Reputation and accountability. This kind of "feature" isn't about preventing Walmart from exploiting children in some foreign country, its about preventing malware and ONLY about preventing malware.
If a piece of malware gets written under this scheme, there are two possibilities: 1) Its not signed and the user clicked OK anyway. Its on the user's head if things go bad. 2) It is signed and Oracle can track down the original signer.
No (reputable) company would want to fall under #2 ever and they'd be loathe to fall under #1 -- $100 and a few hours of paperwork could be burdensome for an individual developer but a mere annoyance at best to even a small firm (unless they're literally on the edge of bankruptcy.)
At the end of the day though, my guess is that this is mostly about passing the buck. Oracle can 100% disclaim responsibility in #1 (well, we warned you!) They've got a bit more responsibility in #2 (in particular, they might have to show that they made a best-effort attempt at preventing malign companies from obtaining or worse, forging, a valid signature and also potentially take some steps to identify said company after the fact if required.)
#1 is particularly obnoxious for end users though. You get a bit of a cry wolf scenario (if Windows' equivalent is anything to go by) in the sense that you see just so many of those popups, probably more than 99% of which are harmless, that your average person would likely fail to recognize the one that isn't harmless. Whether that's a court-worthy argument or not is beyond my ken.
Its a nice thought, but history tends to teach us differently. Reveal yourself as gay? Probably 99% of the people you meet will be OK with that or at least mask their dislike. But that other 1% will do everything in their power to make your life miserable just because they can.
As usual, the few ruin good things for the many (especially if "the few" happen to be in a position of power of some sort and there's no shortage of those) so we're stuck living in a world where your choice isn't always between "hiding" and "acceptance," its between "hiding" and "daily abuse" (usually emotional but sometimes even physical abuse.)
I'd hazard to say that most people would make a distinction between standing up to a massive power imbalance and being successful compared to "ur m0m sux d0nk3y c0x!"
Even pretending to compare someone like Ghandi to your average internet troll is just a troll in itself I'm guessing!
Which is where the RNG boss kicks your ass. Based on the drops I was getting, I estimated it would take around a month per act to get good enough gear to progress through the next act (hell mode). Now I'm definitely not a top player so people who are better at dodging crap might not require quite as much gear in order to progress, but it'll still be a hell of a long haul to do what? See the same levels and ending sequence you saw in hell (and nightmare and normal.)
I personally think Blizzard is doing their usual swing from one extreme to the other. Currently the AH is almost required in order to kit out with a decent set of gear unless you happen to like killing demons enough to put a couple of months of your life into it.
The new plan is to remove the AH all together (and presumably this "loot 2.0" thing will be significantly improving the drop rates of gear your class cares about in order to compensate -- whether by increasing the drops overall or more likely by giving your class' stats a higher chance to be rolled.)
I think there's a great middle ground though -- make the drops high enough that using the AH isn't one-step-from-essential but still allow it to be there for people who are really having a hard time getting that last set piece or whatever. A 1% usage rate rather than a 99% usage rate (or the upcoming 0% usage rate.) Its how the AH is balanced in almost all MMOs and I don't see why it would be any different in D3 if they lined it up that way.
Sure some people with more money than time would still try to kit out completely through the AH but for the rest of us, we could use it as a last rather than the first resort for getting useful gear.
As for RMAH vs GAH.. I'm not a huge fan of the RMAH concept (though I understand Blizzard's wanting to nab a few extra $$$.) But its essentially legitimized gold selling and it frags the game's economy almost as badly. People who can afford it are simply better off than those who can't -- in one of the few arenas where the have-nots are supposed to be on equal ground (give or take a graphics card upgrade.)
Which takes the question to the next level of why do so few women want to be programmers. Or mechanics. Or any other field that's traditionally men-only.
Its not just the hiring practices. Its not just the college classes. How many girls in the 12-16 range do you see getting excited to sit down at a computer and try to hack together their first crappy game? That's where most guys start from my experience (at least those who become amazing programmers.)
No I'd hazard to say the problem starts a lot earlier than that. When Christmas comes around and little Johnny gets a box of Legos while Sally gets a Barbie doll, its already starting the cascade. Johnny gets to be creative and learn the (very very) basics of construction techniques while Sally gets to learn the (very very) basics of how to care for people.
Not that there's anything wrong with knowing how to care for people (especially with average age creeping steadily higher) but it could go a long way to explaining why K12 teachers, nurses, etc have a female majority while the more technical fields end up with a male majority.
Of course this is pretty much pulled out of my rear and as with anything regarding humans, I'm sure there's plenty of other factors involved and a million counter-examples.. but overall I really think there should be more research and education put into the concept of stereotypical children's toys when we're wanting to determine (or break!) stereotypes affecting the adults those children become.
Remember, "play" is part of our behavior for a reason, evolutionarily speaking.
People need to lighten up. It's a game. Not your real life.
