Good point. Myth:TFL was for the most part a RTT RealTime Tactical game. Though, on the big 3v3 ladder matches involving territories maps....I'd say there was plenty of top level strategy required to take and hold for the win.
You're missing something. Blizzard intentionally limited the original Diablo, Starcraft and Diablo II to small (even for the period) resolutions. Why? Not for optimization. To force a 'level playing field'.
I've never understood the obsession with competitive Starcraft. It was a clickfest game with very little overall strategy. Age of Empires II and Myth: the Fallen Lords were more along the lines of games that put the Strategy in RTS.
- servers were down regularly (Too true, they weren't prepared for the playerbase they created. MUDs, EQ, UO, and Meridian69 never had anything close to the rush that WoW experienced.)
- queues (Same as above. But the flaw in your argument is that AoC had queues as well. I was on a mid/high pop server and the first two weeks saw me hitting a queue most evenings.)
- the capability for solo play (I solo'd my fixer in AO. I've soloed in WoW. But until BC, the only reliable and consistent way to get good equipment was go do group instances or be in a decent raid guild.)
Basically every post you have put up boils down to one thing.... You detest solo play. Since a couple of games out there (EQ, AO, EVE come to mind) cater specifically to team gameplay, they are the only decent MMO games on the market. Since Funcom created AO, AoC should be defended.
You constantly accuse others of donning rose colored glasses...how about you drop the myopic view and accept that your personal tastes for team-only play is in the minority for gamers. Judging by subscription numbers and purchases, gamers as a whole like the ability to choose both solo and teamplay within the same game.
AoC is far from the worst MMO I've ever played. Honestly, the content and feel of the first twenty levels were amazing. They blew their wad making that a fantastic experience.
You keep yammering about casual gamers and teamplay experiences... Now that I have a career and family, I consider myself a casual gamer....but I managed to get up close enough to the endgame to see the lack of engaging content. I'm happy to see that we agree on their poor approach to teamplay. Group quests and mobs were not level appropriate. I watched a group my level (50) with two 70+'s (tank/priest) get wiped by group mobs that were green to our group.
So, for the majority of people playing the game, it's pretty much fine.
Shrug... We'll see what their numbers look like in another six months. Out of the 15-20 players I knew going in....none are still there. Most are either back in EQ2, WoW, EVE, or the WAR beta. I'd say the casual/hardcore ratio is about 50/50 in that group. The hardcore guys hated the lack of endgame and the jacked PvP system. The casual guys hated their limited gaming time being wasted.
With regards to AO having a "bad MMO launch", I can only assume you weren't there and didn't waste $65 on it. AO launch was largely unplayable. 1 FPS in major cities. One or two decent equipment choices per slot for each class....just with a different level to match your level. Wild bugs resulting in unplayable (read locked in world geometry) circumstances that would take any number of hours of online wait time before a GM would fix it. Missions being the exact same experience over and over....nothing more than grinding in an instance. It wasn't a bad launch, it was a three month running catastrophe... I understand after a year or 18 months they had most of it worked out. This time, it looks like other than having a impressively stable launch platform, that Funcom has followed the same gameplan, with a 12 month live dev cycle to get the game to a fully enjoyable state.
You are aware that they had to start giving Anarchy Online away and offer free play just to maintain their playerbase, right?
You keep defending it and expounding about how it is a good game and "nothing really destroyed the game for anyone"....but you quit playing as well. Actions > Words.
Look, Fanboi, he's not acting like an idiot, he's being facetious. All of those things were promised at launch, still have not been delivered, and Funcom is now announcing an expansion. AoC was a fun game, for the first 20 levels....then everything was rehash. Basically the same combos and approaches to situations. Endgame content is/was non-existant.
For me, there was no single thing that was dealbreaking....it was the plethora of little annoyances. Corpses can see you and stop you from stealthing....critters 30 levels lower than you can break your stealth. Having to log out/in to register that you really and truly did leave a group and want to join another. Lockups occasionally when zoning. Skill/Stats don't really seem to matter. Consistent lag spikes, regardless of ISP. Mount/dismount issues. Horrible MOB pathing. Piss poor town and merchant placement (you have to climb up on a table to interact with some merchants). "Group" mobs require a full group with Soldier and PoM that are a number of levels higher than the mob to be successful. Aggro ranges are unpredictable and illogical. Untold Animation issues. Femme Assassins have overall lower DPS than identical males. Stealth attacks failing if you have not drawn your dagger beforehand. Combos/Skills/feats not performing in the manner the description indicates. Combos lagging/dropping frames/dropping sequence. And these are just the ones that were affecting my toons on a regular basis. Most of these were brought to the attention of the devs in earlier beta stages....the forums are filled with 'features' discovered after launch. (and, yes, I am aware that, now, three months later they have lovingly fixed about a quarter of the things listed above)
I've beta'd and played most MMO's since I was in the original EQ beta. AoC was a very client/server stable launch compared to most....but that does not excuse the half assed product they delivered to production.
