No no blood in games is not acceptable as long as the game is given an 18+ rating (which means many publishers won't even release it here). All games that are >=16y rated need to have "non-human like" characters which you can then chop up an mutilate however you want as long as it's not solely for the purpose of torture or dismemberment. The German ratings board is in some instances even more ridiculous than the MPAA but German kids don't give a crap anyway. There's enough companies in adjacent Switzerland and Austria which always get the full mature titles with German language in PAL so you can just order there or go on the interwebs. As always prohibition basically takes away more control than it actually grants you.
It's quite simple really. The internet really took off around 1999-2000 for the last ten years (idiotic) governments like mine have been blissfully ignorant of the changes. For the first five years they refused to admit anything had even changed and didn't get it at all. Now in the last five years they suddenly realized how much had actually changed in terms of business and culture and social exchange and so forth and that intimidated them. Therefore, they started trying to gain back control with the expected subtlety of a vice holding a peeled grape. If you don't understand it but it changes everything you do... stamp down on it until it no longer moves and then sloooowly give it back room to breathe to a level with which you are comfortable. I still hope that people realize how strong a force the global interwebs are.
If this does not force the average German to start participating, or at least thinking about way around this, I don't what will.
You don't know much about German mentality do you? It took them a holocaust, nuclear bombs and national defeat and invasion to "think about" why being Nazis was such a bad idea. I'm sometimes ashamed to be a German. Not because of history but because a majority of people have learned absolutely NOTHING from it. I would think that some of the people would at least start a discussion about it but most Germans (from what I can tell) don't (want to) understand the matter. Problem is that only gradually will the things that Joe Public is concerned with get affected. Until then they will have had plenty of time shutting down all those little nagging voices.
We don't need the BKA to put that on the list. The classic RickRoll Youtube vid was already blocked when the GEMA (the german IFPI equivalent) couldn't get their greedy mouths full and demanded horrendous sums of money for their "protected works" to be displayed to German viewers. There are of course dozens of clones and copies still up which aren't registered but the classig "Rick Astley - Never gonna give you up" video only shows a "This video is not available in your country"... way to go cutting us off from the internet culture greedy rights holder bastards.
Actually since the MotionPlus doesn't use the IR sensors that's kinda pointless. This thing contains afaik 3 multi-axis accelerometers that are way more precise than what was possible during the launch of the Wii years back. It snaps into the Wiimote which is a good thing because they have sold 50 million Wiimotes and most people won't be too happy to spend another 200$ on new controllers just to have a sword fight with their mates. Nintendo already pissed off loads of people with their strange antics, now telling me I have to throw away my Wiimotes and buy new ones -no wai. Instead it's a 20$ addon which is much more feasible to most consumers, if you want it... it's 20$ per controller extra instead of another 50 for a new one. Other than that, older games won't work because there is no real patching infrastructure on the Wii that I'm aware of. You would have to re-write potentially large chunks of the controls code to have your game react to the MotionPlus input correctly and why bother in the first place? The games that didn't have M+ don't need it now. Most games wouldn't benefit from simply "tacked on" MotionPlus just as they don't benefit from tacked on waggle or motion control. Now, games that are built around MotionPlus... that's a different story.
An interesting tidbit about this is that the game launched on 17th/20th March and the new DSi launched hardly two weeks later. Saving up money to buy something big? Sounds like a typical resource conflict to me. Whaddya get from you allowance? A new DSi or GTA sqr(4)D Chinatown Wars? I share the view from TFA that the sales numbers will pick up soon. I'd say basically a case of either botched release planning or economic optimism. Maybe they hoped that all people would spend money on the DSi AND GTA:CW
I don't "boycott" Apple. I just don't like their (overpriced) hardware and can't get myself to use Mac OS. Also, I run Linux so iTunes is out of the question and I also don't like their strange media distribution policies and DRM measures and so forth. Only a personal matter of choice, I guess. Love the iPhone design, but it's way too expensive for something I need to illegaly pry open. Carrier dependency is also a no-no. I'd rather live in a 1.5G world than go with a mandatory Apple restriction AND an overpriced restrictive carrier contract. Actually, both won't do seperately either:)
I love how they whine about "the game only sold 100.000 units in two weeks" and make it sound like that's terrible. Madworld has been out for a month and has so far sold ~66.000 copies globally. THAT is bad. GTA:CW was released in mid-march and sold more that 100K copies in merely two weeks. What has this industry become that a hundred thousand players are bad news?
