I believe the point that you're making is that prevantative measures are reasonable in the case where the crime is sufficiently damaging. I have to say that I agree, but I would argue that copyright violation is *not* such a case.
There is only one reasonable solution - you *trust* the consumer not to violate copyright law. *If* the consumer does so, and you catch the consumer, and you try the consumer in a court of law, and the consumer is found to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then you punish the consumer.
In other words, you can't force people to obey the law. Well, you can, but you have to have some sort of fascist state in order to do so - fine if you're a hive dwelling insect, but not acceptable for humans (at least not for me!). Write me a ticket if you catch me speeding, but don't put a governor on my car that won't allow me to speed. Lock me up if I bash someone with a club, but don't handcuff me at birth. That's the way it has to work.
I understand that, given the chance, most consumers will steal media without a second thought.
I absolutely disagree with that statement. In fact, I don't think most people would do that even if it were not illegal.
So the irony was a bit inescapable... I'm still waiting for few trials of "single cell to all life on earth".
Your inability to think your way out of a paper bag is inescapable. If the only way to explain how the continents got to where they are now is to physically move them, then we might as well stop trying to understand anything.
Also, I don't think you really read what I wrote in my previous post.
Not really - we have things we can look at now. Our theory says that they span millions of years. You can't just assume what you're trying to prove.
We're not talking about proving anything, we're talking about coming up with the best explanation for a bunch of data. OK, so we have some fossils that we dug up. I'm able to think about evolution under the assumption that these fossils span millions of years because all of our other current scientific theories (in fields such as physics and chemistry) point to that being true. I can't *prove* that this fossil is X million years old and that this one is only X years old, but I feel confident enough to take it as a given for the purposes of further study. In order to understand the world, you have to make assumptions - in fact, all of our knowledge is made up of assumptions. That's why we call our most accurate scientific knowledge "theory." It's not fact (or at least we can't know whether it is fact or not) but it's the best we've got. We use our various theories to try and date fossils, and to the best of our knowledge they span millions of years. If you doubt those conclusions, then I suggest you find the problems with our current physical theories.
I also think that you must have read somewhere that evolution is "untestable" because you keep using that word. Perhaps you mean that the entire history of life on Earth is not a repeatable experiment -- but if that's what's holding you up then you can give up on trying to understand *anything*. Almost all of the universe is either way in the future, way in the past, or really far away from us. Does that mean we can't understand it? Hardly. Anyway, just because something already happened doesn't mean you can't "test" a theory about it. Say, for example, you think evolutionary theory is a good explanation for the diversity of fossil evidence. Can you test that hypothesis? Of course you can! If your theory predicts a transitional form, and you eventually find an example of that transitional form, then you have strengthened your theory. If you find a fossilized modern human and (according to theory) it dates back to 200 million BC, then one of your theories is wrong. Just to keep score, we *have* found many transitional fossils, and we *have not* found any fossils that cause a major contradiction. Sure, there are conflicts and debates about exactly what happened when, but the big picture is pretty scientifically indisputable right now.
We don't see, and have no explanation for, life arising from unliving material.
That's abiogenesis, not evolution. It's an interesting topic also, but way too much of a tangent.
You're looking at it all wrong. There is *only* #1, a theory that describes populations changing over time in response to selection pressure.
What you think is #2 should really read, "A bunch of data about events happening over millions of years." The data is merely a bunch of facts in need of explanation - we have fossils, we have to come up with the best explanation for why they exist. What's the *only* scientific explanation that anyone has ever been able to come up with? With good ol' #1.
Hope that clarifies your confusion about anyone "believing" your theory #2. We don't "believe" anything - we have data that we collect, and we try to explain it via theory.
Here's a quick and dirty way to check my viewpoint - try to disagree with any one of these three statements: 1. We have data spanning millions of years that shows many intermediate forms of organisms that are similar in many ways to modern organisms. This data can be arranged chronologically into a tree structure based on morphological similarity. (If you disagree about the existence of this physical evidence, then you can stop reading and go back to whatever it is you do.) 2. We have a theory that explains how organisms can change over time, and (as you mentioned yourself) said theory is well understood and quite easy to demonstrate. 3. The theory of how organisms can change over time (evolution) is a possible explanation for the physical evidence that we have. In fact, the theory explains the evidence so well that most scientists accept it as fact, in the same way that we accept relativity as fact. No, the theory is no more perfect than relativity is, but most people are pretty positive that a perfect theory (which we may never discover) would be a modified evolutionary theory, rather than another theory entirely.