After paying for the horrific experience that was the Anarchy Online launch, I said I'd never give Funcom any more money. AoC seduced me. Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, shame on me. My experiences with AoC in beta and release confirmed beyond a doubt that Funcom is a second rate company obsessed with misleading the public about their product and delivering broken goods to the marketplace.
All war is about power, be it influence or economic. The civil war, despite all of the romantic delusions, was no different. You'll find that many wars find rallying points, particularly if the military is filled with either volunteers or citizens of a republic. That rallying cry in the civil war became slavery. In truth, it was launched over economic controls and federal influence over states.
Were the war about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been a legal (as opposed to illegal) document freeing the slaves in the Union and thereby giving the Union the moral high ground in the war.
No war between nations (megalomaniac dictatorships aside) was fought for a princess fair or slavery.
He's doing pushups and situps, not pushing weight. If he wanted to really build muscle, sure he should be doing a few sets of 10 reps at high weight...but he's nowhere near that. If this guy is having trouble with a handfull of pushups and situps, he needs to start at first base. And while we're here, where the hell do you get that higher reps at lower weight ruins your joints?
Quadruple the repetitions that you're performing for starters. Do them in sets of 25. Add a series of squats (even if they're without added weight). This will build muscle...which just existing will burn calories.
Most importantly, add cardio to your exercise. Whatever activity you choose, do it for a minimum of 30 minutes. Walk with speed, jog, run, jump rope, do jump'n'jacks. Whatever you're comfortable with at your current state.
Finally, take a critical eye at the foods you're eating, the portion size, and how much snacking you do. Cut trans fats, saturated fats, and empty calories. Eat more veggies and fruits. Snack on small portions of healthy things to help with appetite control.
The final scene puzzles me: Why did Batman have to take the fall for Two-Face's killings? Couldn't it have just as easily been pinned on the Joker or his henchmen?
(Please excuse the stream of consciousness.) For a variety of reasons. The police backing a vigilante is unethical and the police needed to aspire to the image of Harvey Dent, not Batman. There were many times that internal affairs, bad cops, getting around the law, and the like were mentioned.....I think this was less for color and more to indicate that there were publically known issues within the police dept. Turning Batman back into a fugitive (of sorts) would cut down on the vigilante batman gangs running around wiping out crime. It also puts Batman back into the shadows where he belongs. Makes him more of an antihero to be feared by criminals rather than just an extension of the law.
On the offchance that you're serious... Tethering is the ability to connect your device to your laptop/workstation and use its wireless for internet connectivity. That, low battery consumption, replaceable batteries, push from BES, and a tactile keyboard is what makes Blackberries better corporate devices.
Burglary and copyright violation (in the piracy example) are exhibitions of personal entitlement to something owned by another to the detriment of said owner/creator. Both go against both a legal precedent and social contract.
To go home and use your Skil saw to recreate the wooden duck you saw at the Pottery Barn involves your senses, perception, and your work. It can still violate copyright, but it falls into your slavery argument. To digitally duplicate a work involves nothing of the sort. Nothing is being recreated and there is zero interpretation through senses and perception of the copyright infringer.
So basically it comes down to we agree that it is wrong...but disagree on the categorization and semantics of the issue. (yes, I comprehend what you've written, I merely disagree with the perspective)
Spun....you make fantastic points, and then you have to throw in a bunch of prickish drek in an effort to be entertaining. If you'd drop the sniping, you'd be a much more respectable poster.
My point was that legal terms define a particular aspect of something that can be categorized. Manslaughter is not murder, but both are killing. Burglary and robbery are theft, but neither are referred to that in a legal sense. Copying Iron Man off a screener DVD and then distributing it are copyright violations, even though the essence of the action is theft and distribution. That's not legally what they are...but it can be categorized in that fashion outside of a legal context.
This slashdot article refers to replacing the term 'piracy' which is also not a legal term, so I flip your question right back at you,"Why do you feel the need to make it something it isn't?"
