Posting on Slashdot about punishing and abusing alleged pedophiles is primarily for getting aroused (or getting off). Getting aroused (or getting off) to posting on Slashdot about punishing and abusing alleged pedophiles (not convicted pedophiles, but alleged pedophiles) is just sick [...]. Legality aside, these people should receive psych treatment and be forced to avoid contact with Slashdot.
Sexually abusing people (regardless of age) is never acceptable. Assuming that someone who my have owned images doctored to look like they showed someone sexually abusing someone else is likewise unacceptable, especially since this behavior probably destroys at least as many lives as the other.
Let's get real about something: possession can be involuntary, for a number of reasons (You may not know it was child porn until after you see it for example, after all much mainstream porn advertises the teenage status of the models), and even *if* in a given case it were possible to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that a person had knowingly and deliberately obtained child porn, it is then necessary to distinguish in some way between people who look at child porn in order to identify and prosecute child-porn possession cases, (into which group every pedophile with half a brain will attempt to insert themselves, for obvious reasons) and the actual criminals. (You could not make the distinction, in which case every prosecuting cop, attorney, truck driver, etc. who was in the chain of custody of the evidence would need to be charged as well).
And as for bitching about libertarian bullshit, well, anyone who can get child porn onto your property and call the police about it can end your life, because your name will be in the papers as a child-rapist long before it ever comes out at your trial that the images in question were buried under your back porch, and there's no evidence that you knew about them at all.
The NRA is not crazy. People who believe that gun rights exist to protect the ability to hunt are slightly deluded. Agree with it or no, the 2nd is about the right to use violence to defend oneself, whether that defense be against foreign invasion or tyranny. Calling gun rights about hunting is similar to suggesting that the first amendment doesn't apply to political speech.
Really, the more relevant argument is the ideological one. The ACLU's pro-liberties stance on all other issues comes from their ideology. Their freedom-neutral stance on the second amendment is almost certainly just as ideological, it even comes from the same (modern American liberal) ideology, which is that the ability to forcibly defend oneself and ones freedoms is a right that must be ceded, that society (government) should hold a monopoly on the use of force. I don't agree, and I don't directly donate to them over that issue, but I'll still support them in individual cases around 99.9999% of the time, because they are almost always on the side of individual rights and they are usually supporting people who aren't otherwise able to support themselves.
Note that their stated position is that it is not an individual right. They have taken on what they see as 4th and 1st Amendment issues in gun cases, and individual chapters (Nevada) support gun rights, but basically, the official position of the ACLU is "that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right" (From http://www.aclu.org/crimjustice/gen/35904res20020304.html)
Because the ACLU is supposed to be for *all* rights, and for *all* people. The NAACP doesn't mean that the ACLU doesn't take a position on the issue of discrimination, why should the NRA stop them from taking a position on Gun Rights?
Granted, the ACLU can and should do whatever the hell they want, they aren't accountable to me (or anyone else who isn't a member), and they certainly are intended to be an ideological organization, it just seems odd to me that they claim that the driving ideal is individual rights and freedoms and then neglect such a major one. Then again, the American Civil Liberties That Aren't Self Defense Union (ACLTASDU) would be much less catchy.
Sure, it is *possible*. On the other hand, we'll never know what more they might have made, and how much better or worse it would have been, if all that hard clever thinking had been put to some better use.
It is also *possible* for you to live a full happy life with only one kidney, and many people do, but that doesn't make it a good thing to lose a kidney, just a slightly less bad thing.
More precisely, and hilariously, downloading stuff actually reduces the streetcrime, in the sense that people download instead of buying bootlegs, and the bootleggers don't benefit from the resulting (potential) increase in the artist's popularity (which means, among other things, more live shows with more people at more dollars per person). Like it or not, downloading and "personal use piracy", by devaluing "copies" of content, is making more of a dent in the bootleg copy market than any other social, political, or technological change.
The two other options I was referring to were vans (which are often smaller engined and diesel) and wagons (which usually have less weight, less drag, and less drivetrain friction). Engine size and expected performance are a major factor here, to be fair.
