First of all, anti-trust legislation only comes into force when a company has a monopoly, so it's not really relevant here.
Secondly, this is all dones through legal weaselese. In this case:
1) I've licensed D&D 3e to you under the OGL. That license states that it is non-revokable, and therefore there is NO WAY I can stop you from releasing all you want under it. However... 2) I can offer you the opportunity to license D&D 4e from me under a new license. I can put any clause into that license I want. I can say you need to shave your head, paint your arse blue, and change your name to Stacy if I want. You have the option of either accepting those terms, or not licensing 4e from me.
Note that you could probably take some of those conditions to court for a judgement, if they were particularly egregious. A court may rule that certain licensing restrictions are invalid and unenforceable, and no longer stand. That's why you often see a clause at the end of a license which says something like, "In the event that certain parts of this license are determined to be unenforceable, the remaining parts are still valid." Much of this detail though, depends on country and jurisdiction.
"Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days"
This is a very telling remark, mostly because it's been around for a decade.
When Linux kernel 2.0 came out, it was "ready for primetime," and the only people who said otherwise were trotting out complaints that were fixed in the bad old days. 2.2 kernel, same thing. 2.4, again. People who might be half-interested in trying Linux are more than a little leery partly because the community has been saying "it's finally ready for you now--we've fixed all of those bad things you've heard" for half a generation!
Is Ubuntu ready for the consumer? Yep, I'd say so--I installed it for a friend, and he loves it. That doesn't change the fact that people are suspicious of apologies about "previous" problems.
Blue Jeans definitely is well known in the "rational high-end audio" field. They're notorious in the "irrational high-end magic audio" field, as well, which I consider a plus for them.
Their cables are overpriced for the signal they have to carry, but that's because they're overengineered for the signal they have to carry. What you're paying for with them is (a) cable costs, plus (b) terminator costs, plus (c) modest assembly costs.
Do you need cables that extravagant? Absolutely not. However, if you want some well-engineered and well-built cables, BJ is a bargain.
(personal note: I make all of my own cables; interconnects out of RG6 coax, and speaker out of multiple 18 ga. stranded runs, braided together a la Kimber Cable, to accomplish ~11 ga. Why? Because I feel like it.)
Roundup Ready crops are definitely a GM product. Specifically, a soil bacterium gene that is resistant to glyphosphate-induced inhibition was inserted into the seed. For corn (strain 603, to be specific), here's the quote from Monsanto in their request to the Canadian government:
The 603 line of corn (Zea maysL.) was developed through a specific genetic modification to be tolerant to glyphosate containing herbicides. This novel variety was developed from an inbred dent corn line by insertion of a bacterial 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) encoding gene which provides enhanced tolerance to glyphosate compared to the native corn EPSPS. (a href="http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/gmf-agm/appro/roundup_ready_corn_603-mais_603_roundup_ready_e.html"ref: Health Canada.)
Similar for soybeans and canola.
Secondly, the key to RR crops is consumer (i.e. farmer) product lock-in. Spraying Roundup on early post-emergent seedlings means that you can ONLY grow RR crops. Even with careful application, the drift will cause significant damage to adjacent crops.
Finally, No modern farmer "reuses" seeds, GM or no. Wrong. Just flat out wrong. It's not as common as it was, but MANY farmers harvest seed crops as well as food crops, get them washed and treated, and grow them again. Besides, whether or not it happens is irrelevant--taking away that option, either by splicing in terminator genes or by suing farmers, is just criminal.
"Forgetting for a moment the fact that organic crops are less safe..."
Um...what? I'd love to know what you mean by this.
Unfortunately, in the USA almost everybody DOES care. Racism is getting worse rather than better, and paranoia about racism is making it worse as well. Every racial statistical difference is assumed to be a RACIST statistical difference. Nobody seems to be questioning this, and the marketing companies are promoting it as a way of subdividing the market and selling more.
They shouldn't care. None of it matters. Everyone would be better off if they just got on with their lives and quit worrying about it all. HOWEVER, that's not the reality of 21st century America.
