Wow, can you say "astroturf comment"? Either that or troll, not sure which. Anyway, I'll bite:
If there have been documented cases of it causing problems, then it doesn't really matter if there have been other cases where it was fine. Even if only 10% of end users see problems, don't you think everyone still would like to know about it, so they can make informed decisions?
Or, to put in another, more emotionally charged frame: If there was a baby-food that worked fine most of the time, but in 10% of cases caused the baby to explode violently, don't you think people (particularly potential customers) should be told that there were risks? Just because someone could say "well, MY baby didn't explode" would not somehow absolve the company of responsability of the 10% that did.
That's not just a problem with licensed property, that's a problem with MMORPGs in general. EVERYONE wants to feel like the (or at least a) hero. That's wmy many people play escapist games in the first place. Yes, there are many people who occupy other "niches" in MMORPGs, (such as the "Crafters", for example, or others who play the game more for the social aspect than the achievement one) but by in large, when many people play games, they expect to be the hero.
In single player games, this is not a problem. Heck, even in most MMORPGs, when playing vs the environemnt, this is not a problem. The computer can easily conjure endless hordes of mindless villains for you to triumph over through skill, tactics, and the careful game balance that the designers created, whereby you are JUST enough better than the enemies, that you can consistantly win, while still feeling like you have to "work" for it.
The problem, of course, comes when people, who have been taught to think that they are "the hero", want to fight other players, with similar beliefs. Go listen to the global chat in any PvP zone in most games, and it is FULL, absolutely chalk FULL of complaints, whines, and, in general, people complaining because someone else killed them in a way that they feel was unfair.
The bottom line, unfortunately, is that not everyone can be a hero. In licensed games, or in games that invent their own world. Either way, the ratio of heros:non-heroes has to be fairly small, or else you're not a hero. And no one wants to have to be the non-heroes that the hero triumphs over, again and again. They want to be the hero. 90% of the player base in any game tends to get dominated by the top 10%. That's just the way it is. Not everyone will play equally well. Call it Sturgeon's Law of Pwnage. (Term shamelessly stolen from brokentoys.org) But it plagues non-licensed games just as much as licensed ones.
I think it's just human nature. The games are a nice place where the computer tells us that hooray, we're the best! Eventually this makes us want to go show everyone how "the best" we are. At which point we discover that everyone else harbors similar thoughts, and that not all of us are quite as "the best" as we thought. That's the sort of thing that tends to get people upset.
We care because it sounds like there are still some kind of troubling unknowns? What is the range to be harmful to marine life? This is probably a lot more powerful than sonar, and they already have evidence that that causes problems in whales... I mean, we're talking about a sound wave powerful enough to detonate a torpedo. So maybe the torpedo-detonation range is merely a couple-hundred meters. But how far is the "really mess up sea-life" range? And how much testing is it going to take?
What if every time it is activated, every whale within 5km gets sick and has a 50% chance of dying? And what if it requires several months of testing to make work?
Sure, these are "what ifs". But if there's some evidence to support the hypothesis that "loud underwater noise messes up sea life" (which it seems there is) then it seems reasonable to me that we might want to investigate the effects a bit, before designing ships with giant loudspeakers mounted on the hulls, designed to create shockwaves capable of making things explode.
I dunno. TAPPING an untapped genre is easy. Execution is the hard part.
I mean, I could "tap" the as-far-as-I-know untapped genre of "sentient fruit in Shakespearian plays seen as action dramas" by making a first person shooter and having the enemies be bananas that scream "wherefor art thou?!!?!??" at the top of their lungs before attacking you with crossbow-chainguns.
Kudos are probably not something I'd get, however.
Executing an idea well, that's the hard (and kudo-worthy) part. Just coming up with a "Genre" that people haven't used before is easy. Most "untapped" genres haven't been tapped yet for a good reason: No one can think of a way of executing them well.
Hmm. Yes, that could make an absurdly popular MMORPG. (with the right audiance, at least.)
You, sir, are an evil that rivals StarBucks.
Heck, the whole game is about trying to convince you that you're running around in a world with other people doing the same thing. If they were actually other PEOPLE...
That, and the multiplayer battles have always been the most fun/challenging part of the series....
Is that what NeoPets tried to do? I've heard about it, but don't have any first hand info...
I keep seeing comments talking about "those durned cheat'n bots". But it makes me wonder, what exactly is "cheating" in this case?