As I wrote several times before about TV shows, game releases and cinema starts this is all about segmentation. Putting up an international one-price-for-all platform for movie purchases would undermine the local market branches the industry has elaborately established over the past decades. You can charge different prices for movies in the EU, Asia, US and so forth. The differences make for additional profit. They would never give that up voluntarily.
Well but the problem is... it's iTunes. I don't buy Hard- or Software from Apple. Why should I buy my movies from them. Completely neglecting the fact I can't even install their shitty software -of course.
It hasn't been shut down. The prosecution were all about how this sent a 'message' - and indeed it did. It sent a message that Swedish legal judgements are apparently toothless against a torrent tracker.
You ARE aware that court rulings usually have a certain timespan after which they enter legal status right? Almost no court verdict is immediately binding especially not when there's an appeals trial pending. Also, piratebay is hosted on different servers in different countries. Even if the Swedes shut down one site the distributed model lives on.
Oh, and the whole media circus made damn sure anybody who didn't know about pirate bay before, does now. Congratulations, asshats.
That's why DURING the trial there was very little actual coverage (let alone unbiased) in the news media whereas the verdict EVERYONE published. It's called lopsided reporting.
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
So far it seems like we don't have a choice. The lobbyists and governments make billions of dollars from pursuing this dark path. The consumer is too lazy or uninterested to withdraw his funding for that and merely keeps consuming. What the pirates do is a sort of non-violent rebellion on their terms. They still consume but they also demonstrate that they despise the ruling system. Sure majority rule should tell you that what the people want is priority but rationale and observation will tell you that majorities are no longer formed by the number of people but by the number of dollars.
I am always astonished how much fuss is made around how the DS or the Wii are deemed "family friendly" consoles. For the DS it boils down to a certain market segment that used to be exclusively construed from kids and teenagers. Now that middle aged housewives have got a literal grip on the gaming market of course the entire perception shifts. Over a decade ago when I was much younger and got my first gameboy that was a "toy" nothing more, nothing less. Nowadays videogames have turned into an entirely different category and the very same device can act as a simple "toy" for some and as more mature entertainment vehicle for others. Since Nintendo was always one of the companies that made their money by specifically appealing to the "toy" crowd (they still do) they became associated with that low age low maintainance demographics. What people won't realize is that just as gamers have grown up so did games. M titles will be on all platforms and are merely a logical step. That it took Nintendo so long to jump it's own over-protective shadow is a money laden unsolved mystery to me. Maybe know that they realize how little the Wii can actually compete with the HD platforms they open their portfolio to new markets a little more.
No one proved to them that they actually endorsed or supported illegal filesharing activity. The examples that the prosecution used were either proven to not use the piratebay tracker at all or were simply researched so badly that they had to be dropped as evidence altogether. From a legal perspective no one has made ANY points against the piratebay so far. There are so many holes in that verdict it will be like cutting swiss cheese.
If sales reflect demand it appears that Joe Public doesn't see the value of an open source smart phone.
Problem was... there was never really anything that the public would have been interested in. All the devices sold were clearly marked as "not consumer ready" and missed tons of standard features to survive in the phone market. Of course people don't see the value in an open source smart phone because there is none, never was. That device was a developer toy and unfortunately never left that stage.
Just pass a law that says "Everything that makes you feel funny inside and your mommy didn't tell you about is illegal." Problem solved. This is what this is all about, isn't it? These people never have to learn how to deal with reality because they create legal blinders that forbids other people to show them what's actually going on. Perpetrators should be shot at the spot. Death penalty for repeat offenders.
It could be so simple. Germany has adopted this law as well now teens can legally fuck at the age of 14 but they can never watch the tapes. God forbid someone drew them naked on a giant sinking cruise liner...
Slashdot Mirror
No no blood in games is not acceptable as long as the game is given an 18+ rating (which means many publishers won't even release it here). All games that are >=16y rated need to have "non-human like" characters which you can then chop up an mutilate however you want as long as it's not solely for the purpose of torture or dismemberment. The German ratings board is in some instances even more ridiculous than the MPAA but German kids don't give a crap anyway. There's enough companies in adjacent Switzerland and Austria which always get the full mature titles with German language in PAL so you can just order there or go on the interwebs. As always prohibition basically takes away more control than it actually grants you.