I have my Diamond Monster MX300 card sitting on a shelf, sadly out of service. It was a great card. No, it really was a GREAT card. Unfortunately, the drivers got scarce after Diamond went under, and after years of fighting to make it work consistently and properly under Windows 2000, I broke down and bought a new card--an Audigy2 somethingorother. It's a fine card, but there's absolutely no reason that a hundred bucks shouldn't buy you something comparable to an M-Audio card, at least in terms of input and output quality. Sadly, a complete monopoly on the market has stifled all innovation in the consumer sound card end. As always, Shiny and useless features win out over quality.
First of all, this *IS* slashdot! Technology being used for invasion of privacy is absolutely something that belongs here--especially when it's a company that is so central to our daily online lives.
Secondly, with one case it's possible that Google made a mistake--that they took a step too far, and have realised it. A second (or third, or fourth) example is evidence of their corporate mindset and behaviour, which is very important.
Basically, this is newsworthy because Google is continuing this practice, they're not apologising, they're not backing off, they're only doing the bare minimum to avoid getting their asses sued (or criminally charged) into oblivion.
Besides, what would you rather see on/., an article about the NY Mets being rickrolled? At least this is important.
That's a good example of what they want to do. WHY they want to do it, of course, is that they want more market share. They want to sell you more stuff, and sell more advertising.
Thing is, at what cost? The way they want to customise your "search experience" is by collecting personal, trackable, invasive data about you. Consider another case. You look up in order; online handgun ordering, bank hours, and then Google maps of banks near your house.
Are you planning a bank robbery? Google might think so--if they have the ability to track that history, then in most jurisdictions, they have a legal responsibility to report that suspicion to the police. Of course, due process will ensure that nothing bad will EVER come of such reports, right?
I don't want my privacy invaded for the sake of "improving my user experience," especially when that behaviour collection is kept indefinitely. Give me a search engine that provides reliable and consistent results for a given term, and I'll pick the term that I want.
(Disclaimer: I just don't care enough one way or another to bother with something this silly. Of course, discussing it on/. is another matter entirely!)
If I were to sign this petition, it would be as an indication of encouragement. "Uwe," my signature would say, "your movies really aren't any good. There's probably something else out there that you'd be MUCH better at, and why not dedicate your resources to finding that instead of spending more of your life on bad films? It's just not your forte, man."
The take-home message here, is that I have a terribly eloquent signature.
Now THAT sounds more like the computing world I grew up in! There was a time when most stuff was just out there, and none of us cared much about what minor revision of which license it was released under, because we were just sharing code.
Magazines publishing code to type in was an excellent example. If you typed it in, you could modify it or make copies for your friends at will. Did the license explicitly allow or forbid it? I have no idea--the community understood the idea of community software. It just wasn't that big of a deal. Commercial software eventually came out as well, and we paid for that if we needed it. It wasn't an ideology, it wasn't a philosophy, it was just COMMUNITY, doing...community stuff.
The Free/Open Source Software(tm) _movement_ may be ten years old now, but that's entirely a political creation, and one that I personally feel is regularly wrong-headed. It's so ideological that it's now trying to rewrite history around itself. It has also moved from pro-open anti-closed software to pro-"our license" and anti-"commercial software of any sort", which is ultimately self-destructive.
If you want to advertise to me, you can pay me for my time. In gaming, this means that I might play games with advertising if they're free. If you charge me for the game, then forget it--I am not paying you to advertise to me.
Jim is my MP. When the liberals were in power, he would come out to community events, stand on his (conservative) views, and try to represent the community. He also answered letters and appreciated comments on current issues.
When the Conservative minority took office and he became a cabinet minister, he turned into a corporate-interest zombie. The only thing I've heard from him other than form letters in that time was one reply (eight months after I sent him a letter on the issue), explaining that camcorder movie piracy led to TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in lost revenue for the movie industry, and most of the people who were suffering were the ordinary Joes who were in the bottom 1/3 of the credits on movies. (Assistant gaffer's apprentice, etc.)
He's a shill for the entertainment industry and a COMPLETE sellout. For all we (his constituents) heard about his involvement in the church, he should be excommunicated for disgracing the ideals of religion.
If I heard about "some OS" following this route, I'd be quite happy. With Microsoft, I always fear the worst.