Mostly I agree with you, but this attitude has got to go. This isn't a game of Risk when your little brother tosses the board after you sweep South America. These games are more than "just games" -- especially MMOs but aspects arise in any game with any sort of permanent tracking/image building.
They're hobbies that people dedicate hundreds or thousands of hours of their lives into. If you knew a model train enthusiast who sunk 5 years and a few thousand $ in an amazing train set, you'd probably sympathize with him if it got ruined. Why is it so hard to sympathize with someone who's sunk 5 years and a few thousand $ into building their game persona?
The "its just a game" attitude is one of the biggest roadblocks to gaming ever being seen as a mature industry. We won't have that as long as we implicitly assume gamers are in some way just being childish and that games wouldn't really matter to them if they "grew up." It might not be "real life" (whatever that's supposed to mean in our modern everything-online world) but its still their life.
Except if they do they get people bitching about how they're censoring things and violating first amendment rights (even though they're a private company and not subject to the first amendment, and frequently even if they're not a US company in the first place) and whatever other crap.
And that's assuming they can afford to employ enough moderators for it to matter.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I'm personally OK with them "censoring" trolls on their own forums and banning people for in-game harassment and whatever else they need to do but of course as always, its the vocal minority who make the most stink and get the most acknowledgement (especially if they have media ties and "company X is censoring me!" starts appearing in blogs and news sites.)
While I'm not trying to justify the bile some of the trolls spout, there is a grain of truth to the whole "noob" idea. Beginners make games less fun. Though I should rephrase that -- people who are too far out of your skill level make games no fun (regardless of which direction the deviation runs.)
TFA compared joining an online game to joining a local basketball club. That's completely bogus for the most part -- it would only be a fair comparison if you have a couple NBA-level players in the club. The new players are naturally going to be inferior. And not just a little inferior -- MASSIVELY so.
Then go ahead and match the new guys up against the NBA guys without any training -- in many games you start out with around the equivalent of knowing a basketball is round and little more -- and see how far those games go.
Of course game devs have realized this and several of them try to implement matching systems based on win ratios or whatever. Those work out fairly well with a large enough player base to draw from but in the realm of online games, that has to be a HUGE population -- probably on the order of 10s or 100s of thousands before you can consistently get a set of relatively even matches (without making the players wait too long for an opponent.) But for most games, especially indie games, if they even bother implementing such a system they rarely get the critical mass necessary to have it work well and we're back to square one.
Its a hard problem but I don't think we should just be dismissing the "noob" phenomena out of hand or we're effectively just doing exactly what the trolls are -- trying to deny the fact that people have a ramp-up time for any new endeavor. We're just being less obvious about it. Its a problem that needs to be dealt with on its own and not lumped into the general "trolls are jerks" category as in at least this one case, they also have a valid point fueling their hatred.
There's some truth to this but it comes with some logic behind it as well (all somewhat related and rarely will you likely find any one being the solo reason for any nerf):
1) Sampling bias. Most people don't complain when their class gets buffed. Most people DO complain when their class gets nerfed. So you tend to hear a LOT more about the nerfs than you do about the buffs.
2) Its easier to nerf 1 class than it is to buff 9 classes. These companies have a particular target in mind (whether it be time, # potions you use, minimum level to succeed, whatever) and if they raised all 9 to a new target it would require rebalancing the entire game, whereas bringing an outlier back into balance requires work on a single class.
3) Players are smart. There may be unforeseen interactions between skills or equipment that nobody (devs, QA or beta testers) realized prior to release that end up making specific characters far more powerful than expected when somebody discovers the magic button sequence. There are likely similar interactions that can make your character severely underpowered but those are self-compensating by the fact that nobody would bother using them except as a joke.
Class balance (or weapon balance or skill balance or whatever your game requires) is not an easy task. Unfortunately the people who bitch the loudest rarely have much concept of what the changes they're requesting would actually imply for the game beyond "I W4NTZ MOAR P0WARZ." At the very least, they generally forget that such buffs would just put pressure on everyone else to choose the same character makeup and they'd still be on a level playing field.
That said, nobody's perfect even when you've got the resources and (presumed) QA power of a juggernaut like Blizzard. They've fucked up before. They will again. Its human nature. They do have a tendency to make their new classes OP though (can't speak for other companies/games) and I'm not entirely convinced its by accident -- it could be partly in order to encourage a useful number of players to bother going to the hassle of class changing. Of course we've only got two sample points so far (DK, Monk) so take that suggestion with a gigantic grain of salt.
I'd throw in a healthy dose of "most people don't know what they fuck they want." Many of the "demands" tend to come in the form of "you nerfed my favorite cheap trick you bastards!" or occasionally "I can't purely dominate everyone give me a buff!"
The best part is that its usually the "hardcore" gamers who demand this stuff (I put it in quotes because its usually the second-tier hardcores -- those who put in a lot of hours but don't bother trying to understand what they're ranting about. The truly dedicated usually have a clue, though that isn't to imply that having a clue automatically negates your ability to be a jackass -- its just less common among people who use their brains before their mouths/keyboards.)