At the end of the day you feel that duplicating an owner's work, saturating the market, depressing the market value of the item, and depriving that owner of revenues is not, in essence, depriving the owner of anything...therefore not making the action a theft in essence if not in a strict legal definition. That's fine. One of the wonderful aspects of the world we live in is that you can think for yourself and interpret things in your own way. I'd be a pretty boring place otherwise.
I want to thank you for your enlightening post. I'll have to be more careful with my littering. Amazing how those little things slip by me...
I do agree with you that if you are discussing exact legal terms, copying software is not theft, it is indeed copyright violation. Just like embezzling a few million isn't theft, it is a fraudulent reallocation of resources. Using legal terms to qualify the exact nature of the transgression does not change the root of the activity.
You are both depriving the producer of revenue AND making use of their product without paying for ownership. It's much like 'stealing' wifi access from your neighbor. The only physical aspect of the theft involves electrons/impulses/etc...
"the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny."
Copyright (whether you approve or not) denotes ownership...making it intellectual property. The wrongful taking of makes it theft.
Funny how the slashdot crowd considers it theft if Microsoft includes GPL'ed code, but if it involves a person stealing music/movies/software, it is a right in the pursuit of happiness.
Some of us are fond of ours because they process our food and give us useful limbs.
Yeahhh...I think it's the abundance of food processing that is the root of this. If people are so fond of their bodies, why don't they take better care of them?
After all, you can get spare parts, but you only get one with matching serial numbers.
He's not going to get into a college with those marks and you don't get a "good" tech job without a degree.
sigh. And this is part of the problem. I am a principle in a tech company that does a few million a year, largely in billable hours. Out of my data employees, half lack degrees and two of those are my technical leads. Their skills are top notch, but just because they don't have the appropriate ribbons and medals, they obviously can't be performing their jobs to such a high standard.
The sooner that people realize two things, the better the world will become...
- 50% of people are below average, and should never consume the resources required to advance beyond secondary school. Many of those that are above average will attend with little thought as to the long term ramifications of their major.
- While University is the bastion of high symbol manipulation, most students, but not all, are never taught to think for themselves, rather they are rewarded for rote memorization and regurgitation...which has to be beaten out of them if they are to succeed in any field that requires individual thought and motivation. Sadly, campus life overshadows education in the minds of most students today.
Ah...and I never bothered to finish my degree. Somehow professional advancement got in the way. That being said, both of my boys will attend university in a number of years....yes, I am a hypocrite. grin.
Breaking and entering and burglary are not serious crimes? Glad to hear it....could you forward along your home address?
I think everyone is in agreement that 38 years would be a nutty sentence. There is an almost zero chance that is what he will end up with, that is the MAXIMUM sentence for 50+ felony accounts if he were to serve all years sequentially. Typical slashdot sensationalism. This isn't some intelligent kid just changing a grade. Also keep in mind that these are only the crimes that he has been caught performing.
That being said, why not put teh ev17 genius to work? Make him work for the state for the next four years....and if he pulls any more shenanigans, make him serve four in the pokey and deport him when he gets out. This would give ample time to see if he has learned his lesson.
I said (a) that an overall market share that included businesses will not be the same as a market share defined as only personal computers and it's the latter proportion that is relevant. And (b), that alternative O/S's are going to be more common amongst better educated demographics and people that play role-playing games tend to be more educated. Now which of those are you disputing?
I'll dispute both of your suppositions. You're making wild assumptions in an effort to back your opinion and make youself feel superior. I'll try to avoid throwing questionable numbers about and address your two points with actuals. (a) Out of the people that I know, both in and out of the tech field, almost all (~85%) have windows installations at home. Out of all the gamers I know through local shops, with the exception of two zealots, they *all* have windows installations at home. That's not to say that I don't use my Mac and my MythTV box....but I have an XP install for gaming or particular applications. (b) Yes, more educated people roleplay than uneducated...which tends to be the case with just about anything involving written materials and gameplay based on individual imagination. Not all of those intelligent individuals are geeks....the last group I played regularly with included a coder, an engineer, a bookie, an architect, a network tech, an electrician, a retail sales, and a corporate sales guy. Once again, every gamer had a windows rig at home to be used for that purpose.
As explained quite clearly, I thought, if one person in a gaming group has a Mac or Linux box, that's a disincentive for the whole group to use the product.
