Actually the stereotypical "Players" you describe with their wants & needs and what they value are only the Achiever kind of player in the Bartle Player Type classification (here).
The Explorers, Socializers or Killers do not necessarilly derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks.
Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying.
The truth is that, in MMORPGs, grinding based game-playing is a cheap way for publishers to create time-sinks in the game instead of spending money in creating real content like areas, dungeons, boss encounters, story quests and others.
While most people that played MMORPGs in the time of UO and the like were willing to live with it (since there was nothing beter), nowadays, there's plenty of MMORPGs out there with massive amounts of content for players to enjoy (in my personal experience, both current WoW - it was worse in the past - and LOTRO are very good in that aspect).
(Now the head of some guy in another article is going to blow)
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't always:
Advocate group publishes report that promotes/detracts from whatever the group promotes/detracts from.
Sometimes its: Publisher of report that promotes/detracts from something get's tagged as belonging to a group that promotes/detracts from that something.
It is in fact a very common tactic to "paint" your critics of belonging to a group with an agenda as a means of devaluating their comments.
Of course, around here in/. we're all well aware of all the dirty psychological tricks employed in this kind of speach and will not fall for them.... right!????
You're making the assumption that the Copyright Office will exist in 130 years time and the even more tall assumption that they will care enough during those 130 years to keep all those masters in pristine order AND keep the capability to read them.
Yes, copyright is screwed up enough that the time-frames involved are more than a century.
You're whole point is aimed at the wrong target: nobody says that he shouldn't be tried and convicted if found guilty - even he himself admits he's done it.
The point that most people are making is that he should be tried (and convicted if found guilty) in the UK, not the US. There's plenty of reasons for that, the main one being that the penalties imposed by the US justice system for the kind of crime he commited are considered excessive and inhuman in the civilized world.
By reading the discussion on Wikipedia the impression that I have is that it suffers from a huge problem of "Petty Dictatorships".
A "Petty Dictatorship" is when you have somebody who gets a small power (say, a bouncer in a nightclub) and then proceeds to exercise it against other on any chance they have, probably because it makes them feel powerful.
Certainly, many of the Wikipedia admins on the discussion page seem to be being obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionisy (while hidding behind vague concepts - like notoriety - and obscure references to Wikipedia rules).
So, in other words, all the normal things that happen when you get a new phone/upgrade an existing phone.
Some of us actually just buy unlocked phones: after my first phone, I have never again been locked in a mobile phone contract (saved tons of money btw).
Is this not an option in the US with this mobile phone?
I imagine some lawyers are running around looking nervous at quite a few big software companies this morning. All those DRM systems, for example, just became a bit of a liability: if I install a game and it simply doesn't work, then all those arguments about not returning opened products for a refund just became untenable. (Take note, Ubisoft and games shops.) And if you play silly wotsits on someone's computer to try to install your software's copy protection system and you get it wrong and damage their system, $DEITY help you, because it looks like the courts aren't going to. (Take note Sony, Adobe, et al.)
I live in the UK and I have successfully returned opened software products for a refund multiple times. The process is simple, you bring the software back to the store you say it doesn't work correctly and you uter the magic words "Not Fit For Purpose". If they still try and stall you, you uter then even more powerfull words "Then I'll have to complain to Trading Standards".
The no-return policies are cunning lies to deceive ignorant customers: your right to return a product within the warranty time if it is not fit for purpose cannot be taken away. What they actually are saying is that you can return an unopened product for any reason within X time (in other words, an extra right) but they word it in such a way that people tend to interpret it as "you cannot return an opened product at all". In fact, if they explicitly stated that you cannot return an opened product at all, they would be sued by Trading Standards. [IANAL but once upon a time I did trade online as a business so I read all the rules]
This is also why I don't buy software online, especially from companies not based in the UK - if you have to reach them by e-mail or phone they can stall you as long as they wish (or until you loose your patience and take them to Small Claims Court), and if based outside the UK they're pretty much out of your reach for redress.