And then on the odd occasion when their wish is granted, they turn around and bitch that the game is too easy. The somehow want to both be able to completely dominate without trying and be challenged at the same time.. which in my (and I assume most peoples') worlds are rather mutually exclusive goals.
Of course this isn't everybody. Some people actually have thoughtful, insightful and otherwise useful input. Unfortunately those often get drowned out amongst all the spammers, trolls, asshats and other noisemakers who seem to make up the larger portion of online communities (at least posters.. lurkers by definition aren't being noisy.)
And the point you're missing is "for now." Who knows when the people developing your software will decide that TPM modules are prevalent enough to flip the switch on a large scale.
I don't think Stallman's rant is likely to come into play well.. ever. TPM's big draw is DRM capabilities. Things like enforcing auto-deleting emails can already be implemented without TPM if someone really wanted. As would internal-only encrypted emails. Both of which would require specialized email software whether or not TPM was involved. And both easily defeated by a screen capture.
Then again, like CSS and the PS3 keys -- if TPM ever becomes a big enough problem for people to care about on a practical level rather than a theoretical one, you can bet some clever hacker somewhere will figure out how to nab the master keys or otherwise interfere with the chip's operation.
In the meantime the rest of us will continue not really giving a crap since breaking DRM only has to be done by a single ripper and everyone else can happily continue torrenting the product unrestricted by any technical issues. And there's not much "they" can do about that one as long as general purpose computing exists in any capacity. As long as I'm able to write code, I'm able to write code that reads and plays an unencrypted mkv stream (or whatever the format de jour is by the time this all comes to be.)
Its only unreasonable to expect engine swaps because engines are big, heavy and expensive.
If you could go grab a new engine off the shelf for a couple hundred bucks and install by hand with a high chance of success like you can with computer components, you can bet that you'd see a hell of a lot more Ford Focuses with Porche engines in them (and/or even more effort to differentiate bolt patterns and whatnot as a form of vendor lock-in than they already do.)
The real problem is that you have no way to know if a phone has been poorly tested until you've already paid for it. If you're lucky you'll find the problems during the return period but those are pretty short these days (typically a week where I come from.)
Of course if you can restrain yourself from buying the newest and shiniest models the second they hit the floor you can simply read reviews like this a few weeks later -- but obviously somebody has to go first in order to write said reviews.
I'm kind of annoyed with my own phone right now -- or rather my provider. They were hailing it as their new flagship product (well non-Apple product) when I purchased it. Now three years later they have yet to release a single update for it even though HTC has released a port of Jellybean for the device and all they have to do is add their rebranding and network lock-in crap. Meanwhile all of the lesser phones released around the same time are getting the updates.
Why did they ignore the one phone the sales drone was talking up? Who knows (and it wasn't about price -- I was looking for a phone in that price range. Just a question of which one.) But I had no way to predict that my particular model would get the shaft while less expensive models would be treated well. I'll still have no way to predict that with whatever model I get on my next upgrade cycle.
The only thing I do know is that I won't be aiming for an expensive phone again -- if I'm going to risk getting shafted either way, I'm better off to risk it on a $150 investment rather than a $500 one since I'm obviously not getting much benefit for my additional dollars.
The free market works on greed. Stupidity is optional but generally won't affect the free market in itself.
Where it breaks down is when there are significant barriers to entry. A working free market requires no only established "competition," but also the ability for new competitors to enter the market if the incumbents are being fuckwads thus forcing them to either clean up their act or die trying.
Markets like phones (both land and cell,) cable TV, railways, power transmission, etc all have huge barriers to entry -- both legal and economic. It costs a hell of a lot to run thousands of miles of wire and even if you can afford it, getting the right-of-ways presents its own problems. Plus all of the legal challenges you'll face from incumbents trying to protect their market, eco groups trying to protect whatever (especially relevant if you're trying to run wire through non-urban areas,) crazies who just try to prevent everything purely for the sake of preventing things and so on.
And then once you work through all of that, you have to be able to convince customers that you're actually a big enough improvement over the established players that its worth their time and effort (and often money) to switch to your service.
The free market on such large scales (in almost any market) is rarely overly "free" -- its a very small number of very large companies that are often in collusion (if not direct legal collusion, at least under a shared understanding that rocking the boat too much has a chance of sinking everybody.) Most of the recent (past 10ish years or so) influx by small independent providers (in the phone and internet markets at least) is only available due to government intervention forcing the big providers to lease out lines/bandwidth/whatever at a rate low enough to enable competitors to make a profit. Its the very antithesis of a free market -- but regulation is the only practical solution to allow for competition since the big guys certainly wouldn't enable competitors like that of their own volition and the extremely high barriers to entry limit or even eliminate any possibility of real competitors getting started.