I have a vision of Win7 coming with the kernel, GUI, network, and IE modules standard. Sound would be a for-pay extra. High resolution video playback would be a for-pay extra. Encryption would be a for-pay extra.
Of course, the OS might actually be leaner and faster, but in my mind this is predominantly a marketing/revenue model rather than an OS architecture model. But then, I'm just a full-time cynic.
First of all, I'm a Unix admin and have done my time in the trenches (AKA user support). In that world, we'd occasionally get people asking for (or DEMANDING) the root password, so they could install software on their workstations. If they wouldn't give up, then if their manager presented a written request, we would have them change the root password on their workstation to something they knew and we didn't, and they'd never hear from us again. It's either our machine to administer or theirs, but not both. If we were feeling gracious, we'd give them one free rebuild the first time they blew up their machine, but not very often.
In the windows world, ignoring all of the painful permission settings, there's ultimately only one additional issue: Malware. Allowing users to manage their own PCs means that virus protection will NOT be maintained, spyware will be installed, and spambots will appear in the environment. This is a pretty big risk in my mind, but I view a corporate Windows environment to be a pointless risk from the outset.
I notice that this book is 928 pages, same as the hardcover of Cryptonomicon. This means that I probably won't be reading it.
It's not that I object to long books, but I still haven't made it through Cryptonomicon, and don't feel much like going back to it. Somewhere in there, I'm quite certain, is a really good story struggling to break free--and that story is probably around 300 pages. The man needs an editor with a wooden ruler to smack his knuckles now and then.
I'd like to finish one of his "amazing" books, but life is too short, and at this point there are too many other things that I'd rather read first.
Even if the hard limits of silicon circuits are reached in four years, we will NOT be switching to nanotubes, graphene, superconductors, or quantum computing. Any of those technologies are at least a decade away from commercial applications, and 15 years is more likely. If there's nowhere to advance after four more years (and I rather doubt that--we've got too much history proving us wrong), then we'll just grow out. Bigger silicon dies, bigger cache, more cores. Maybe we'll actually hit the terminus of Moore's law, but that won't stop computers from advancing, and it won't magically make any of the alternative technologies mature.
When someone makes a nanotube 80486 that I can buy and use, THEN I'll start to believe we're close to a technology shift. Hell, give me a 4004 - at least it's a product.
I'm not necessarily against gaming at this level--I've done it in the past (spent about 30 full days of playing one of my characters in Dark Age of Camelot) and walked away from it with no harm, but a lot of fun times. It's exceedingly unlikely that I'll ever do it again, now that I'm a parent.:-)
Tossing tobacco and gambling (or gaming) into the same category always pushes one of my buttons, since there is a clear and distinct line between addiction and 'behavioural addiction.' For now though, I'll let that one slide, because computer games are in fact very carefully designed to mimic the response of an addictive compound. Is this amoral? Hard to claim unequivocally, since encouraging customers to continue to buy your products is the fundamental basis of business and capitalism. (and I'm not about to begin talking about whether capitalism is fundamentally amoral! At least not today.) The question is: Where do you draw the line? Is making something tasty sufficient? No, probably not. How about delivering a flavour that you don't _quite_ get enough of, so need more, a la Lay's Potato Chips (Remember the "Betcha can't eat just one" campaign? the product is designed that way). That's a bit more questionable. Games are kind of hard to categorize this way, because the risk/effort/reward model is inherent to most games, as it is also inherent to addiction. (!) Monopoly is based on this model. So is (paper-and-pen) D&D. Pure strategy games like chess and go aren't necessarily, but as soon as you get into a community of players, the competitive pyramid is, which also points out that competitive sports operate in the same way: Start as a neophyte, improve quickly to competency, and then further improvements come slower and slower, with more and more effort (practice) required. Getting from "weakest guy in the club" (in whatever sport you're fond of) to "middle of the pack" is probably half a year's effort. Getting to "top of the club" might be another few years. Shining in the local community can take a bit longer, and going from local to regional to national to international star will probably take decades.
So all of that rambling is just to establish that this sort of behavioural model is a natural and fundamental process. Whew!