What they're talking about is A-level exams. These are taken by high-school graduates before college.
It's not that Comp Sci students will graduate without having learned those languages, it's that candidates for Comp Sci higher education will not be expected to know them.
As unfair as it seems to some old hands in IT, nowadays the industry rarelly hires people without college degrees for Programmer positions, so this does not mean we'll be swamped by a wave of "semi-literate" programmers.
EULAs are not valid in most of the world - they are considered a one sided attempt at changing the terms of the implicit contract which is the sale and as such are not worth the paper they are written on.
Steam on the other hand is a software agent that remotelly imposes the will of a 3rd party after the sale. If they abuse it, it is you that now has to spend time and money seeking redress in the courts.
CD check during installation only is DRM done well.
Anything which after I bought a game checks with a remote entity to see if I'm actually allowed to play it (said remote entity might reply with "No") is just a form of imposing arbitrary after-sale restrictions on my ownership rights.
Steam apologists sound like a man which, having been daily beaten up with a steel rod in the recent past, now says how good it is to be beaten up daily with a baseball bat.
If you ever worked with highly intelligent people, you surelly have noticed that some of them are hardly as successful as one would expect from their IQ - even if you have not noticed that about yourself.
Intelligent people are in fact easier to con because: - They are so (over)confident in their own mental abilities and believe so much that they are thus un-connable that they won't even see the emotional/social manipulation of the conman (in a sense, they have a huge blind spot). - Their confort zone is often logic, not influencing people, so they cannot even recognize some of the "moves" for what they are.
Both US main parties are right wing and corporatist.
This is well known outside the US where the press is diverse enough and worldy enough for people to actually be exposed to all kinds of points of view, not just always the same two points of view portrayed as being opposite.
If it wasn't for the fact the US policy has a huge influence on the rest of the world, this would simply be humouristic and entertaining in a snobish way for the rest of the world. As is, i think most of us just wish that the US population pull their heads out of their collective asses and look at the shit for what it is instead of concentrating on the flies.
And yet in most places with high birth rates, the mortality rates have been enormously reduced with the introduction of modern medicine, sanitation and higiene while the birth rates didn't actually decrease, which is why many poor and middle-wealth countries now have exceptionally high population growth rates - same number of births, lower number of deaths.
In fact, excluding laws to that effect (such as China's One Child Policy) the reduction in birth rates seems to be more correlated with wealth and education than with mortality rates.
They're planning on atomizing sea water into the air.
Sea-water has salt in it.
A high salt content makes agricultural land unfertile.
Frequent salty rains over a land area would slowly increase the salt levels in that area, effectivelly poisoning the land.
So they won't be doing it close to land at at all: it will be done in the middle of the ocean where all that salt will simple fall down to the ocean again. Lots of clouds to reflect the sunlight back into space work just as well (if not beter) over the ocean than over land.
One of the comments on the site with TFA is from someone that keeps his sports games for a long time because of the replayability that online playing gives.
Consider for a moment that with the "Online Pass" at any point EA can drop (or sneakilly slow down to a crawl) all multiplayer, user created content and online community features on a game "we don't support anymore" so as to pump-up sales of the new version. What EA is doing here is to try and control the lifecycle of a game after the sale way beyond just second-hand sales.
Basically they're doing the same as Ubisoft but with a bit of carrot, not just the stick.
No, that's neither capitalists nor free market supporters. What those are are corporatists or Fascists.
It might very well be the case that (perfect) Capitalism, like (perfect) Communism, is unstable because it does not take in account the inherent characteristics of Human beings and societies.
True Capitalism should sit somewhere between Anarchy and Corporatism: - Capitalism cannot work in a rule-less world (ie Anarchy) since some regulation and enforcement is required for things like enforcing contracts and enforcing property ownership (in an Anarchist system, ownership is decided by your ability to defend it yourself) which in turn are a pre-requesite for effecient working Markets, without which there is no Capitalism.