I don't know that I'd lump Vista in there. Yes it was a disaster at release but it was also a good faith (or as close to it as a company like Microsoft gets) attempt at solving many of the problems that people had been bitching about for years -- primarily security concerns. Most of the biggest complaints relating to Vista stemmed in some way or another from a program/driver/etc that worked under XP but blew up under Vista (often silently) due to UAC. Could they have done something better and more backwards-compatible than UAC? Perhaps. But that's easier to claim in retrospect and even if the issues became readily apparent during public beta, that's already a couple years too late to go back to the drawing board.
Metro on the other hand is a pure take-it-up-the-tailpipe-and-like-it attack on their customer base. They looked at the dwindling PC market and the growing mobile market and instead of trying to enter into the latter with a decent device on its own merits, they decided to try using their PC dominance as a sledge hammer and it failed spectacularly in a way that Vista never did (conceptually at least.. I don't know how the sales figures compare and probably wouldn't trust them anyway as those seem to be based more marketing hype than real numbers.)
Again by the time public beta is well.. public.. its far too late to start from scratch. That said, if we go back to the pre-releases and alphas and such you can hypothesize a difference in mentality -- "we'll solve this by release" vs "whatever its not like they have a choice" when issues were raised. (Then again "it doesn't work with nVidia drivers" is a lot more clear-cut than "I don't like the color of these tiles" so the latter becomes much easier to write off as nostalgia and unwarranted griping by the people who really wanted Metro to succeed.)
Using a tried and true story-telling formula in games is perfectly reasonable. It has to be stretched out some to compensate for the fact that games are generally a lot longer than movies (that is, more highs and lows between the beginning and the end to keep the excitement flowing.)
That's not the problem with modern AAA games. The problem with modern AAA games is that they're not just following a general formula or outline, they're actually to the point of basically cloning each other. All of them are essentially "earth toned hyper-realistic soldier simulator FPS." At least the ones people are usually talking about when making these claims (and justifiably so in a lot of ways.. COD, BF and similar consistently top the bestsellers lists. Of course the fact that people keep buying them suggests that perhaps this is what "we" want, for a suitably large sample of "we.")
One thing to note though is that much of the time, these guys are actually portrayed as alpha males -- they're just shy for her (or optionally women in general but quite often they're also playboys and she's "the one" to straighten them out.. with an easy line into the conflict phase to boot.) Essentially suggesting the fantasy of having an alpha male without the unfortunately common side effect of being an ass that alpha males often suffer from in real life.
As usual with generalizations, take it with a grain (or sometimes box) of salt when applying to any specific example.
1) The utter crap doesn't get imported, so you don't know about it. Mostly this.
2) Very few foreign film industries invest as much into single movies that Hollywood does. And the less money there is to lose, the more the people putting up the money are willing to risk it on a gamble. A lot of this but not as much as #1 -- even low budget movies are a significant investment (minus the very very low ones like Clerks or Blair Witch.. but the number of movies on that level of budget that are huge hits is staggeringly small. Even if you consistently make a profit on $50k movies, you're not going to get rich fast. 10% profit on a single $5m movie is equal to 100% profit on 5 $50k movies. At that scale, time becomes a measuring commodity as much as money.)
No. The new scripts are sitting in the producers' trash cans because new = risky = bad.
Meanwhile they're reading over the script for 14 Fast 27 Furious and pretty sure that they'll go for it if only the third race scene can be moved from London to Paris because they promised their mistress a trip to France and don't want it to show up on their personal credit card statement.
(Disclaimer: I don't know any actual producers. I'm not even sure if they're the ones responsible for the drudgery or if they're just cogs as well. Replace "producers" with appropriate title of drudge-peddlers.)
I'd say probably a combination of "can't see the forest for the trees" -- ie: so many reality shows and other such mindless crap that you tune out before you hit a good one (or realize that one you've already hit would be good.)
That and TV has been turned into a pretty horrible medium. Being fed 4-10% of a story each week and riddled with commercials at that makes watching even good series painful. I'm sure I'm still in a minority but certainly not alone in just waiting for the dvd/blu-ray releases of shows I want to watch. If I still remember them a year later when the discs are out.
That said, once those discs are available, I generally do enjoy series more than movies. 13-26x 42min episodes allows for a lot more story telling than a single 2 hour movie possibly can and with the discs I have the flexibility to watch them commercial free and on my schedule rather than the network's (which is usually as back-to-back as my free time allows.)
There of course is some downside to this as well. TV shows rarely have a budget anywhere close to a blockbuster movie and have to spread what they've got across a lot more time so the special effects tends to be pretty minimal and weak in comparison. They also run the risk of the writers running out of ideas mid-season and giving you a few hours of boring filler before the finale climax starts getting going. On the other hand, I can generally just avoid shows where that gets too obnoxious (having a year of reviews available makes it somewhat easier to judge whether a show is worth my money or not!)
Name one public media distribution system that isn't plastered with ads? People don't assume they have a right to ad-free viewing because the don't have that right. If you don't like the ads on a site you have the right to not visit that site and (so far) you have the freedom (not right) to attempt to block the ad.
