Copy-and-paste. The antagonist was originally China, but the game was hastily reworked once the publisher decided to market and sell the game in China.
There are really only two types of torrents where you will get a lot of throughput: DVD-rips of popular movies on public trackers and reasonably popular stuff on private trackers where people are playing around with seedboxes.
I agree. If you find someone who has constructed a well-written argument that disagrees with you (some of the anti-privacy, anti-filesharing, and pro-censorship commenters come to mind), the best (or at least most constructive) approach is to respond to them, not to try to mod them into oblivion.
It's too bad that, now that publishers realize that ebooks are here to stay, they are trying to take advantage of the situation by keeping prices high and using proprie
...tary formats (often device-specific) and DRM. My apologies. I will now save face by blaming Slashdot 3.0 and watch as people mod me up.
It's too bad that, now that publishers realize that ebooks are here to stay, they are trying to take advantage of the situation by keeping prices high and using proprie
"Pirates" are an excuse. It is really about control, and it is much wider-reaching than people think. With DRM, the publisher controls the game and you're simply buying a license to play it, one they can revoke any time. This makes them more money. Blame the people who are ultimately responsible for everyone's misery -- publishers!
If your definition of "freedom" includes being able to hide improper behavior from your neighbors, then yes, your freedom is in jeopardy.
This is the main reason why privacy exists in the first place. Despite what you may believe, many people kept secrets even before the Internet (I know, shocking); as a child, you would simply have been unaware of it. The fact is that, in the 1950s (to pick a random decade), certain behaviours that are now tolerated by many people (polyamory, homosexuality, political beliefs of a certain nature) were once judged heavily. Your neighbours and your job interviewer do not need to know your sexual fetishes, who you voted for, what you believe in (if you believe in anything), or any details that are by their very nature personal and sacrosanct -- unless you choose to reveal them (which happens depressingly often).
Furthermore, you are conflating an archaic form of judgement with a modern one; the mob justice of ancient tribes with modern legal systems. Simply put, your neighbours are a collection of people with (presumably) a similar socio-economic status. They are in no way qualified to make individual judgements about your behaviour, as much as many of them probably wish they could. Even respected experts are not immune to social bias; the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness is a prime example of personal beliefs and the power of zeitgeist overcoming objectivity and rational thinking.
Even our modern and enlightened system of justice is not immune to this. Legislation is always a hit-and-miss proposition, and the track record of state, provincial, and municipal legislators is far worse than federal. Many things that once were illegal are now illegal no longer. Inevitably, one must apply his or her knowledge of history to the present in an effort to divine what is illegal now but will be legal in the future. Marijuana? Sharing of (what presumably would have been) copyrighted material? Wiretapping? Oh wait, that's already legal for people who are above the law. I will let your own words condemn you:
Unless, of course, you are talking about actual illegal activity, in which case you *should* be arrested. That's why we have laws.
So every revolutionary should be arrested for having committed treason? What about the ones in Libya? What about the American Founding Fathers? Who you recognize as the legitimate government simply depends on your point of view, and what laws they make derives from that.
In summary, trying to hide behind the "nothing to hide" excuse gets you nowhere, and neither does pointless nostalgia.
The worst are the lame ones that are obviously done by market-savvy one-man contracting firms; stuff like "x is horribly insecure, but OverPriced, Ltd. can help you secure your systems," or "y is the great new direction in computing, says (Marketing Dept. of company that sells y." Technical people are often just as susceptible to marketing as anyone else; the endorsement of Apple by people who should really know better is a symptom of that and the 'rebound' to Microsoft or other traditional "big bad" companies is another. I just wish there were more stories on/. about science and technology ("things that matter"), not science and technology according to some company's advertisement.