On another note, I've always felt that SUVs were more or less entirely bad, in the sense that they don't do anything well: they can't carry as much stuff as a van or pickup, they can't carry any more people than a large station wagon (there were seven seat wagons long before there were SUVs), they mostly suck off road, they use more fuel than any two of these other options, they generally drive quite poorly, and because the headlights and bumpers and center of mass are higher off the ground, SUVs do more damage to other drivers at night, blind oncoming drivers at night, and block visibility at intersections.
The geography of the USA isn't exactly the motivating factor, it's the way that development has been applied to geography. A substantial fraction of the population manages to live in highly built up areas that are nonetheless miles from any commercial structure with no public transit, because:
(a) it's cheaper to buy one big blob of land, subdivide into lots, and build lots of the same house on those lots,
(b) most American towns and cities use zoning to separate out real-estate based on usage,
(c) the population has grown substantially through an era when car manufacturing was one of the largest American industries, which employed hundreds of thousands of people, which makes car ownership associated with patriotism,
(d) individual freedom and independence has a strong hold on the American mentality and the automobile is both a very effective means to that end (the freedom to go where you want when you want) and a symbol of that freedom (thanks partly to advertising). All of this is a long way of saying: car makers and land developers both make plenty of money, and they both benefit from the separation of residential, commercial, and industrial spaces so that people need to commute to shop or work, and they've spent some of that money getting communities laid out that way.
Actually, I used to bike to school in the northeast USA all through the winter, and while it never got below 0, it did get into single digits (F, not C, do your own math) and I would routinely arrive with icicles in my hair. It was definitely character building, and I did get some sympathetic girls to help me warm up, but it's definitely not a good idea, you need that stupid teenager macho.
So basically: "If you're not with me 100%, you must be against me 100%"?
Alright, do me a favor: define "piracy". What forms of file/media exchange that don't involve the copyright owner, if any, are NOT piracy by your definition? Do you believe people should be permitted to resell media? How about to give it away? Give it away after they've used it?
At what point should a copyrighted work enter the public domain? When the author dies? When the author's last descendant dies? What about abandoned works, works that are still copyrighted but the copyright owner has ceased to offer them for sale? Do you think works should ever revert to the public domain? What about derivative works, parody works, and the like? To what extent do you think it should be possible for, say, TCOS to use the copyrights they hold on their religious texts to prevent those texts from being publicly discussed?
You go on about people who want things for free, (and I sympathize, it's painful to watch people devalue something you worked to create), but there are a great many people who are in this for reasons other than free stuff. Some people want to be able to legally watch DVDs they own on whatever device they choose, some people are concerned that the "copyright police" are trampling on their right to privacy, some people really believe that copyright is in principal immoral. When you lump these people in with the free-stuff camp, and disregard their grievances, you lend credence to the more extreme among them, the ones who claim that copyright holders have no respect for fair use, that copyright holders want to charge again for the same content in a different format, and that copyright in general is a bad idea that should be abandoned.
I don't want copyright to go away completely, but I do think that the current system needs to be examined, debated, and adapted. If you refuse to engage me and people like me in debate about the subject, and insist that we are all freeloaders, using phrases like "This is evident" as your justification, you are effectively absenting yourself from that debate.
I'd be happier if the Democrats and Republicans re-branded themselves as Mommy Government and Daddy Government, but they aren't going to because they (as far as I know) actually believe that there exist issues in this country and in public policy, and they have ideas about how to solve them. I think many of their ideas are stupid and wrong, and I disagree with their solutions, but they are attempting to resolve social issues. So is the pirate party. The issues they are attacking start with copyright, and include along with that consumers rights, privacy, and patents. If you have better ideas, let's hear them, this is a discussion forum. If you don't think copyright needs any reform, can you make a case for that? The digital entertainment industry only needs copyright for the business model "produce something, and then sell copies". WoW doesn't really need copyright to survive, musicians have been around for several millenia before copyright, and there are more examples. Would it affect digital entertainment negatively if copyright disappeared? I'm sure it would, just as I'm sure it would put a dent in novel sales. Would digital entertainment survive if copies were only valuable for 5 years and there was no effective way to prevent people violating that copyright? Almost certainly, after all that isn't that different from the way things are now, although I would be able to get copies of a bunch of old games that are copyrighted but not for sale anymore.