But you have absolutely no right to tell the site owner that they aren't allowed to put an ad up on their own site any more than you can tell the cable company or radio station that they aren't allowed to include ads in their programming.
I think you are not speaking pedantically and are instead making an offhand reference to literal interpretation creationism.
Not offhand -- I mentioned on several occasions that I was referring specifically to literal creation theories (and even more specifically to the zealotous creationists that make the most media noise.) I have no problem with you or anyone else reconciling religion's ancient teachings with what modern science has taught us about the world. I have a problem when you claim that religion's teachings deny scientific fact.
As for your examples -- I have never claimed science is infallible. In fact I explicitly stated an example where that's not the case (Newton's gravity which is a hell of a lot more accurately measured than anything from the Earth's history -- and still found to be wrong 400 years later.)
The difference is that science can be proven wrong. The religious zealots I've been discussing on the other hand do not believe that the Bible (and to be specific since apparently reading between the lines is hard, I mean their interpretation of the Bible) can be proven wrong in even the slightest context.
God created scientists who claim God does not exist, therefore God does not exist? That's your argument in a nutshell.
Way to rip out context. No, God created scientists who claim specific parts of the Bible are incorrect. For those people who believe the Bible must be 100% correct, having proof to the contrary is equivalent "God does not exist." The scientists who came up with such a proof are not making that claim -- the zealots are the one claiming that the proof must be wrong because of this (false) logic.
If you want a good historic example -- the number zero was banned from mathematics for a few hundred years because some zealot in the church decided that zero == void == no God and since the assumption was that God existed, zero obviously could not exist (it was church ruled time after all -- anyone who didn't agree with that assumption was shown "proof" in the form of a whip if not a gallows.)
Nowadays not even the craziest zealot (well ok, maybe the craziest one) would believe zero == no God, but that wasn't just a whacky theory at one point it was a fundamental belief.
In science these are called "assumptions". Belief in things unseen. Nobody was around to measure the rate of radioactive decay 10,000 years ago, yet the assumption is that it was the same as what is measured today. From this faith comes the age of the Earth. Assumptions are all around us in science, yet few seem to understand (or just admit) their significance.
Absolutely, but this goes back to having the ability to prove the assumptions wrong. That is a critical component of any scientific theory and the major feature that distinguishes a scientific theory from a faith-based one. The faith-based one can by nature never be disproved which intrinsically makes it non-scientific. Few people and no legitimate scientists would claim science is complete and 100% correct.
No, it wouldn't take a great "margin of error" in a measurement that is based on flawed assumptions for it to be completely wrong.
Right, which is why you need multiple independent sources for verification. Yes its possible that they're ALL wrong but the more you have the less likely that possibility is. You're absolutely correct that we don't have a 100% accurate estimate for the age of our planet -- but we've got enough estimates from various sources that all put it way way beyond 6000 years that we can be fairly certain a literal interpretation of the Bible's timeline is incorrect.
Hm.. my quoting of your post is getting out of order, but I'm not going to worry about that on a day+ old thread, so continuing on...
And yet, scientists do this every day of their lives. Well, almost. If I
I can't disagree with your examples. What I disagree with is the premise the people haven't always been that fucking stupid. I think the biggest difference we're seeing isn't an increase in stupidity and irresponsibility (at least not a great disastrous one,) but an increase of general knowledge of these things.
Reality shows are to life what porn is to sex -- over-the-top appeals to the senses. Different senses generally but nonetheless. What they do have in common is that neither of them are particularly realistic. Sure if you look hard enough, you can find someone who fits a reality show to a T (hell they find those people somewhere..) but if you look hard enough you can find a girl who wants to fuck like a porn star too. But because they exist doesn't mean they're particularly common.
Lets take a fun example of humanity's "responsibility" and "common sense" over history -- The royal families in many nations! Inbred so much that their blood doesn't clot and half of them are functionally insane. Yet even without knowledge of genetics, practically any good animal breeder from any point in history could have told them the likely outcome of too much incest. And these are the people who ruled our nations, sacrificed our lives in wars the average person knew or cared nothing about and so on.
I'd wager to say that humanity has always been just as stupid as we are now, on average. We've just invented better ways (social, technological, political) for the extremely stupid to make a name for themselves in ways that were previously unheard of. Its just too bad that the extremely smart (some of whom built those "better ways!") rarely get the same public attention -- watching the act of inventing a better TV isn't nearly as exciting as watching some moron make an ass of themselves in front of it.)
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Reputation and accountability. This kind of "feature" isn't about preventing Walmart from exploiting children in some foreign country, its about preventing malware and ONLY about preventing malware.
If a piece of malware gets written under this scheme, there are two possibilities:
1) Its not signed and the user clicked OK anyway. Its on the user's head if things go bad.
2) It is signed and Oracle can track down the original signer.
No (reputable) company would want to fall under #2 ever and they'd be loathe to fall under #1 -- $100 and a few hours of paperwork could be burdensome for an individual developer but a mere annoyance at best to even a small firm (unless they're literally on the edge of bankruptcy.)