I'm not assuming that anything is non-lethal. My point is just that Taser International (which has a vested interest in selling tasers) has tried in the past to obstruct any inquiry into whether taser-related deaths were caused primarily by tasers or by other factors. They know that, to gain widespread support, they need to cultivate the image of tasers being "safe". Even though they might not claim they are non-lethal, trying to bury any evidence of them causing deaths is obviously a deliberate action designed to mislead people into believing their product is more safe than it is, which does nothing but encourage overuse.
I also object to you making (poor) guesses about my motivation and knowledge. I have no problems with tasers from a technical standpoint; I simply dislike people being misled about how safe they are. In almost every case of a taser-related death, Taser International has stubbornly tried to pin the death on any cause other than the taser itself. If they can't accept responsibility for the fact that the use of their product can occasionally result in death, there will continue to be little awareness and training aimed at minimizing the chance of permanent harm and death.
There are several high-profile cases where police either used a taser unnecessarily (to incapacitate someone who had already been cuffed to make it more convenient to transport them), or the use of a taser resulted in death (some people with heart problems and/or epilepsy). If you look at the tasers themselves, it is clear that there are potential side-effects from their use, up to and including almost instantaneous death. Rather than working hard to mis-attribute every death to something unrelated to the taser, Taser International should be allowing the facts to come forth, even if it destroys the image they have cultivated of tasers being always non-lethal. Usually non-lethal, maybe, but since there is really no way to tell if someone will react badly to one, the culture of them being entirely non-lethal becomes dangerous.
The issue with tasers is not that they exist, but that they are misused -- Taser International has misled police and the public to believe that tasers are more safe than they really are, so police will happily overuse them without making as many judgement calls as if they used live weapons. While trying to ban tasers is misguided, trying to educate people about them (especially when people with financial stakes try as hard as they can to obscure the information) is not.
Personally, I would have released it on the same disc as the reboot and called it the "authorized emulation release" or something similar. Id re-releases its older games, and so does Bethesda. I even recall games like Bloodrayne being re-released on the same disc as their movie adaptation. The fact is that it is against EA's ideas of what business should be: they want gaming to exist like the world of 1984, with everything in the present and where the past can be erased or altered based on their whims. After all, if people played older games, they might not be constantly buying new ones. Better to try to force people nostalgic for the original game to buy the new version instead of playing the old one with an emulator, at least for EA.
Seems like another argument to take responsibility away from individual users. I'm sure it involves filtering domains that "may be virus vectors and may contain illegal content that the user is being protected from". Little "Great Firewalls" for each ISP? Considering that this is coming from Australia, it might be a part of yet another attempt to push for the creation of a Great Firewall at the ISP level, using "industry standards" to enforce it instead of a law that has to be approved and might be struck down.
I consider it to be more about the history. Early reactors were glorified refineries for weapons-grade material, so in the US public's mind in the 1960s and 70s, nuclear power was a tool of "the man" and was tied to nuclear weapons. Most public opinion on it hasn't really changed since then. People simply go "nuclear = bad". As well, there's the problem of high-profile incidents (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, now Fukushima), whereas coal plants will endanger people slowly, over time.
I would simply say that war influences how much is spend on certain areas of science and technology. For instance, witness how the fear has changed to health scares, with enormous amounts of money being spent on pharmaceutical research.
Regardless of your attack on "petulant geeks", you're right. Most institutions will deliberately keep secret what they block and, in many cases, why. Lack of information and confusion allows them to instill fear in students or employees. They hope that the fear will do more to keep them "in line" than a technical solution, and most managers/teachers/administrators are adept at orchestrating it.
I would think that the group to blame would not be Bioware. Rather, I direct your attention to a certain vowel-dominated acronym...