And as I explained quite clearly, you're addressing the RARE exception. If home penetration were as high as you would like to believe, all major gaming software would have crossplatform releases. This is more the exception than the rule....because the crossplatform sales do not justify the dev and support expenses.
Planning to support multiple O/S's from the start is much easier. For example, if WotC had chosen to use OpenGL instead of DirectX 10, they'd now find it not that difficult at all to support Macs and Linux boxes. The increase in cost would be fairly small in comparison to the return on investment.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. They should have laid the groundwork for future cross platform support. If the product develops wings and the interest is there....push cross platform support as hard and fast as possible.
Like that little company Blizzard, you mean?
Bringing up Blizzard in this context is like referencing Nazis to try to prove a point in a forum. Blizzard had guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands, the internal staff to support the cycle, and the reserves to fund the development....and still their cross platform deployment included ONLY OSX. In this discussion, we are talking about having limited resources to test a tentative market by a company/brand with a bad software product track record. That is a totally different animal which would cause anyone with a hand on the purse strings to hesitate.
Practice lags behind Possibility. Saying if something were worthwhile it would be being done by others would have left mankind in the caves without fire or the wheel.
Yes, and I can throw out that just because we can do a thing does not mean that we should. If anything has proven this it would be the dotcom years. Fund projects that push the boundaries AND have a reasonable chance of returns.
I gave solid reasons why I thought the way I did which you are welcome to engage with if you wish. But you haven't, you've skipped my arguments and just gone for strawmen and sarcasm. It suggests you can't see actual problems with what I've said if those are your responses.
I thought I'd pretty much poked holes in most of your arguments. You believe that a cross platform product is what WotC should have pursued. You believe this beca
Being a computer geek does not equate being a role player.
Being a role player does not equate running a non-Windows OS.
However, being a computer gamer generally does equate running Windows on at least one of your machines or partitions.
Thanks to Slashdot's abundance of myopic codemonkeys there are a lot of posters generally unable to accept that quite a few geeks out there really don't find Linux to be the cat's meow and will refuse to run Windows due to some asinine 'geek in-crowd' groupthink. Windows dominates the overall market. Windows dominates the gaming market. Why waste cross platform dev costs on the release of your product which is designed to test the waters of virtual tabletop gaming?
Don't waste your fingertips on building up an argument in favor of cross platform web based game... If it were such a viable choice, you would see a helluva lot more companies taking that route.
Accept it. You are a geek. You know code. Just because you can brilliantly find an offending semicolon in two million lines of code does not grant you some kind of omnipotent understanding of real world business and marketing. If it did, I doubt you would be wasting your day accumulating 1000+ post counts on all your favorite geek boards.
I get the impression that the poster was addressing the fanboi aspect of the 'review' as much as the odd new edition features he was championing.
The fact that the 'veteran DM' only dated back to AD&D2.0 and his review read like it was written by a dim witted cheerleader made it useless to most readers.
I'd debated buying all the 4.0 books to read through and develop an educated opinion....but most of the reviews I've read so far (particularly those written by fanbois) has totally turned me off of this edition. Maybe there will be a gameshop running a demo that I can watch and get an actual experience without having to spend a few duckets.
Why the hell does Slashdot need to promote another tech-savy, yet socially-retarded geek trying to screw up the world around them in the name of free beer?
Not only that, but maybe a little ISP responsibility across the board would be a good thing. Over the past few years I've had multiple clients with entire class C's. Total INTERNAL hosts for each client was less than 30. By a slim margin, most of those class C's were being given out by Sprint.
Ah, if only I had mod points for you! The Intellivision was by far the most advanced (for it's time) console ever released...truly the Amiga of consoles. 12 button touch pad, 8 (or 16) direction disk control, and four waist buttons.
I remember dominating Sea Battle with the PT boat. Armor Battle with sneaky hidden landmines. Setting up a hail mary from the shotgun in Football. Dungeoncrawling with AD&D. Listening to that southern drawl in B-17 Bomber (with Intellivoice). Spending God-knows how many hours playing Space Hawk until my thumbs were bruised. Dying to get home to see if I could beat my high score at Space Armada. The rush the first time I saw the shielded black bot in NightStalker.
The first mods I ever performed were to take apart the controllers and install the aftermarket joystick and enlarged waist buttons. I also bought the Intellivision pack for the original Xbox to relive a little childhood bliss.
NES, Sega Genesis, Colecovision, Atari 2600, Dreamcast, Playstation, Xbox, Wii...all good, but the Intellivision outshines them all.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. Myth:TFL was for the most part a RTT RealTime Tactical game. Though, on the big 3v3 ladder matches involving territories maps....I'd say there was plenty of top level strategy required to take and hold for the win.