On the other hand extreme, Corporatism is a situation where Corporations have taken over the mechanisms for Rule Setting - in other words, the game is fixed.
So the ideal notion of Capitalism places it at a point between Anarchy and Corporatism where there are enough Rules and Enforcement to make the Markets work but no Market player, no mater how big or powerful, has the ability to influence the Rules or their Enforcement.
I postulate that, given the way Politics (the rule setters), Power and Money interact, it is impossible to have a situation where the Players do not influence the Rules and furthermore, the bigger the player the more influence they have in setting the Rules.
In other words, a Capitalist system is an unstable social construct that tends to slide into Corporativism.
Maybe he's talking about Information Overload which is indeed a problem.
Think about those managers that are completelly Blackberry driven (those that almost always give the highest priority to their BB, even in meetings) and now consider the quality of their decision making: for people that get so many e-mails and are so on top of things, they usually are surprisingly uninformed and unthinking in their decisions.
Maybe Obama's statements should be read as: - President of the USA says that nowadays people have too many things pulling their attention and receive too much low-value information and that has negative consequences with regards to their knowledge and wisdom.
instead of: - Well know Democrat politician tells people what they're doing wrong.
You know, even though he's the lider of a political party in a highly politically polarised nation, he's still the fucking president of the US of A and he didn't got there by being stupid. Maybe he's capable of an informed opinion...
<RANT> It pisses me off to no end that me, an European, have to be then one pointing out the he's a man that has succeeded in getting elected to a highly coveted position, which few can achieve and that maybe his non-political opinions, at least once in a while, should be heard instead of dismissed outright because of his political affiliation </RANT>
For example Reproductive System contain images and pictures that will be "inspiring" for most males of a certain age (in fact, a hole in a wall is "inspiring" at that age).
From all the DRM systems out there, Steam is the least intrusive one and it actually gives you more value to the game (community, in-game browser, archievements). I take Steam over Ubisoft's intrusive always-online DRM (with nothing to gain) or SecuROM/StarForce that install hidden kernel drivers in your system any day.
Reminds me of some of the arguments used by some people to justify the some of the most egregious of the previous US adminstration's measures.
Basically it boiled down to "It's not at all bad compared to what they do in North Korea".
Fifth incarnation of a once great game that was boring already on version 3 is going to use DRM that requires at least periodical Internet connectivity on your gamming machine
We have also decided that it's right that the people who create artworks deserve some reward for that work. The system to make that reward possible is copyright.
The image that immediatelly came to my mind was that of a painter selling a painting.
Note that copyright was not required or involved in any way and yet the creator of the artwork got rewarded for that work.
In fact, the only way copyright would be involved would be if someone made a copy of the painting. Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Here's another one: do you know that if you whistle a tune on the street it can be considered as an unauthorised public performance?
The natural law is that people freely exchange ideas. That includes telling others about ways of making things, singing, whisteling and playing music, telling stories and jokes that you read/heard-from-others and more.
Copyright actually goes against the natural law of free exchange of ideas - it assigns ownership to ideas and restricts exchanges of ideas to require (often paid) authorization from third-parties.
In fact, even though it's perfectly possible for a copyright owner to do so, they won't charge someone for whisteling the tune they own the copyright for in the street because: a) They can't catch you easilly enough to make it worth the trouble. b) The public outcry on such heavy handed uses of copyright might very well kill it.
The only reason Copyright exists is because some thinkers in the 17th century decided that a time-limited mechanism to reward the makers of new ideas would promote creation and exchange of ideas more than it would hinder it. This fine balance (assuming it ever worked) has been thoroughly broken in the last century.
Why? Even pirating costs something. User has to find copy, download it and get it working (also, he must have lerned how to do each of the three things). His time is not "free". Hell, even intent of pirating something means it is worth at least something to downloader.
Problem is that this worth is way, way below current pricetag and soemthing that typical gaming comany does not "get".
