The meta-irony here comes through in the point that terrorists aren't really a danger to normal people (statistically speaking), and in fact are probably less of a hazard than slipping on dog poop on the sidewalk.
Are you really making the case that most people in the UK are more likely to be killed by sidewalk dog poop than acts of terrorism? I understand that the likelihood of either is quite low, but I'm still going to have to see a few cases of death by sidewalk poo before I believe they occur with any frequency.
Nah. They'll look to England's failed example and say "ours will work because we're gonna privatize it" Maybe they'd be right.
In my neighborhood, we've got two housing projects. One is city-run, and one is privately managed. Both have cameras.
The city-run cameras are nearly useless. If shots are fired in the area, the police have to file a report to review the camera footage, which they'll get in a matter of days. Unsurprisingly, those cameras haven't proven effective in deterring or solving crimes.
The cameras at the privately managed housing are under no such restrictions. Shots fired? Run into the on-premises security office, talk to the guy on duty, review the tapes immediately. They've led to the apprehension of suspects in a matter of minutes or hours, since police officers were able to see where they'd fled.
Sure, maybe the privately-run cameras are much more effective because they circumvent the city's measures intended to preserve civil liberties. I'm just referring to effectiveness in deterring or solving crimes.
FTFA, it looks like the reasoning for the introduction of such legislation stems from someone watching said pr0n and murdering a woman...
I'm wondering what other images will become illegal because they elicit violence... Don't worry, the author of the bill has a very high standard for legality:
"anything which is going to cause damage to other people needs to be stopped."
That's pretty good. Right there, you can already ban peanuts and cars and bears. (Bears DO need to be stopped.) But she's being a bit modest: since they haven't shown that violent pornography actually causes damage to other people, this is all in theory. Furthermore, she's actually referring to something that causes someone to cause damage to another person. So her statement, if not edited for modesty and brevity, would read more like:
"Anything which I think could cause damage to someone, or encourage someone else to cause damage to someone, needs to be stopped."
I'm pretty sure that category includes her, so I hope she decides to address that problem sooner rather than later.
Look at 1930's Germany. If you weren't communist or jewish, then you, as a german, probably did rather well under the Nazi's. You mean, right before you were drafted and then shot?
Now if the legal copies were about this price, that market would not exist. $20 for a copy of Open Season? What are they thinking. It's high prices that cause a piracy market to exist.
Sure, but then you're competing with the margin on blank DVDs. Where the REAL inroads to piracy are to be made are the fact that people are buying movies at all.
If you REALLY want to fight piracy, just make a product that no one wants at any price. It's a desirable product that causes a piracy market to exist. Extra bonus: if you're trying to ensure nobody wants your product, think of all the money you'll save in marketing!
I'm glad to see the pendulum swinging back towards sanity. When I was in high school, it was going in the opposite direction. All of our classes started handing out "summer packets"-- a fairly large amount of homework the student was required to complete during the summer. If the student did not complete the homework to a satisfactory level, they'd be kicked out of the class. (In practice, loud enough parents could negate the whole thing.)
It's heartening to see that educational thinking is moving at least a little bit away from "idle hands are the devil's workshop" as a primary tenet.
Bah! If I want to play Wii games, I have to buy a Wii. Outlaw the Wii.
I hear the latest Strokes album actually uses special iTunes Cell technology to give you more Hertz. Forget being able to play music on anything other than iTunes-- who would want to!?
The story makes it sound like someone's actually developing this. In actuality, a few guys are taking this piece of paper and a short pitch around, saying, "hey, make this $75 million Fallout MMO!". People will give money to Infinium before they fund this.... Wait, what's that? Infinium just got another round? Sigh....
When asked whether he'd agree that it's larger companies like EA which are driving bigger game budgets, Tascan replied, "I think a lot of [other companies] are spending even more money."
EA's Godfather cost well over $20 million for a primarily current-gen title, and he wants to blame the other companies?
Alain Tascan also claimed Gears of War had zero innovation, completely ignoring the active reload, and the best implementation of a cover system in games to date. How did he make such a mistake? According to him, he never played Gears of War, so that might have something to do with it.
Why would Tascan make such ridiculous comments? Why would Ken Kutaragi make them? It's great gaming press, and it gets people to focus on your company and your games. EA needs someone to spout off occasionally (Sony's doing okay). But here's a question for Tascan: how well did that work out for Kutaragi?