You're missing something. Blizzard intentionally limited the original Diablo, Starcraft and Diablo II to small (even for the period) resolutions. Why? Not for optimization. To force a 'level playing field'.
I've never understood the obsession with competitive Starcraft. It was a clickfest game with very little overall strategy. Age of Empires II and Myth: the Fallen Lords were more along the lines of games that put the Strategy in RTS.
Your three bitches about the WoW launch are :
- servers were down regularly (Too true, they weren't prepared for the playerbase they created. MUDs, EQ, UO, and Meridian69 never had anything close to the rush that WoW experienced.)
- queues (Same as above. But the flaw in your argument is that AoC had queues as well. I was on a mid/high pop server and the first two weeks saw me hitting a queue most evenings.)
- the capability for solo play (I solo'd my fixer in AO. I've soloed in WoW. But until BC, the only reliable and consistent way to get good equipment was go do group instances or be in a decent raid guild.)
Basically every post you have put up boils down to one thing.... You detest solo play. Since a couple of games out there (EQ, AO, EVE come to mind) cater specifically to team gameplay, they are the only decent MMO games on the market. Since Funcom created AO, AoC should be defended.
You constantly accuse others of donning rose colored glasses...how about you drop the myopic view and accept that your personal tastes for team-only play is in the minority for gamers. Judging by subscription numbers and purchases, gamers as a whole like the ability to choose both solo and teamplay within the same game.
AoC is far from the worst MMO I've ever played. Honestly, the content and feel of the first twenty levels were amazing. They blew their wad making that a fantastic experience.
You keep yammering about casual gamers and teamplay experiences... Now that I have a career and family, I consider myself a casual gamer....but I managed to get up close enough to the endgame to see the lack of engaging content. I'm happy to see that we agree on their poor approach to teamplay. Group quests and mobs were not level appropriate. I watched a group my level (50) with two 70+'s (tank/priest) get wiped by group mobs that were green to our group.
So, for the majority of people playing the game, it's pretty much fine.
Shrug... We'll see what their numbers look like in another six months. Out of the 15-20 players I knew going in....none are still there. Most are either back in EQ2, WoW, EVE, or the WAR beta. I'd say the casual/hardcore ratio is about 50/50 in that group. The hardcore guys hated the lack of endgame and the jacked PvP system. The casual guys hated their limited gaming time being wasted.
With regards to AO having a "bad MMO launch", I can only assume you weren't there and didn't waste $65 on it. AO launch was largely unplayable. 1 FPS in major cities. One or two decent equipment choices per slot for each class....just with a different level to match your level. Wild bugs resulting in unplayable (read locked in world geometry) circumstances that would take any number of hours of online wait time before a GM would fix it. Missions being the exact same experience over and over....nothing more than grinding in an instance. It wasn't a bad launch, it was a three month running catastrophe... I understand after a year or 18 months they had most of it worked out. This time, it looks like other than having a impressively stable launch platform, that Funcom has followed the same gameplan, with a 12 month live dev cycle to get the game to a fully enjoyable state.
You are aware that they had to start giving Anarchy Online away and offer free play just to maintain their playerbase, right?
You keep defending it and expounding about how it is a good game and "nothing really destroyed the game for anyone"....but you quit playing as well. Actions > Words.
Look, Fanboi, he's not acting like an idiot, he's being facetious. All of those things were promised at launch, still have not been delivered, and Funcom is now announcing an expansion. AoC was a fun game, for the first 20 levels....then everything was rehash. Basically the same combos and approaches to situations. Endgame content is/was non-existant.
For me, there was no single thing that was dealbreaking....it was the plethora of little annoyances. Corpses can see you and stop you from stealthing....critters 30 levels lower than you can break your stealth. Having to log out/in to register that you really and truly did leave a group and want to join another. Lockups occasionally when zoning. Skill/Stats don't really seem to matter. Consistent lag spikes, regardless of ISP. Mount/dismount issues. Horrible MOB pathing. Piss poor town and merchant placement (you have to climb up on a table to interact with some merchants). "Group" mobs require a full group with Soldier and PoM that are a number of levels higher than the mob to be successful. Aggro ranges are unpredictable and illogical. Untold Animation issues. Femme Assassins have overall lower DPS than identical males. Stealth attacks failing if you have not drawn your dagger beforehand. Combos/Skills/feats not performing in the manner the description indicates. Combos lagging/dropping frames/dropping sequence. And these are just the ones that were affecting my toons on a regular basis. Most of these were brought to the attention of the devs in earlier beta stages....the forums are filled with 'features' discovered after launch. (and, yes, I am aware that, now, three months later they have lovingly fixed about a quarter of the things listed above)
I've beta'd and played most MMO's since I was in the original EQ beta. AoC was a very client/server stable launch compared to most....but that does not excuse the half assed product they delivered to production.
