents for one episode is way too much for me to do anything more than buy an occasional episode. I'll just wait for the reruns or for it to come out on dvd.
Actually probably not. On C-Band, the big dishes, all the religious channels and shopping channels are in the clear, meaning that you can get them without paying for them. I would imagine that the cable company just puts them on there so they can say they have x number of channels. After all, both the religious channels and the shopping channels both make their money in the same way: people calling in and giving them their credit card numbers. Therefore, they don't need to charge cable companies to carry them.
Sorry, I'm a videogame expert, not a legal one! Over here in the USA, people almost always use England and the UK interchangeably which apparetnly isn't correct.
I more or less post basically the same response to every single videogame law thread on slashdot because no matter how many stories are posted there is always at least one person who is under the assumption that ratings in the USA are given out by the government. I don't blame the people who post or anything. Online they are frequently from England or other countries where the ratings are government enforced, so there's no reason why they should know US laws. However, it does indicate the power of the rhetoric that these lawmakers use. Quite often the lawmakers or anti-videogame activists will say, "The ratings are voluntary and enforced by the industry themselves!" without mentioning that film ratings are rated in the same manner.
In the United States this is not accurate. In the USA, NO ratings on media are government enforced. All ratings from videogames to TV shows to movies are self-imposed. There is NO law that prevents minors from entering R rated movies. Therefore to single out games would take an overwhelming amount of evidence that games were harmful.
Even things like "XXX" movies are not government rated. If someone is arrested for selling pornography to a minor, they first have to establish that the item in question is indeed pornography (sure in many cases this is trivial, but there have been several cases where comic books containing sexual material have been seized and the court cases have basically revolved around proving they were pornographic).
Moreover, the film industry has largely taken to circumventing their own rating system by releasing the film as PG-13 in US theaters and then come out with an "unrated edition" on DVD which they commonly advertise as containing more nudity and/or violence. Even if it were illegal for a store to sell a child an "R" rated film, how could it be illegal to sell a film which isn't even rated?
We defined violence as acts in which the aggressor causes or attempts to cause physical injury or death to another character. We did not include damage to objects, accidental actions that unintentionally harmed another character, the effects of natural disasters, or the presence of dangerous obstacles that could not be attributed to the actions of a particular character. We also did not count as violence any intentional acts of physical force that represented normal play in a sports game (e.g., tacking in football or checking in hockey), because the intention of the player is technically to stop the other player without causing injury. We did count excessive physical contact in sports games, such as punching or otherwise attacking another player (e.g., after the football play was over).
This is a problem from the start. So unintentional harm is not violence? This instantly brings up the question of what the player's "intention" is. Is your intention to kill someone or to win? Is winning accomplished by killing?
They then continue: "We also did not count as violence any intentional acts of physical force that represented normal play in a sports game" which immediately sets up a binary division between sports and videogames. I've long argued that if we are worried about violence, we should be a lot more worried about the kids who hit each other so hard they have to wear padding and helmets than we should be about the kids sitting on the couch with controllers in their hands. Such a division also indicates that in the minds of the researchers that, seemingly without examination, sports are ok, but videogames aren't. If they didn't assume that sports were ok, then they would examine them for violence. If they didn't assume that videogames weren't ok, then they would not examine them for violence.
In the joystiq interview, when asked, "Do you feel that the violence portrayed in games like Pac-Man and Mario Bros. is harmful to minors? In what way does it affect their growth to warrant a rating exceeding that of the pre-designated E?"
Funny that when asked about the impacts of media violence she pretends not to be qualified to make a statement about it, but somehow refernces three people who have consistently been crying that the sky is falling when it comes to media violence for years. Were one to actually be objective, it would seem that one would suggest contacting people who have been less convinced that media violence is bad.
When asked, "To what extent are video games used as a scapegoat for politicians and activists?" she responds, "This is not a question that I have researched so I'm not sure how to answer it. My impression is that every industry thinks that it is the scapegoat for politicians and activists. This is America." So basically she is saying that the videogame industry is a bunch of crybabies and that it is common to whine about things that you have no reason to whine about. Sure, just like when the Comic Book industry was complaining that they were being scapegoated...