It's quite simple really. The internet really took off around 1999-2000 for the last ten years (idiotic) governments like mine have been blissfully ignorant of the changes. For the first five years they refused to admit anything had even changed and didn't get it at all. Now in the last five years they suddenly realized how much had actually changed in terms of business and culture and social exchange and so forth and that intimidated them. Therefore, they started trying to gain back control with the expected subtlety of a vice holding a peeled grape. If you don't understand it but it changes everything you do ... stamp down on it until it no longer moves and then sloooowly give it back room to breathe to a level with which you are comfortable. I still hope that people realize how strong a force the global interwebs are.
If this does not force the average German to start participating, or at least thinking about way around this, I don't what will.
You don't know much about German mentality do you? It took them a holocaust, nuclear bombs and national defeat and invasion to "think about" why being Nazis was such a bad idea. I'm sometimes ashamed to be a German. Not because of history but because a majority of people have learned absolutely NOTHING from it. I would think that some of the people would at least start a discussion about it but most Germans (from what I can tell) don't (want to) understand the matter. Problem is that only gradually will the things that Joe Public is concerned with get affected. Until then they will have had plenty of time shutting down all those little nagging voices.
We don't need the BKA to put that on the list. The classic RickRoll Youtube vid was already blocked when the GEMA (the german IFPI equivalent) couldn't get their greedy mouths full and demanded horrendous sums of money for their "protected works" to be displayed to German viewers. There are of course dozens of clones and copies still up which aren't registered but the classig "Rick Astley - Never gonna give you up" video only shows a "This video is not available in your country" ... way to go cutting us off from the internet culture greedy rights holder bastards.
Needs to be stopped, burned and sealed away.
1. Malware/Virus Removal Tool 2. Windows Updater 3. VirtualBox running Windows XP
I don't know but I sure hope so. We'll find out after it's released, I guess.
Actually since the MotionPlus doesn't use the IR sensors that's kinda pointless. This thing contains afaik 3 multi-axis accelerometers that are way more precise than what was possible during the launch of the Wii years back. It snaps into the Wiimote which is a good thing because they have sold 50 million Wiimotes and most people won't be too happy to spend another 200$ on new controllers just to have a sword fight with their mates. Nintendo already pissed off loads of people with their strange antics, now telling me I have to throw away my Wiimotes and buy new ones -no wai. Instead it's a 20$ addon which is much more feasible to most consumers, if you want it ... it's 20$ per controller extra instead of another 50 for a new one. Other than that, older games won't work because there is no real patching infrastructure on the Wii that I'm aware of. You would have to re-write potentially large chunks of the controls code to have your game react to the MotionPlus input correctly and why bother in the first place? The games that didn't have M+ don't need it now. Most games wouldn't benefit from simply "tacked on" MotionPlus just as they don't benefit from tacked on waggle or motion control. Now, games that are built around MotionPlus ... that's a different story.
An interesting tidbit about this is that the game launched on 17th/20th March and the new DSi launched hardly two weeks later. Saving up money to buy something big? Sounds like a typical resource conflict to me. Whaddya get from you allowance? A new DSi or GTA sqr(4)D Chinatown Wars? I share the view from TFA that the sales numbers will pick up soon. I'd say basically a case of either botched release planning or economic optimism. Maybe they hoped that all people would spend money on the DSi AND GTA:CW
I don't "boycott" Apple. I just don't like their (overpriced) hardware and can't get myself to use Mac OS. Also, I run Linux so iTunes is out of the question and I also don't like their strange media distribution policies and DRM measures and so forth. Only a personal matter of choice, I guess. Love the iPhone design, but it's way too expensive for something I need to illegaly pry open. Carrier dependency is also a no-no. I'd rather live in a 1.5G world than go with a mandatory Apple restriction AND an overpriced restrictive carrier contract. Actually, both won't do seperately either :)
DS Chinatown Wars flops badly
I love how they whine about "the game only sold 100.000 units in two weeks" and make it sound like that's terrible. Madworld has been out for a month and has so far sold ~66.000 copies globally. THAT is bad. GTA:CW was released in mid-march and sold more that 100K copies in merely two weeks. What has this industry become that a hundred thousand players are bad news?
