I was going to mention this, but you beat me to it... I don't think there's much reason to get excited about this here when we can't even do QRCodes on our phones... For years I've heard there are some that can do its Western counterpart, Semacode, but I've never seen a phone that can read them in person, and it's definitely not even 1/4 as widely adopted here -- I've really only seen them on parcels and machine parts for inventory tracking so far.
So the hidden code/glyph is academically a bit interesting, but I'm still waiting for the 5-10 year old tech to get here first...:/
This has been happening for a long time now. A year ago, I got a message from Telus stating that I had violated copyright by downloading an episode of Battlestar Galactica that came on TV here anyway, but I'd missed it - the message had my IP address, the torrent tracker I was on, the time I was spotted there, and the name of the file I was downloading, but of course, not who it was that complained about it.
The sad thing is that I don't even know if the complainant had any jurisdiction to stop me from downloading, but legally, I strongly suspect they can't do anything in court, so they complain instead to my ISP who would be more than easily enough scared into terminating my account if they get too many complaints.
Personally, I like dungeon crawler type games like Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Untold Legends, etc... and they force you to start out weak, and ill-equipped, but the game's difficulty is laid out so that as you play each level and clear each dungeon, you're generally powerful enough by the time you're finished to take on the next one.
Currently I'm playing WoW with some friends, and while it seems the same on the surface, there are so many missions where you talk to one NPC who sends you running west through a desert for 20-30 min only to search an entire randomly laid out town for another NPC, walk up to them, deliver a message, and run 20 min back the way you came to say "He got the message!" Or like the article mentioned, kill 100 of the same monster to get 10 items (heh... back when I played Ragnarok Online it was more like kill 10,000 for ONE item!...or do without it!) These are shameless wastes of time. There is no real gameplay in pointing toward a city and holding down the "up" button until you get there. There are games that take it even further like Eve Online where to learn a skill, you simply choose the skill to learn (or buy it) then start it training in the background - then wait for its timer to finish. At the start it takes minutes, but higher level skills can take weeks or more to learn. This is a game you pay monthly for! You pay them to sit around and wait!
I don't know if the problem is so much that he doesn't like any RPGs, but there is definitely a difference between good design and bad. You can start as a weakling and it'll be fine if the game is paced well. On the flipside, you can be a godly character already and have the fun sucked out of the game by doing pointless busywork and nonsensical errands (collect 600 wolf noses! Only 1 in 50 wolves HAVE a nose!)
Though GTA:San Andreas starts you off as a crappy driver, bad bike rider, slow runner without much stamina, no respect, no sex appeal, etc etc... until you grind those skills up doing related tasks.
It's kind of sad, because due to the horribly buggy worlds of GTA, I usually just used the game to fool around, but when I started GTA:SA, I found that I'd have to basically run around and excercise my various stat bars up to an adequate level before I could play the game. So basically, it falls into the same traps detailed in the article.
Lots of games have "shelves," but RE4 is the one that bothers me the most now since it's such an awesome game...
I'm fighting the big guy in the flaming barn, but I don't have anything that can scratch him. Dump all my handguns into him, empty some boxes of ammo from the shotgun, toss three of each kind of grenade... then get mowed down.
It's not fun. It's not realistic - the guy goes well beyond any rules of physics unless he's made of diamond... The only real answer I guess is to go back a dozen or two hours and replay the whole game, hoping to have more supplies the next time I make it there... and that's just not going to happen.:/
That's actually why I've given up, aside from days on end of troubleshooting whenever something hiccups.
Linux has its uses, to be sure, but for my personal use, there's really nothing I can do in any version of Linux that I'm not already doing in Windows much easier, and admittedly, in a way I've already learned. My laptop dual-boots to Ubuntu, and it actually runs great - shockingly it detected and works with my sound card, video carg, WLAN NIC, etc... Unfortunately, I have no use for it. There's no REASON for me to switch because I don't need Linux FOR anything. It's not like Windows XP is running unstably or anything - I'm sure no one here will believe me as it seems most haven't seen Windows for 10 years, but XP hasn't actually crashed yet in the 2-3 years I've owned my laptop. It's fast, and the last time I had any kind of virus on my machine, it was a trojan - SubSeven, about oh... 9 years ago on Win98 because I must have forgotten to scan something. My fault. Now if I were a clueless newbie, my machine would be inundated with malware no doubt, but I know how to use Windows.