Whining about your impending troll moderation is good way to ensure that it happens.
Not *every* content producer supports p2p, but then, I cannot think of a single social change that was unanimously accepted or rejected. Disagreeing about how the world should be run is one of the all-time most popular human activities.
I'm happy that the pirate party has a parliament seat because I feel that they provide a much needed counterpoint to the notion, widely advocated by large industry groups, that copyrights should last until the end of time, and that in fact they do not sell a product but rather a "license" to view content.
And you may not be a middleman, but may of the copyright based industries contain a large number of businesses whose business model came down to making and distributing copies. These people have aggressively attacked the internet, p2p, and many other technologies, because those technologies would make their services redundant. (A common theme, which can be seen around almost any major technological innovation). Because many of these industry groups (RIAA for example) used to charge both the artists and the consumers quite a bit for the business of making and distributing copies, both artists and consumers are often driven to prefer new technologies (direct internet sales, p2p) which allow them to get this same service for free. You sell content directly over the internet. You might even try distributing demos over p2p, which can save you a meaningful amount of bandwidth and hosting costs. Twenty years ago, you would have had to get a publisher, and give them a substantial fraction of your sale price, so that they could get discs into stores for you. So you *do* benefit from this new technology. You might not be benefiting as much as you could, and the downsides might still outweigh the upsides, but the mere fact that you are still in business and aren't signed to a label/publisher means that you benefit.
Right... just like mix tapes were theft, and recording tv shows was theft.
I admire the efforts you made to reach out to the people pirating your games, and (hopefully) reminding the people who download whatever, whenever, that someone put effort into creating it, and that someone does deserve some kind of reward.
But File-sharing does not mean theft, it means exchanging files. Every computer I own is running at least one piece of software which I obtained from P2P sites at the direction of the copyright holder. They do this because it saves them distribution costs, which is very important when you aren't charging for it.
Equating file-sharing with car-jacking is exactly the attitude that makes people decide that the pro-copyright side of this debate are a bunch of idiots, and the perpetual insistence that each and every copy should be a sale doesn't help credibility either.
If you believe that Life + 70 years is a reasonable term for copyrights, that the patent system works perfectly, or that privacy is not a right, than you are disagreeing with the pirate party (Their statement of principals can be found here: http://www.piratpartiet.se/documents/Principles%203.2.pdf). If you continue to approach the copyright debate by calling everyone who disagrees with you "nothing more than a bunch of college kids who want shit for free" than you shouldn't be too surprised if you find yourself pushing people who might otherwise defend copyright away.
I support the right of creators to get paid for what they produce. I don't pirate games, but I do give old ones that I no longer play to friends, and accept their old games in return. When you insist that I am a "teenage hoodie checking out of society", and that "violating artist rights is what the PIRATE Party wants", you tell me that you do not support my rights to content that I have obtained legally. That's not helping your case that other people should support your ownership rights.
Paying $/Gig is all well and good, but that usually isn't what tiered pricing is. Tiered pricing usually involves a minimum price that's unreasonably high for the amount of data included, and then very expensive chunks of overage. (Just like old cellphone plans, or the texting plans that are widely being objected to). Now if someone offered me unfiltered, unfettered, (meaning I can serve whatever the hell I want, for example) internet access, at 20/20 or better speed, with static IP, for $2/Gigabyte transferred/month, I'd be signing up right now. If I'm going to pay per use, than when I go on vacation and use nothing, I damn well better pay nothing.
-- Does my home FIOS plan (asynchronous, no static IP, servers explicitly banned) count as "internet access"? I would argue that it technically does not, though it is very close.
2. Right to control what software is on your computer
-- What about the related immunity from liability for things running on your computer without your knowledge?
3. Right to copy anything you own for your own personal use
--Fair enough
4. Right to use software that does not interfere with anyone else's right
--I don't follow.