Now tell me, what's the best scientific explanation for all of the fossils we've dug up? (Hint: it's not an "untestable, unrepeatable historical theory" like the imaginary one you called #2. It's Evolutionary Theory, which you called #1.)
I like your reasoning, but I think there's more to human behavior than you point out.
Ants and other eusocial critters may die for the hive, but arguably they are cells in the larger organism that is the hive.
Yes, and humans can be viewed as cells in the larger organism that is human society. Humans, as extremely social animals, are not independent in the way that most animals are. Much of our behavior is influenced by other humans and by the unwritten (and written) norms of our society. Humans tend to direct their most violent behaviors toward those that are "different" in some way. Those who are not seen as a part of the group. Racism and religiously justified attacks are perfect examples of this.
Looking at it that way, it's not surprising that we have war. War is a battle between societies, and humans are merely ammunition. The only hope for peace is to merge all humans into a single cohesive society. You'll always have groups that will turn against the society that spawned them, but as long as those groups are relatively small (gangs, as opposed to nations) the damage should be minimal.
Can we form a single worldwide (or larger) society? That remains to be seen, but we seem to be moving in that direction in some ways. Then again, maybe we have too many people for that to be possible.
Hmm. I didn't study the Sony software in detail, but if I remember correctly it ran hidden in the background and prevented you from ripping Sony CD's. I wouldn't call that alone "spyware", but maybe it was also phoning home to report the user's actions. If so, then yes, it was spyware.
That aside, what would you call a rootkit that was modified to run independently, without requiring input from a "remote entity"? It's similar to a trojan, but the defining characteristic of a trojan is that it sneaks in by looking like something desirable. That doesn't apply in the case of Sony's software, so what was it? It existed to give a local, alien program root access to your machine. Seems to fit your definition with the exception that the remote entity doesn't interact with the program at runtime. They just set it up initially and it does it's thing on its own.
In other words, "rootkit" seems more applicable than "spyware" to me. I'm completely open to suggestions, though - I'm not an expert on malware taxonomy, I just know what I hate.;)
Yes! I would personally love to go back to cartridges. Faster loads, lower power consumption, more durable... too bad they're more expensive to produce, but it's hard to compete with the economy of stamping discs.
Hmm, this is currently modded flamebait, which strikes me as unfair. Is it not sensible to boycott a company that engages (or at least has recently engaged) in shady business practices?
Take me, for example. I own several Sony products, including a PS2, an NTSC monitor, and a receiver. Will I ever buy another product from them? Not in the foreseeable future. I've been shopping around for digital cameras and camcorders for the last few days, and I've been skipping right over the Sony models. They probably have exactly what I'm looking for, and in the right price range too, but that big SONY on the side of it might as well say 'Made by slave labor'. I'm not even going to give their offerings any consideration.
In other words, I don't like their business practices, so I won't give them my money. Not only is that not flamebait, it's completely pertinent to the topic! I was planning to buy a PS3 this generation, but not now. The high price that they've announced isn't even the deciding factor, since I was going to wait a couple of years for it to come down - the real reason is the rootkit, pure and simple.
Re:Ok, I was interested before but now....
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Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the problem people have with the idea is that they think "you swing it like a sword" means "it's exactly like swinging a sword." Of course not -- it's a video game, not virtual reality.
The better way to think of it is this: your virtual character, who is constrained by the physics of the game, is the one swinging the sword. You, with your controller, are more like a ghost that the virtual character tries to imitate. Your job is to guide the character, not to *be* the character.
If the virtual sword fails to penetrate something, then you have to deal with that - you can't just expect it to be wherever your "ghost" sword is. Same with trying to waggle your two-handed broadsword back and forth at a high rate -- your character can't keep up, so you'll have to slow down to compensate.
Anybody who is disappointed that it's not exactly like using a real sword simply has unrealistic expectations. That said, though, which would you rather have -- "ghost imitation" control, or "choose from 4 swings and a block" (pushbutton) control?
Exactly. When I saw the "not so bad" headline, I assumed that the story was that Vista's intrusive DRM/Trusted computing "features" had been dropped. Those are the things that make Vista "bad". I'll take an OS that crashes over an OS that supervises how I use my data.
Sorry Microsoft, but I'll never buy (or even *use*) that kind of crap.
Well, I hope you're right about the general public not really appreciating higher definition content, because maybe they'll stick with DVD for a while and let these new DRM'd HD formats go stale. I personally would appreciate higher resolution movies, but not enough to compromise my ideals. I was holding out for a HD movie player or game console before buying an HDTV, and at this point it looks like I'm going to keep waiting.