(OT rant) You can argue that Linux is more secure out of the box for a new user, but which one? That's also a double standard, since whenever I hear someone has a problem with Linux the typical replies are "RTFM, noob!" or "Way to advertise your incompetence!" I guess it's ok to spend weeks reading manpages, howtos, wikis, and forums to get a Linux distro running, but Windows had better be perfect out of the box or it's crap! If you took 1/10th the time it takes to learn to run Linux competently, and got up to speed on Windows basics instead, you could easily never get another virus on your XP box, and probably even avoid spyware without issue. Yes, you'd still be paying TOO MUCH MONEY for it, but what do you get? A useful OS that does whatever's needed of it - not the weird Win 3.1-based horror story FUD you hear on/. all the time. I don't hate Linux... I actually want to play with it some more, I just have no reason to do so.
I agree. In high school I used a TI-83 - a slight improvement on an ooold design. It did exactly what I needed it to for math class, calculator-specific instructions in textbooks were usually for a TI-82 so it was easy to translate them, I was able to store notes in string memory, and I still spent way more time programming games and graphical apps than I should have, instead of listening in class.
Ask your instructor/professor/teacher what the best calculator for the course would be, get it, learn it, and use it to its fullest and it won't matter if your calculator is 20 years old as long as it fits the material you're learning. There's no "cool" way to do math, unfortunately. Save the cool gagetry for things like handheld games/PDA/cel phones/GPS and things like that.
lewp also makes a good point... aim too high and you may not be able to use it on a test. Don't count on your teacher being coordinated with the examiner/test supervisor about the stats your calculator is allowed either.
Does this mean we can finally look forward to skipping, randomly disconnecting streaming video? Wait... we already have that. The only real advantage to Skype is that it can call landlines. It's nice for that, but it's not like their streaming is that hot... just their ability to use a simple trick to open a port on a firewall.
Saying they're selling our rights back to us or squeezing every cent they can out of customers evokes an emotional response, but it would be better if they actually explain how that happens.
For example, incorporating regional lockouts into copy protection, so it is integral to the game/DVD disc, but still allows the company to charge inflated rates in certain regions and keep people from importing from a cheaper region even if the content is the same.
Luckily for consumers though, almost every time, they opt for a small decryption key or a weak encryption algorithm since stronger encryption tends to mean increased processor and memory usage or the need for specialized hardware - and as cheap as that is, it adds up on millions+ of systems....so we get flimsy DRM that can be popped off trivially, and the R&D on this insufficient scrambling is wasted. There's no danger in explaining it like this either since they KNOW this, but don't want to bump the cost up (even if it were more expensive, it's not that simple - on portables like MP3 players it could even mean shorter battery life! haha...) So for the time being, I'll try to fight the DRM they do choose to use, but overall I just laugh at it since a "fix" is always available in very short order. Usually +/- a couple weeks of its commercial debut.:)
First, all but two of the podcasts I listen to (5 or 6) are voice only, and owned wholly by their producers. Second, I don't own any iPods and never will, but I always listen to my podcasts on an MP3 player, so the only effect DRM would have is that I wouldn't have any hardware that could decode the podcast, and I'd have to stop listening to them.
This idea wins big points for stupidity though. Almost as good as radio transmitters hidden in Canadian coins!
So what does it matter if it "runs OSX" and is a "mini PC" if you can't run anything? Still, it was already irrelevant to me when I found out it was only on Cingular... and had a non-replacable battery (on a phone? Are you crazy, Steve?!)
*sigh* I want to keep neutral about this, but I can't help but hate Apple... It's like a company formed to give the opposite of what I want.
I work in an IT department, and I've had so many people comment to me about how Windows XP will crash after sitting unattended for a few days, or how slow their new PC is, how often it crashes etc... To me, this is almost unheard of - my home PCs (some on XP) and the XP workstations at work are fast, stable, and generally well capable of whatever I ask of them.