After paying for the horrific experience that was the Anarchy Online launch, I said I'd never give Funcom any more money. AoC seduced me. Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, shame on me. My experiences with AoC in beta and release confirmed beyond a doubt that Funcom is a second rate company obsessed with misleading the public about their product and delivering broken goods to the marketplace.
All war is about power, be it influence or economic. The civil war, despite all of the romantic delusions, was no different. You'll find that many wars find rallying points, particularly if the military is filled with either volunteers or citizens of a republic. That rallying cry in the civil war became slavery. In truth, it was launched over economic controls and federal influence over states.
Were the war about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been a legal (as opposed to illegal) document freeing the slaves in the Union and thereby giving the Union the moral high ground in the war.
No war between nations (megalomaniac dictatorships aside) was fought for a princess fair or slavery.
He's doing pushups and situps, not pushing weight. If he wanted to really build muscle, sure he should be doing a few sets of 10 reps at high weight...but he's nowhere near that. If this guy is having trouble with a handfull of pushups and situps, he needs to start at first base. And while we're here, where the hell do you get that higher reps at lower weight ruins your joints?
Quadruple the repetitions that you're performing for starters. Do them in sets of 25. Add a series of squats (even if they're without added weight). This will build muscle...which just existing will burn calories.
Most importantly, add cardio to your exercise. Whatever activity you choose, do it for a minimum of 30 minutes. Walk with speed, jog, run, jump rope, do jump'n'jacks. Whatever you're comfortable with at your current state.
Finally, take a critical eye at the foods you're eating, the portion size, and how much snacking you do. Cut trans fats, saturated fats, and empty calories. Eat more veggies and fruits. Snack on small portions of healthy things to help with appetite control.
The final scene puzzles me: Why did Batman have to take the fall for Two-Face's killings? Couldn't it have just as easily been pinned on the Joker or his henchmen?
(Please excuse the stream of consciousness.) For a variety of reasons. The police backing a vigilante is unethical and the police needed to aspire to the image of Harvey Dent, not Batman. There were many times that internal affairs, bad cops, getting around the law, and the like were mentioned.....I think this was less for color and more to indicate that there were publically known issues within the police dept. Turning Batman back into a fugitive (of sorts) would cut down on the vigilante batman gangs running around wiping out crime. It also puts Batman back into the shadows where he belongs. Makes him more of an antihero to be feared by criminals rather than just an extension of the law.
On the offchance that you're serious... Tethering is the ability to connect your device to your laptop/workstation and use its wireless for internet connectivity. That, low battery consumption, replaceable batteries, push from BES, and a tactile keyboard is what makes Blackberries better corporate devices.
Burglary and copyright violation (in the piracy example) are exhibitions of personal entitlement to something owned by another to the detriment of said owner/creator. Both go against both a legal precedent and social contract.
To go home and use your Skil saw to recreate the wooden duck you saw at the Pottery Barn involves your senses, perception, and your work. It can still violate copyright, but it falls into your slavery argument. To digitally duplicate a work involves nothing of the sort. Nothing is being recreated and there is zero interpretation through senses and perception of the copyright infringer.
So basically it comes down to we agree that it is wrong...but disagree on the categorization and semantics of the issue. (yes, I comprehend what you've written, I merely disagree with the perspective)
Spun....you make fantastic points, and then you have to throw in a bunch of prickish drek in an effort to be entertaining. If you'd drop the sniping, you'd be a much more respectable poster.
My point was that legal terms define a particular aspect of something that can be categorized. Manslaughter is not murder, but both are killing. Burglary and robbery are theft, but neither are referred to that in a legal sense. Copying Iron Man off a screener DVD and then distributing it are copyright violations, even though the essence of the action is theft and distribution. That's not legally what they are...but it can be categorized in that fashion outside of a legal context.
This slashdot article refers to replacing the term 'piracy' which is also not a legal term, so I flip your question right back at you,"Why do you feel the need to make it something it isn't?"