The thing is, given that RPGs are based on that model, is it natural and reasonable that a company would do their best to tweak the game mechanics to align more closely to the implementation that encourages the most repeat business, or is it reprehensible that they're modeling addiction to paying customers?
The answer is absolutely and completely clear: Maybe.:-)
"While I believe that they are really trying to stick to the 'Do No Evil' ideal..."
And with that statement, Google proves that their massive PR campaign has worked.
Google is evil and does do evil quite regularly. They are, in fact, at least as evil as any other typical publicly traded company.
I'm not sure now if they ever actually cleaved to the "don't be evil" philosophy, or just started it as a PR campaign and went about their business, cheerfully ignoring it internally.
Google is idealistic? Not even remotely--they're aggressive, mercenary, and willing to sell their grandmother's sexual secrets for a profit. In other words they're just another company. The only thing that makes them unique is their amazing ability to keep blinders on most of the otherwise internet-savy public.
"I'm too busy and important to play this game seriously, and it's too boring otherwise, so that makes cheating against the other players just fine. Besides, I didn't get my money back the last time I cheated, so they owe me!"
I'm not sure whether to nod my head wisely, or scream hysterically.
Let me get this straight: The OS doesn't perform well when it's installed. It gets better at some things when it figures out what things the user does on a regular basis?
Great. So if I'm a gamer, will it be unusably slow when I go to organise my photos once every month or so? Or if I use it mainly for music processing, the odd time I have for gaming will be pointless, because I need to play games for two days before it's acceptable?
This is ridiculous. I can't imagine if this is an idiotic tech idea that wasn't stopped in time, or an idiotic marketing idea that wasn't fought hard enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Originally the /. post read:
"Might want to think hard about what's on your laptop if you're going to be passing through a US international airport."
Allow me to edit it for the rest of the world:
"Might want to think hard about (...) passing through a US international airport."
Yeah, that looks better.
First of all, anti-trust legislation only comes into force when a company has a monopoly, so it's not really relevant here.
Secondly, this is all dones through legal weaselese. In this case:
1) I've licensed D&D 3e to you under the OGL. That license states that it is non-revokable, and therefore there is NO WAY I can stop you from releasing all you want under it. However...
2) I can offer you the opportunity to license D&D 4e from me under a new license. I can put any clause into that license I want. I can say you need to shave your head, paint your arse blue, and change your name to Stacy if I want. You have the option of either accepting those terms, or not licensing 4e from me.
Note that you could probably take some of those conditions to court for a judgement, if they were particularly egregious. A court may rule that certain licensing restrictions are invalid and unenforceable, and no longer stand. That's why you often see a clause at the end of a license which says something like, "In the event that certain parts of this license are determined to be unenforceable, the remaining parts are still valid." Much of this detail though, depends on country and jurisdiction.
Whenever the Linux zealots feel like putting down the "one-True-Holy-license" pitchforks and start to implement it.
The code is out there. You're welcome to use it following the license under which it was released.
"Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days"
This is a very telling remark, mostly because it's been around for a decade.
When Linux kernel 2.0 came out, it was "ready for primetime," and the only people who said otherwise were trotting out complaints that were fixed in the bad old days.
2.2 kernel, same thing. 2.4, again. People who might be half-interested in trying Linux are more than a little leery partly because the community has been saying "it's finally ready for you now--we've fixed all of those bad things you've heard" for half a generation!
Is Ubuntu ready for the consumer? Yep, I'd say so--I installed it for a friend, and he loves it. That doesn't change the fact that people are suspicious of apologies about "previous" problems.
Blue Jeans definitely is well known in the "rational high-end audio" field. They're notorious in the "irrational high-end magic audio" field, as well, which I consider a plus for them.
Their cables are overpriced for the signal they have to carry, but that's because they're overengineered for the signal they have to carry. What you're paying for with them is (a) cable costs, plus (b) terminator costs, plus (c) modest assembly costs.
Do you need cables that extravagant? Absolutely not. However, if you want some well-engineered and well-built cables, BJ is a bargain.
(personal note: I make all of my own cables; interconnects out of RG6 coax, and speaker out of multiple 18 ga. stranded runs, braided together a la Kimber Cable, to accomplish ~11 ga. Why? Because I feel like it.)