The XBox360 and PS3 just aren't floating my wii, and the Wii itself doesn't do HD. As for movies, under normal circumstances I would never buy data that I don't have full usage of, so these DRM restricted HD movies just aren't going to fly. Thank goodness we had at least one generation of digital content, so I know I won't ever lose the ability to watch the data that I already purchased.
Right now I'm recommending to anyone who asks to just stick with DVD for a couple more years, in the hopes that content owners get their heads out of their asses, which I sincerely hope they do. I've paid for all of the DVD movies that I own, and I haven't distributed copies to anyone, but if they persist with this DRM crap then I'll only be moving on to the next generation once it's cracked. Hell, I may start pirating just to spite the bastards.
At some point, none of this junk is worth the trouble anyway. The public in general is likely to eventually adopt DRM if it's the only option available, but I'll probably just stop watching movies. X P
Footnote: Since I may seem like a hypocrite for caring about DRM'd movies and yet not minding copy protected video games, I can explain the discrepancy. At this point in time there is a big difference between interactive and non interactive entertainment. A movie is a series of pictures with a synched soundtrack. You can come up with a standard format for this data, and anybody can look at that data and know how to view/manipulate it. Since this is the case, I *expect* the data to be in a standard format, and that I will have permission to view/manipulate it as I see fit (with certain restrictions on redistribution). Interactive entertainment, on the other hand, could not be easily standardized at this point in time. If we had a universal simulator that all video games ran in, then that would be one thing. Right now, however, what we have are custom pieces of software. Whether the content is protected or not makes little difference to me, so long as it's not a hindrance to actually *running* the software (phone-home to validate schemes are absolutely unacceptable). The amount of difficulty involved in re-engineering a game to do something different or to play on a different piece of hardware makes the difficulty of overcoming copy protection trivial. In other words, I don't care if it's protected since I'm not going to reformat it anyway. If I want a backup, I can make a bitwise copy.
Interestingly, the nunchuck half of the controller looks a lot like the central handle of the n64 controller. It has a similar shape, a thumb stick, and a trigger (actually two triggers, I think).
I've yet to hold it in my hand, of course, but I wonder if it feels the same.
I didn't actually read the article, of course, but the text you quoted does not compare the total number of adult gamers to the total number of teen gamers. It just says that adult gamers are more likely to spend ten hours or more per week than teen gamers.
In other words, it's 33% vs 11%. It could be 3 adult gamers out of the total 10 vs 11 teens out of the total 100.
The path to enlightenment is littered with the corpses of the ignorant. Just as uncountable species have risen and fallen on Earth and only Humans (as far as we know) have reached the level of cognitive ability that we have, surely billions of species throughout the universe will try and fail to truly understand everything to the greatest extent possible.
How do we "win" the game of "continue to advance"? Nobody can tell you the best strategy, but "just hit the gas and see what happens" sounds like a good way to veer off a cliff.
Sure, if all species use that strategy then at least one of them is likely to make it -- it's just extremely unlikely to be *us*. I still vote for taking it at walking speed and trying to see what lies ahead. Note that I don't mean sitting around on our asses -- we should be pushing ourselves forward technologically, exploring our solar system, and otherwise protecting ourselves. What we shouldn't be doing, IMO, is taking risks that could wipe us out.
Could ecological disaster wipe us out? I'm pretty sure that it could at this point.
The entire point of environmentalism is not to protect the Earth, it is to protect the humans. Yes, the climate changes, and life will go on no matter what we do. What we don't know is whether we will go on.
Can we survive if the climate changes? What species are we dependent on? What environmental conditions are required for us to maintain our current expensive brainpower? What will it take for us to revert to more efficient animals with a lower level of consciousness?
This is a list of questions that are too complicated to answer right now. I vote that until we can answer them, we just be conservative and try to change our environment as little as possible. What do you think?
Well, for starters it won't be on the XBox 360. If windows is an obnoxious platform, the XBox is even worse. Yes, all consoles are going to be restrictive, but that's fine if I'm just using the platform for console games exclusively. I have my computer for general purpose use, and that's where I'll expect to develop and play independent games, as well as do whatever I want with whatever data I have stored on whatever media I own.
Apparently I'm looking at a future where I won't have those freedoms on a MS OS, so here's hoping that more independent games are cross platform.
I *am* in the US, and I agree with you entirely. George is an evil man, or at least a stupid man controlled by other evil men.