Then I got to the part about EA being involved and I pretty much stopped reading.
I will not buy anything from EA again. I don't like their business practices and feel they are very bad for the gaming industry in the long term.
I have a less principled opposition. I've just been burned too many times by EA's buggy, unsupported titles. Compare any title EA's ever released with Blizzard's Starcraft, Warcraft, or Diablo. I have occasional complaints about WoW's support, but I can't think of any conceivable way that EA would even provide half the support. Warhammer Online looks great, though, so I'd love for them to prove me wrong.
Lik-Sang was given the right to distribute products within a certain region, they broke the terms of their contract with sony and now they're closing their doors, and blaming it on sony.
I didn't see any mention of breach of contract in the linked articles, which were admittedly a little thin. All they said was that "grey importing PS2, PSP or PS3 into the EU, without the express permission of SCE is illegal", but that doesn't make it clear to me that any contract existed between Lik-Sang and Sony. Do you have a link to a better article that explains more of what happened?
Didn't you view the slide show!? Spore's creature evolution will change the way our children learn, and its character creation tool will revolutionize the fields of design and marketing. Its sophisticated yet entertaining information displays and interfaces will facilitate a deep understanding of how physics drives the universe in all who play it. Its fully sentient aliens will learn to exist outside of the game, and then outside of the computer, and working in harmony they will establish peace in the Middle East.
The entire reason I started playing Eve was because the lack of shards. During my time on WoW, I would run into friends IRL who would say they would be playing WoW, but unless I wanted to do the entire level grind again, I would never be able to hang out with them in game. So, if any of my friends started playing Eve, I could hook up with them and fly. It was good times.
Absolutely. It's always been a bit of a problem with other MMOs, but since they've been smaller, you just had about 8 servers that you might be spread out among. Eventually, I'd get all my friends on the same one.
WoW has, uh, this many realms. In the U.S.. Add to that that you really can't do much with your friends if you're 10 levels away or more, and it becomes pretty tough to wrangle all your friends together. With EVE, you just jump on, pop into your Teamspeak/Ventrilo server, and you're good to go. Very cool.
Now, I'm not sure EVE would scale to 5 million or so users without some serious work, but it'd be an interesting challenge.
Hmm, I'm not a producer-type, so I wouldn't count myself as any sort of spokesperson for this stuff. Wikipedia's article has a fair number of links, though many of them seem to be simply to conference abstracts. Agile Alliance might be a better resource: they have user stories. Most of the success stories and case studies I've read have been in books about Scrum, specifically the first two on this page.
Personally, I've had varying degrees of success. A friend at a 10-person startup is having a lot of success with daily 15-minute standups and 30 day cycles, but then, how much does it really stretch your process when you only have 10 people? We successfully used some XP methods at Homestead, but I don't know whether we'd be counted as agile, overall. TDD didn't work out for us very well. Short cycles worked really well in some cases. I don't think anyone from there wrote an article on our experiences, though it would have been useful.
Regarding game-specific success stories, I don't have anything for you. Does Valve's cabal system count as agile? Does it count as a success? The most successful games I can think of pretty much all shipped horribly late. Also problematic: the largest, most formalized efforts to improve software development methodologies have taken place outside of games, and the products are different enough that straight ports don't seem to work. It feels like we're having some successes and some failures with the Scrum adaptation we're using right now, but it's too early to tell-- it can't be counted as a success if we haven't shipped.
I'd be wary of condemning an entire school of thought on development methodology, based on a possible misinterpretation of a portion of a sentence written by non-production staff from a company using the methodology outside of the context it was primarily developed in.
insisting that such a system would not violate citizens' privacy and was not a civil liberties issue.
Wait a second. If a national database with the DNA of everyone working in the US, used to track their movements, is not an invasion of privacy or a civil liberties issue... I'm a little hard pressed to think of what is! Implanted GPS trackers? Mandatory video surveillance of everyone's bedrooms?
Slashdot Mirror
The meta-irony here comes through in the point that terrorists aren't really a danger to normal people (statistically speaking), and in fact are probably less of a hazard than slipping on dog poop on the sidewalk.
Are you really making the case that most people in the UK are more likely to be killed by sidewalk dog poop than acts of terrorism? I understand that the likelihood of either is quite low, but I'm still going to have to see a few cases of death by sidewalk poo before I believe they occur with any frequency.