In most cases, I'd say that "cheating" is doing anything that is against the rules of the game that gives you an unfair advantage. But what here is the bot doing?
As far as I can tell, none of the things this bot does are things that acutal human players couldn't do, if they wanted to bother. So then at that point is it still cheating?
The one exception to this is the collusion. That's clearly against the rules of poker. But I predict that that will be a self-correcting problem. Since after all, it won't be long before someone makes an alternate version of the BOT that feeds incorrect data to the other BOTs so that you're more likely to win money from them. (Since game-theory wise, if you're the only cheater in a room full of honest people, you have an advantage.) And shortly after that, other bots will start to do the same, until the "collusion" a bot gets cannot be trusted, and is no longer a worthwhile channel of information.
(Heck, a whole war of bots trying to "Read" other bots based on their (possibly erronious) collusion information could start. That could actually be kind of fun to watch. From a distance.)
Anyway, as long as the BOTs aren't actually hacking the system, or forcing other peoples' clients to crash, etc, then I think you could make a good argument that it's not really cheating.
(And no, I'm not a bot user or apologist. All of my online poker playing is restricted to free sites, anyway...)
I think the point is, EA is doing it's usual thing: Secure a license, and then slowly degrade quality, counting on the momentum of all the people who have bought the previous versions (that may have actually been somewhat good) until the franchise is driven into the ground.
(This trend has particularly evident on EA's handling of the James Bond license)
Of course, the twist on this one is they've managed to completely shut out any competitors from having an NFL-branded game through legal shenanigans. So they're counting not only on all the people who liked previous Madden, but also all the people who played other NFL games who want a new one, and have no other place to get one.
Why with that kind of base they can count on, they barely have to ship a game at all. They can just put poo in a box and sell it!
My prediction? EA will continue to milk this advantage as long as it can, and people will keep buying it, until someone just says "fine, we'll make a NON-NFL themed football game" and releases a superior product. And then all is well. Until EA uses it's monolithic buying power to acquire the company, and repeat the cycle.
Is it just me, or is this past the point of even remote sanity? I mean, intellectual property laws have been getting crazier and crazier, but... getting to the point where you're not allowed to say certain WORDS because someone else "owns" them?
Uh..
How the HECK do you justify any sort of legal backing for that? None of the people with exclusive rights to the words in question invented such words. There are SURE as heck a lot of examples of prior art. It's not as if they made up some NEW words, and said they were off limits. That would be (slightly) more resonable. But you can't just take a chunk of an already existing language, and reserve certain words in an attempt to give a financial advantage to certain companies.
Er. Ok, I guess in UK you can. (And I have no doubt that such a thing could happen here in the US as well.)
But you SHOULDN'T be able to. To me, this is a very loud and clear sign that something in our system is kinda broke.
True, the.swf file format does stand for shockwave flash. However, this is a flash animation; a shockwave animation is something quite different. This was an animation that was produced via macromedia flash, and runs in their flash player.
A shockwave animation is one that is produced in Macromedia Director, and requires an entirely different plugin.
They're separate products and separate file formats. The flash format (which is far more common) is vector based, and was designed to stream interesting animations to people while using up as little bandwidth as possible. Similarly, the flash player itself is (or at least originally was) designed to be as small as possible.
In contrast, the shockwave player was designed from the start to handle lots of stuff (bitmaps, vectors, 3d) and so was always a much heavier player.
So anyway, the parent post is right, I think. This is a FLASH animation, not a shockwave animation. Calling this a shockwave animation in the headline is misleading.
Yeah... maybe not wheelchair, but before my mother had knee replacement surgury, so that simply walking actually caused acute physical PAIN, she got a sticker for handicapped spots. She tried to use it as little as possible, but seriously, she is exactly the sort of case that is why those spots are THERE. There are a lot of medical reasons why walking long distances may be discomforting, painful, or harmful. Not all of them involve wheelchairs.
Don't be so quick to dismiss other peoples' problems as insignificant, just because you've been fortunate enough not to have had to suffer them yourself.
Yeah, and I hope the byproducts of these "self cleaning" buildings don't end up with unfortunate side effects of their own. We've already seen other cases of "enviornmentally friendly" emissions causing problems of their own in sufficient quantities...
