The world doesn't owe me a living doing what I want to do, nor them doing what they might want to do. Quite true, however, if someone wants to benefit from the work you do, they owe you compensation for it, unless you specifically allow them to benefit free of charge. If a person wants me to fix their computer, they have no right to come in and demand that I give it to them for free. They have the right to have someone else fix their computer, if someone else is willing to do it for free, but not me (assuming that I'm unwilling to work for free). The work that anyone does deserves to be compensated if someone wants to benefit from it, whether that work is fixing a car, scrubbing a toilet, performing a triple bypass, or writing a book (and I do not mean the physical copies, I mean the content itself).
It seems like we're not going to agree on this fundamental point, though.
Forgot to mention that there's synthesized music, even today. FF games, for example, have synthesized music (I'm not sure about FF12, but I know FFX does). Which is a shame, really... I don't really understand why we're still using synthesized stuff when we have the capability for using proper recordings.
I have the right to be cranky - I put in the years it takes to be able to play everything in those games on a real guitar Why does this come up every time Guitar Hero gets mentioned? I'm sorry, but playing a real guitar doesn't give you the right to be cranky about the game in general. If there are dumb kids who figure that they're hot stuff because they're good at Guitar Hero, then be cranky at them, but it's not the game's damn fault. I play both real guitar and Guitar Hero, and they're entirely different beasts. Bringing up the real instrument in a discussion about the game over and over and over (and yes, I know it isn't just you) is getting pretty nonsensical.
If you're referring to the redistribution of physical copies, then there's nothing wrong with that. The copy was already made, and there's nothing to stop it being sold. What copyright is supposed to prevent, and justly so, is unauthorized copying for a reasonable amount of time, so that the author can profit from their work. The current law extends too long, of course, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the concept.
It is being made an all-or-nothing scenario as we speak by attempts at digital restrictions management and internet filtering. Never say you weren't warned. Nonetheless, it isn't inherently an all-or-nothing scenario. Current interpretation and enforcement of copyright law does not reflect on the concept of copyright law and its enforcement, merely the fact that we're fucking it up.
It is evil in that it denies people freedom of speech. Bullshit! That's the most blatantly false thing I've ever read on slashdot. Copyright law denies people not a goddamn thing, except the ability to get stuff against the creator's wishes. Furthermore,
It is IMPOSSIBLE to enforce copyright without monitoring all communication. is also astoundingly false. You don't need to enforce copyright totally, 100%. Hell, no law is enforced 100%. There are criminals which remain un-caught, it happens. What you need to do is enforce the law as much as you can, without intruding on people's rights, such as right to privacy of communication. It's not an all-or-nothing scenario like you paint.
You just don't like facing the fact that YOU are evil because you support copyright. Wow, what a great rebuttal to Atlantis. "You don't like facing the truth [note the assumption that what you say is objective, observable fact, when it's anything but], because you're one of the evil ones!" Truly, sir, you will go down in history as one of the great masters of debate.
Because laws are there for the good of society, not just to please the individual. Laws are also there to protect the rights of individuals. If an author wishes to not distribute their book any more, then damn it, that's their right. If they wish to make money off every copy sold, it's also their right. Individual rights trump the good of society here, imnsho.
Actually, I'd say that Uematsu is par for the course in that sense. Of the other composers you listed, I've only heard the work of Jeremy Soule and Koji Kondo (and Hitoshi Sakimoto, but I wasn't impressed by the FFXII soundtrack a bit), and both of them have rather few really great songs in comparison to the rest of their stuff. Morrowind is a prime example, the opening theme is FANTASTIC, but the rest of the soundtrack is complete "meh", in my opinion. Koji Kondo is the same: on any given Zelda soundtrack, I'm indifferent to far more songs than I'm excited about.
This doesn't mean I think the music is bad, of course, video game music is the genre I listen to most. It just doesn't seem to have a lot of consistency of quality.
Hook, line, and sinker.. And the drones do exactly as expected... God forbid we have opinions that happen to agree with the industry viewpoint. That makes us drones.
...wait. No it doesn't. You're just being an ass. I can apply your same logic to YOUR position, and say you're a drone for believing what the nanny-state government wants you to believe. It'd be ridiculous, of course, and it's ridiculous when you make that argument as well.
That's a pretty huge limitation, especially for the Slashdot crowd! Not really. I'd wager most people around here here have a copy of Windows (legit or otherwise) sitting around for when they might need it. And of course, for the general population, it barely counts as a limitation at all.
