Posting an article's baseless speculation about what an announcement means takes away all the fun of letting us baselessly speculate about what an announcement means.
He's not saying that Half-Life is retro or that no one wants to make Half-Life 3, he's saying that no one at Valve wants to make a HL3 that is just more of the same. Valve seems to pride itself on gameplay innovations, and if they can't come up with something totally unique and creative for HL3, they aren't going to just put it out as-is.
There are several problems with that logic, though: for one, they don't come up with those types of innovations very often and rely on hiring outside talent to provide them (e.g. Portal). Second, all that innovation hunting tends to be focused on crafting new franchises (Portal, again); I don't think Valve is particularly concerned with thinking of a new gimmick specifically for the next Half-Life.
The biggest point is that I don't think most Half-Life fans care about that level of innovation quite as much as Mr. Newell and would be more than satisfied with a "retro" HL3. Part of the reason for this is because what we call HL3 is really just the end of HL2. Fans are more eager to see how the story ends than whatever new physics gimmick Valve is going to add to the game. I think there would be far greater expectations for a new Half-Life entry with a new story and new characters, but we know that's not what the theoretical next Half-Life game would be. The disconnect between fan expectations and Valve's expectations is very frustrating.
I'm astonished by how many people are crying about the notion that she could have deleted emails without records; if you're adamant that politicians are corrupt enough to do that, then why do you assume they couldn't make unwanted emails permanently disappear from the.gov accounts they're supposed to be using? Catching Mrs. Clinton with her hand in the cookie jar doesn't change the nature of secrecy and mistrust which underlie politics as a whole. Politicians aren't going to suddenly stop communicating things they don't want on record, they're just going to try harder to keep those things buried. None of this addresses or helps to solve the much more apparent problem of poor security standards.
What you're seeing is the typical conservative notion that deregulation promotes investment, which deliberately draws attention away from the fact that the reason the US broadband infrastructure leaves so much to be desired is not because of a lack of investment but because there is nothing enforceable in place which requires them to spend the money they already receive on the necessary upgrades. Government subsidies, your monthly rates; only the barest minimum of any of that goes toward upgrades which are deemed absolutely necessary, while the rest accounts for billions of dollars in profits.
Regarding last mile bundling, one of the arguments against it is that more competition would stifle innovation. That might hold water except that the only "innovation" these companies are investing in are new and better ways to curb your bandwidth consumption. Thankfully for the millions who simply have no choice of provider because of location, fiber has already been invented. Don't worry folks -- as soon as we guarantee that no competition is ever able to enter your area, your ISP will be at your door the next morning to run high speed fiber straight into your home!
People are getting confused because it appears to be a win for net neutrality on the surface. Really now, do you think a former telecoms lobbyist would put that on the table if service providers didn't have something to gain from it? It's simply being used as a bargaining chip here to win people over into supporting the very reason our infrastructure is a global embarrassment. A decade from now, when you are paying $120/mo for 10down/1.5up Super Premium High-Speed Internet Turbo Boost Plus, they'll expect you to smile and be happy with your "open internet." To remind those with poor short-term memories, deregulation is what led to the whole Comcast BitTorrent debacle in the late 2000s; what a great win for net neutrality that turned out to be.
Rest assured that "no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling" will only benefit the bottom line of service providers. This is a compromise, one that wants you to accept long-term mediocrity for a temporary victory. How satisfied will you be when there's nothing left but the good graces of monopolistic corporations to stop your rates from skyrocketing and nowhere else to turn when they finally do?
Correction: Apparently the album view does have a neat expanding songlist if you single-click on an album, there is just an obnoxious delay which is why I didn't notice it before. Double-clicking still only plays the album without opening this list though, so it's now a two-step process. -1 intuitiveness.
Once I figured out how to get it to sort my albums by title rather than artist again, I have to say I'm getting used to the minimalist interface. iTunes has always been minimal on features, so it never made sense that its UI was such a mess. Now it's more, uh, pushbutton-y? Feels like it was designed for touchscreens, oddly enough. I definitely like the new pop-out Visualizer, now I can properly have that running on my secondary display without jumping back and forth between the full interface. The only thing I'm not digging is how double-clicking an album immediately starts playing it instead of opening the song list. There's actually no way to get to that song list anymore, you have to start the album and then skip to the track you want, else you have to sort through the Songs view which includes your entire library. Oh well.