I think that a lot of gamers (often the very young and/or very stupid) don't properly understand the relationship between the developer and the publisher. It is supposedly analogous to authors and publishers, but it's a bit more like screenwriters and producers. Publishers have a great deal (perhaps too much) creative control over the way games are designed. This is mostly done by the developers because they have no choice; unless they want to go the indie route and rely on word-of-mouth and perhaps a few Youtube videos, they won't be successful because they rely on the publisher's gigantic marketing and hype machine, along with connections and arm-twisting (how do you think demos get packaged with consoles or with other games, for instance?) One of the things publishers almost always dictate is DRM. For instance, many EA games from the mid-00s used the same sort of key generation, the same disk checker, etc. This isn't really a choice for developers, especially after the first game in a series is made. For an example, look at the fighting between Activision and Infinity Ward when Infinity Ward wanted more control over Call of Duty and resented Activision selling the name out to any studio they felt like. This was after they tried to distance themselves from the Call of Duty name entirely, having initially planned to release the Modern Warfare games simply as "Modern Warfare".
In summary, DRM is almost always the publisher's fault. This is why I have resolved myself to not purchase (that is, not pay for) any game produced by most of the major publishers such as Activision or EA. I can't stand the thought of providing such groups with funds to continue their operations, even if I like developers such as Bioware.
The Wii is partially separated from this grouping, as its control scheme is so unusual (or was) that most games weren't ported to it and its own games were Wii-exclusives. This is changing now that other consoles have jumped onto the motion control bandwagon, however.
I would rather say that consoles are aimed at different people. Compare, for instance, the relatively simple games on the NES and other late-80s consoles versus the very first tactical, strategy, and management games on the Amiga, IBM PC, and other home computer systems. As time has gone on and the negative stigma against consoles degraded, they began to share games. Far from being a repeated pattern, it has only really been true for one or two console generations. However, something else has degraded as well. Rather than specializing a game around its platform, geared towards a certain level of graphics, a certain type of input, etc., a game is being treated as its own entity that can just be dumped onto any platform. Because of this, games necessarily pander to the lowest common denominator (currently the Xbox 360) in terms of performance and input.
Slashdot Mirror
"When I give the poor food they call me a saint, when I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist." - Dom Hélder Câmara
The real thought-provoker is why the same inquiry wasn't applied to John McCain for having been born in Panama.
Copy-and-paste. The antagonist was originally China, but the game was hastily reworked once the publisher decided to market and sell the game in China.
There are really only two types of torrents where you will get a lot of throughput: DVD-rips of popular movies on public trackers and reasonably popular stuff on private trackers where people are playing around with seedboxes.
I agree. If you find someone who has constructed a well-written argument that disagrees with you (some of the anti-privacy, anti-filesharing, and pro-censorship commenters come to mind), the best (or at least most constructive) approach is to respond to them, not to try to mod them into oblivion.
It's too bad that, now that publishers realize that ebooks are here to stay, they are trying to take advantage of the situation by keeping prices high and using proprie
...tary formats (often device-specific) and DRM. My apologies. I will now save face by blaming Slashdot 3.0 and watch as people mod me up.
It's too bad that, now that publishers realize that ebooks are here to stay, they are trying to take advantage of the situation by keeping prices high and using proprie
"Pirates" are an excuse. It is really about control, and it is much wider-reaching than people think. With DRM, the publisher controls the game and you're simply buying a license to play it, one they can revoke any time. This makes them more money. Blame the people who are ultimately responsible for everyone's misery -- publishers!
If your definition of "freedom" includes being able to hide improper behavior from your neighbors, then yes, your freedom is in jeopardy.
This is the main reason why privacy exists in the first place. Despite what you may believe, many people kept secrets even before the Internet (I know, shocking); as a child, you would simply have been unaware of it. The fact is that, in the 1950s (to pick a random decade), certain behaviours that are now tolerated by many people (polyamory, homosexuality, political beliefs of a certain nature) were once judged heavily. Your neighbours and your job interviewer do not need to know your sexual fetishes, who you voted for, what you believe in (if you believe in anything), or any details that are by their very nature personal and sacrosanct -- unless you choose to reveal them (which happens depressingly often).