Finally, she concludes by stating, "We developed and consistently applied definitions for violence and other content." That is nice and all. However, being
ECW was forced on SciFi by NBC who now owns SciFI (ok technically NBC-Universal) WWE (who owns ECW) is on NBC owned USA network and when WWE wanted to bring back ECW NBC wanted to air it and shoved it on SciFi. Neither wrestling fans or SciFi fans can understand the logic of that.
And when the ECW fans heard it was coming back but on SciFi they thgouth WTF is this doing on this shitty channel? And fans STILL wonder. As it turns out WWE, who owns ECW has a deal to show them main show Raw on the USA netowork which NBC now owns. So WWE wanted to bring back ECW. NBC wanted to show it but they didn't want to put it on USA or Bravo, so SciFi was all that was left. That's the logic of corporations for you. Apparently, its debut was the highest ratings SciFi ever had. I'm a wrestling fan and a scifi fan, and it still doesn't make any sense. The random shit SciFi is asking them to put in like zombies and vampires to try to make some sort of sense aren't appealing to SciFi fans and are just irritating to wrestling fans.
So it seems that Microsoft's strategy of announcing new features as soon as a competitor comes along in order to encourage people to wait rather than buying a compatitor has changed with the times. Now they will just do a half-assed implimentation that relies on the community to maintain it in order to placate government rules and maintain market share rather than let a competitor in the door.
Of interst may be Jon Festinger's book Video Game Law which covers the various videogame laws that have been passed, but also lawsuits involving videogames from the cases involving Ralph Baer's patents up until Blizzards suit against makers of the bnetd project.
It seems to have been published only in Canada, but if nothing else it can be ordered from the publisher.
So this is just like OpenOffice.org then? I've read a lot of complains that OO.o is tightly controlled by Sun. Sun should just do as AOL did and spin off their open source projects as a seperate company.
There is also the fact that at least at Indiana University (Bloomington campus) I see the computer labs full of people checking webbased email, surfing the web, or writing papers (that seem to be pure text, of course I'm just walking by looking for a free computer so they very well may be doing very complex layouts). There doesn't seem to be much reason for the university to pay microsoft licence fees for that. Of course it is also the case that the mac labs are empty because people "don't know how to use macs" so I'm sure they would freek out if they saw Linux on the machines (of course because of people like that who would rather stand in line to use a windows machine than go into the mostly empty mac lab, I seek out the macs!).
The first season of the US Big Brother was similar. They did the challenges, but they didn't backstab or anything. Of course now they've changed it so that the audience doesn't vote but the house guests making it basically just Survivor in a house.
The post referred to in the article talks about how the developer thinks that the Acid2 Test is biased because the person who made it also has a page that says using IE is dangerous. My thought is if IE people think that the Acid2 test is biased against IE then why don't they create their own standards compliant test page that works better in IE7(beta) than in Firefox or Opera? There are tons of non-standards compliant IE-only webpages out there. It would be interesting to see a standards complaiant page where IE works better than Firefox or Opera.
From Jack's book, Out of Harm's Way, page 124: "From August 1992 until John [his son] went off to school, my job was to be his stay-at-home father." "We decided I would be the one to stay at home. It made sense. Patricia [his wife] had a great job, and my professional life, jumbled by a radio war [against Stern] and other efforts stemming from that endeavor, was less structured, to say the least."
So while I think that Jack did a wonderful thing in staying home to take care of his son, the fact is he hasn't had to have a job outside of the home in a long time. Now that his son is older, Jack must have a LOT of spare time on his hands.
Free time + moral indignation + law degree = lots of lawsuits
Is there a place where you can look up the cases a lawyer has tried in court? I am curious if Jack has actually won any of the countless lawsuits he has been involved in.