My home state of CT had two storms that took out power to most of the state for over a week just last year. Get on our level.
On a serious note, it's kind of sad to see that even after our horrendous storms and massive consumer backlash against CL&P's near-monopoly, there are still power companies out there acting like it could never happen to them, not having a contingency plan for the worst case scenario.
That's the kind of nitpicking which is just as stupid as you'd like to make copyright law look. If Tetris was such a simple concept that it shouldn't deserve copyright protection, then why would official Tetris be so much more popular than profitable than not-quite-Tetris? There are plenty of similar block-dropping games which use different types of blocks, varying mechanics and so on which are very similar to Tetris, but different enough that they don't encounter legal trouble, yet none of them reach the level of ubiquitous popularity and recognition that Tetris itself has. Why?
Tetris is more than just a "set of polygons that can be constructed out of 4 congruent squares," and that is precisely why it is and should be protected. If none of this were true, no one would bother trying to make exact copies of Tetris such as Mino, and people wouldn't get all flustered trying to argue such copies should be legal. There is a high demand for Tetris, not sort-of-Tetris, and that's why TTC and its licensees are the only ones allowed to profit from it whether you like it or not.
That's not really a fair analogy, since you're equating the differences between games in the FPS genre to differences between Tetris clones. Tetris is a very simplistic game with minimalistic elements, so it is only defined by a very limited set of qualities. You can only imitate so many of those before you go from Tetris clone to just Tetris. After all, that's why we liberally use "Tetris clone" or "Insert first puzzle game to use these mechanics here clone" to define puzzle games, rather than just calling them Puzzle games. FPS games have more complex engines, mechanics, and a far wider array of qualities that can vary. As the judge in this case said, you can't base the infringement on the mechanics of the game - but without its mechanics, Tetris can really only be defined by limited details such as block shapes and well size. Besides all of that, 90s developers might have been trying to ride the success of Doom and the rising FPS genre, but none of them actually said, "Yeah, we're purposefully and deliberately copying Doom just to see if id can enforce their copyright."
Look at this another way: 90s FPS games were successful on their own without being exact copies of Doom. That also applies for puzzle games which are not Tetris. However, plenty of people want to play Tetris itself, not "sort of Tetris but with a fundamental gameplay mechanic changed to get around legal trouble." Mino would not have met with success if it was not an exact clone of Tetris, and I can say that confidently because of how upset people get over developers not being able to make exact clones of Tetris. There's more money in Tetris than sort-of-Tetris, and that is exactly why TTC goes after copies.
You don't need to break down and analyze which individual details make a Tetris clone a Tetris clone that violates copyright versus a Tetris clone which doesn't; it's quite clear at first glance that Mino is just simply Tetris. I know this sort of thing is a popular debate, and this is hardly the first example of its kind, but the extremely wide range of Tetris clones that survive without legal problems do so because their developers make at least the bare minimum effort to change something fundamental. Note, that's not to suggest TTC doesn't go after several of these as well, but they are certainly far less successful in those cases.
I think the point here is that if EA had taken this exact game and released it as their official licensed version of Tetris for iOS, no one would be the wiser. I understand that EA's official version isn't spectacular and we all wish we could play something much better without threats of legal action being thrown around, but the decision is really clear cut in this case, so I don't think it's unreasonable to cut TTC some slack here, or the DC judge in this case.
For anyone still shaking their fists in anger at TTC, I'd just like to point out this snippet from the article: "Xio readily admitted that Mino purposefully and deliberately copied from Tetris." He wanted this fight, and he lost.
Looking at how they describe their process of "e-gifting," I have to imagine this method was used somewhere, anywhere else first. I'm not up on patent law, but I thought you could essentially overrule a patent as long as you can prove you came up with it first.