We have a lot of irrational non-thinkers here in the USA, which is the reason we have the inept, selfish, inhuman leaders that we do. I do what I can to fight for the American principles of freedom, equality, and humanitarianism -- but if I lose then I will accept my fate when we become the shame of the planet. I really can't blame the rest of the world for hating my country if I am unable to fix it.
For the same reason, moderate Muslims are going to have to take control of their religion if they don't want to be branded as murderous terrorists. The extremists have to be marginalized and socially stigmatized. Moderate Christians have the same problem as well -- if they don't want to be stereotyped as irrational murderers fighting for theocracy then they're going to have to very vocally disown both the pushy evangelical Christians who want to force their beliefs on the rest of the world and the bloodsucking politicains that commit atrocious acts under the banner of Christianity.
Yeah, I had to watch that cutscene way too many times myself. POP:TT is a good game, but the unskippable cutscenes are really unacceptable.
I know you could just look on gamefaqs if you really wanted to get past those 2 guys, but I'll give you the strategy anyway -- stop reading if you want to watch that cutscene a few more times and figure it out for yourself. The trick is to attack the guy with the sword, then dodge the other guy's big axe attack. Axe man will be stunned for a few seconds, so run around behind him and start a speed kill. Should only have to do it a couple of times.
IMO cutscenes can be used effectively, but we all know that they can also be very, very bad. A couple of games that I've been playing recently, Shadow of the Colossus (totally awesome game) and POP:two thrones, provide some good contrast.
POP has pre-rendered cutscenes that are often unskippable. Shadow of the Colossus has cutscenes that are rendered in-game and are skippable. These two differences have a huge effect. Of course unskippable cutscenes are annoying, especially after you've seen them 5 times, but also annoying are cutscenes in which the entire world suddenly looks completely different. Especially obvious in POP was when you went from the opening movie to the in-game graphics. The graphics are good, but they don't look like the pre-rendered stuff. Really lame.
Shadow of the Colossus handles cutscenes well, but I think they could still be improved. Yes, everybody wants the option of skipping cutscenes, but I think a lot of people want to watch them, too. How come I can't pause the game during cutscenes? What am I supposed to do when a 5 minute ending movie is playing and somebody knocks on the door? I either don't answer the door, or I beat the game again later so I can see what happens. Lame.
My suggestions: 1. No pre-rendered cutscenes 2.Ability to pause the cutscene and bring up a menu with the option to skip
Why are these not universal in modern games? Does anybody disagree with these preferences?
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In other words, you can't force people to obey the law. Well, you can, but you have to have some sort of fascist state in order to do so - fine if you're a hive dwelling insect, but not acceptable for humans (at least not for me!). Write me a ticket if you catch me speeding, but don't put a governor on my car that won't allow me to speed. Lock me up if I bash someone with a club, but don't handcuff me at birth. That's the way it has to work.
I absolutely disagree with that statement. In fact, I don't think most people would do that even if it were not illegal.Also, I don't think you really read what I wrote in my previous post.
I also think that you must have read somewhere that evolution is "untestable" because you keep using that word. Perhaps you mean that the entire history of life on Earth is not a repeatable experiment -- but if that's what's holding you up then you can give up on trying to understand *anything*. Almost all of the universe is either way in the future, way in the past, or really far away from us. Does that mean we can't understand it? Hardly. Anyway, just because something already happened doesn't mean you can't "test" a theory about it. Say, for example, you think evolutionary theory is a good explanation for the diversity of fossil evidence. Can you test that hypothesis? Of course you can! If your theory predicts a transitional form, and you eventually find an example of that transitional form, then you have strengthened your theory. If you find a fossilized modern human and (according to theory) it dates back to 200 million BC, then one of your theories is wrong. Just to keep score, we *have* found many transitional fossils, and we *have not* found any fossils that cause a major contradiction. Sure, there are conflicts and debates about exactly what happened when, but the big picture is pretty scientifically indisputable right now.
That's abiogenesis, not evolution. It's an interesting topic also, but way too much of a tangent.What you think is #2 should really read, "A bunch of data about events happening over millions of years." The data is merely a bunch of facts in need of explanation - we have fossils, we have to come up with the best explanation for why they exist. What's the *only* scientific explanation that anyone has ever been able to come up with? With good ol' #1.
Hope that clarifies your confusion about anyone "believing" your theory #2. We don't "believe" anything - we have data that we collect, and we try to explain it via theory.