5. The Right to publish any information that is true without fear of takedown notices
--There has to be some takedown process though, for information that is untrue. You never get to publish without any fear, there just needs to be a counter-takedown notice process.
6. The Right to possess any information
--So, no copyrights? What about stolen credit card numbers? I'm actually in favor of this one, by and large, but I do feel that something here needs to be more precise: possession of data is *never* a crime by itself. (A civil matter, sure. Evidence of a crime, sure. Not a crime on it's own).
7. The Right to control your own hardware
--Damn straight.
8. The Right to use any device for any purpose that does not interfere with rights of others
--How is this different from 7?
9. The Right to remain anonymous
--Except when violating the rights of others? Do I have the right to anonymously make false statements defaming people? (Again, I'm not opposed to the idea, but playing devil's advocate).
10.The Right to have free, uncensored speech on your own servers
--Except when violating the rights of others? Do I have the right to freely display images of you that I obtained illegally? (Devil's advocate again).
I still hate the Catcher in the Rye, but the one I *really* hate is the Great Gatsby. On the other hand, I read Moby Dick despite various attempts at discouraging me (mostly people telling me not to read during class, and pay attention to Hawthorne.
Does anyone play an "adult" videogame to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenille self-indulgence. Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
[...]
The funny part is that the Fallujah game is the type of controversial topic that can use video games for exploring the human condition. Which is exactly why it's blocked while *cough*"adult entertainment"*cough* runs rampant. No one really wants to take a hard look at the unpleasentries that need to change. Books like Mockingbird were once burned for their controversal nature. Let's see if someone has the guts to watch a few of their DVDs burn.
It is just as possible to explore any given aspect of the human condition through games as it is through TV, film, play, novel, and song. The majority of publicized games do not do this, for the same reason that the majority of blockbuster films do not do this: it doesn't sell that well, and the people who make them like money.
Even so, it can be hard to draw a line between juvenile and thought provoking. Consider the following question: is Serious Sam art?
It certainly isn't exploring the human condition, but it is exploring the concept of the grizzled, beweaponed, musclebound man, and how ludicrous that hero seems today, though his defining characteristics would be immediately familiar to Homer, or Ovid.
What about Manhunt? I suspect that if the people who think it should be banned forced themselves to play it through, they would have spent much of that time thinking about certain aspects of the human condition.
Rapelay? Well, I haven't played it, but merely knowing that it exists allows me to know something about myself: I really believe in freedom of speech. It's made me think about something else too: I believe that a person can play, and enjoy, a game about rape without being a potential rapist, or in any other way a bad person. One's entertainment does not speak to one's character flaws. Of course, now I can't feel superior to all those Halo players.
As was stated earlier, however, the Pirate party *met* those standards. They *are* an officially recognized party in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party
I don't need 1920x1200, (or 2560x1600 in my case), but I like it. It's better. It's not about bragging rights, it's about having a picture that fills my peripheral vision. I use the extra display space extensively for non-gaming, but I I really like the ability, when gaming, to have a seamless image that fills my field of vision. If that image were 1024x600, it would look horrible, and each pixel would be painfully large and jagged. I've played some games in 1280x800, and even that looked kind of jagged.
As for intensive stuff being kind of a tech demo, I can't fault you there. Crysis was a really fun tech demo though, and I enjoyed playing it. The majority of the stuff I really like isn't that (graphics) intensive though, Supreme Commander, Mount & Blade, have all been quite awesome. If it comes to that, my video card is an 8800GTX that I bought more than two years ago, when I bought the big monitor. I have felt no pressure to upgrade in that time, even from Fallout 3 or Far Cry 2.
I think it's partially related to stagnation in developer tools, in that it hasn't gotten any easier or cheaper to make games that require high end hardware to run, and it's gotten harder and more expensive to make games that look good. Plus, as you say, much of the pretty but bland stuff has moved to consoles, where it's easier for the developers to be confident that it will run properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Posting on Slashdot about punishing and abusing alleged pedophiles is primarily for getting aroused (or getting off). Getting aroused (or getting off) to posting on Slashdot about punishing and abusing alleged pedophiles (not convicted pedophiles, but alleged pedophiles) is just sick [...]. Legality aside, these people should receive psych treatment and be forced to avoid contact with Slashdot.