Um...no.
Roundup Ready crops are definitely a GM product. Specifically, a soil bacterium gene that is resistant to glyphosphate-induced inhibition was inserted into the seed. For corn (strain 603, to be specific), here's the quote from Monsanto in their request to the Canadian government:
The 603 line of corn (Zea maysL.) was developed through a specific genetic modification to be tolerant to glyphosate containing herbicides. This novel variety was developed from an inbred dent corn line by insertion of a bacterial 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) encoding gene which provides enhanced tolerance to glyphosate compared to the native corn EPSPS. (a href="http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/gmf-agm/appro/roundup_ready_corn_603-mais_603_roundup_ready_e.html"ref: Health Canada.)
Similar for soybeans and canola.
Secondly, the key to RR crops is consumer (i.e. farmer) product lock-in. Spraying Roundup on early post-emergent seedlings means that you can ONLY grow RR crops. Even with careful application, the drift will cause significant damage to adjacent crops.
Finally, No modern farmer "reuses" seeds, GM or no.
Wrong. Just flat out wrong. It's not as common as it was, but MANY farmers harvest seed crops as well as food crops, get them washed and treated, and grow them again. Besides, whether or not it happens is irrelevant--taking away that option, either by splicing in terminator genes or by suing farmers, is just criminal.
"Forgetting for a moment the fact that organic crops are less safe..."
Um...what? I'd love to know what you mean by this.
Unfortunately, in the USA almost everybody DOES care. Racism is getting worse rather than better, and paranoia about racism is making it worse as well. Every racial statistical difference is assumed to be a RACIST statistical difference. Nobody seems to be questioning this, and the marketing companies are promoting it as a way of subdividing the market and selling more.
They shouldn't care. None of it matters. Everyone would be better off if they just got on with their lives and quit worrying about it all. HOWEVER, that's not the reality of 21st century America.
http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&thread.id=2534367
I have my Diamond Monster MX300 card sitting on a shelf, sadly out of service. It was a great card. No, it really was a GREAT card. Unfortunately, the drivers got scarce after Diamond went under, and after years of fighting to make it work consistently and properly under Windows 2000, I broke down and bought a new card--an Audigy2 somethingorother.
It's a fine card, but there's absolutely no reason that a hundred bucks shouldn't buy you something comparable to an M-Audio card, at least in terms of input and output quality. Sadly, a complete monopoly on the market has stifled all innovation in the consumer sound card end. As always, Shiny and useless features win out over quality.
Ummm....wrong couple. The Borings are the ones who are actively suing. It's the McKees who are rolling over.
Two reasons.
/., an article about the NY Mets being rickrolled? At least this is important.
First of all, this *IS* slashdot! Technology being used for invasion of privacy is absolutely something that belongs here--especially when it's a company that is so central to our daily online lives.
Secondly, with one case it's possible that Google made a mistake--that they took a step too far, and have realised it. A second (or third, or fourth) example is evidence of their corporate mindset and behaviour, which is very important.
Basically, this is newsworthy because Google is continuing this practice, they're not apologising, they're not backing off, they're only doing the bare minimum to avoid getting their asses sued (or criminally charged) into oblivion.
Besides, what would you rather see on
That's a good example of what they want to do. WHY they want to do it, of course, is that they want more market share. They want to sell you more stuff, and sell more advertising.
Thing is, at what cost? The way they want to customise your "search experience" is by collecting personal, trackable, invasive data about you. Consider another case. You look up in order; online handgun ordering, bank hours, and then Google maps of banks near your house.
Are you planning a bank robbery? Google might think so--if they have the ability to track that history, then in most jurisdictions, they have a legal responsibility to report that suspicion to the police. Of course, due process will ensure that nothing bad will EVER come of such reports, right?
I don't want my privacy invaded for the sake of "improving my user experience," especially when that behaviour collection is kept indefinitely. Give me a search engine that provides reliable and consistent results for a given term, and I'll pick the term that I want.
(Disclaimer: I just don't care enough one way or another to bother with something this silly. Of course, discussing it on /. is another matter entirely!)