In my neighborhood, we've got two housing projects. One is city-run, and one is privately managed. Both have cameras.
The city-run cameras are nearly useless. If shots are fired in the area, the police have to file a report to review the camera footage, which they'll get in a matter of days. Unsurprisingly, those cameras haven't proven effective in deterring or solving crimes.
The cameras at the privately managed housing are under no such restrictions. Shots fired? Run into the on-premises security office, talk to the guy on duty, review the tapes immediately. They've led to the apprehension of suspects in a matter of minutes or hours, since police officers were able to see where they'd fled.
Sure, maybe the privately-run cameras are much more effective because they circumvent the city's measures intended to preserve civil liberties. I'm just referring to effectiveness in deterring or solving crimes.
I'm wondering what other images will become illegal because they elicit violence... Don't worry, the author of the bill has a very high standard for legality:
"anything which is going to cause damage to other people needs to be stopped."
That's pretty good. Right there, you can already ban peanuts and cars and bears. (Bears DO need to be stopped.) But she's being a bit modest: since they haven't shown that violent pornography actually causes damage to other people, this is all in theory. Furthermore, she's actually referring to something that causes someone to cause damage to another person. So her statement, if not edited for modesty and brevity, would read more like:
"Anything which I think could cause damage to someone, or encourage someone else to cause damage to someone, needs to be stopped."
I'm pretty sure that category includes her, so I hope she decides to address that problem sooner rather than later.
Now if the legal copies were about this price, that market would not exist. $20 for a copy of Open Season? What are they thinking. It's high prices that cause a piracy market to exist.
Sure, but then you're competing with the margin on blank DVDs. Where the REAL inroads to piracy are to be made are the fact that people are buying movies at all.
If you REALLY want to fight piracy, just make a product that no one wants at any price. It's a desirable product that causes a piracy market to exist. Extra bonus: if you're trying to ensure nobody wants your product, think of all the money you'll save in marketing!
I'm glad to see the pendulum swinging back towards sanity. When I was in high school, it was going in the opposite direction. All of our classes started handing out "summer packets"-- a fairly large amount of homework the student was required to complete during the summer. If the student did not complete the homework to a satisfactory level, they'd be kicked out of the class. (In practice, loud enough parents could negate the whole thing.)
It's heartening to see that educational thinking is moving at least a little bit away from "idle hands are the devil's workshop" as a primary tenet.
Bah! If I want to play Wii games, I have to buy a Wii. Outlaw the Wii.
I hear the latest Strokes album actually uses special iTunes Cell technology to give you more Hertz. Forget being able to play music on anything other than iTunes-- who would want to!?
The pricing model for online play isn't final yet. The details on online play are fuzzy as well.
Yup. In fact, Roper's statement is part of the design process for their online model.
Where's the article about the tree huggers funding pro global warming research?
I don't know, where is it?
The story makes it sound like someone's actually developing this. In actuality, a few guys are taking this piece of paper and a short pitch around, saying, "hey, make this $75 million Fallout MMO!". People will give money to Infinium before they fund this. ... Wait, what's that? Infinium just got another round? Sigh....
With all of these "house on fire" metaphors, why hasn't someone suggested simply buying fire insurance?
Then, if your house burns down, just stay somewhere else for a while while someone builds you a new house.
I, for one, wouldn't want us mucking around trying to change nature under the auspices that we're doing it for nature's own good.
Mucking about doing unnatural things like burning less oil?
You can save the hi-res WMV here (link under the streaming version): http://xboxmovies.teamxbox.com/xbox-360-hires/4001 /Halo-3-Trailer-HD/
When asked whether he'd agree that it's larger companies like EA which are driving bigger game budgets, Tascan replied, "I think a lot of [other companies] are spending even more money."
EA's Godfather cost well over $20 million for a primarily current-gen title, and he wants to blame the other companies?
Alain Tascan also claimed Gears of War had zero innovation, completely ignoring the active reload, and the best implementation of a cover system in games to date. How did he make such a mistake? According to him, he never played Gears of War, so that might have something to do with it.
Why would Tascan make such ridiculous comments? Why would Ken Kutaragi make them? It's great gaming press, and it gets people to focus on your company and your games. EA needs someone to spout off occasionally (Sony's doing okay). But here's a question for Tascan: how well did that work out for Kutaragi?