At the end of the day you feel that duplicating an owner's work, saturating the market, depressing the market value of the item, and depriving that owner of revenues is not, in essence, depriving the owner of anything...therefore not making the action a theft in essence if not in a strict legal definition. That's fine. One of the wonderful aspects of the world we live in is that you can think for yourself and interpret things in your own way. I'd be a pretty boring place otherwise.
I want to thank you for your enlightening post. I'll have to be more careful with my littering. Amazing how those little things slip by me...
I do agree with you that if you are discussing exact legal terms, copying software is not theft, it is indeed copyright violation. Just like embezzling a few million isn't theft, it is a fraudulent reallocation of resources. Using legal terms to qualify the exact nature of the transgression does not change the root of the activity.
You are both depriving the producer of revenue AND making use of their product without paying for ownership. It's much like 'stealing' wifi access from your neighbor. The only physical aspect of the theft involves electrons/impulses/etc...
"the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny."
Copyright (whether you approve or not) denotes ownership...making it intellectual property. The wrongful taking of makes it theft.
Funny how the slashdot crowd considers it theft if Microsoft includes GPL'ed code, but if it involves a person stealing music/movies/software, it is a right in the pursuit of happiness.
Some of us are fond of ours because they process our food and give us useful limbs.
Yeahhh...I think it's the abundance of food processing that is the root of this. If people are so fond of their bodies, why don't they take better care of them?
After all, you can get spare parts, but you only get one with matching serial numbers.
He's not going to get into a college with those marks and you don't get a "good" tech job without a degree.
sigh. And this is part of the problem. I am a principle in a tech company that does a few million a year, largely in billable hours. Out of my data employees, half lack degrees and two of those are my technical leads. Their skills are top notch, but just because they don't have the appropriate ribbons and medals, they obviously can't be performing their jobs to such a high standard.
The sooner that people realize two things, the better the world will become...
- 50% of people are below average, and should never consume the resources required to advance beyond secondary school. Many of those that are above average will attend with little thought as to the long term ramifications of their major.
- While University is the bastion of high symbol manipulation, most students, but not all, are never taught to think for themselves, rather they are rewarded for rote memorization and regurgitation...which has to be beaten out of them if they are to succeed in any field that requires individual thought and motivation. Sadly, campus life overshadows education in the minds of most students today.
Ah...and I never bothered to finish my degree. Somehow professional advancement got in the way. That being said, both of my boys will attend university in a number of years....yes, I am a hypocrite. grin.
Breaking and entering and burglary are not serious crimes? Glad to hear it....could you forward along your home address?
I think everyone is in agreement that 38 years would be a nutty sentence. There is an almost zero chance that is what he will end up with, that is the MAXIMUM sentence for 50+ felony accounts if he were to serve all years sequentially. Typical slashdot sensationalism. This isn't some intelligent kid just changing a grade. Also keep in mind that these are only the crimes that he has been caught performing.
That being said, why not put teh ev17 genius to work? Make him work for the state for the next four years....and if he pulls any more shenanigans, make him serve four in the pokey and deport him when he gets out. This would give ample time to see if he has learned his lesson.
I said (a) that an overall market share that included businesses will not be the same as a market share defined as only personal computers and it's the latter proportion that is relevant. And (b), that alternative O/S's are going to be more common amongst better educated demographics and people that play role-playing games tend to be more educated. Now which of those are you disputing?
I'll dispute both of your suppositions. You're making wild assumptions in an effort to back your opinion and make youself feel superior. I'll try to avoid throwing questionable numbers about and address your two points with actuals. (a) Out of the people that I know, both in and out of the tech field, almost all (~85%) have windows installations at home. Out of all the gamers I know through local shops, with the exception of two zealots, they *all* have windows installations at home. That's not to say that I don't use my Mac and my MythTV box....but I have an XP install for gaming or particular applications. (b) Yes, more educated people roleplay than uneducated...which tends to be the case with just about anything involving written materials and gameplay based on individual imagination. Not all of those intelligent individuals are geeks....the last group I played regularly with included a coder, an engineer, a bookie, an architect, a network tech, an electrician, a retail sales, and a corporate sales guy. Once again, every gamer had a windows rig at home to be used for that purpose.
As explained quite clearly, I thought, if one person in a gaming group has a Mac or Linux box, that's a disincentive for the whole group to use the product.