Other countries manage it by being physically smaller and having denser populations. The US is very large and has a lot of people spread out with miles of space between them depending on the area, and in these cases they are lucky to have a single ISP to choose from, giving certain ones regional monopolies. Prices are lower and speeds are higher in the Northeast and other densely-populated areas, because the availability of different service providers means healthy competition.
Of course this is a really basic explanation, there are far bigger underlying problems that contribute to our relatively high prices and low speeds.
I don't know if it has been pointed out or if all Gawker sites are doing it, but at least Kotaku is now actively encouraging users to create "fake" accounts on these services, violating their respective ToS agreements.
Yes it would, there is nothing criminal about that until I actually produce a briefcase with a million dollars in it. The officer could still harass the hell out of me for it, probably put me in cuffs and take me to the local station, but it won't go any further than that.
The U.S. concept of freedom of speech (and other freedoms as defined in the Bill of Rights) is that the government has no right to make laws which infringe upon it/them. This does not mean that it is consequence-free, of course, which is why we still have concepts such as hate crime and the ability to file lawsuits. But for the law to step in and make decisions regarding the restriction of speech, it is quite disturbing to think of how a law like "inciting racial hatred" would have even been passed, and how imprisonment was determined to be an acceptable form of punishment for it.
The primary purpose of the U.S. having an explicitly defined Bill of Rights is to prevent any one group or authority from leveraging their standards on another. Monarchies and aristocracies allow the few to leverage laws in their favor, to oppress society at large with no recourse. Democracy counters this by making sure the majority is heard and society at large gets to decide what is best for them. But it goes further than that; simply being a majority doesn't make you free from the same biases monarchs and aristocrats are susceptible to, so we have gradually made provisions to ensure the majority cannot restrict the freedoms of minorities either. Even if those minorities are racists and bigots, the idea that their human rights can be restricted is even more reprehensible than anything they might say or do. So who voted for this "inciting racial hatred" law to be put in place, and is it right just because it passed a majority? Remember, there are options for recourse outside of government intervention.
You're correct. The U.S. has such a thing as hate crime, and there's nothing to suggest that this man couldn't have been sued had he been a U.S. resident, but for any government to claim the power to enforce restrictions on speech is disturbing and exactly why the U.S. has the First Amendment in the first place.
Speculation and futures bend the rules of supply and demand. Gas prices are not determined by actual supply and demand, they are determined by speculators hedging on low supply in the future. Would you care to explain why despite supply being at an all time high just a few years ago, prices never came down to match? You can't say that it has anything to do with our oil coming from unstable nations; it's been that way for a long time, decades before we ever saw gas prices climb above the $2 mark.
I take it what you're asking is how futures contracts actually impact the market price of anything since they are essentially an artificial market not bound by the laws of supply and demand. When speculators buy enough contracts at above the current market price, oil producers see this and start artificially limiting their supply in hopes that they'll be able to sell it all down the road at that higher price, and that causes the price of oil to go up now. We had an agency called the CFTC put in place specifically to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but what happened? Enron happened.
You remember Enron, don't you? They were instrumental in exploiting a loophole in the CFTC's regulatory powers to allow oil speculators to trade outside of those regulations. As the CFTC lost power, the futures market exploded, and as it has continued to increase dramatically over the past decade, so too have oil prices. You have to be out of your mind to argue that oil prices coincidentallyskyrocketed with the futures market.
Speculation. That's what it boils down to, folks. If you really want to see $2.00 gas prices again, outlaw speculation and it will happen overnight. It is absolutely mind-boggling that this practice is allowed with no checks or balances to keep it from driving our gas prices sky high. People will bring up anything else, like gas taxes or domestic drilling, just to draw attention from the real problem. It's almost like no one on either side wants to have that conversation, though.
Sure, dogs don't learn the same as humans do, but that's because they have their own naturally-developed instinctive way of doing things. Robots don't learn the same as humans do because their technical capabilities are different, but the way they learn is still human design. The way a robot learns can be changed, and it will most certainly evolve to adapt to new technologies, but no matter what there will always be human design behind it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Posting an article's baseless speculation about what an announcement means takes away all the fun of letting us baselessly speculate about what an announcement means.