Just a thought, but... If it's directly connected to my computer via USB... well, I controll my computer. And thus what my computer sends to that port. So in theory, people should be able to write all sorts of fun things to take advantage of this fact. Especially given that the gameboy DS already has the ability to download games over wireless. I predict some fun hacks coming out of this, unless I'm missing something here...
Not that I don't fundamentally agree with you, (if we don't expect people to act morally, they probably won't) but... One problem with what you're saying is that a cultural insistance on personal morality requires that you first have a commonly agreed upon morality to start insisting upon. And getting lots of people to agree on the same moral code is something that has been historically pretty difficult...
So yeah, it's fine, having a social insistance upon morality, as long as everyone is onboard with it. But having someone try to insist you behave in a manner that is NOT what you see as moral quickly turns from social responsibility into oppression...
In theory, this is what governments are supposed to do. Everyone votes, (or otherwise has some input) and decides what parts of morality they can agree upon enough to enshrine as law. Of course, in practice, this system is just as vulnerable to corruption as any other. But, at the risk of sounding cynical, "do you have a better idea"? (better as in, better for everyone, and not just better for your personal idea of how everyone should act)
I think it actually (or perhaps also?) falls under the pigeonhole principal. In order to fit x seperate pidgeons, you need at least x holes. Or, in data storage terms, to be able to always represent x bytes worth of data, you need at least x bytes worth of data. (Compression sometimes seems to get around this, but with compression, it's almost always a tradeoff: It can store certain configurations of data (usually the most common) in less than x bytes, but other configurations (random noise, for example) almost always takes more. In order to ALWAYS be sure of being able to store x bytes, you need at least x bytes to store it in.)
I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as anyone, but I wish this letter had had more meat in it. In particular, the final point ("I know people who haven't gotten their checks from you guys, so nyah") is a pretty weak...
The first part is ok, I just wish there were more of it. It's not like the recording industry's history doesn't have enough hypocricy to fill several articles. That would have made a better impression. "Extending musical copyrights for centuries is absurd, and clearly just a money grab" is a much better argument (imho) than "You steal from us, so it's ok if we steal back".
While I may not speak for everyone here, I at least DO put my money where my mouth is. I haven't bought a sony product since the PS1 I bought used 6 years ago. Sure, the Playstation 2 has shiny graphics, and the PSP looks shiny as well. But y'know what? I think I'd rather put my money into nintendo, who is at least trying to create innovative games, and who's business practices are at least marginally better than sony's.
So yeah. I do put my money where my mouth is. and will continue to do so, by not buying a PSP. Now the question is... do you, oh would-be inflamitory poster? Or are you as hypocritical as you accuse everyone else of being?
As for what happens when Apple goes out of business, well, DRM authorizations are localized, and there are already programs to move your authorization manualy. Presumably, if Apple were to go out of business, they would either open the DRM, issue a universal authorizer program, or someone else would step in.
presumably? Why so? More than one company has gone belly-up and just faded away, leaving their product to do nothing, but still bound by legal restrictions. If Apple were to go out of business, then there might not be anyone AROUND to do any of these things. Because, y'know, they went out of business.
If they were close to going out of business, do you think they would a) spend valuable man-hours on making, testing, and releasing a nice tool for the public, or b) focus all their resources on getting out of trouble?
The mistake that everyone always makes in thinking about flash is in confusing what it can do with what they see done with it.
What can flash do?
It's an extremely flexible scripting language, that enables extreme rapid-development of GUIs, graphics, audio, and other multimedia applications.
And the resulting files are fairly small, (or at least can be, if they're not chock-full of sounds).
And the graphics are both very small, and scalable, since it's all vector-based.
And it streams, so if set up correctly, even modem users can join in the fun.
In short, Flash is a pretty cool development environment for creating web apps.
That being said...
what do people see flash used for?
pop up adds. And web sites with too much flash and not enough content.
Is this the fault of flash? I don't think so. The only thing flash is guilty of is making it TOO easy to create things, so everyone and their kid brother tries to. And 95% of it sucks. But ease of user-interface is usually a goal, and not a crime...
I think that flash, in and of itself, is an extremely powerful tool, that fills a needed (or at least highly useful) niche in web and multimedia development.
Don't hate the product, hate the dorks who think that a web site built entirely out of flash is cool, with looping audio, and annoying animations.
(Am I the only one who remembers all the annoying java-apps that people added to web pages for a while, with weird cursors with tails, snow, and other strangeness?)