At the end of the day though, my guess is that this is mostly about passing the buck. Oracle can 100% disclaim responsibility in #1 (well, we warned you!) They've got a bit more responsibility in #2 (in particular, they might have to show that they made a best-effort attempt at preventing malign companies from obtaining or worse, forging, a valid signature and also potentially take some steps to identify said company after the fact if required.)
#1 is particularly obnoxious for end users though. You get a bit of a cry wolf scenario (if Windows' equivalent is anything to go by) in the sense that you see just so many of those popups, probably more than 99% of which are harmless, that your average person would likely fail to recognize the one that isn't harmless. Whether that's a court-worthy argument or not is beyond my ken.
Its a nice thought, but history tends to teach us differently. Reveal yourself as gay? Probably 99% of the people you meet will be OK with that or at least mask their dislike. But that other 1% will do everything in their power to make your life miserable just because they can.
As usual, the few ruin good things for the many (especially if "the few" happen to be in a position of power of some sort and there's no shortage of those) so we're stuck living in a world where your choice isn't always between "hiding" and "acceptance," its between "hiding" and "daily abuse" (usually emotional but sometimes even physical abuse.)
I'd hazard to say that most people would make a distinction between standing up to a massive power imbalance and being successful compared to "ur m0m sux d0nk3y c0x!"
Even pretending to compare someone like Ghandi to your average internet troll is just a troll in itself I'm guessing!
Which is where the RNG boss kicks your ass. Based on the drops I was getting, I estimated it would take around a month per act to get good enough gear to progress through the next act (hell mode). Now I'm definitely not a top player so people who are better at dodging crap might not require quite as much gear in order to progress, but it'll still be a hell of a long haul to do what? See the same levels and ending sequence you saw in hell (and nightmare and normal.)
I personally think Blizzard is doing their usual swing from one extreme to the other. Currently the AH is almost required in order to kit out with a decent set of gear unless you happen to like killing demons enough to put a couple of months of your life into it.
The new plan is to remove the AH all together (and presumably this "loot 2.0" thing will be significantly improving the drop rates of gear your class cares about in order to compensate -- whether by increasing the drops overall or more likely by giving your class' stats a higher chance to be rolled.)
I think there's a great middle ground though -- make the drops high enough that using the AH isn't one-step-from-essential but still allow it to be there for people who are really having a hard time getting that last set piece or whatever. A 1% usage rate rather than a 99% usage rate (or the upcoming 0% usage rate.) Its how the AH is balanced in almost all MMOs and I don't see why it would be any different in D3 if they lined it up that way.
Sure some people with more money than time would still try to kit out completely through the AH but for the rest of us, we could use it as a last rather than the first resort for getting useful gear.
As for RMAH vs GAH.. I'm not a huge fan of the RMAH concept (though I understand Blizzard's wanting to nab a few extra $$$.) But its essentially legitimized gold selling and it frags the game's economy almost as badly. People who can afford it are simply better off than those who can't -- in one of the few arenas where the have-nots are supposed to be on equal ground (give or take a graphics card upgrade.)
Which takes the question to the next level of why do so few women want to be programmers. Or mechanics. Or any other field that's traditionally men-only.
Its not just the hiring practices. Its not just the college classes. How many girls in the 12-16 range do you see getting excited to sit down at a computer and try to hack together their first crappy game? That's where most guys start from my experience (at least those who become amazing programmers.)
No I'd hazard to say the problem starts a lot earlier than that. When Christmas comes around and little Johnny gets a box of Legos while Sally gets a Barbie doll, its already starting the cascade. Johnny gets to be creative and learn the (very very) basics of construction techniques while Sally gets to learn the (very very) basics of how to care for people.
Not that there's anything wrong with knowing how to care for people (especially with average age creeping steadily higher) but it could go a long way to explaining why K12 teachers, nurses, etc have a female majority while the more technical fields end up with a male majority.
Of course this is pretty much pulled out of my rear and as with anything regarding humans, I'm sure there's plenty of other factors involved and a million counter-examples.. but overall I really think there should be more research and education put into the concept of stereotypical children's toys when we're wanting to determine (or break!) stereotypes affecting the adults those children become.
Remember, "play" is part of our behavior for a reason, evolutionarily speaking.
People need to lighten up. It's a game. Not your real life.
Mostly I agree with you, but this attitude has got to go. This isn't a game of Risk when your little brother tosses the board after you sweep South America. These games are more than "just games" -- especially MMOs but aspects arise in any game with any sort of permanent tracking/image building.
They're hobbies that people dedicate hundreds or thousands of hours of their lives into. If you knew a model train enthusiast who sunk 5 years and a few thousand $ in an amazing train set, you'd probably sympathize with him if it got ruined. Why is it so hard to sympathize with someone who's sunk 5 years and a few thousand $ into building their game persona?