And as I explained quite clearly, you're addressing the RARE exception. If home penetration were as high as you would like to believe, all major gaming software would have crossplatform releases. This is more the exception than the rule....because the crossplatform sales do not justify the dev and support expenses.
Planning to support multiple O/S's from the start is much easier. For example, if WotC had chosen to use OpenGL instead of DirectX 10, they'd now find it not that difficult at all to support Macs and Linux boxes. The increase in cost would be fairly small in comparison to the return on investment.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. They should have laid the groundwork for future cross platform support. If the product develops wings and the interest is there....push cross platform support as hard and fast as possible.
Like that little company Blizzard, you mean?
Bringing up Blizzard in this context is like referencing Nazis to try to prove a point in a forum. Blizzard had guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands, the internal staff to support the cycle, and the reserves to fund the development....and still their cross platform deployment included ONLY OSX. In this discussion, we are talking about having limited resources to test a tentative market by a company/brand with a bad software product track record. That is a totally different animal which would cause anyone with a hand on the purse strings to hesitate.
Practice lags behind Possibility. Saying if something were worthwhile it would be being done by others would have left mankind in the caves without fire or the wheel.
Yes, and I can throw out that just because we can do a thing does not mean that we should. If anything has proven this it would be the dotcom years. Fund projects that push the boundaries AND have a reasonable chance of returns.
I gave solid reasons why I thought the way I did which you are welcome to engage with if you wish. But you haven't, you've skipped my arguments and just gone for strawmen and sarcasm. It suggests you can't see actual problems with what I've said if those are your responses.
I thought I'd pretty much poked holes in most of your arguments. You believe that a cross platform product is what WotC should have pursued. You believe this beca
Being a computer geek does not equate being a role player.
Being a role player does not equate running a non-Windows OS.
However, being a computer gamer generally does equate running Windows on at least one of your machines or partitions.
Thanks to Slashdot's abundance of myopic codemonkeys there are a lot of posters generally unable to accept that quite a few geeks out there really don't find Linux to be the cat's meow and will refuse to run Windows due to some asinine 'geek in-crowd' groupthink. Windows dominates the overall market. Windows dominates the gaming market. Why waste cross platform dev costs on the release of your product which is designed to test the waters of virtual tabletop gaming?
Don't waste your fingertips on building up an argument in favor of cross platform web based game... If it were such a viable choice, you would see a helluva lot more companies taking that route.
Accept it. You are a geek. You know code. Just because you can brilliantly find an offending semicolon in two million lines of code does not grant you some kind of omnipotent understanding of real world business and marketing. If it did, I doubt you would be wasting your day accumulating 1000+ post counts on all your favorite geek boards.
The fact that the 'veteran DM' only dated back to AD&D2.0 and his review read like it was written by a dim witted cheerleader made it useless to most readers.
I'd debated buying all the 4.0 books to read through and develop an educated opinion....but most of the reviews I've read so far (particularly those written by fanbois) has totally turned me off of this edition. Maybe there will be a gameshop running a demo that I can watch and get an actual experience without having to spend a few duckets.
Penny Arcade
Real, functional, and looks like hella fun...
dailymail.co.uk
Too true. Concise and to the point. I like it.
Why the hell does Slashdot need to promote another tech-savy, yet socially-retarded geek trying to screw up the world around them in the name of free beer?
Not only that, but maybe a little ISP responsibility across the board would be a good thing. Over the past few years I've had multiple clients with entire class C's. Total INTERNAL hosts for each client was less than 30. By a slim margin, most of those class C's were being given out by Sprint.
Ah, if only I had mod points for you! The Intellivision was by far the most advanced (for it's time) console ever released. ..truly the Amiga of consoles. 12 button touch pad, 8 (or 16) direction disk control, and four waist buttons.
I remember dominating Sea Battle with the PT boat. Armor Battle with sneaky hidden landmines. Setting up a hail mary from the shotgun in Football. Dungeoncrawling with AD&D. Listening to that southern drawl in B-17 Bomber (with Intellivoice). Spending God-knows how many hours playing Space Hawk until my thumbs were bruised. Dying to get home to see if I could beat my high score at Space Armada. The rush the first time I saw the shielded black bot in NightStalker.
The first mods I ever performed were to take apart the controllers and install the aftermarket joystick and enlarged waist buttons. I also bought the Intellivision pack for the original Xbox to relive a little childhood bliss.
NES, Sega Genesis, Colecovision, Atari 2600, Dreamcast, Playstation, Xbox, Wii...all good, but the Intellivision outshines them all.