If I were to sign this petition, it would be as an indication of encouragement. "Uwe," my signature would say, "your movies really aren't any good. There's probably something else out there that you'd be MUCH better at, and why not dedicate your resources to finding that instead of spending more of your life on bad films? It's just not your forte, man."
The take-home message here, is that I have a terribly eloquent signature.
Now THAT sounds more like the computing world I grew up in! There was a time when most stuff was just out there, and none of us cared much about what minor revision of which license it was released under, because we were just sharing code.
Magazines publishing code to type in was an excellent example. If you typed it in, you could modify it or make copies for your friends at will. Did the license explicitly allow or forbid it? I have no idea--the community understood the idea of community software. It just wasn't that big of a deal. Commercial software eventually came out as well, and we paid for that if we needed it. It wasn't an ideology, it wasn't a philosophy, it was just COMMUNITY, doing...community stuff.
The Free/Open Source Software(tm) _movement_ may be ten years old now, but that's entirely a political creation, and one that I personally feel is regularly wrong-headed. It's so ideological that it's now trying to rewrite history around itself. It has also moved from pro-open anti-closed software to pro-"our license" and anti-"commercial software of any sort", which is ultimately self-destructive.
If you want to advertise to me, you can pay me for my time. In gaming, this means that I might play games with advertising if they're free. If you charge me for the game, then forget it--I am not paying you to advertise to me.
Good luck with that.
Jim is my MP. When the liberals were in power, he would come out to community events, stand on his (conservative) views, and try to represent the community. He also answered letters and appreciated comments on current issues.
When the Conservative minority took office and he became a cabinet minister, he turned into a corporate-interest zombie. The only thing I've heard from him other than form letters in that time was one reply (eight months after I sent him a letter on the issue), explaining that camcorder movie piracy led to TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in lost revenue for the movie industry, and most of the people who were suffering were the ordinary Joes who were in the bottom 1/3 of the credits on movies. (Assistant gaffer's apprentice, etc.)
He's a shill for the entertainment industry and a COMPLETE sellout. For all we (his constituents) heard about his involvement in the church, he should be excommunicated for disgracing the ideals of religion.
If I heard about "some OS" following this route, I'd be quite happy. With Microsoft, I always fear the worst.
I have a vision of Win7 coming with the kernel, GUI, network, and IE modules standard. Sound would be a for-pay extra. High resolution video playback would be a for-pay extra. Encryption would be a for-pay extra.
Of course, the OS might actually be leaner and faster, but in my mind this is predominantly a marketing/revenue model rather than an OS architecture model. But then, I'm just a full-time cynic.
First of all, I'm a Unix admin and have done my time in the trenches (AKA user support). In that world, we'd occasionally get people asking for (or DEMANDING) the root password, so they could install software on their workstations. If they wouldn't give up, then if their manager presented a written request, we would have them change the root password on their workstation to something they knew and we didn't, and they'd never hear from us again. It's either our machine to administer or theirs, but not both. If we were feeling gracious, we'd give them one free rebuild the first time they blew up their machine, but not very often.
In the windows world, ignoring all of the painful permission settings, there's ultimately only one additional issue: Malware. Allowing users to manage their own PCs means that virus protection will NOT be maintained, spyware will be installed, and spambots will appear in the environment. This is a pretty big risk in my mind, but I view a corporate Windows environment to be a pointless risk from the outset.
I notice that this book is 928 pages, same as the hardcover of Cryptonomicon. This means that I probably won't be reading it.
It's not that I object to long books, but I still haven't made it through Cryptonomicon, and don't feel much like going back to it. Somewhere in there, I'm quite certain, is a really good story struggling to break free--and that story is probably around 300 pages. The man needs an editor with a wooden ruler to smack his knuckles now and then.
I'd like to finish one of his "amazing" books, but life is too short, and at this point there are too many other things that I'd rather read first.