Do you actually have to ask? This IS "news for nerds", remember... If you can't see the appeal in having an excuse to combine geeky electronics + launching ballistic projectiles at "friends", then maybe you're on the wrong forum...
And let's not forget the OTHER wonderful games from looking glass, besides deus ex: System Shock 1&2, Thief 1&2, and sometimes 3, or even the non-looking glass classic No one lives forever 1 or 2.
All marvelous games that have good, well presented stories.
Halflife has a well presented story, (and what I've seen of halflife 2 also has one.) The problem is that it isn't a GOOD story.
[spoiler alert for original HL]
The original halflife had a really crappy story, when it came down to it. It was basically equivalent to the story of Doom. (Which is seldom held up for any real litterary praise...)
At it's core, it's just "Aliens are coming in through our teleporters and attacking! Kill'em!"
So far from what I've seen of HL2, the story is the minor variation of "Aliens have come in through our teleporters, and have taken over. Kill'em!"
Now don't get me wrong. The presentation is marvelous. They never break character, never give you a cutscene where you can't interact with things, and all story elements are presented through the game, not through external constructs like story sequences, NIS'es, or the like. I LOVE the presentation.
I just wish the actual story itself was better. And to the people who are saying "No, the story rocks, d00d!", I ask: take a step back, and think about what the story actually IS. Not how it is being told to you (which I agree is awesome) but what the story would be, if you were trying to orally describe it to someone else. I submit that it would basically boil down to "aliens have taken over. Shoot stuff." Which is not exactly shakespeare...
Now that the US has lots of "IP" we believe in strong IP laws, completely contrary to those laid out when the country was founded, and the media companies advocate laws that would have made it impossible for them to have gotten their start.
Well, of course they [the companies] do. For the simple reason that they're pragmatic, instead of altruistic. They remember what happened to the people before them when they DID get their start. They have no desire to let someone else do to them what they did to their predecessors.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, can you say "astroturf comment"? Either that or troll, not sure which. Anyway, I'll bite:
If there have been documented cases of it causing problems, then it doesn't really matter if there have been other cases where it was fine. Even if only 10% of end users see problems, don't you think everyone still would like to know about it, so they can make informed decisions?
Or, to put in another, more emotionally charged frame: If there was a baby-food that worked fine most of the time, but in 10% of cases caused the baby to explode violently, don't you think people (particularly potential customers) should be told that there were risks? Just because someone could say "well, MY baby didn't explode" would not somehow absolve the company of responsability of the 10% that did.
That's not just a problem with licensed property, that's a problem with MMORPGs in general. EVERYONE wants to feel like the (or at least a) hero. That's wmy many people play escapist games in the first place. Yes, there are many people who occupy other "niches" in MMORPGs, (such as the "Crafters", for example, or others who play the game more for the social aspect than the achievement one) but by in large, when many people play games, they expect to be the hero.
In single player games, this is not a problem. Heck, even in most MMORPGs, when playing vs the environemnt, this is not a problem. The computer can easily conjure endless hordes of mindless villains for you to triumph over through skill, tactics, and the careful game balance that the designers created, whereby you are JUST enough better than the enemies, that you can consistantly win, while still feeling like you have to "work" for it.
The problem, of course, comes when people, who have been taught to think that they are "the hero", want to fight other players, with similar beliefs. Go listen to the global chat in any PvP zone in most games, and it is FULL, absolutely chalk FULL of complaints, whines, and, in general, people complaining because someone else killed them in a way that they feel was unfair.
The bottom line, unfortunately, is that not everyone can be a hero. In licensed games, or in games that invent their own world. Either way, the ratio of heros:non-heroes has to be fairly small, or else you're not a hero. And no one wants to have to be the non-heroes that the hero triumphs over, again and again. They want to be the hero. 90% of the player base in any game tends to get dominated by the top 10%. That's just the way it is. Not everyone will play equally well. Call it Sturgeon's Law of Pwnage. (Term shamelessly stolen from brokentoys.org) But it plagues non-licensed games just as much as licensed ones.
I think it's just human nature. The games are a nice place where the computer tells us that hooray, we're the best! Eventually this makes us want to go show everyone how "the best" we are. At which point we discover that everyone else harbors similar thoughts, and that not all of us are quite as "the best" as we thought. That's the sort of thing that tends to get people upset.