Threats are the standard MO for Jack. He constantly tells people that they need to do whatever he says, "or else." That is litterally what he says. Stop it or else. Here's just one example http://www.vgcats.com/jack.php
This is all a moot point, but I'm not entirely convinced that dishonesty is the key to winning. What would be lost if you told everyone before the vote exactly what you were going to do? You could still switch sides and still vote off firends but you could be honest about it and tell them ahead of time. There is still always the chance that this could result in the person you were voting out backstabbing you. However, isn't that always a possibility regardless?
So I don't know that being totally honest about what you were donig would decrease your chances of winning. Of course I don't think it would change you chances of loosing either.
All of this is to say that I'm bored formula of Survivor and all the variations that the show creators have made have not been intersting enough for me.
The key though, is that they pick people who will, in fact, play the game the way they want it played. Once Richard Hatch on the first season embodied the backstabbing and laying style of playing, a great number of people adopted that playing style and the producers of the show have, I can only assume, people that will play that way.
There is nothing about game that requires that you have to be dishonest or backstab. I have thought it would be facinating if once a group of players realized this and said, "look, we are going to be honest with each other. Here are our aliances and here is who we are going to vote out." Of course the flaw of that would be if someone lied about being honest, but at least it would be interesting in that for a while there would be no drama and no secrecy about the vote. Of course I also think it would be great if the contestants revolted and just said, "No. We aren't going to do your game. We are here. You've spent millions of dollars on setting this up so you can't just kick us all out. We're poor so you aren't going to get anywhere suing us. So we are taking control for the remained of the show." Neither of these things will ever happen because they screen out people who don't want to play the game the "right" way.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to have a PS2 to be a console gamer? So all those machines I've bought from Atari, Nintendo, and Microsoft don't count? Curses!
WHen I saw the headline, I was afrad that someone had stumbled on Henry Jenkins "Video Game Myths Debunked" had been rediscovered once again and posted. (Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the article, but it just gets discovered every once in a while as if it were a new article).
I would counter that with DVDs you get higher quality and bonus features that you don't get with itunes as well as the ability to resell the dvd's if you don't want them any more.
Each purchase has positives and negatives. My ipod is an old generation 3 one that doesn't have a color screen, let alone the ability to play video, and I'd rather watch show son my tv than computer, so there isn't much call for me to buy shows on itunes. If I had a mediaceter computer or an ipod that played video I might have a different opinion.
or you could use something like emusic or audio lunchbox which sell mp3s and not files with drm on them. Microsoft and Apple are not the only choices. They are the most popular choices for music with DRM
except if i were to buy as many programs on itunes as i watch in a month, it would probably cost me more than my cable bill does for an entire year. 99 cents for one episode is way too much for me to do anything more than buy an occasional episode. I'll just wait for the reruns or for it to come out on dvd.
Actually probably not. On C-Band, the big dishes, all the religious channels and shopping channels are in the clear, meaning that you can get them without paying for them. I would imagine that the cable company just puts them on there so they can say they have x number of channels.
After all, both the religious channels and the shopping channels both make their money in the same way: people calling in and giving them their credit card numbers. Therefore, they don't need to charge cable companies to carry them.
Sorry, I'm a videogame expert, not a legal one! Over here in the USA, people almost always use England and the UK interchangeably which apparetnly isn't correct.
I more or less post basically the same response to every single videogame law thread on slashdot because no matter how many stories are posted there is always at least one person who is under the assumption that ratings in the USA are given out by the government.
I don't blame the people who post or anything. Online they are frequently from England or other countries where the ratings are government enforced, so there's no reason why they should know US laws. However, it does indicate the power of the rhetoric that these lawmakers use. Quite often the lawmakers or anti-videogame activists will say, "The ratings are voluntary and enforced by the industry themselves!" without mentioning that film ratings are rated in the same manner.
In the United States this is not accurate.
In the USA, NO ratings on media are government enforced.
All ratings from videogames to TV shows to movies are self-imposed.
There is NO law that prevents minors from entering R rated movies.