Furthermore, you are conflating an archaic form of judgement with a modern one; the mob justice of ancient tribes with modern legal systems. Simply put, your neighbours are a collection of people with (presumably) a similar socio-economic status. They are in no way qualified to make individual judgements about your behaviour, as much as many of them probably wish they could. Even respected experts are not immune to social bias; the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness is a prime example of personal beliefs and the power of zeitgeist overcoming objectivity and rational thinking.
Even our modern and enlightened system of justice is not immune to this. Legislation is always a hit-and-miss proposition, and the track record of state, provincial, and municipal legislators is far worse than federal. Many things that once were illegal are now illegal no longer. Inevitably, one must apply his or her knowledge of history to the present in an effort to divine what is illegal now but will be legal in the future. Marijuana? Sharing of (what presumably would have been) copyrighted material? Wiretapping? Oh wait, that's already legal for people who are above the law. I will let your own words condemn you:
Unless, of course, you are talking about actual illegal activity, in which case you *should* be arrested. That's why we have laws.
So every revolutionary should be arrested for having committed treason? What about the ones in Libya? What about the American Founding Fathers? Who you recognize as the legitimate government simply depends on your point of view, and what laws they make derives from that.
In summary, trying to hide behind the "nothing to hide" excuse gets you nowhere, and neither does pointless nostalgia.
The worst are the lame ones that are obviously done by market-savvy one-man contracting firms; stuff like "x is horribly insecure, but OverPriced, Ltd. can help you secure your systems," or "y is the great new direction in computing, says (Marketing Dept. of company that sells y." Technical people are often just as susceptible to marketing as anyone else; the endorsement of Apple by people who should really know better is a symptom of that and the 'rebound' to Microsoft or other traditional "big bad" companies is another. I just wish there were more stories on /. about science and technology ("things that matter"), not science and technology according to some company's advertisement.
I'm not assuming that anything is non-lethal. My point is just that Taser International (which has a vested interest in selling tasers) has tried in the past to obstruct any inquiry into whether taser-related deaths were caused primarily by tasers or by other factors. They know that, to gain widespread support, they need to cultivate the image of tasers being "safe". Even though they might not claim they are non-lethal, trying to bury any evidence of them causing deaths is obviously a deliberate action designed to mislead people into believing their product is more safe than it is, which does nothing but encourage overuse.
I also object to you making (poor) guesses about my motivation and knowledge. I have no problems with tasers from a technical standpoint; I simply dislike people being misled about how safe they are. In almost every case of a taser-related death, Taser International has stubbornly tried to pin the death on any cause other than the taser itself. If they can't accept responsibility for the fact that the use of their product can occasionally result in death, there will continue to be little awareness and training aimed at minimizing the chance of permanent harm and death.
There are several high-profile cases where police either used a taser unnecessarily (to incapacitate someone who had already been cuffed to make it more convenient to transport them), or the use of a taser resulted in death (some people with heart problems and/or epilepsy). If you look at the tasers themselves, it is clear that there are potential side-effects from their use, up to and including almost instantaneous death. Rather than working hard to mis-attribute every death to something unrelated to the taser, Taser International should be allowing the facts to come forth, even if it destroys the image they have cultivated of tasers being always non-lethal. Usually non-lethal, maybe, but since there is really no way to tell if someone will react badly to one, the culture of them being entirely non-lethal becomes dangerous.
The issue with tasers is not that they exist, but that they are misused -- Taser International has misled police and the public to believe that tasers are more safe than they really are, so police will happily overuse them without making as many judgement calls as if they used live weapons. While trying to ban tasers is misguided, trying to educate people about them (especially when people with financial stakes try as hard as they can to obscure the information) is not.
There are several that do; Evince, for instance.
Personally, I would have released it on the same disc as the reboot and called it the "authorized emulation release" or something similar. Id re-releases its older games, and so does Bethesda. I even recall games like Bloodrayne being re-released on the same disc as their movie adaptation. The fact is that it is against EA's ideas of what business should be: they want gaming to exist like the world of 1984, with everything in the present and where the past can be erased or altered based on their whims. After all, if people played older games, they might not be constantly buying new ones. Better to try to force people nostalgic for the original game to buy the new version instead of playing the old one with an emulator, at least for EA.