The funny thing is that MS have somehow sold you the proposition that it's all or nothing - you must 'standardize' on MS. Not at all. However, in my mind, if a company is already (truly) standardized on MS, that means they probably have a strong desire to have a uniform platform, for whatever reason. Thus, a move would be all or nothing. That's just how I would imagine things happening, however, reality frequently diverges from predictions.
If, however, they were deluged with support complaints or bad press because a significant proportion of IE users were presented with an error message on their favourite websites, that might provide the impetus for them to change it. Fair enough, I just see your idea as being chock full of risk. If the users ever realized that they were intentionally left in the cold, even for a day, they could be furious. Then again, they could be apathetic.
However, what would you do if Google did it (the incentive for them is obvious - they could put a link to Firefox and say "maybe you should try using THIS instead", and then sit back and laugh)? Or some other site that was indispensable to you? If it was truly indispensable, I would probably have to suck it up for the time being, unfortunately. That said, I would immediately begin keeping a keen eye out for alternatives to that site which I could use.
That's quite acceptable, of course. I have no problem with not ensuring that your site works with any browser in particular, especially if that browser doesn't follow the standards. It's deliberate exclusion that I would have a problem with, i.e., "if (browser == MSIE) noSiteForYou();".
I wasn't talking about any sort of application in particular. Your points are valid, but I feel they'd be better directed at the GGP, not me, because I was merely trying to say that if the client wants to use MS products, you won't get very far by telling them that you have something better and they should change their ways. Either do it the way they want it done, or don't do it at all.
But we're talking what a company uses here, or at least I assumed we were. Switching to anything except Linux, if you run a Windows environment, is going to be prohibitively expensive. And why would you do such a thing? The only reason I can think of is if you need an app that is exclusive to one of the other platforms. All of the big OS contenders work pretty damn equally well, so you wouldn't need to switch for performance reasons. I'm not saying that there are NO reasons to switch, but that they're pretty damn few and far between, because switching is going to be one hell of a project.
And what, exactly, makes you think that this will get Microsoft to do anything, rather than having a legion of users pissed off at you? I know that if any web site I went to deliberately locked me out for a day because I use IE, those pricks wouldn't ever see a bit of traffic from me again.
Somehow I don't think telling your clients to move away from the platform they're standardized on is generally going to go over well. There are almost no reasons, apart from ideological ones, to move away from MS products (note I said here move away from, meaning specifically a platform switch)... so how are you going to convince your prospective clients that you're right and they're wrong?
Your comments on WoW convince me that you haven't actually given the expansion any serious play time. Huge chunks of players have not jumped ship, for starters. For another, if you call heroic keying "long, uber-slow rep grinds", you have the worst gaming ADD I've ever seen. Granted, my character is human, but it took me a scant couple of weeks after hitting 70 to be heroic keyed for ALL instances. Plus, it's gotten even EASIER in the last patch, as heroic keying requires honored, not revered, now. The expansion has things you can complain about reasonably, but rep grinds absolutely are not one of them.
I disagree. GH3 is easily the best in the series, Neversoft managed to really pick up the torch on that one. Yes, it's too hard. Yes, the boss battles are dumb and don't add anything. The core gameplay, however, is the same, the graphics are better, and the song selection is about a billion times better than GH2 (I couldn't stand about half the songs in that game).
Supporting copyright does not mean supporting copyright law as-is, that should be obvious. Nowhere did I say that anyone thinks that having a 120-year copyright is reasonable.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, buddy, but Blizzard's franchises are STILL popular. Warcraft III was highly acclaimed when it came out, and widely enjoyed. Starcraft is still, of course, rabidly played in Korea and other places, as will Starcraft II, I imagine. World of Warcraft (the last game Blizzard released for a while) doesn't even count as a sequel to Warcraft in any way, considering that it isn't an RTS. So yeah, I don't know where you get your ideas, but it isn't reality.
Not just the WoW community. There are many people who are fans of Blizzard games in general, and I, for one, will be not too happy if the excellent quality of their games goes down because of this. Will they have the balls, for example, under their new management, to cancel mostly-finished games just cause they aren't happy with how it's turning out? I doubt it, but we'll see.
Color me skeptical on this one. Almost as skeptical as I am about the BioWare/EA deal.