Therefore to single out games would take an overwhelming amount of evidence that games were harmful.
Even things like "XXX" movies are not government rated. If someone is arrested for selling pornography to a minor, they first have to establish that the item in question is indeed pornography (sure in many cases this is trivial, but there have been several cases where comic books containing sexual material have been seized and the court cases have basically revolved around proving they were pornographic).
Moreover, the film industry has largely taken to circumventing their own rating system by releasing the film as PG-13 in US theaters and then come out with an "unrated edition" on DVD which they commonly advertise as containing more nudity and/or violence. Even if it were illegal for a store to sell a child an "R" rated film, how could it be illegal to sell a film which isn't even rated?
As far as I know the only real info released about the next version of office for mac is that it won't have visual basic.
First, their definition of violence
This is a problem from the start. So unintentional harm is not violence? This instantly brings up the question of what the player's "intention" is. Is your intention to kill someone or to win? Is winning accomplished by killing?
They then continue: "We also did not count as violence any intentional acts of physical force that represented normal play in a sports game" which immediately sets up a binary division between sports and videogames. I've long argued that if we are worried about violence, we should be a lot more worried about the kids who hit each other so hard they have to wear padding and helmets than we should be about the kids sitting on the couch with controllers in their hands. Such a division also indicates that in the minds of the researchers that, seemingly without examination, sports are ok, but videogames aren't. If they didn't assume that sports were ok, then they would examine them for violence. If they didn't assume that videogames weren't ok, then they would not examine them for violence.
In the joystiq interview, when asked, "Do you feel that the violence portrayed in games like Pac-Man and Mario Bros. is harmful to minors? In what way does it affect their growth to warrant a rating exceeding that of the pre-designated E?"
Her response was,
Funny that when asked about the impacts of media violence she pretends not to be qualified to make a statement about it, but somehow refernces three people who have consistently been crying that the sky is falling when it comes to media violence for years. Were one to actually be objective, it would seem that one would suggest contacting people who have been less convinced that media violence is bad.
When asked, "To what extent are video games used as a scapegoat for politicians and activists?" she responds, "This is not a question that I have researched so I'm not sure how to answer it. My impression is that every industry thinks that it is the scapegoat for politicians and activists. This is America." So basically she is saying that the videogame industry is a bunch of crybabies and that it is common to whine about things that you have no reason to whine about. Sure, just like when the Comic Book industry was complaining that they were being scapegoated...
Finally, she concludes by stating, "We developed and consistently applied definitions for violence and other content." That is nice and all. However, being
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Paradise
ECW was forced on SciFi by NBC who now owns SciFI (ok technically NBC-Universal) WWE (who owns ECW) is on NBC owned USA network and when WWE wanted to bring back ECW NBC wanted to air it and shoved it on SciFi. Neither wrestling fans or SciFi fans can understand the logic of that.
And when the ECW fans heard it was coming back but on SciFi they thgouth WTF is this doing on this shitty channel? And fans STILL wonder.
As it turns out WWE, who owns ECW has a deal to show them main show Raw on the USA netowork which NBC now owns. So WWE wanted to bring back ECW. NBC wanted to show it but they didn't want to put it on USA or Bravo, so SciFi was all that was left.
That's the logic of corporations for you.
Apparently, its debut was the highest ratings SciFi ever had.
I'm a wrestling fan and a scifi fan, and it still doesn't make any sense. The random shit SciFi is asking them to put in like zombies and vampires to try to make some sort of sense aren't appealing to SciFi fans and are just irritating to wrestling fans.
So it seems that Microsoft's strategy of announcing new features as soon as a competitor comes along in order to encourage people to wait rather than buying a compatitor has changed with the times. Now they will just do a half-assed implimentation that relies on the community to maintain it in order to placate government rules and maintain market share rather than let a competitor in the door.
Of interst may be Jon Festinger's book Video Game Law which covers the various videogame laws that have been passed, but also lawsuits involving videogames from the cases involving Ralph Baer's patents up until Blizzards suit against makers of the bnetd project. It seems to have been published only in Canada, but if nothing else it can be ordered from the publisher.