Still, I've worked on totally dysfunctional home systems that have 8-20 things in the system tray, most of them bundled expired trial versions of software that came with the computer, and these things crash left and right, churn away at simple tasks, using virtual memory almost exclusively. After seeing these VERY VERY COMMON OEM systems, I can easily see why so many people still hate Windows. The worst offenders in my books are bundled trial versions of antivirus software - these massive resource hogs not only slow down the system brutally with incessant resident scanning (needed, I suppose, for those who don't scan otherwise) and after a short while they expire, but it still takes a crowbar and a blowtorch to uninstall them! They're locked into the PC/OS so tightly that the average user really needs a PC technician to get it off. Most I guess either wind up with an expired scanner and no replacement, or they end up paying for updates on the scanner they can't uninstall otherwise!
"PC DECRAPIFIER" SAVES LIVES. GOOGLE IT IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOUR PC. (Probably not many on/. though...)
Of course, if you're technically adept enough, it's still best to bite the bullet and just install a fresh copy of the OS then patch it up to date and install all the apps you want.
Though I'd be surprised if they didn't eventually do this after copying DDR and Guitar Freaks. Drums are a natural next step and I don't think they're gonna go after Beatmania and Pop'n Music unless rhythm games REALLY catch on over here.
Plastic ones! Considering RFID tags are blockable by a layer of common kitchen tinfoil, even if the chips survived the minting process, the signal would be blocked out completely. This allegation was made by someone with no technical understanding of how RFID even works. (Though I guess another kind of transmitter is theoretically possible if illogical for reasons stated in the article.)
Thanks, US DoD, for coming up with a premise even dumber than hypothetical WMDs! I guess Canada's safe from invasion so long as there's someone with common sense to catch this crap.
Even though Sony isn't part of a keiretsu, they operate somewhat like a keiretsu of their own. So to boycott all of Sony because one or maybe two branches do something you don't like is the same thing as boycotting Hitachi, Ricoh, Yamaha, and Nissan because Canon (hypothetically) put spyware in a printer driver. (All companies are part of the Fuyo keiretsu)
The point I'm trying to make is that Sony BMG did something so unethical I would never buy from them. Sony consumer electronics is generally very good, though too restrictive when it comes to audio players. Sony Computer Entertainment America, Europe, and Japan have been nothing but good to me, even if they always make the most boneheaded launches and hire stupid companies for promotion.
Most Slashdotters seem to have looked at the single Sony BMG incident and immediately concluded that all of Sony are the most evil companies out there, and that's overly simplistic. Of course, you're entitled to buy or not buy as you choose anyway, I just think a lot of people are barking up the wrong corporate tree by boycotting all of Sony. They're an MS-sized company where one branch literally doesn't know what the other is doing.
Not really... there are plenty of games you can get on PSX and PS2, GameCube, PSX, and GBA, N64 and GBC, even Wii, XBox360, and Gameboy Advance!...and so on. It's called porting.
If Halo ran on PS2, it simply wouldn't have light refraction effects, and would have lower-res textures and fewer polygons, but it would still be well presentable and functional. They wouldn't just run the XBox version on it - they never do that. Just look at any EA racing game like Need for Speed Carbon - it's available on everything pretty much, and there are differences in the versions depending on hardware. It's a licensing issue that keeps Halo off PS2. If MS/Bungie rubber stamped it, companies would jump at the chance to bring it to other platforms.
Most people also don't realize that there are a lot of associated companies called "Sony," and that Sony BMG, SCEA/SCEE/SCEJ, Sony consumer electronics, and even Sony cosmetics and Sony life insurance are all only loosely related.
In Japan, it's common that one company will get into a lot of fields. It happens over here too, but in North America, companies usually have to make up new names for their different divisions (even for little things like common cars vs luxury cars) so that a single incident doesn't cause a knee-jerk reaction with the public that hurts the whole set of company divisions.
I don't know... consumers over here seem to love or hate a company with no in between, and will switch between the two at a moment's notice.
Ragnarok Online is an MMORPG very much like a cute anime-style Diablo. 16 players per guild (I think? Haven't played in a couple years...), as many people in one area as you want. The client is free and downloadable, so you only pay for time used.
The downside is tons of grinding for loot/EXP killing the same monster forever - but that doesn't really set in until way later levels. It moves fast enough at the start.
No instance dungeons either, if that's what you mean by WoW not being an MMORPG.
Actually, I didn't want to get into unprovable conspiracy theories, but I do agree. Even when I watched them drop on TV, I went "WTF! That was a demolition!"