Here's a quick and dirty way to check my viewpoint - try to disagree with any one of these three statements:
1. We have data spanning millions of years that shows many intermediate forms of organisms that are similar in many ways to modern organisms. This data can be arranged chronologically into a tree structure based on morphological similarity. (If you disagree about the existence of this physical evidence, then you can stop reading and go back to whatever it is you do.)
2. We have a theory that explains how organisms can change over time, and (as you mentioned yourself) said theory is well understood and quite easy to demonstrate.
3. The theory of how organisms can change over time (evolution) is a possible explanation for the physical evidence that we have. In fact, the theory explains the evidence so well that most scientists accept it as fact, in the same way that we accept relativity as fact. No, the theory is no more perfect than relativity is, but most people are pretty positive that a perfect theory (which we may never discover) would be a modified evolutionary theory, rather than another theory entirely.
Now tell me, what's the best scientific explanation for all of the fossils we've dug up? (Hint: it's not an "untestable, unrepeatable historical theory" like the imaginary one you called #2. It's Evolutionary Theory, which you called #1.)
Looking at it that way, it's not surprising that we have war. War is a battle between societies, and humans are merely ammunition. The only hope for peace is to merge all humans into a single cohesive society. You'll always have groups that will turn against the society that spawned them, but as long as those groups are relatively small (gangs, as opposed to nations) the damage should be minimal.
Can we form a single worldwide (or larger) society? That remains to be seen, but we seem to be moving in that direction in some ways. Then again, maybe we have too many people for that to be possible.
That aside, what would you call a rootkit that was modified to run independently, without requiring input from a "remote entity"? It's similar to a trojan, but the defining characteristic of a trojan is that it sneaks in by looking like something desirable. That doesn't apply in the case of Sony's software, so what was it? It existed to give a local, alien program root access to your machine. Seems to fit your definition with the exception that the remote entity doesn't interact with the program at runtime. They just set it up initially and it does it's thing on its own.
In other words, "rootkit" seems more applicable than "spyware" to me. I'm completely open to suggestions, though - I'm not an expert on malware taxonomy, I just know what I hate. ;)
Still waiting...
Take me, for example. I own several Sony products, including a PS2, an NTSC monitor, and a receiver. Will I ever buy another product from them? Not in the foreseeable future. I've been shopping around for digital cameras and camcorders for the last few days, and I've been skipping right over the Sony models. They probably have exactly what I'm looking for, and in the right price range too, but that big SONY on the side of it might as well say 'Made by slave labor'. I'm not even going to give their offerings any consideration.
In other words, I don't like their business practices, so I won't give them my money. Not only is that not flamebait, it's completely pertinent to the topic! I was planning to buy a PS3 this generation, but not now. The high price that they've announced isn't even the deciding factor, since I was going to wait a couple of years for it to come down - the real reason is the rootkit, pure and simple.
The better way to think of it is this: your virtual character, who is constrained by the physics of the game, is the one swinging the sword. You, with your controller, are more like a ghost that the virtual character tries to imitate. Your job is to guide the character, not to *be* the character.
If the virtual sword fails to penetrate something, then you have to deal with that - you can't just expect it to be wherever your "ghost" sword is. Same with trying to waggle your two-handed broadsword back and forth at a high rate -- your character can't keep up, so you'll have to slow down to compensate.
Anybody who is disappointed that it's not exactly like using a real sword simply has unrealistic expectations. That said, though, which would you rather have -- "ghost imitation" control, or "choose from 4 swings and a block" (pushbutton) control?
I find this new learning fascinating. What does "emacs" mean in your world? ; )
Sorry Microsoft, but I'll never buy (or even *use*) that kind of crap.
The XBox360 and PS3 just aren't floating my wii, and the Wii itself doesn't do HD. As for movies, under normal circumstances I would never buy data that I don't have full usage of, so these DRM restricted HD movies just aren't going to fly. Thank goodness we had at least one generation of digital content, so I know I won't ever lose the ability to watch the data that I already purchased.
Right now I'm recommending to anyone who asks to just stick with DVD for a couple more years, in the hopes that content owners get their heads out of their asses, which I sincerely hope they do. I've paid for all of the DVD movies that I own, and I haven't distributed copies to anyone, but if they persist with this DRM crap then I'll only be moving on to the next generation once it's cracked. Hell, I may start pirating just to spite the bastards.