He's not saying that Half-Life is retro or that no one wants to make Half-Life 3, he's saying that no one at Valve wants to make a HL3 that is just more of the same. Valve seems to pride itself on gameplay innovations, and if they can't come up with something totally unique and creative for HL3, they aren't going to just put it out as-is.
There are several problems with that logic, though: for one, they don't come up with those types of innovations very often and rely on hiring outside talent to provide them (e.g. Portal). Second, all that innovation hunting tends to be focused on crafting new franchises (Portal, again); I don't think Valve is particularly concerned with thinking of a new gimmick specifically for the next Half-Life.
The biggest point is that I don't think most Half-Life fans care about that level of innovation quite as much as Mr. Newell and would be more than satisfied with a "retro" HL3. Part of the reason for this is because what we call HL3 is really just the end of HL2. Fans are more eager to see how the story ends than whatever new physics gimmick Valve is going to add to the game. I think there would be far greater expectations for a new Half-Life entry with a new story and new characters, but we know that's not what the theoretical next Half-Life game would be. The disconnect between fan expectations and Valve's expectations is very frustrating.
I'm astonished by how many people are crying about the notion that she could have deleted emails without records; if you're adamant that politicians are corrupt enough to do that, then why do you assume they couldn't make unwanted emails permanently disappear from the .gov accounts they're supposed to be using? Catching Mrs. Clinton with her hand in the cookie jar doesn't change the nature of secrecy and mistrust which underlie politics as a whole. Politicians aren't going to suddenly stop communicating things they don't want on record, they're just going to try harder to keep those things buried. None of this addresses or helps to solve the much more apparent problem of poor security standards.
What you're seeing is the typical conservative notion that deregulation promotes investment, which deliberately draws attention away from the fact that the reason the US broadband infrastructure leaves so much to be desired is not because of a lack of investment but because there is nothing enforceable in place which requires them to spend the money they already receive on the necessary upgrades. Government subsidies, your monthly rates; only the barest minimum of any of that goes toward upgrades which are deemed absolutely necessary, while the rest accounts for billions of dollars in profits.
Regarding last mile bundling, one of the arguments against it is that more competition would stifle innovation. That might hold water except that the only "innovation" these companies are investing in are new and better ways to curb your bandwidth consumption. Thankfully for the millions who simply have no choice of provider because of location, fiber has already been invented. Don't worry folks -- as soon as we guarantee that no competition is ever able to enter your area, your ISP will be at your door the next morning to run high speed fiber straight into your home!
People are getting confused because it appears to be a win for net neutrality on the surface. Really now, do you think a former telecoms lobbyist would put that on the table if service providers didn't have something to gain from it? It's simply being used as a bargaining chip here to win people over into supporting the very reason our infrastructure is a global embarrassment. A decade from now, when you are paying $120/mo for 10down/1.5up Super Premium High-Speed Internet Turbo Boost Plus, they'll expect you to smile and be happy with your "open internet." To remind those with poor short-term memories, deregulation is what led to the whole Comcast BitTorrent debacle in the late 2000s; what a great win for net neutrality that turned out to be.
Rest assured that "no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling" will only benefit the bottom line of service providers. This is a compromise, one that wants you to accept long-term mediocrity for a temporary victory. How satisfied will you be when there's nothing left but the good graces of monopolistic corporations to stop your rates from skyrocketing and nowhere else to turn when they finally do?
Correction: Apparently the album view does have a neat expanding songlist if you single-click on an album, there is just an obnoxious delay which is why I didn't notice it before. Double-clicking still only plays the album without opening this list though, so it's now a two-step process. -1 intuitiveness.
Once I figured out how to get it to sort my albums by title rather than artist again, I have to say I'm getting used to the minimalist interface. iTunes has always been minimal on features, so it never made sense that its UI was such a mess. Now it's more, uh, pushbutton-y? Feels like it was designed for touchscreens, oddly enough. I definitely like the new pop-out Visualizer, now I can properly have that running on my secondary display without jumping back and forth between the full interface. The only thing I'm not digging is how double-clicking an album immediately starts playing it instead of opening the song list. There's actually no way to get to that song list anymore, you have to start the album and then skip to the track you want, else you have to sort through the Songs view which includes your entire library. Oh well.