For example: If I feel you are being sexually harassed at our place of employment (hypothetically of course), could I not file a sexual harassment complaint on your behalf? or even without putting your name in it at all, putting the harassers continued employement in jeopardy? The answer....yes. And you don't have to feel harassed at all. Matter of fact, short of you sticking up for the individual who supposedly harassed you in this example, your feelings on the subject don't even matter Unfortunately, this would likely be the case. To me, it's a travesty, that someone could do such a thing. Now granted, the ability to report something that didn't happen to you does have its merits (if someone was legitimately harassed and can't/doesn't want to stand up for themselves), but it's a damn shame that it can also happen in a case like you described. I'm not sure what can be done about it, though, except to make sure that if someone gets accused of harassing you and you feel they didn't, you stand up for them.
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Considering the alternative is that we take the work from them by force, I'd consider your world view far, far, far more sad.
It seems like we're not going to agree on this fundamental point, though.
Forgot to mention that there's synthesized music, even today. FF games, for example, have synthesized music (I'm not sure about FF12, but I know FFX does). Which is a shame, really... I don't really understand why we're still using synthesized stuff when we have the capability for using proper recordings.
This doesn't mean I think the music is bad, of course, video game music is the genre I listen to most. It just doesn't seem to have a lot of consistency of quality.
Hey now, we wouldn't say that! It's not in any of the Guitar Hero games. :P
That's quite acceptable, of course. I have no problem with not ensuring that your site works with any browser in particular, especially if that browser doesn't follow the standards. It's deliberate exclusion that I would have a problem with, i.e., "if (browser == MSIE) noSiteForYou();".
I wasn't talking about any sort of application in particular. Your points are valid, but I feel they'd be better directed at the GGP, not me, because I was merely trying to say that if the client wants to use MS products, you won't get very far by telling them that you have something better and they should change their ways. Either do it the way they want it done, or don't do it at all.
But we're talking what a company uses here, or at least I assumed we were. Switching to anything except Linux, if you run a Windows environment, is going to be prohibitively expensive. And why would you do such a thing? The only reason I can think of is if you need an app that is exclusive to one of the other platforms. All of the big OS contenders work pretty damn equally well, so you wouldn't need to switch for performance reasons. I'm not saying that there are NO reasons to switch, but that they're pretty damn few and far between, because switching is going to be one hell of a project.
And what, exactly, makes you think that this will get Microsoft to do anything, rather than having a legion of users pissed off at you? I know that if any web site I went to deliberately locked me out for a day because I use IE, those pricks wouldn't ever see a bit of traffic from me again.
Somehow I don't think telling your clients to move away from the platform they're standardized on is generally going to go over well. There are almost no reasons, apart from ideological ones, to move away from MS products (note I said here move away from, meaning specifically a platform switch)... so how are you going to convince your prospective clients that you're right and they're wrong?
Your comments on WoW convince me that you haven't actually given the expansion any serious play time. Huge chunks of players have not jumped ship, for starters. For another, if you call heroic keying "long, uber-slow rep grinds", you have the worst gaming ADD I've ever seen. Granted, my character is human, but it took me a scant couple of weeks after hitting 70 to be heroic keyed for ALL instances. Plus, it's gotten even EASIER in the last patch, as heroic keying requires honored, not revered, now. The expansion has things you can complain about reasonably, but rep grinds absolutely are not one of them.
I disagree. GH3 is easily the best in the series, Neversoft managed to really pick up the torch on that one. Yes, it's too hard. Yes, the boss battles are dumb and don't add anything. The core gameplay, however, is the same, the graphics are better, and the song selection is about a billion times better than GH2 (I couldn't stand about half the songs in that game).
Supporting copyright does not mean supporting copyright law as-is, that should be obvious. Nowhere did I say that anyone thinks that having a 120-year copyright is reasonable.
Aha, but this result is only possible because of copyright law. Thus, if one is celebrating this case, they are indirectly saying copyright is good.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, buddy, but Blizzard's franchises are STILL popular. Warcraft III was highly acclaimed when it came out, and widely enjoyed. Starcraft is still, of course, rabidly played in Korea and other places, as will Starcraft II, I imagine. World of Warcraft (the last game Blizzard released for a while) doesn't even count as a sequel to Warcraft in any way, considering that it isn't an RTS. So yeah, I don't know where you get your ideas, but it isn't reality.
Color me skeptical on this one. Almost as skeptical as I am about the BioWare/EA deal.