Sexually abusing people (regardless of age) is never acceptable. Assuming that someone who my have owned images doctored to look like they showed someone sexually abusing someone else is likewise unacceptable, especially since this behavior probably destroys at least as many lives as the other.
Let's get real about something: possession can be involuntary, for a number of reasons (You may not know it was child porn until after you see it for example, after all much mainstream porn advertises the teenage status of the models), and even *if* in a given case it were possible to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that a person had knowingly and deliberately obtained child porn, it is then necessary to distinguish in some way between people who look at child porn in order to identify and prosecute child-porn possession cases, (into which group every pedophile with half a brain will attempt to insert themselves, for obvious reasons) and the actual criminals. (You could not make the distinction, in which case every prosecuting cop, attorney, truck driver, etc. who was in the chain of custody of the evidence would need to be charged as well).
And as for bitching about libertarian bullshit, well, anyone who can get child porn onto your property and call the police about it can end your life, because your name will be in the papers as a child-rapist long before it ever comes out at your trial that the images in question were buried under your back porch, and there's no evidence that you knew about them at all.
The NRA is not crazy. People who believe that gun rights exist to protect the ability to hunt are slightly deluded. Agree with it or no, the 2nd is about the right to use violence to defend oneself, whether that defense be against foreign invasion or tyranny. Calling gun rights about hunting is similar to suggesting that the first amendment doesn't apply to political speech.
Why doesn't the ACLU just come out and say "We're not pro gun rights, we don't believe that self defense is a right"? Oh, they did:
http://www.aclu.org/crimjustice/gen/35904res20020304.html
Really, the more relevant argument is the ideological one. The ACLU's pro-liberties stance on all other issues comes from their ideology. Their freedom-neutral stance on the second amendment is almost certainly just as ideological, it even comes from the same (modern American liberal) ideology, which is that the ability to forcibly defend oneself and ones freedoms is a right that must be ceded, that society (government) should hold a monopoly on the use of force. I don't agree, and I don't directly donate to them over that issue, but I'll still support them in individual cases around 99.9999% of the time, because they are almost always on the side of individual rights and they are usually supporting people who aren't otherwise able to support themselves.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aclu+second+amendment
Note that their stated position is that it is not an individual right. They have taken on what they see as 4th and 1st Amendment issues in gun cases, and individual chapters (Nevada) support gun rights, but basically, the official position of the ACLU is "that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right" (From http://www.aclu.org/crimjustice/gen/35904res20020304.html)
Because the ACLU is supposed to be for *all* rights, and for *all* people. The NAACP doesn't mean that the ACLU doesn't take a position on the issue of discrimination, why should the NRA stop them from taking a position on Gun Rights?
Granted, the ACLU can and should do whatever the hell they want, they aren't accountable to me (or anyone else who isn't a member), and they certainly are intended to be an ideological organization, it just seems odd to me that they claim that the driving ideal is individual rights and freedoms and then neglect such a major one. Then again, the American Civil Liberties That Aren't Self Defense Union (ACLTASDU) would be much less catchy.
Sure, it is *possible*. On the other hand, we'll never know what more they might have made, and how much better or worse it would have been, if all that hard clever thinking had been put to some better use.
It is also *possible* for you to live a full happy life with only one kidney, and many people do, but that doesn't make it a good thing to lose a kidney, just a slightly less bad thing.
Artists are now forced to take time out of doing what they want to do.
Just like the rest of us who work for a living?
More precisely, and hilariously, downloading stuff actually reduces the streetcrime, in the sense that people download instead of buying bootlegs, and the bootleggers don't benefit from the resulting (potential) increase in the artist's popularity (which means, among other things, more live shows with more people at more dollars per person). Like it or not, downloading and "personal use piracy", by devaluing "copies" of content, is making more of a dent in the bootleg copy market than any other social, political, or technological change.
The two other options I was referring to were vans (which are often smaller engined and diesel) and wagons (which usually have less weight, less drag, and less drivetrain friction). Engine size and expected performance are a major factor here, to be fair.