I bet the designer got paid more for that logo than I make in a year.
My home state of CT had two storms that took out power to most of the state for over a week just last year. Get on our level.
On a serious note, it's kind of sad to see that even after our horrendous storms and massive consumer backlash against CL&P's near-monopoly, there are still power companies out there acting like it could never happen to them, not having a contingency plan for the worst case scenario.
That's the kind of nitpicking which is just as stupid as you'd like to make copyright law look. If Tetris was such a simple concept that it shouldn't deserve copyright protection, then why would official Tetris be so much more popular than profitable than not-quite-Tetris? There are plenty of similar block-dropping games which use different types of blocks, varying mechanics and so on which are very similar to Tetris, but different enough that they don't encounter legal trouble, yet none of them reach the level of ubiquitous popularity and recognition that Tetris itself has. Why?
Tetris is more than just a "set of polygons that can be constructed out of 4 congruent squares," and that is precisely why it is and should be protected. If none of this were true, no one would bother trying to make exact copies of Tetris such as Mino, and people wouldn't get all flustered trying to argue such copies should be legal. There is a high demand for Tetris, not sort-of-Tetris, and that's why TTC and its licensees are the only ones allowed to profit from it whether you like it or not.
That's not really a fair analogy, since you're equating the differences between games in the FPS genre to differences between Tetris clones. Tetris is a very simplistic game with minimalistic elements, so it is only defined by a very limited set of qualities. You can only imitate so many of those before you go from Tetris clone to just Tetris. After all, that's why we liberally use "Tetris clone" or "Insert first puzzle game to use these mechanics here clone" to define puzzle games, rather than just calling them Puzzle games. FPS games have more complex engines, mechanics, and a far wider array of qualities that can vary. As the judge in this case said, you can't base the infringement on the mechanics of the game - but without its mechanics, Tetris can really only be defined by limited details such as block shapes and well size. Besides all of that, 90s developers might have been trying to ride the success of Doom and the rising FPS genre, but none of them actually said, "Yeah, we're purposefully and deliberately copying Doom just to see if id can enforce their copyright."
Look at this another way: 90s FPS games were successful on their own without being exact copies of Doom. That also applies for puzzle games which are not Tetris. However, plenty of people want to play Tetris itself, not "sort of Tetris but with a fundamental gameplay mechanic changed to get around legal trouble." Mino would not have met with success if it was not an exact clone of Tetris, and I can say that confidently because of how upset people get over developers not being able to make exact clones of Tetris. There's more money in Tetris than sort-of-Tetris, and that is exactly why TTC goes after copies.
You don't need to break down and analyze which individual details make a Tetris clone a Tetris clone that violates copyright versus a Tetris clone which doesn't; it's quite clear at first glance that Mino is just simply Tetris. I know this sort of thing is a popular debate, and this is hardly the first example of its kind, but the extremely wide range of Tetris clones that survive without legal problems do so because their developers make at least the bare minimum effort to change something fundamental. Note, that's not to suggest TTC doesn't go after several of these as well, but they are certainly far less successful in those cases.
I think the point here is that if EA had taken this exact game and released it as their official licensed version of Tetris for iOS, no one would be the wiser. I understand that EA's official version isn't spectacular and we all wish we could play something much better without threats of legal action being thrown around, but the decision is really clear cut in this case, so I don't think it's unreasonable to cut TTC some slack here, or the DC judge in this case.
For anyone still shaking their fists in anger at TTC, I'd just like to point out this snippet from the article: "Xio readily admitted that Mino purposefully and deliberately copied from Tetris." He wanted this fight, and he lost.
So you can reach that cap faster. Zoom!
Because "the Cloud" will just run itself, right?
Looking at how they describe their process of "e-gifting," I have to imagine this method was used somewhere, anywhere else first. I'm not up on patent law, but I thought you could essentially overrule a patent as long as you can prove you came up with it first.