Normal building collapses don't go "crak-crak-crak-crak-crak-crak-crak!" then freefall into their own footprint despite being that tall... twice in one day... within a block of each other. The support columns are an oddball factor, but even then, it shouldn't have been nearly so tidy (and there should have been support columns jutting far out of the rubble... unless they were neatly snapped in half every 10 feet or so...)
Never mind that plenty of buildings that height have burned up to 6 floors (also making way better airflow than a bunch of kerosene smothered for air like 9/11) for a day or two without permanent structural damage.
Ok, enough of that... I'm gonna get modded into a bottomless pit, haha
Actually, at flight height, they probably would have been out of range for cel calls.
Although I haven't verified the measurements/tower densities/average transmitter strength/etc... personally, so feel free to shoot this full of holes. Just figured I'd throw it out there.
I miss the late 90s when they actually kept score and showed us our karma... there was the whole "karma-whoring" issue though, which IMHO was more the issue of people accusing of whoring than actually doing it...
I think the only real impact we'll see is unrelated sites being blocked with no real explanation as to how they got on the list, as with most blacklists. Also, we may eventually see people being raided/arrested mistakenly for... I don't know... going to a site that springs a blocked popup ad on them?
While I'm predicting the worst, I expect that as part of the filtering, people will now find that there are logs of every URL they've accessed in the few cases where those logs don't already exist. Usually they don't matter (ISP server logs, etc) but now they may be skimmed to profile net users' habits for law enforcement agencies like CSIS.
Ultimately, if this isn't scrapped in the early stages, expect its reach to spread first across other kinds of porn, then P2P sites, and looking at the history of Canadian Customs & Revenue Agency, eventually we'll have any sites they disagree with blocked, for example, for expressing certain opinions. (Look up all the books that customs has confiscated for no legally acceptable reason...)
Then again, not nearly as many people have been afraid to speak out against this as I thought, so it's also possible that it'll be gone within a year of its implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to mention this, but you beat me to it...
:/
I don't think there's much reason to get excited about this here when we can't even do QRCodes on our phones... For years I've heard there are some that can do its Western counterpart, Semacode, but I've never seen a phone that can read them in person, and it's definitely not even 1/4 as widely adopted here -- I've really only seen them on parcels and machine parts for inventory tracking so far.
So the hidden code/glyph is academically a bit interesting, but I'm still waiting for the 5-10 year old tech to get here first...
This has been happening for a long time now. A year ago, I got a message from Telus stating that I had violated copyright by downloading an episode of Battlestar Galactica that came on TV here anyway, but I'd missed it - the message had my IP address, the torrent tracker I was on, the time I was spotted there, and the name of the file I was downloading, but of course, not who it was that complained about it.
The sad thing is that I don't even know if the complainant had any jurisdiction to stop me from downloading, but legally, I strongly suspect they can't do anything in court, so they complain instead to my ISP who would be more than easily enough scared into terminating my account if they get too many complaints.
Personally, I like dungeon crawler type games like Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Untold Legends, etc... and they force you to start out weak, and ill-equipped, but the game's difficulty is laid out so that as you play each level and clear each dungeon, you're generally powerful enough by the time you're finished to take on the next one.
...or do without it!) These are shameless wastes of time. There is no real gameplay in pointing toward a city and holding down the "up" button until you get there. There are games that take it even further like Eve Online where to learn a skill, you simply choose the skill to learn (or buy it) then start it training in the background - then wait for its timer to finish. At the start it takes minutes, but higher level skills can take weeks or more to learn. This is a game you pay monthly for! You pay them to sit around and wait!
Currently I'm playing WoW with some friends, and while it seems the same on the surface, there are so many missions where you talk to one NPC who sends you running west through a desert for 20-30 min only to search an entire randomly laid out town for another NPC, walk up to them, deliver a message, and run 20 min back the way you came to say "He got the message!" Or like the article mentioned, kill 100 of the same monster to get 10 items (heh... back when I played Ragnarok Online it was more like kill 10,000 for ONE item!
I don't know if the problem is so much that he doesn't like any RPGs, but there is definitely a difference between good design and bad. You can start as a weakling and it'll be fine if the game is paced well. On the flipside, you can be a godly character already and have the fun sucked out of the game by doing pointless busywork and nonsensical errands (collect 600 wolf noses! Only 1 in 50 wolves HAVE a nose!)