On another note, I've always felt that SUVs were more or less entirely bad, in the sense that they don't do anything well: they can't carry as much stuff as a van or pickup, they can't carry any more people than a large station wagon (there were seven seat wagons long before there were SUVs), they mostly suck off road, they use more fuel than any two of these other options, they generally drive quite poorly, and because the headlights and bumpers and center of mass are higher off the ground, SUVs do more damage to other drivers at night, blind oncoming drivers at night, and block visibility at intersections.
The geography of the USA isn't exactly the motivating factor, it's the way that development has been applied to geography. A substantial fraction of the population manages to live in highly built up areas that are nonetheless miles from any commercial structure with no public transit, because:
(a) it's cheaper to buy one big blob of land, subdivide into lots, and build lots of the same house on those lots,
(b) most American towns and cities use zoning to separate out real-estate based on usage,
(c) the population has grown substantially through an era when car manufacturing was one of the largest American industries, which employed hundreds of thousands of people, which makes car ownership associated with patriotism,
(d) individual freedom and independence has a strong hold on the American mentality and the automobile is both a very effective means to that end (the freedom to go where you want when you want) and a symbol of that freedom (thanks partly to advertising).
All of this is a long way of saying: car makers and land developers both make plenty of money, and they both benefit from the separation of residential, commercial, and industrial spaces so that people need to commute to shop or work, and they've spent some of that money getting communities laid out that way.
Was it uphill both ways?
Actually, I used to bike to school in the northeast USA all through the winter, and while it never got below 0, it did get into single digits (F, not C, do your own math) and I would routinely arrive with icicles in my hair. It was definitely character building, and I did get some sympathetic girls to help me warm up, but it's definitely not a good idea, you need that stupid teenager macho.
So basically: "If you're not with me 100%, you must be against me 100%"?
Alright, do me a favor: define "piracy". What forms of file/media exchange that don't involve the copyright owner, if any, are NOT piracy by your definition? Do you believe people should be permitted to resell media? How about to give it away? Give it away after they've used it?
At what point should a copyrighted work enter the public domain? When the author dies? When the author's last descendant dies? What about abandoned works, works that are still copyrighted but the copyright owner has ceased to offer them for sale? Do you think works should ever revert to the public domain? What about derivative works, parody works, and the like? To what extent do you think it should be possible for, say, TCOS to use the copyrights they hold on their religious texts to prevent those texts from being publicly discussed?
You go on about people who want things for free, (and I sympathize, it's painful to watch people devalue something you worked to create), but there are a great many people who are in this for reasons other than free stuff. Some people want to be able to legally watch DVDs they own on whatever device they choose, some people are concerned that the "copyright police" are trampling on their right to privacy, some people really believe that copyright is in principal immoral. When you lump these people in with the free-stuff camp, and disregard their grievances, you lend credence to the more extreme among them, the ones who claim that copyright holders have no respect for fair use, that copyright holders want to charge again for the same content in a different format, and that copyright in general is a bad idea that should be abandoned.
I don't want copyright to go away completely, but I do think that the current system needs to be examined, debated, and adapted. If you refuse to engage me and people like me in debate about the subject, and insist that we are all freeloaders, using phrases like "This is evident" as your justification, you are effectively absenting yourself from that debate.
I'd be happier if the Democrats and Republicans re-branded themselves as Mommy Government and Daddy Government, but they aren't going to because they (as far as I know) actually believe that there exist issues in this country and in public policy, and they have ideas about how to solve them. I think many of their ideas are stupid and wrong, and I disagree with their solutions, but they are attempting to resolve social issues.
So is the pirate party. The issues they are attacking start with copyright, and include along with that consumers rights, privacy, and patents. If you have better ideas, let's hear them, this is a discussion forum. If you don't think copyright needs any reform, can you make a case for that?