Even if the hard limits of silicon circuits are reached in four years, we will NOT be switching to nanotubes, graphene, superconductors, or quantum computing. Any of those technologies are at least a decade away from commercial applications, and 15 years is more likely. If there's nowhere to advance after four more years (and I rather doubt that--we've got too much history proving us wrong), then we'll just grow out. Bigger silicon dies, bigger cache, more cores. Maybe we'll actually hit the terminus of Moore's law, but that won't stop computers from advancing, and it won't magically make any of the alternative technologies mature.
When someone makes a nanotube 80486 that I can buy and use, THEN I'll start to believe we're close to a technology shift. Hell, give me a 4004 - at least it's a product.
Bottom line: We're not there yet.
Wow. Some very interesting points there!
:-)
:-)
I'm not necessarily against gaming at this level--I've done it in the past (spent about 30 full days of playing one of my characters in Dark Age of Camelot) and walked away from it with no harm, but a lot of fun times. It's exceedingly unlikely that I'll ever do it again, now that I'm a parent.
Tossing tobacco and gambling (or gaming) into the same category always pushes one of my buttons, since there is a clear and distinct line between addiction and 'behavioural addiction.' For now though, I'll let that one slide, because computer games are in fact very carefully designed to mimic the response of an addictive compound. Is this amoral? Hard to claim unequivocally, since encouraging customers to continue to buy your products is the fundamental basis of business and capitalism. (and I'm not about to begin talking about whether capitalism is fundamentally amoral! At least not today.) The question is: Where do you draw the line? Is making something tasty sufficient? No, probably not. How about delivering a flavour that you don't _quite_ get enough of, so need more, a la Lay's Potato Chips (Remember the "Betcha can't eat just one" campaign? the product is designed that way). That's a bit more questionable. Games are kind of hard to categorize this way, because the risk/effort/reward model is inherent to most games, as it is also inherent to addiction. (!) Monopoly is based on this model. So is (paper-and-pen) D&D. Pure strategy games like chess and go aren't necessarily, but as soon as you get into a community of players, the competitive pyramid is, which also points out that competitive sports operate in the same way: Start as a neophyte, improve quickly to competency, and then further improvements come slower and slower, with more and more effort (practice) required. Getting from "weakest guy in the club" (in whatever sport you're fond of) to "middle of the pack" is probably half a year's effort. Getting to "top of the club" might be another few years. Shining in the local community can take a bit longer, and going from local to regional to national to international star will probably take decades.
So all of that rambling is just to establish that this sort of behavioural model is a natural and fundamental process. Whew!
The thing is, given that RPGs are based on that model, is it natural and reasonable that a company would do their best to tweak the game mechanics to align more closely to the implementation that encourages the most repeat business, or is it reprehensible that they're modeling addiction to paying customers?
The answer is absolutely and completely clear: Maybe.
"While I believe that they are really trying to stick to the 'Do No Evil' ideal..."
And with that statement, Google proves that their massive PR campaign has worked.
Google is evil and does do evil quite regularly. They are, in fact, at least as evil as any other typical publicly traded company.
I'm not sure now if they ever actually cleaved to the "don't be evil" philosophy, or just started it as a PR campaign and went about their business, cheerfully ignoring it internally.
Google is idealistic? Not even remotely--they're aggressive, mercenary, and willing to sell their grandmother's sexual secrets for a profit. In other words they're just another company. The only thing that makes them unique is their amazing ability to keep blinders on most of the otherwise internet-savy public.
Classic joke: How do you tell the difference between a Canadian and an American travelling abroad?
The Canadian only has _one_ maple leaf on his backpack.
Translation:
"I'm too busy and important to play this game seriously, and it's too boring otherwise, so that makes cheating against the other players just fine. Besides, I didn't get my money back the last time I cheated, so they owe me!"
You're the reason I don't pay for online games.
I'm not sure whether to nod my head wisely, or scream hysterically.
Let me get this straight: The OS doesn't perform well when it's installed. It gets better at some things when it figures out what things the user does on a regular basis?
Great. So if I'm a gamer, will it be unusably slow when I go to organise my photos once every month or so? Or if I use it mainly for music processing, the odd time I have for gaming will be pointless, because I need to play games for two days before it's acceptable?
This is ridiculous. I can't imagine if this is an idiotic tech idea that wasn't stopped in time, or an idiotic marketing idea that wasn't fought hard enough.