Though GTA:San Andreas starts you off as a crappy driver, bad bike rider, slow runner without much stamina, no respect, no sex appeal, etc etc... until you grind those skills up doing related tasks.
It's kind of sad, because due to the horribly buggy worlds of GTA, I usually just used the game to fool around, but when I started GTA:SA, I found that I'd have to basically run around and excercise my various stat bars up to an adequate level before I could play the game. So basically, it falls into the same traps detailed in the article.
Lots of games have "shelves," but RE4 is the one that bothers me the most now since it's such an awesome game...
:/
I'm fighting the big guy in the flaming barn, but I don't have anything that can scratch him. Dump all my handguns into him, empty some boxes of ammo from the shotgun, toss three of each kind of grenade... then get mowed down.
It's not fun. It's not realistic - the guy goes well beyond any rules of physics unless he's made of diamond... The only real answer I guess is to go back a dozen or two hours and replay the whole game, hoping to have more supplies the next time I make it there... and that's just not going to happen.
That's actually why I've given up, aside from days on end of troubleshooting whenever something hiccups.
/. all the time. I don't hate Linux... I actually want to play with it some more, I just have no reason to do so.
Linux has its uses, to be sure, but for my personal use, there's really nothing I can do in any version of Linux that I'm not already doing in Windows much easier, and admittedly, in a way I've already learned. My laptop dual-boots to Ubuntu, and it actually runs great - shockingly it detected and works with my sound card, video carg, WLAN NIC, etc... Unfortunately, I have no use for it. There's no REASON for me to switch because I don't need Linux FOR anything. It's not like Windows XP is running unstably or anything - I'm sure no one here will believe me as it seems most haven't seen Windows for 10 years, but XP hasn't actually crashed yet in the 2-3 years I've owned my laptop. It's fast, and the last time I had any kind of virus on my machine, it was a trojan - SubSeven, about oh... 9 years ago on Win98 because I must have forgotten to scan something. My fault. Now if I were a clueless newbie, my machine would be inundated with malware no doubt, but I know how to use Windows.
(OT rant)
You can argue that Linux is more secure out of the box for a new user, but which one? That's also a double standard, since whenever I hear someone has a problem with Linux the typical replies are "RTFM, noob!" or "Way to advertise your incompetence!" I guess it's ok to spend weeks reading manpages, howtos, wikis, and forums to get a Linux distro running, but Windows had better be perfect out of the box or it's crap! If you took 1/10th the time it takes to learn to run Linux competently, and got up to speed on Windows basics instead, you could easily never get another virus on your XP box, and probably even avoid spyware without issue. Yes, you'd still be paying TOO MUCH MONEY for it, but what do you get? A useful OS that does whatever's needed of it - not the weird Win 3.1-based horror story FUD you hear on
I agree. In high school I used a TI-83 - a slight improvement on an ooold design. It did exactly what I needed it to for math class, calculator-specific instructions in textbooks were usually for a TI-82 so it was easy to translate them, I was able to store notes in string memory, and I still spent way more time programming games and graphical apps than I should have, instead of listening in class.
Ask your instructor/professor/teacher what the best calculator for the course would be, get it, learn it, and use it to its fullest and it won't matter if your calculator is 20 years old as long as it fits the material you're learning. There's no "cool" way to do math, unfortunately. Save the cool gagetry for things like handheld games/PDA/cel phones/GPS and things like that.
lewp also makes a good point... aim too high and you may not be able to use it on a test. Don't count on your teacher being coordinated with the examiner/test supervisor about the stats your calculator is allowed either.
Does this mean we can finally look forward to skipping, randomly disconnecting streaming video?
Wait... we already have that. The only real advantage to Skype is that it can call landlines. It's nice for that, but it's not like their streaming is that hot... just their ability to use a simple trick to open a port on a firewall.
Saying they're selling our rights back to us or squeezing every cent they can out of customers evokes an emotional response, but it would be better if they actually explain how that happens.
For example, incorporating regional lockouts into copy protection, so it is integral to the game/DVD disc, but still allows the company to charge inflated rates in certain regions and keep people from importing from a cheaper region even if the content is the same.