We care because it sounds like there are still some kind of troubling unknowns? What is the range to be harmful to marine life? This is probably a lot more powerful than sonar, and they already have evidence that that causes problems in whales... I mean, we're talking about a sound wave powerful enough to detonate a torpedo. So maybe the torpedo-detonation range is merely a couple-hundred meters. But how far is the "really mess up sea-life" range? And how much testing is it going to take?
What if every time it is activated, every whale within 5km gets sick and has a 50% chance of dying? And what if it requires several months of testing to make work?
Sure, these are "what ifs". But if there's some evidence to support the hypothesis that "loud underwater noise messes up sea life" (which it seems there is) then it seems reasonable to me that we might want to investigate the effects a bit, before designing ships with giant loudspeakers mounted on the hulls, designed to create shockwaves capable of making things explode.
Obligitory september 19th Arr:
Arr!
I dunno. TAPPING an untapped genre is easy. Execution is the hard part.
I mean, I could "tap" the as-far-as-I-know untapped genre of "sentient fruit in Shakespearian plays seen as action dramas" by making a first person shooter and having the enemies be bananas that scream "wherefor art thou?!!?!??" at the top of their lungs before attacking you with crossbow-chainguns.
Kudos are probably not something I'd get, however.
Executing an idea well, that's the hard (and kudo-worthy) part. Just coming up with a "Genre" that people haven't used before is easy. Most "untapped" genres haven't been tapped yet for a good reason: No one can think of a way of executing them well.
Hmm. Yes, that could make an absurdly popular MMORPG. (with the right audiance, at least.)
...
You, sir, are an evil that rivals StarBucks.
Heck, the whole game is about trying to convince you that you're running around in a world with other people doing the same thing. If they were actually other PEOPLE...
That, and the multiplayer battles have always been the most fun/challenging part of the series.
Is that what NeoPets tried to do? I've heard about it, but don't have any first hand info...
I keep seeing comments talking about "those durned cheat'n bots". But it makes me wonder, what exactly is "cheating" in this case?
In most cases, I'd say that "cheating" is doing anything that is against the rules of the game that gives you an unfair advantage. But what here is the bot doing?
As far as I can tell, none of the things this bot does are things that acutal human players couldn't do, if they wanted to bother. So then at that point is it still cheating?
The one exception to this is the collusion. That's clearly against the rules of poker. But I predict that that will be a self-correcting problem. Since after all, it won't be long before someone makes an alternate version of the BOT that feeds incorrect data to the other BOTs so that you're more likely to win money from them. (Since game-theory wise, if you're the only cheater in a room full of honest people, you have an advantage.) And shortly after that, other bots will start to do the same, until the "collusion" a bot gets cannot be trusted, and is no longer a worthwhile channel of information.
(Heck, a whole war of bots trying to "Read" other bots based on their (possibly erronious) collusion information could start. That could actually be kind of fun to watch. From a distance.)
Anyway, as long as the BOTs aren't actually hacking the system, or forcing other peoples' clients to crash, etc, then I think you could make a good argument that it's not really cheating.
(And no, I'm not a bot user or apologist. All of my online poker playing is restricted to free sites, anyway...)
It's not a peripheral, silly!
It's a boot device!
*boot!*
I think the point is, EA is doing it's usual thing: Secure a license, and then slowly degrade quality, counting on the momentum of all the people who have bought the previous versions (that may have actually been somewhat good) until the franchise is driven into the ground.
(This trend has particularly evident on EA's handling of the James Bond license)
Of course, the twist on this one is they've managed to completely shut out any competitors from having an NFL-branded game through legal shenanigans. So they're counting not only on all the people who liked previous Madden, but also all the people who played other NFL games who want a new one, and have no other place to get one.
Why with that kind of base they can count on, they barely have to ship a game at all. They can just put poo in a box and sell it!
My prediction? EA will continue to milk this advantage as long as it can, and people will keep buying it, until someone just says "fine, we'll make a NON-NFL themed football game" and releases a superior product. And then all is well. Until EA uses it's monolithic buying power to acquire the company, and repeat the cycle.
Fun!
Is it just me, or is this past the point of even remote sanity? I mean, intellectual property laws have been getting crazier and crazier, but... getting to the point where you're not allowed to say certain WORDS because someone else "owns" them?
Uh..