Actually, most DRM in games is such that installing, activating and dealing with potential problems (connection problems, CD-protection issues on your DVD-Reader or simply DRM that does not like some program you have installed) is actually more hassle than finding and downloading the game using your favorite copyright infringement tools.
In fact, every extra "trick" implemented in DRM just increases the probability that the shinny new game you just bought will fail to run on your system (and now you have the hassle of a return).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the stereotypical "Players" you describe with their wants & needs and what they value are only the Achiever kind of player in the Bartle Player Type classification (here).
The Explorers, Socializers or Killers do not necessarilly derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks.
Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying.
The truth is that, in MMORPGs, grinding based game-playing is a cheap way for publishers to create time-sinks in the game instead of spending money in creating real content like areas, dungeons, boss encounters, story quests and others.
While most people that played MMORPGs in the time of UO and the like were willing to live with it (since there was nothing beter), nowadays, there's plenty of MMORPGs out there with massive amounts of content for players to enjoy (in my personal experience, both current WoW - it was worse in the past - and LOTRO are very good in that aspect).
Correlation != Causation
(Now the head of some guy in another article is going to blow)
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't always:
Sometimes its:
Publisher of report that promotes/detracts from something get's tagged as belonging to a group that promotes/detracts from that something.
It is in fact a very common tactic to "paint" your critics of belonging to a group with an agenda as a means of devaluating their comments.
Of course, around here in /. we're all well aware of all the dirty psychological tricks employed in this kind of speach and will not fall for them .... right!????
You're making the assumption that the Copyright Office will exist in 130 years time and the even more tall assumption that they will care enough during those 130 years to keep all those masters in pristine order AND keep the capability to read them.
Yes, copyright is screwed up enough that the time-frames involved are more than a century.
You're whole point is aimed at the wrong target: nobody says that he shouldn't be tried and convicted if found guilty - even he himself admits he's done it.
The point that most people are making is that he should be tried (and convicted if found guilty) in the UK, not the US. There's plenty of reasons for that, the main one being that the penalties imposed by the US justice system for the kind of crime he commited are considered excessive and inhuman in the civilized world.
I don't think this will work at.
For starters, they need really tiny VR glasses and I don't think the technology is there yet.
Then they don't really say which fobia they're going to treat at all. Sounds a bit fishy to.
Last but not least, do they really expect that they will be able to find cockroaches that can afford the treatment.
Honestly, I think the whole thing of treating cockroaches for fobia is some kind of scam.
By reading the discussion on Wikipedia the impression that I have is that it suffers from a huge problem of "Petty Dictatorships".
A "Petty Dictatorship" is when you have somebody who gets a small power (say, a bouncer in a nightclub) and then proceeds to exercise it against other on any chance they have, probably because it makes them feel powerful.
Certainly, many of the Wikipedia admins on the discussion page seem to be being obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionisy (while hidding behind vague concepts - like notoriety - and obscure references to Wikipedia rules).
Actually it's more like:
- £450 SIM Free
- £243 with the £25/month, 100 minutes a month, 2 years contract (i.e. £843 total)
That said, depending on the contract you take you can even get the phone "free" (with the £45/month 2 years contract, so it really costs you £1080).
Some of us actually just buy unlocked phones: after my first phone, I have never again been locked in a mobile phone contract (saved tons of money btw).
Is this not an option in the US with this mobile phone?
I live in the UK and I have successfully returned opened software products for a refund multiple times. The process is simple, you bring the software back to the store you say it doesn't work correctly and you uter the magic words "Not Fit For Purpose". If they still try and stall you, you uter then even more powerfull words "Then I'll have to complain to Trading Standards".
The no-return policies are cunning lies to deceive ignorant customers: your right to return a product within the warranty time if it is not fit for purpose cannot be taken away. What they actually are saying is that you can return an unopened product for any reason within X time (in other words, an extra right) but they word it in such a way that people tend to interpret it as "you cannot return an opened product at all". In fact, if they explicitly stated that you cannot return an opened product at all, they would be sued by Trading Standards.