Luckily for consumers though, almost every time, they opt for a small decryption key or a weak encryption algorithm since stronger encryption tends to mean increased processor and memory usage or the need for specialized hardware - and as cheap as that is, it adds up on millions+ of systems. ...so we get flimsy DRM that can be popped off trivially, and the R&D on this insufficient scrambling is wasted. There's no danger in explaining it like this either since they KNOW this, but don't want to bump the cost up (even if it were more expensive, it's not that simple - on portables like MP3 players it could even mean shorter battery life! haha...) So for the time being, I'll try to fight the DRM they do choose to use, but overall I just laugh at it since a "fix" is always available in very short order. Usually +/- a couple weeks of its commercial debut. :)
First, all but two of the podcasts I listen to (5 or 6) are voice only, and owned wholly by their producers. Second, I don't own any iPods and never will, but I always listen to my podcasts on an MP3 player, so the only effect DRM would have is that I wouldn't have any hardware that could decode the podcast, and I'd have to stop listening to them.
This idea wins big points for stupidity though. Almost as good as radio transmitters hidden in Canadian coins!
So one day, eventually, maybe, we'll see HD-DVDs as big as a current Blu-Ray disc?
And HD-DVD is doing so well why? I don't care about movies - I want a Blu-Ray burner!
So what does it matter if it "runs OSX" and is a "mini PC" if you can't run anything?
Still, it was already irrelevant to me when I found out it was only on Cingular... and had a non-replacable battery (on a phone? Are you crazy, Steve?!)
*sigh* I want to keep neutral about this, but I can't help but hate Apple... It's like a company formed to give the opposite of what I want.
I work in an IT department, and I've had so many people comment to me about how Windows XP will crash after sitting unattended for a few days, or how slow their new PC is, how often it crashes etc... To me, this is almost unheard of - my home PCs (some on XP) and the XP workstations at work are fast, stable, and generally well capable of whatever I ask of them.
/. though...)
Still, I've worked on totally dysfunctional home systems that have 8-20 things in the system tray, most of them bundled expired trial versions of software that came with the computer, and these things crash left and right, churn away at simple tasks, using virtual memory almost exclusively. After seeing these VERY VERY COMMON OEM systems, I can easily see why so many people still hate Windows. The worst offenders in my books are bundled trial versions of antivirus software - these massive resource hogs not only slow down the system brutally with incessant resident scanning (needed, I suppose, for those who don't scan otherwise) and after a short while they expire, but it still takes a crowbar and a blowtorch to uninstall them! They're locked into the PC/OS so tightly that the average user really needs a PC technician to get it off. Most I guess either wind up with an expired scanner and no replacement, or they end up paying for updates on the scanner they can't uninstall otherwise!
"PC DECRAPIFIER" SAVES LIVES. GOOGLE IT IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOUR PC. (Probably not many on
Of course, if you're technically adept enough, it's still best to bite the bullet and just install a fresh copy of the OS then patch it up to date and install all the apps you want.
Then you could have a RedOctane GitaDora! http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/puzzle/guitarfreaksvdr ummaniav/index.html
Though I'd be surprised if they didn't eventually do this after copying DDR and Guitar Freaks. Drums are a natural next step and I don't think they're gonna go after Beatmania and Pop'n Music unless rhythm games REALLY catch on over here.
Plastic ones! Considering RFID tags are blockable by a layer of common kitchen tinfoil, even if the chips survived the minting process, the signal would be blocked out completely. This allegation was made by someone with no technical understanding of how RFID even works. (Though I guess another kind of transmitter is theoretically possible if illogical for reasons stated in the article.)
Thanks, US DoD, for coming up with a premise even dumber than hypothetical WMDs! I guess Canada's safe from invasion so long as there's someone with common sense to catch this crap.
Even though Sony isn't part of a keiretsu, they operate somewhat like a keiretsu of their own. So to boycott all of Sony because one or maybe two branches do something you don't like is the same thing as boycotting Hitachi, Ricoh, Yamaha, and Nissan because Canon (hypothetically) put spyware in a printer driver. (All companies are part of the Fuyo keiretsu)
The point I'm trying to make is that Sony BMG did something so unethical I would never buy from them. Sony consumer electronics is generally very good, though too restrictive when it comes to audio players. Sony Computer Entertainment America, Europe, and Japan have been nothing but good to me, even if they always make the most boneheaded launches and hire stupid companies for promotion.