How the HECK do you justify any sort of legal backing for that? None of the people with exclusive rights to the words in question invented such words. There are SURE as heck a lot of examples of prior art. It's not as if they made up some NEW words, and said they were off limits. That would be (slightly) more resonable. But you can't just take a chunk of an already existing language, and reserve certain words in an attempt to give a financial advantage to certain companies.
Er. Ok, I guess in UK you can. (And I have no doubt that such a thing could happen here in the US as well.)
But you SHOULDN'T be able to. To me, this is a very loud and clear sign that something in our system is kinda broke.
True, the .swf file format does stand for shockwave flash. However, this is a flash animation; a shockwave animation is something quite different. This was an animation that was produced via macromedia flash, and runs in their flash player.
A shockwave animation is one that is produced in Macromedia Director, and requires an entirely different plugin.
They're separate products and separate file formats. The flash format (which is far more common) is vector based, and was designed to stream interesting animations to people while using up as little bandwidth as possible. Similarly, the flash player itself is (or at least originally was) designed to be as small as possible.
In contrast, the shockwave player was designed from the start to handle lots of stuff (bitmaps, vectors, 3d) and so was always a much heavier player.
So anyway, the parent post is right, I think. This is a FLASH animation, not a shockwave animation. Calling this a shockwave animation in the headline is misleading.
Yeah... maybe not wheelchair, but before my mother had knee replacement surgury, so that simply walking actually caused acute physical PAIN, she got a sticker for handicapped spots. She tried to use it as little as possible, but seriously, she is exactly the sort of case that is why those spots are THERE. There are a lot of medical reasons why walking long distances may be discomforting, painful, or harmful. Not all of them involve wheelchairs.
Don't be so quick to dismiss other peoples' problems as insignificant, just because you've been fortunate enough not to have had to suffer them yourself.
Yeah, and I hope the byproducts of these "self cleaning" buildings don't end up with unfortunate side effects of their own. We've already seen other cases of "enviornmentally friendly" emissions causing problems of their own in sufficient quantities...
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...
Just a thought, but... If it's directly connected to my computer via USB... well, I controll my computer. And thus what my computer sends to that port. So in theory, people should be able to write all sorts of fun things to take advantage of this fact. Especially given that the gameboy DS already has the ability to download games over wireless. I predict some fun hacks coming out of this, unless I'm missing something here...
Not that I don't fundamentally agree with you, (if we don't expect people to act morally, they probably won't) but... One problem with what you're saying is that a cultural insistance on personal morality requires that you first have a commonly agreed upon morality to start insisting upon. And getting lots of people to agree on the same moral code is something that has been historically pretty difficult...
So yeah, it's fine, having a social insistance upon morality, as long as everyone is onboard with it. But having someone try to insist you behave in a manner that is NOT what you see as moral quickly turns from social responsibility into oppression...
In theory, this is what governments are supposed to do. Everyone votes, (or otherwise has some input) and decides what parts of morality they can agree upon enough to enshrine as law. Of course, in practice, this system is just as vulnerable to corruption as any other. But, at the risk of sounding cynical, "do you have a better idea"? (better as in, better for everyone, and not just better for your personal idea of how everyone should act)
I think it actually (or perhaps also?) falls under the pigeonhole principal. In order to fit x seperate pidgeons, you need at least x holes. Or, in data storage terms, to be able to always represent x bytes worth of data, you need at least x bytes worth of data. (Compression sometimes seems to get around this, but with compression, it's almost always a tradeoff: It can store certain configurations of data (usually the most common) in less than x bytes, but other configurations (random noise, for example) almost always takes more. In order to ALWAYS be sure of being able to store x bytes, you need at least x bytes to store it in.)
I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as anyone, but I wish this letter had had more meat in it. In particular, the final point ("I know people who haven't gotten their checks from you guys, so nyah") is a pretty weak...
The first part is ok, I just wish there were more of it. It's not like the recording industry's history doesn't have enough hypocricy to fill several articles. That would have made a better impression. "Extending musical copyrights for centuries is absurd, and clearly just a money grab" is a much better argument (imho) than "You steal from us, so it's ok if we steal back".
You assume a lot.
While I may not speak for everyone here, I at least DO put my money where my mouth is. I haven't bought a sony product since the PS1 I bought used 6 years ago. Sure, the Playstation 2 has shiny graphics, and the PSP looks shiny as well. But y'know what? I think I'd rather put my money into nintendo, who is at least trying to create innovative games, and who's business practices are at least marginally better than sony's.