As I wrote several times before about TV shows, game releases and cinema starts this is all about segmentation. Putting up an international one-price-for-all platform for movie purchases would undermine the local market branches the industry has elaborately established over the past decades. You can charge different prices for movies in the EU, Asia, US and so forth. The differences make for additional profit. They would never give that up voluntarily.
It's under 'Movies' in the iTunes Store.
Well but the problem is... it's iTunes. I don't buy Hard- or Software from Apple. Why should I buy my movies from them. Completely neglecting the fact I can't even install their shitty software -of course.
www.thepiratebay.org
It hasn't been shut down. The prosecution were all about how this sent a 'message' - and indeed it did. It sent a message that Swedish legal judgements are apparently toothless against a torrent tracker.
You ARE aware that court rulings usually have a certain timespan after which they enter legal status right? Almost no court verdict is immediately binding especially not when there's an appeals trial pending. Also, piratebay is hosted on different servers in different countries. Even if the Swedes shut down one site the distributed model lives on.
Oh, and the whole media circus made damn sure anybody who didn't know about pirate bay before, does now. Congratulations, asshats.
That's why DURING the trial there was very little actual coverage (let alone unbiased) in the news media whereas the verdict EVERYONE published. It's called lopsided reporting.
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
So far it seems like we don't have a choice. The lobbyists and governments make billions of dollars from pursuing this dark path. The consumer is too lazy or uninterested to withdraw his funding for that and merely keeps consuming. What the pirates do is a sort of non-violent rebellion on their terms. They still consume but they also demonstrate that they despise the ruling system. Sure majority rule should tell you that what the people want is priority but rationale and observation will tell you that majorities are no longer formed by the number of people but by the number of dollars.
I am always astonished how much fuss is made around how the DS or the Wii are deemed "family friendly" consoles. For the DS it boils down to a certain market segment that used to be exclusively construed from kids and teenagers. Now that middle aged housewives have got a literal grip on the gaming market of course the entire perception shifts. Over a decade ago when I was much younger and got my first gameboy that was a "toy" nothing more, nothing less. Nowadays videogames have turned into an entirely different category and the very same device can act as a simple "toy" for some and as more mature entertainment vehicle for others. Since Nintendo was always one of the companies that made their money by specifically appealing to the "toy" crowd (they still do) they became associated with that low age low maintainance demographics. What people won't realize is that just as gamers have grown up so did games. M titles will be on all platforms and are merely a logical step. That it took Nintendo so long to jump it's own over-protective shadow is a money laden unsolved mystery to me. Maybe know that they realize how little the Wii can actually compete with the HD platforms they open their portfolio to new markets a little more.
No one proved to them that they actually endorsed or supported illegal filesharing activity. The examples that the prosecution used were either proven to not use the piratebay tracker at all or were simply researched so badly that they had to be dropped as evidence altogether. From a legal perspective no one has made ANY points against the piratebay so far. There are so many holes in that verdict it will be like cutting swiss cheese.
QFT - PFH Quoted for truth ... punished for heresy.
If sales reflect demand it appears that Joe Public doesn't see the value of an open source smart phone.
Problem was ... there was never really anything that the public would have been interested in. All the devices sold were clearly marked as "not consumer ready" and missed tons of standard features to survive in the phone market. Of course people don't see the value in an open source smart phone because there is none, never was. That device was a developer toy and unfortunately never left that stage.
Or are all codecs finally included again like they used to be? Can't believe I have to re-compile VLC just to encode Xvid directly.
Without incidents like these it's getting really tough to argue against those who have all the information and therefore power.
Everyone who's got "great" in their nickname received a million dollars and a complementary holodeck ... but nevermind.
Welcome our new Gorilla cider overlords ...
even if they don't want to hear it. That's manly isn't it?
Just pass a law that says "Everything that makes you feel funny inside and your mommy didn't tell you about is illegal." Problem solved. This is what this is all about, isn't it? These people never have to learn how to deal with reality because they create legal blinders that forbids other people to show them what's actually going on. Perpetrators should be shot at the spot. Death penalty for repeat offenders.
...
It could be so simple. Germany has adopted this law as well now teens can legally fuck at the age of 14 but they can never watch the tapes. God forbid someone drew them naked on a giant sinking cruise liner