Other countries manage it by being physically smaller and having denser populations. The US is very large and has a lot of people spread out with miles of space between them depending on the area, and in these cases they are lucky to have a single ISP to choose from, giving certain ones regional monopolies. Prices are lower and speeds are higher in the Northeast and other densely-populated areas, because the availability of different service providers means healthy competition. Of course this is a really basic explanation, there are far bigger underlying problems that contribute to our relatively high prices and low speeds.
I don't know if it has been pointed out or if all Gawker sites are doing it, but at least Kotaku is now actively encouraging users to create "fake" accounts on these services, violating their respective ToS agreements.
Yes it would, there is nothing criminal about that until I actually produce a briefcase with a million dollars in it. The officer could still harass the hell out of me for it, probably put me in cuffs and take me to the local station, but it won't go any further than that.
Quick, someone alert all of the major energy companies so they can buy up the patents and sit on them for eternity!
The U.S. concept of freedom of speech (and other freedoms as defined in the Bill of Rights) is that the government has no right to make laws which infringe upon it/them. This does not mean that it is consequence-free, of course, which is why we still have concepts such as hate crime and the ability to file lawsuits. But for the law to step in and make decisions regarding the restriction of speech, it is quite disturbing to think of how a law like "inciting racial hatred" would have even been passed, and how imprisonment was determined to be an acceptable form of punishment for it.
The primary purpose of the U.S. having an explicitly defined Bill of Rights is to prevent any one group or authority from leveraging their standards on another. Monarchies and aristocracies allow the few to leverage laws in their favor, to oppress society at large with no recourse. Democracy counters this by making sure the majority is heard and society at large gets to decide what is best for them. But it goes further than that; simply being a majority doesn't make you free from the same biases monarchs and aristocrats are susceptible to, so we have gradually made provisions to ensure the majority cannot restrict the freedoms of minorities either. Even if those minorities are racists and bigots, the idea that their human rights can be restricted is even more reprehensible than anything they might say or do. So who voted for this "inciting racial hatred" law to be put in place, and is it right just because it passed a majority? Remember, there are options for recourse outside of government intervention.
You're correct. The U.S. has such a thing as hate crime, and there's nothing to suggest that this man couldn't have been sued had he been a U.S. resident, but for any government to claim the power to enforce restrictions on speech is disturbing and exactly why the U.S. has the First Amendment in the first place.
Speculation and futures bend the rules of supply and demand. Gas prices are not determined by actual supply and demand, they are determined by speculators hedging on low supply in the future. Would you care to explain why despite supply being at an all time high just a few years ago, prices never came down to match? You can't say that it has anything to do with our oil coming from unstable nations; it's been that way for a long time, decades before we ever saw gas prices climb above the $2 mark.
I take it what you're asking is how futures contracts actually impact the market price of anything since they are essentially an artificial market not bound by the laws of supply and demand. When speculators buy enough contracts at above the current market price, oil producers see this and start artificially limiting their supply in hopes that they'll be able to sell it all down the road at that higher price, and that causes the price of oil to go up now. We had an agency called the CFTC put in place specifically to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but what happened? Enron happened.
You remember Enron, don't you? They were instrumental in exploiting a loophole in the CFTC's regulatory powers to allow oil speculators to trade outside of those regulations. As the CFTC lost power, the futures market exploded, and as it has continued to increase dramatically over the past decade, so too have oil prices. You have to be out of your mind to argue that oil prices coincidentallyskyrocketed with the futures market.
Hopefully by actual supply and demand, rather than what speculators predict future supply and demand will be.
We can only speculate
Speculation. That's what it boils down to, folks. If you really want to see $2.00 gas prices again, outlaw speculation and it will happen overnight. It is absolutely mind-boggling that this practice is allowed with no checks or balances to keep it from driving our gas prices sky high. People will bring up anything else, like gas taxes or domestic drilling, just to draw attention from the real problem. It's almost like no one on either side wants to have that conversation, though.
Sure, dogs don't learn the same as humans do, but that's because they have their own naturally-developed instinctive way of doing things. Robots don't learn the same as humans do because their technical capabilities are different, but the way they learn is still human design. The way a robot learns can be changed, and it will most certainly evolve to adapt to new technologies, but no matter what there will always be human design behind it all.