The digital entertainment industry only needs copyright for the business model "produce something, and then sell copies". WoW doesn't really need copyright to survive, musicians have been around for several millenia before copyright, and there are more examples. Would it affect digital entertainment negatively if copyright disappeared? I'm sure it would, just as I'm sure it would put a dent in novel sales. Would digital entertainment survive if copies were only valuable for 5 years and there was no effective way to prevent people violating that copyright? Almost certainly, after all that isn't that different from the way things are now, although I would be able to get copies of a bunch of old games that are copyrighted but not for sale anymore.
Whining about your impending troll moderation is good way to ensure that it happens.
Not *every* content producer supports p2p, but then, I cannot think of a single social change that was unanimously accepted or rejected. Disagreeing about how the world should be run is one of the all-time most popular human activities.
I'm happy that the pirate party has a parliament seat because I feel that they provide a much needed counterpoint to the notion, widely advocated by large industry groups, that copyrights should last until the end of time, and that in fact they do not sell a product but rather a "license" to view content.
And you may not be a middleman, but may of the copyright based industries contain a large number of businesses whose business model came down to making and distributing copies. These people have aggressively attacked the internet, p2p, and many other technologies, because those technologies would make their services redundant. (A common theme, which can be seen around almost any major technological innovation). Because many of these industry groups (RIAA for example) used to charge both the artists and the consumers quite a bit for the business of making and distributing copies, both artists and consumers are often driven to prefer new technologies (direct internet sales, p2p) which allow them to get this same service for free. You sell content directly over the internet. You might even try distributing demos over p2p, which can save you a meaningful amount of bandwidth and hosting costs. Twenty years ago, you would have had to get a publisher, and give them a substantial fraction of your sale price, so that they could get discs into stores for you. So you *do* benefit from this new technology. You might not be benefiting as much as you could, and the downsides might still outweigh the upsides, but the mere fact that you are still in business and aren't signed to a label/publisher means that you benefit.
Right... just like mix tapes were theft, and recording tv shows was theft.
I admire the efforts you made to reach out to the people pirating your games, and (hopefully) reminding the people who download whatever, whenever, that someone put effort into creating it, and that someone does deserve some kind of reward.
But File-sharing does not mean theft, it means exchanging files. Every computer I own is running at least one piece of software which I obtained from P2P sites at the direction of the copyright holder. They do this because it saves them distribution costs, which is very important when you aren't charging for it.
Equating file-sharing with car-jacking is exactly the attitude that makes people decide that the pro-copyright side of this debate are a bunch of idiots, and the perpetual insistence that each and every copy should be a sale doesn't help credibility either.
If you believe that Life + 70 years is a reasonable term for copyrights, that the patent system works perfectly, or that privacy is not a right, than you are disagreeing with the pirate party (Their statement of principals can be found here: http://www.piratpartiet.se/documents/Principles%203.2.pdf). If you continue to approach the copyright debate by calling everyone who disagrees with you "nothing more than a bunch of college kids who want shit for free" than you shouldn't be too surprised if you find yourself pushing people who might otherwise defend copyright away.
I support the right of creators to get paid for what they produce. I don't pirate games, but I do give old ones that I no longer play to friends, and accept their old games in return. When you insist that I am a "teenage hoodie checking out of society", and that "violating artist rights is what the PIRATE Party wants", you tell me that you do not support my rights to content that I have obtained legally. That's not helping your case that other people should support your ownership rights.
Paying $/Gig is all well and good, but that usually isn't what tiered pricing is. Tiered pricing usually involves a minimum price that's unreasonably high for the amount of data included, and then very expensive chunks of overage. (Just like old cellphone plans, or the texting plans that are widely being objected to). Now if someone offered me unfiltered, unfettered, (meaning I can serve whatever the hell I want, for example) internet access, at 20/20 or better speed, with static IP, for $2/Gigabyte transferred/month, I'd be signing up right now. If I'm going to pay per use, than when I go on vacation and use nothing, I damn well better pay nothing.
1. Right to access the internet if you pay for it
-- Does my home FIOS plan (asynchronous, no static IP, servers explicitly banned) count as "internet access"? I would argue that it technically does not, though it is very close.
2. Right to control what software is on your computer
-- What about the related immunity from liability for things running on your computer without your knowledge?