So this is just like OpenOffice.org then? I've read a lot of complains that OO.o is tightly controlled by Sun.
Sun should just do as AOL did and spin off their open source projects as a seperate company.
There is also the fact that at least at Indiana University (Bloomington campus) I see the computer labs full of people checking webbased email, surfing the web, or writing papers (that seem to be pure text, of course I'm just walking by looking for a free computer so they very well may be doing very complex layouts). There doesn't seem to be much reason for the university to pay microsoft licence fees for that.
Of course it is also the case that the mac labs are empty because people "don't know how to use macs" so I'm sure they would freek out if they saw Linux on the machines (of course because of people like that who would rather stand in line to use a windows machine than go into the mostly empty mac lab, I seek out the macs!).
The first season of the US Big Brother was similar. They did the challenges, but they didn't backstab or anything.
Of course now they've changed it so that the audience doesn't vote but the house guests making it basically just Survivor in a house.
The post referred to in the article talks about how the developer thinks that the Acid2 Test is biased because the person who made it also has a page that says using IE is dangerous.
My thought is if IE people think that the Acid2 test is biased against IE then why don't they create their own standards compliant test page that works better in IE7(beta) than in Firefox or Opera?
There are tons of non-standards compliant IE-only webpages out there. It would be interesting to see a standards complaiant page where IE works better than Firefox or Opera.
From Jack's book, Out of Harm's Way, page 124: "From August 1992 until John [his son] went off to school, my job was to be his stay-at-home father." "We decided I would be the one to stay at home. It made sense. Patricia [his wife] had a great job, and my professional life, jumbled by a radio war [against Stern] and other efforts stemming from that endeavor, was less structured, to say the least."
So while I think that Jack did a wonderful thing in staying home to take care of his son, the fact is he hasn't had to have a job outside of the home in a long time. Now that his son is older, Jack must have a LOT of spare time on his hands.
Free time + moral indignation + law degree = lots of lawsuits
Is there a place where you can look up the cases a lawyer has tried in court? I am curious if Jack has actually won any of the countless lawsuits he has been involved in.
Threats are the standard MO for Jack. He constantly tells people that they need to do whatever he says, "or else." That is litterally what he says. Stop it or else.
Here's just one example http://www.vgcats.com/jack.php
This is all a moot point, but I'm not entirely convinced that dishonesty is the key to winning. What would be lost if you told everyone before the vote exactly what you were going to do? You could still switch sides and still vote off firends but you could be honest about it and tell them ahead of time. There is still always the chance that this could result in the person you were voting out backstabbing you. However, isn't that always a possibility regardless?
So I don't know that being totally honest about what you were donig would decrease your chances of winning. Of course I don't think it would change you chances of loosing either.
All of this is to say that I'm bored formula of Survivor and all the variations that the show creators have made have not been intersting enough for me.
The key though, is that they pick people who will, in fact, play the game the way they want it played. Once Richard Hatch on the first season embodied the backstabbing and laying style of playing, a great number of people adopted that playing style and the producers of the show have, I can only assume, people that will play that way.
There is nothing about game that requires that you have to be dishonest or backstab. I have thought it would be facinating if once a group of players realized this and said, "look, we are going to be honest with each other. Here are our aliances and here is who we are going to vote out." Of course the flaw of that would be if someone lied about being honest, but at least it would be interesting in that for a while there would be no drama and no secrecy about the vote.
Of course I also think it would be great if the contestants revolted and just said, "No. We aren't going to do your game. We are here. You've spent millions of dollars on setting this up so you can't just kick us all out. We're poor so you aren't going to get anywhere suing us. So we are taking control for the remained of the show."
Neither of these things will ever happen because they screen out people who don't want to play the game the "right" way.
"I wanted to give it too thumbs up...but alas the technology wasn't around in my 9th grade shop class."
You must have spend more time in shop class than English class...