Most Slashdotters seem to have looked at the single Sony BMG incident and immediately concluded that all of Sony are the most evil companies out there, and that's overly simplistic. Of course, you're entitled to buy or not buy as you choose anyway, I just think a lot of people are barking up the wrong corporate tree by boycotting all of Sony. They're an MS-sized company where one branch literally doesn't know what the other is doing.
Not really... there are plenty of games you can get on PSX and PS2, GameCube, PSX, and GBA, N64 and GBC, even Wii, XBox360, and Gameboy Advance! ...and so on. It's called porting.
If Halo ran on PS2, it simply wouldn't have light refraction effects, and would have lower-res textures and fewer polygons, but it would still be well presentable and functional. They wouldn't just run the XBox version on it - they never do that. Just look at any EA racing game like Need for Speed Carbon - it's available on everything pretty much, and there are differences in the versions depending on hardware. It's a licensing issue that keeps Halo off PS2. If MS/Bungie rubber stamped it, companies would jump at the chance to bring it to other platforms.
Most people also don't realize that there are a lot of associated companies called "Sony," and that Sony BMG, SCEA/SCEE/SCEJ, Sony consumer electronics, and even Sony cosmetics and Sony life insurance are all only loosely related.
In Japan, it's common that one company will get into a lot of fields. It happens over here too, but in North America, companies usually have to make up new names for their different divisions (even for little things like common cars vs luxury cars) so that a single incident doesn't cause a knee-jerk reaction with the public that hurts the whole set of company divisions.
I don't know... consumers over here seem to love or hate a company with no in between, and will switch between the two at a moment's notice.
Ragnarok Online is an MMORPG very much like a cute anime-style Diablo. 16 players per guild (I think? Haven't played in a couple years...), as many people in one area as you want. The client is free and downloadable, so you only pay for time used.
The downside is tons of grinding for loot/EXP killing the same monster forever - but that doesn't really set in until way later levels. It moves fast enough at the start.
No instance dungeons either, if that's what you mean by WoW not being an MMORPG.
Actually, I didn't want to get into unprovable conspiracy theories, but I do agree. Even when I watched them drop on TV, I went "WTF! That was a demolition!"
Normal building collapses don't go "crak-crak-crak-crak-crak-crak-crak!" then freefall into their own footprint despite being that tall... twice in one day... within a block of each other. The support columns are an oddball factor, but even then, it shouldn't have been nearly so tidy (and there should have been support columns jutting far out of the rubble... unless they were neatly snapped in half every 10 feet or so...)
Never mind that plenty of buildings that height have burned up to 6 floors (also making way better airflow than a bunch of kerosene smothered for air like 9/11) for a day or two without permanent structural damage.
Ok, enough of that... I'm gonna get modded into a bottomless pit, haha
Actually, at flight height, they probably would have been out of range for cel calls.
Although I haven't verified the measurements/tower densities/average transmitter strength/etc... personally, so feel free to shoot this full of holes. Just figured I'd throw it out there.
I miss the late 90s when they actually kept score and showed us our karma... there was the whole "karma-whoring" issue though, which IMHO was more the issue of people accusing of whoring than actually doing it...
I think the only real impact we'll see is unrelated sites being blocked with no real explanation as to how they got on the list, as with most blacklists. Also, we may eventually see people being raided/arrested mistakenly for... I don't know... going to a site that springs a blocked popup ad on them?
While I'm predicting the worst, I expect that as part of the filtering, people will now find that there are logs of every URL they've accessed in the few cases where those logs don't already exist. Usually they don't matter (ISP server logs, etc) but now they may be skimmed to profile net users' habits for law enforcement agencies like CSIS.
Ultimately, if this isn't scrapped in the early stages, expect its reach to spread first across other kinds of porn, then P2P sites, and looking at the history of Canadian Customs & Revenue Agency, eventually we'll have any sites they disagree with blocked, for example, for expressing certain opinions. (Look up all the books that customs has confiscated for no legally acceptable reason...)
Then again, not nearly as many people have been afraid to speak out against this as I thought, so it's also possible that it'll be gone within a year of its implementation.