3. Right to copy anything you own for your own personal use
--Fair enough
4. Right to use software that does not interfere with anyone else's right
--I don't follow.
5. The Right to publish any information that is true without fear of takedown notices
--There has to be some takedown process though, for information that is untrue. You never get to publish without any fear, there just needs to be a counter-takedown notice process.
6. The Right to possess any information
--So, no copyrights? What about stolen credit card numbers? I'm actually in favor of this one, by and large, but I do feel that something here needs to be more precise: possession of data is *never* a crime by itself. (A civil matter, sure. Evidence of a crime, sure. Not a crime on it's own).
7. The Right to control your own hardware
--Damn straight.
8. The Right to use any device for any purpose that does not interfere with rights of others
--How is this different from 7?
9. The Right to remain anonymous
--Except when violating the rights of others? Do I have the right to anonymously make false statements defaming people? (Again, I'm not opposed to the idea, but playing devil's advocate).
10.The Right to have free, uncensored speech on your own servers
--Except when violating the rights of others? Do I have the right to freely display images of you that I obtained illegally? (Devil's advocate again).
I still hate the Catcher in the Rye, but the one I *really* hate is the Great Gatsby. On the other hand, I read Moby Dick despite various attempts at discouraging me (mostly people telling me not to read during class, and pay attention to Hawthorne.
Does anyone play an "adult" videogame to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenille self-indulgence. Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
[...]
The funny part is that the Fallujah game is the type of controversial topic that can use video games for exploring the human condition. Which is exactly why it's blocked while *cough*"adult entertainment"*cough* runs rampant. No one really wants to take a hard look at the unpleasentries that need to change. Books like Mockingbird were once burned for their controversal nature. Let's see if someone has the guts to watch a few of their DVDs burn.
It is just as possible to explore any given aspect of the human condition through games as it is through TV, film, play, novel, and song. The majority of publicized games do not do this, for the same reason that the majority of blockbuster films do not do this: it doesn't sell that well, and the people who make them like money.
Even so, it can be hard to draw a line between juvenile and thought provoking. Consider the following question: is Serious Sam art? It certainly isn't exploring the human condition, but it is exploring the concept of the grizzled, beweaponed, musclebound man, and how ludicrous that hero seems today, though his defining characteristics would be immediately familiar to Homer, or Ovid.
What about Manhunt? I suspect that if the people who think it should be banned forced themselves to play it through, they would have spent much of that time thinking about certain aspects of the human condition. Rapelay? Well, I haven't played it, but merely knowing that it exists allows me to know something about myself: I really believe in freedom of speech. It's made me think about something else too: I believe that a person can play, and enjoy, a game about rape without being a potential rapist, or in any other way a bad person. One's entertainment does not speak to one's character flaws. Of course, now I can't feel superior to all those Halo players.
As was stated earlier, however, the Pirate party *met* those standards. They *are* an officially recognized party in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party
I don't need 1920x1200, (or 2560x1600 in my case), but I like it. It's better. It's not about bragging rights, it's about having a picture that fills my peripheral vision. I use the extra display space extensively for non-gaming, but I I really like the ability, when gaming, to have a seamless image that fills my field of vision. If that image were 1024x600, it would look horrible, and each pixel would be painfully large and jagged. I've played some games in 1280x800, and even that looked kind of jagged.
As for intensive stuff being kind of a tech demo, I can't fault you there. Crysis was a really fun tech demo though, and I enjoyed playing it. The majority of the stuff I really like isn't that (graphics) intensive though, Supreme Commander, Mount & Blade, have all been quite awesome. If it comes to that, my video card is an 8800GTX that I bought more than two years ago, when I bought the big monitor. I have felt no pressure to upgrade in that time, even from Fallout 3 or Far Cry 2.
I think it's partially related to stagnation in developer tools, in that it hasn't gotten any easier or cheaper to make games that require high end hardware to run, and it's gotten harder and more expensive to make games that look good. Plus, as you say, much of the pretty but bland stuff has moved to consoles, where it's easier for the developers to be confident that it will run properly.
Captive touchscreen aside, the HTC Touch Pro does most of that, though it does require a dongle for the headphone jack.