The "its just a game" attitude is one of the biggest roadblocks to gaming ever being seen as a mature industry. We won't have that as long as we implicitly assume gamers are in some way just being childish and that games wouldn't really matter to them if they "grew up." It might not be "real life" (whatever that's supposed to mean in our modern everything-online world) but its still their life.
don't do anything about harassment and griefing
Except if they do they get people bitching about how they're censoring things and violating first amendment rights (even though they're a private company and not subject to the first amendment, and frequently even if they're not a US company in the first place) and whatever other crap.
And that's assuming they can afford to employ enough moderators for it to matter.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. I'm personally OK with them "censoring" trolls on their own forums and banning people for in-game harassment and whatever else they need to do but of course as always, its the vocal minority who make the most stink and get the most acknowledgement (especially if they have media ties and "company X is censoring me!" starts appearing in blogs and news sites.)
While I'm not trying to justify the bile some of the trolls spout, there is a grain of truth to the whole "noob" idea. Beginners make games less fun. Though I should rephrase that -- people who are too far out of your skill level make games no fun (regardless of which direction the deviation runs.)
TFA compared joining an online game to joining a local basketball club. That's completely bogus for the most part -- it would only be a fair comparison if you have a couple NBA-level players in the club. The new players are naturally going to be inferior. And not just a little inferior -- MASSIVELY so.
Then go ahead and match the new guys up against the NBA guys without any training -- in many games you start out with around the equivalent of knowing a basketball is round and little more -- and see how far those games go.
Of course game devs have realized this and several of them try to implement matching systems based on win ratios or whatever. Those work out fairly well with a large enough player base to draw from but in the realm of online games, that has to be a HUGE population -- probably on the order of 10s or 100s of thousands before you can consistently get a set of relatively even matches (without making the players wait too long for an opponent.) But for most games, especially indie games, if they even bother implementing such a system they rarely get the critical mass necessary to have it work well and we're back to square one.
Its a hard problem but I don't think we should just be dismissing the "noob" phenomena out of hand or we're effectively just doing exactly what the trolls are -- trying to deny the fact that people have a ramp-up time for any new endeavor. We're just being less obvious about it. Its a problem that needs to be dealt with on its own and not lumped into the general "trolls are jerks" category as in at least this one case, they also have a valid point fueling their hatred.
There's some truth to this but it comes with some logic behind it as well (all somewhat related and rarely will you likely find any one being the solo reason for any nerf):
1) Sampling bias. Most people don't complain when their class gets buffed. Most people DO complain when their class gets nerfed. So you tend to hear a LOT more about the nerfs than you do about the buffs.
2) Its easier to nerf 1 class than it is to buff 9 classes. These companies have a particular target in mind (whether it be time, # potions you use, minimum level to succeed, whatever) and if they raised all 9 to a new target it would require rebalancing the entire game, whereas bringing an outlier back into balance requires work on a single class.
3) Players are smart. There may be unforeseen interactions between skills or equipment that nobody (devs, QA or beta testers) realized prior to release that end up making specific characters far more powerful than expected when somebody discovers the magic button sequence. There are likely similar interactions that can make your character severely underpowered but those are self-compensating by the fact that nobody would bother using them except as a joke.
Class balance (or weapon balance or skill balance or whatever your game requires) is not an easy task. Unfortunately the people who bitch the loudest rarely have much concept of what the changes they're requesting would actually imply for the game beyond "I W4NTZ MOAR P0WARZ." At the very least, they generally forget that such buffs would just put pressure on everyone else to choose the same character makeup and they'd still be on a level playing field.
That said, nobody's perfect even when you've got the resources and (presumed) QA power of a juggernaut like Blizzard. They've fucked up before. They will again. Its human nature. They do have a tendency to make their new classes OP though (can't speak for other companies/games) and I'm not entirely convinced its by accident -- it could be partly in order to encourage a useful number of players to bother going to the hassle of class changing. Of course we've only got two sample points so far (DK, Monk) so take that suggestion with a gigantic grain of salt.
I'd throw in a healthy dose of "most people don't know what they fuck they want." Many of the "demands" tend to come in the form of "you nerfed my favorite cheap trick you bastards!" or occasionally "I can't purely dominate everyone give me a buff!"
The best part is that its usually the "hardcore" gamers who demand this stuff (I put it in quotes because its usually the second-tier hardcores -- those who put in a lot of hours but don't bother trying to understand what they're ranting about. The truly dedicated usually have a clue, though that isn't to imply that having a clue automatically negates your ability to be a jackass -- its just less common among people who use their brains before their mouths/keyboards.)
And then on the odd occasion when their wish is granted, they turn around and bitch that the game is too easy. The somehow want to both be able to completely dominate without trying and be challenged at the same time.. which in my (and I assume most peoples') worlds are rather mutually exclusive goals.
Of course this isn't everybody. Some people actually have thoughtful, insightful and otherwise useful input. Unfortunately those often get drowned out amongst all the spammers, trolls, asshats and other noisemakers who seem to make up the larger portion of online communities (at least posters.. lurkers by definition aren't being noisy.)