Seems like another argument to take responsibility away from individual users. I'm sure it involves filtering domains that "may be virus vectors and may contain illegal content that the user is being protected from". Little "Great Firewalls" for each ISP? Considering that this is coming from Australia, it might be a part of yet another attempt to push for the creation of a Great Firewall at the ISP level, using "industry standards" to enforce it instead of a law that has to be approved and might be struck down.
I consider it to be more about the history. Early reactors were glorified refineries for weapons-grade material, so in the US public's mind in the 1960s and 70s, nuclear power was a tool of "the man" and was tied to nuclear weapons. Most public opinion on it hasn't really changed since then. People simply go "nuclear = bad". As well, there's the problem of high-profile incidents (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, now Fukushima), whereas coal plants will endanger people slowly, over time.
TARDIS. You fail the geek test. Thank you and try again when you feel ready.
I would simply say that war influences how much is spend on certain areas of science and technology. For instance, witness how the fear has changed to health scares, with enormous amounts of money being spent on pharmaceutical research.
Regardless of your attack on "petulant geeks", you're right. Most institutions will deliberately keep secret what they block and, in many cases, why. Lack of information and confusion allows them to instill fear in students or employees. They hope that the fear will do more to keep them "in line" than a technical solution, and most managers/teachers/administrators are adept at orchestrating it.
"41% of Facebook Users Willing to Press a Button Without Understanding or Caring About the Consequences."
Let's just hope none of them end up in missile silos.
I second this. I am reminded of the Edison quote, "I will make electricity so cheap, only the rich will burn candles." The cheap excuse
I would think that the group to blame would not be Bioware. Rather, I direct your attention to a certain vowel-dominated acronym...
I think that a lot of gamers (often the very young and/or very stupid) don't properly understand the relationship between the developer and the publisher. It is supposedly analogous to authors and publishers, but it's a bit more like screenwriters and producers. Publishers have a great deal (perhaps too much) creative control over the way games are designed. This is mostly done by the developers because they have no choice; unless they want to go the indie route and rely on word-of-mouth and perhaps a few Youtube videos, they won't be successful because they rely on the publisher's gigantic marketing and hype machine, along with connections and arm-twisting (how do you think demos get packaged with consoles or with other games, for instance?) One of the things publishers almost always dictate is DRM. For instance, many EA games from the mid-00s used the same sort of key generation, the same disk checker, etc. This isn't really a choice for developers, especially after the first game in a series is made. For an example, look at the fighting between Activision and Infinity Ward when Infinity Ward wanted more control over Call of Duty and resented Activision selling the name out to any studio they felt like. This was after they tried to distance themselves from the Call of Duty name entirely, having initially planned to release the Modern Warfare games simply as "Modern Warfare".
In summary, DRM is almost always the publisher's fault. This is why I have resolved myself to not purchase (that is, not pay for) any game produced by most of the major publishers such as Activision or EA. I can't stand the thought of providing such groups with funds to continue their operations, even if I like developers such as Bioware.
The Wii is partially separated from this grouping, as its control scheme is so unusual (or was) that most games weren't ported to it and its own games were Wii-exclusives. This is changing now that other consoles have jumped onto the motion control bandwagon, however.
I would rather say that consoles are aimed at different people. Compare, for instance, the relatively simple games on the NES and other late-80s consoles versus the very first tactical, strategy, and management games on the Amiga, IBM PC, and other home computer systems. As time has gone on and the negative stigma against consoles degraded, they began to share games. Far from being a repeated pattern, it has only really been true for one or two console generations. However, something else has degraded as well. Rather than specializing a game around its platform, geared towards a certain level of graphics, a certain type of input, etc., a game is being treated as its own entity that can just be dumped onto any platform. Because of this, games necessarily pander to the lowest common denominator (currently the Xbox 360) in terms of performance and input.