At some point, none of this junk is worth the trouble anyway. The public in general is likely to eventually adopt DRM if it's the only option available, but I'll probably just stop watching movies. X P
Footnote:
Since I may seem like a hypocrite for caring about DRM'd movies and yet not minding copy protected video games, I can explain the discrepancy. At this point in time there is a big difference between interactive and non interactive entertainment. A movie is a series of pictures with a synched soundtrack. You can come up with a standard format for this data, and anybody can look at that data and know how to view/manipulate it. Since this is the case, I *expect* the data to be in a standard format, and that I will have permission to view/manipulate it as I see fit (with certain restrictions on redistribution). Interactive entertainment, on the other hand, could not be easily standardized at this point in time. If we had a universal simulator that all video games ran in, then that would be one thing. Right now, however, what we have are custom pieces of software. Whether the content is protected or not makes little difference to me, so long as it's not a hindrance to actually *running* the software (phone-home to validate schemes are absolutely unacceptable). The amount of difficulty involved in re-engineering a game to do something different or to play on a different piece of hardware makes the difficulty of overcoming copy protection trivial. In other words, I don't care if it's protected since I'm not going to reformat it anyway. If I want a backup, I can make a bitwise copy.
I've yet to hold it in my hand, of course, but I wonder if it feels the same.
In other words, it's 33% vs 11%. It could be 3 adult gamers out of the total 10 vs 11 teens out of the total 100.
How do we "win" the game of "continue to advance"? Nobody can tell you the best strategy, but "just hit the gas and see what happens" sounds like a good way to veer off a cliff.
Sure, if all species use that strategy then at least one of them is likely to make it -- it's just extremely unlikely to be *us*. I still vote for taking it at walking speed and trying to see what lies ahead. Note that I don't mean sitting around on our asses -- we should be pushing ourselves forward technologically, exploring our solar system, and otherwise protecting ourselves. What we shouldn't be doing, IMO, is taking risks that could wipe us out.
Could ecological disaster wipe us out? I'm pretty sure that it could at this point.
Can we survive if the climate changes? What species are we dependent on? What environmental conditions are required for us to maintain our current expensive brainpower? What will it take for us to revert to more efficient animals with a lower level of consciousness?
This is a list of questions that are too complicated to answer right now. I vote that until we can answer them, we just be conservative and try to change our environment as little as possible. What do you think?
Apparently I'm looking at a future where I won't have those freedoms on a MS OS, so here's hoping that more independent games are cross platform.
We have a lot of irrational non-thinkers here in the USA, which is the reason we have the inept, selfish, inhuman leaders that we do. I do what I can to fight for the American principles of freedom, equality, and humanitarianism -- but if I lose then I will accept my fate when we become the shame of the planet. I really can't blame the rest of the world for hating my country if I am unable to fix it.
For the same reason, moderate Muslims are going to have to take control of their religion if they don't want to be branded as murderous terrorists. The extremists have to be marginalized and socially stigmatized. Moderate Christians have the same problem as well -- if they don't want to be stereotyped as irrational murderers fighting for theocracy then they're going to have to very vocally disown both the pushy evangelical Christians who want to force their beliefs on the rest of the world and the bloodsucking politicains that commit atrocious acts under the banner of Christianity.
As support for 2K wanes, I'm getting visions of a Linux desktop and a lot of console gaming in my future...
I know you could just look on gamefaqs if you really wanted to get past those 2 guys, but I'll give you the strategy anyway -- stop reading if you want to watch that cutscene a few more times and figure it out for yourself. The trick is to attack the guy with the sword, then dodge the other guy's big axe attack. Axe man will be stunned for a few seconds, so run around behind him and start a speed kill. Should only have to do it a couple of times.
POP has pre-rendered cutscenes that are often unskippable. Shadow of the Colossus has cutscenes that are rendered in-game and are skippable. These two differences have a huge effect. Of course unskippable cutscenes are annoying, especially after you've seen them 5 times, but also annoying are cutscenes in which the entire world suddenly looks completely different. Especially obvious in POP was when you went from the opening movie to the in-game graphics. The graphics are good, but they don't look like the pre-rendered stuff. Really lame.
Shadow of the Colossus handles cutscenes well, but I think they could still be improved. Yes, everybody wants the option of skipping cutscenes, but I think a lot of people want to watch them, too. How come I can't pause the game during cutscenes? What am I supposed to do when a 5 minute ending movie is playing and somebody knocks on the door? I either don't answer the door, or I beat the game again later so I can see what happens. Lame.
My suggestions:
1. No pre-rendered cutscenes
2.Ability to pause the cutscene and bring up a menu with the option to skip
Why are these not universal in modern games? Does anybody disagree with these preferences?