[IANAL but once upon a time I did trade online as a business so I read all the rules]
This is also why I don't buy software online, especially from companies not based in the UK - if you have to reach them by e-mail or phone they can stall you as long as they wish (or until you loose your patience and take them to Small Claims Court), and if based outside the UK they're pretty much out of your reach for redress.
What they're talking about is A-level exams. These are taken by high-school graduates before college.
It's not that Comp Sci students will graduate without having learned those languages, it's that candidates for Comp Sci higher education will not be expected to know them.
As unfair as it seems to some old hands in IT, nowadays the industry rarelly hires people without college degrees for Programmer positions, so this does not mean we'll be swamped by a wave of "semi-literate" programmers.
EULAs are not valid in most of the world - they are considered a one sided attempt at changing the terms of the implicit contract which is the sale and as such are not worth the paper they are written on.
Steam on the other hand is a software agent that remotelly imposes the will of a 3rd party after the sale. If they abuse it, it is you that now has to spend time and money seeking redress in the courts.
CD check during installation only is DRM done well.
Anything which after I bought a game checks with a remote entity to see if I'm actually allowed to play it (said remote entity might reply with "No") is just a form of imposing arbitrary after-sale restrictions on my ownership rights.
Steam apologists sound like a man which, having been daily beaten up with a steel rod in the recent past, now says how good it is to be beaten up daily with a baseball bat.
Intelligence is different from (street) Smarts.
If you ever worked with highly intelligent people, you surelly have noticed that some of them are hardly as successful as one would expect from their IQ - even if you have not noticed that about yourself.
Intelligent people are in fact easier to con because:
- They are so (over)confident in their own mental abilities and believe so much that they are thus un-connable that they won't even see the emotional/social manipulation of the conman (in a sense, they have a huge blind spot).
- Their confort zone is often logic, not influencing people, so they cannot even recognize some of the "moves" for what they are.
Both US main parties are right wing and corporatist.
This is well known outside the US where the press is diverse enough and worldy enough for people to actually be exposed to all kinds of points of view, not just always the same two points of view portrayed as being opposite.
If it wasn't for the fact the US policy has a huge influence on the rest of the world, this would simply be humouristic and entertaining in a snobish way for the rest of the world. As is, i think most of us just wish that the US population pull their heads out of their collective asses and look at the shit for what it is instead of concentrating on the flies.
And yet in most places with high birth rates, the mortality rates have been enormously reduced with the introduction of modern medicine, sanitation and higiene while the birth rates didn't actually decrease, which is why many poor and middle-wealth countries now have exceptionally high population growth rates - same number of births, lower number of deaths.
In fact, excluding laws to that effect (such as China's One Child Policy) the reduction in birth rates seems to be more correlated with wealth and education than with mortality rates.
They're planning on atomizing sea water into the air.
Sea-water has salt in it.
A high salt content makes agricultural land unfertile.
Frequent salty rains over a land area would slowly increase the salt levels in that area, effectivelly poisoning the land.
So they won't be doing it close to land at at all: it will be done in the middle of the ocean where all that salt will simple fall down to the ocean again. Lots of clouds to reflect the sunlight back into space work just as well (if not beter) over the ocean than over land.
One of the comments on the site with TFA is from someone that keeps his sports games for a long time because of the replayability that online playing gives.
Consider for a moment that with the "Online Pass" at any point EA can drop (or sneakilly slow down to a crawl) all multiplayer, user created content and online community features on a game "we don't support anymore" so as to pump-up sales of the new version. What EA is doing here is to try and control the lifecycle of a game after the sale way beyond just second-hand sales.
Basically they're doing the same as Ubisoft but with a bit of carrot, not just the stick.
It might very well be the case that (perfect) Capitalism, like (perfect) Communism, is unstable because it does not take in account the inherent characteristics of Human beings and societies.