So yeah. I do put my money where my mouth is. and will continue to do so, by not buying a PSP. Now the question is... do you, oh would-be inflamitory poster? Or are you as hypocritical as you accuse everyone else of being?
As for what happens when Apple goes out of business, well, DRM authorizations are localized, and there are already programs to move your authorization manualy. Presumably, if Apple were to go out of business, they would either open the DRM, issue a universal authorizer program, or someone else would step in.
presumably? Why so? More than one company has gone belly-up and just faded away, leaving their product to do nothing, but still bound by legal restrictions. If Apple were to go out of business, then there might not be anyone AROUND to do any of these things. Because, y'know, they went out of business.
If they were close to going out of business, do you think they would
a) spend valuable man-hours on making, testing, and releasing a nice tool for the public, or
b) focus all their resources on getting out of trouble?
The mistake that everyone always makes in thinking about flash is in confusing what it can do with what they see done with it.
What can flash do?
It's an extremely flexible scripting language, that enables extreme rapid-development of GUIs, graphics, audio, and other multimedia applications.
And the resulting files are fairly small, (or at least can be, if they're not chock-full of sounds).
And the graphics are both very small, and scalable, since it's all vector-based.
And it streams, so if set up correctly, even modem users can join in the fun.
In short, Flash is a pretty cool development environment for creating web apps.
That being said...
what do people see flash used for?
pop up adds. And web sites with too much flash and not enough content.
Is this the fault of flash? I don't think so. The only thing flash is guilty of is making it TOO easy to create things, so everyone and their kid brother tries to. And 95% of it sucks. But ease of user-interface is usually a goal, and not a crime...
I think that flash, in and of itself, is an extremely powerful tool, that fills a needed (or at least highly useful) niche in web and multimedia development.
Don't hate the product, hate the dorks who think that a web site built entirely out of flash is cool, with looping audio, and annoying animations.
(Am I the only one who remembers all the annoying java-apps that people added to web pages for a while, with weird cursors with tails, snow, and other strangeness?)
Do you actually have to ask? This IS "news for nerds", remember... If you can't see the appeal in having an excuse to combine geeky electronics + launching ballistic projectiles at "friends", then maybe you're on the wrong forum...
That's no moon...
It's a space station!
And let's not forget the OTHER wonderful games from looking glass, besides deus ex: System Shock 1&2, Thief 1&2, and sometimes 3, or even the non-looking glass classic No one lives forever 1 or 2.
All marvelous games that have good, well presented stories.
Halflife has a well presented story, (and what I've seen of halflife 2 also has one.) The problem is that it isn't a GOOD story.
[spoiler alert for original HL]
The original halflife had a really crappy story, when it came down to it. It was basically equivalent to the story of Doom. (Which is seldom held up for any real litterary praise...)
At it's core, it's just "Aliens are coming in through our teleporters and attacking! Kill'em!"
So far from what I've seen of HL2, the story is the minor variation of "Aliens have come in through our teleporters, and have taken over. Kill'em!"
Now don't get me wrong. The presentation is marvelous. They never break character, never give you a cutscene where you can't interact with things, and all story elements are presented through the game, not through external constructs like story sequences, NIS'es, or the like. I LOVE the presentation.
I just wish the actual story itself was better. And to the people who are saying "No, the story rocks, d00d!", I ask: take a step back, and think about what the story actually IS. Not how it is being told to you (which I agree is awesome) but what the story would be, if you were trying to orally describe it to someone else. I submit that it would basically boil down to "aliens have taken over. Shoot stuff." Which is not exactly shakespeare...
Woah, two of them! What a bargain!
I used to worry about big brother abusing his power. But with two of them... they can watch each other!
Now that the US has lots of "IP" we believe in strong IP laws, completely contrary to those laid out when the country was founded, and the media companies advocate laws that would have made it impossible for them to have gotten their start.
Well, of course they [the companies] do. For the simple reason that they're pragmatic, instead of altruistic. They remember what happened to the people before them when they DID get their start. They have no desire to let someone else do to them what they did to their predecessors.
Of course they wouldn't...
Mister Marcus Buckly, of 5426 Millhouse street, apartment 37B, Danbury Nebraska.
Nothing like that ever happens on the internet!