Then I got to the part about EA being involved and I pretty much stopped reading.
I will not buy anything from EA again. I don't like their business practices and feel they are very bad for the gaming industry in the long term.
I have a less principled opposition. I've just been burned too many times by EA's buggy, unsupported titles. Compare any title EA's ever released with Blizzard's Starcraft, Warcraft, or Diablo. I have occasional complaints about WoW's support, but I can't think of any conceivable way that EA would even provide half the support. Warhammer Online looks great, though, so I'd love for them to prove me wrong.
Lik-Sang was given the right to distribute products within a certain region, they broke the terms of their contract with sony and now they're closing their doors, and blaming it on sony.
I didn't see any mention of breach of contract in the linked articles, which were admittedly a little thin. All they said was that "grey importing PS2, PSP or PS3 into the EU, without the express permission of SCE is illegal", but that doesn't make it clear to me that any contract existed between Lik-Sang and Sony. Do you have a link to a better article that explains more of what happened?
Seconded: I have a modded XBox that has never had a pirated game copied to or played on it. It's a great media box.
"Game released on console to require that console's controller"
Didn't you view the slide show!? Spore's creature evolution will change the way our children learn, and its character creation tool will revolutionize the fields of design and marketing. Its sophisticated yet entertaining information displays and interfaces will facilitate a deep understanding of how physics drives the universe in all who play it. Its fully sentient aliens will learn to exist outside of the game, and then outside of the computer, and working in harmony they will establish peace in the Middle East.
Games have been disturbing us since 1982.
The entire reason I started playing Eve was because the lack of shards. During my time on WoW, I would run into friends IRL who would say they would be playing WoW, but unless I wanted to do the entire level grind again, I would never be able to hang out with them in game. So, if any of my friends started playing Eve, I could hook up with them and fly. It was good times.
Absolutely. It's always been a bit of a problem with other MMOs, but since they've been smaller, you just had about 8 servers that you might be spread out among. Eventually, I'd get all my friends on the same one.
WoW has, uh, this many realms. In the U.S.. Add to that that you really can't do much with your friends if you're 10 levels away or more, and it becomes pretty tough to wrangle all your friends together. With EVE, you just jump on, pop into your Teamspeak/Ventrilo server, and you're good to go. Very cool.
Now, I'm not sure EVE would scale to 5 million or so users without some serious work, but it'd be an interesting challenge.
Hmm, I'm not a producer-type, so I wouldn't count myself as any sort of spokesperson for this stuff. Wikipedia's article has a fair number of links, though many of them seem to be simply to conference abstracts. Agile Alliance might be a better resource: they have user stories. Most of the success stories and case studies I've read have been in books about Scrum, specifically the first two on this page.
Personally, I've had varying degrees of success. A friend at a 10-person startup is having a lot of success with daily 15-minute standups and 30 day cycles, but then, how much does it really stretch your process when you only have 10 people? We successfully used some XP methods at Homestead, but I don't know whether we'd be counted as agile, overall. TDD didn't work out for us very well. Short cycles worked really well in some cases. I don't think anyone from there wrote an article on our experiences, though it would have been useful.
Regarding game-specific success stories, I don't have anything for you. Does Valve's cabal system count as agile? Does it count as a success? The most successful games I can think of pretty much all shipped horribly late. Also problematic: the largest, most formalized efforts to improve software development methodologies have taken place outside of games, and the products are different enough that straight ports don't seem to work. It feels like we're having some successes and some failures with the Scrum adaptation we're using right now, but it's too early to tell-- it can't be counted as a success if we haven't shipped.
I'd be wary of condemning an entire school of thought on development methodology, based on a possible misinterpretation of a portion of a sentence written by non-production staff from a company using the methodology outside of the context it was primarily developed in.
Because managers don't trust engineers.
To give a counterpoint, our management is doing Scrum because us engineers asked them to.
insisting that such a system would not violate citizens' privacy and was not a civil liberties issue.
Wait a second. If a national database with the DNA of everyone working in the US, used to track their movements, is not an invasion of privacy or a civil liberties issue... I'm a little hard pressed to think of what is! Implanted GPS trackers? Mandatory video surveillance of everyone's bedrooms?