True Capitalism should sit somewhere between Anarchy and Corporatism:
- Capitalism cannot work in a rule-less world (ie Anarchy) since some regulation and enforcement is required for things like enforcing contracts and enforcing property ownership (in an Anarchist system, ownership is decided by your ability to defend it yourself) which in turn are a pre-requesite for effecient working Markets, without which there is no Capitalism.
On the other hand extreme, Corporatism is a situation where Corporations have taken over the mechanisms for Rule Setting - in other words, the game is fixed.
So the ideal notion of Capitalism places it at a point between Anarchy and Corporatism where there are enough Rules and Enforcement to make the Markets work but no Market player, no mater how big or powerful, has the ability to influence the Rules or their Enforcement.
I postulate that, given the way Politics (the rule setters), Power and Money interact, it is impossible to have a situation where the Players do not influence the Rules and furthermore, the bigger the player the more influence they have in setting the Rules.
In other words, a Capitalist system is an unstable social construct that tends to slide into Corporativism.
Maybe he's talking about Information Overload which is indeed a problem.
Think about those managers that are completelly Blackberry driven (those that almost always give the highest priority to their BB, even in meetings) and now consider the quality of their decision making: for people that get so many e-mails and are so on top of things, they usually are surprisingly uninformed and unthinking in their decisions.
Maybe Obama's statements should be read as:
- President of the USA says that nowadays people have too many things pulling their attention and receive too much low-value information
and that has negative consequences with regards to their knowledge and wisdom.
instead of:
- Well know Democrat politician tells people what they're doing wrong.
You know, even though he's the lider of a political party in a highly politically polarised nation, he's still the fucking president of the US of A and he didn't got there by being stupid. Maybe he's capable of an informed opinion ...
<RANT>
It pisses me off to no end that me, an European, have to be then one pointing out the he's a man that has succeeded in getting elected to a highly coveted position, which few can achieve and that maybe his non-political opinions, at least once in a while, should be heard instead of dismissed outright because of his political affiliation
</RANT>
You must be new here.
For example Reproductive System contain images and pictures that will be "inspiring" for most males of a certain age (in fact, a hole in a wall is "inspiring" at that age).
Is this porn?
Reminds me of some of the arguments used by some people to justify the some of the most egregious of the previous US adminstration's measures.
Basically it boiled down to "It's not at all bad compared to what they do in North Korea".
Fifth incarnation of a once great game that was boring already on version 3 is going to use DRM that requires at least periodical Internet connectivity on your gamming machine
Cracked product expected to be superior.
News at 5.
The image that immediatelly came to my mind was that of a painter selling a painting.
Note that copyright was not required or involved in any way and yet the creator of the artwork got rewarded for that work.
In fact, the only way copyright would be involved would be if someone made a copy of the painting. Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Here's another one: do you know that if you whistle a tune on the street it can be considered as an unauthorised public performance?
The natural law is that people freely exchange ideas. That includes telling others about ways of making things, singing, whisteling and playing music, telling stories and jokes that you read/heard-from-others and more.
Copyright actually goes against the natural law of free exchange of ideas - it assigns ownership to ideas and restricts exchanges of ideas to require (often paid) authorization from third-parties.
In fact, even though it's perfectly possible for a copyright owner to do so, they won't charge someone for whisteling the tune they own the copyright for in the street because:
a) They can't catch you easilly enough to make it worth the trouble.
b) The public outcry on such heavy handed uses of copyright might very well kill it.
The only reason Copyright exists is because some thinkers in the 17th century decided that a time-limited mechanism to reward the makers of new ideas would promote creation and exchange of ideas more than it would hinder it. This fine balance (assuming it ever worked) has been thoroughly broken in the last century.
Actually, most DRM in games is such that installing, activating and dealing with potential problems (connection problems, CD-protection issues on your DVD-Reader or simply DRM that does not like some program you have installed) is actually more hassle than finding and downloading the game using your favorite copyright infringement tools.
In fact, every extra "trick" implemented in DRM just increases the probability that the shinny new game you just bought will fail to run on your system (and now you have the hassle of a return).