And the point you're missing is "for now." Who knows when the people developing your software will decide that TPM modules are prevalent enough to flip the switch on a large scale.
I don't think Stallman's rant is likely to come into play well.. ever. TPM's big draw is DRM capabilities. Things like enforcing auto-deleting emails can already be implemented without TPM if someone really wanted. As would internal-only encrypted emails. Both of which would require specialized email software whether or not TPM was involved. And both easily defeated by a screen capture.
Then again, like CSS and the PS3 keys -- if TPM ever becomes a big enough problem for people to care about on a practical level rather than a theoretical one, you can bet some clever hacker somewhere will figure out how to nab the master keys or otherwise interfere with the chip's operation.
In the meantime the rest of us will continue not really giving a crap since breaking DRM only has to be done by a single ripper and everyone else can happily continue torrenting the product unrestricted by any technical issues. And there's not much "they" can do about that one as long as general purpose computing exists in any capacity. As long as I'm able to write code, I'm able to write code that reads and plays an unencrypted mkv stream (or whatever the format de jour is by the time this all comes to be.)
Its only unreasonable to expect engine swaps because engines are big, heavy and expensive.
If you could go grab a new engine off the shelf for a couple hundred bucks and install by hand with a high chance of success like you can with computer components, you can bet that you'd see a hell of a lot more Ford Focuses with Porche engines in them (and/or even more effort to differentiate bolt patterns and whatnot as a form of vendor lock-in than they already do.)
The car/computer analogy only goes so far.
The real problem is that you have no way to know if a phone has been poorly tested until you've already paid for it. If you're lucky you'll find the problems during the return period but those are pretty short these days (typically a week where I come from.)
Of course if you can restrain yourself from buying the newest and shiniest models the second they hit the floor you can simply read reviews like this a few weeks later -- but obviously somebody has to go first in order to write said reviews.
I'm kind of annoyed with my own phone right now -- or rather my provider. They were hailing it as their new flagship product (well non-Apple product) when I purchased it. Now three years later they have yet to release a single update for it even though HTC has released a port of Jellybean for the device and all they have to do is add their rebranding and network lock-in crap. Meanwhile all of the lesser phones released around the same time are getting the updates.
Why did they ignore the one phone the sales drone was talking up? Who knows (and it wasn't about price -- I was looking for a phone in that price range. Just a question of which one.) But I had no way to predict that my particular model would get the shaft while less expensive models would be treated well. I'll still have no way to predict that with whatever model I get on my next upgrade cycle.
The only thing I do know is that I won't be aiming for an expensive phone again -- if I'm going to risk getting shafted either way, I'm better off to risk it on a $150 investment rather than a $500 one since I'm obviously not getting much benefit for my additional dollars.
The free market works on greed. Stupidity is optional but generally won't affect the free market in itself.
Where it breaks down is when there are significant barriers to entry. A working free market requires no only established "competition," but also the ability for new competitors to enter the market if the incumbents are being fuckwads thus forcing them to either clean up their act or die trying.
Markets like phones (both land and cell,) cable TV, railways, power transmission, etc all have huge barriers to entry -- both legal and economic. It costs a hell of a lot to run thousands of miles of wire and even if you can afford it, getting the right-of-ways presents its own problems. Plus all of the legal challenges you'll face from incumbents trying to protect their market, eco groups trying to protect whatever (especially relevant if you're trying to run wire through non-urban areas,) crazies who just try to prevent everything purely for the sake of preventing things and so on.
And then once you work through all of that, you have to be able to convince customers that you're actually a big enough improvement over the established players that its worth their time and effort (and often money) to switch to your service.
The free market on such large scales (in almost any market) is rarely overly "free" -- its a very small number of very large companies that are often in collusion (if not direct legal collusion, at least under a shared understanding that rocking the boat too much has a chance of sinking everybody.) Most of the recent (past 10ish years or so) influx by small independent providers (in the phone and internet markets at least) is only available due to government intervention forcing the big providers to lease out lines/bandwidth/whatever at a rate low enough to enable competitors to make a profit. Its the very antithesis of a free market -- but regulation is the only practical solution to allow for competition since the big guys certainly wouldn't enable competitors like that of their own volition and the extremely high barriers to entry limit or even eliminate any possibility of real competitors getting started.
But he's always having halting problems.
I don't know that I'd lump Vista in there. Yes it was a disaster at release but it was also a good faith (or as close to it as a company like Microsoft gets) attempt at solving many of the problems that people had been bitching about for years -- primarily security concerns. Most of the biggest complaints relating to Vista stemmed in some way or another from a program/driver/etc that worked under XP but blew up under Vista (often silently) due to UAC. Could they have done something better and more backwards-compatible than UAC? Perhaps. But that's easier to claim in retrospect and even if the issues became readily apparent during public beta, that's already a couple years too late to go back to the drawing board.
Metro on the other hand is a pure take-it-up-the-tailpipe-and-like-it attack on their customer base. They looked at the dwindling PC market and the growing mobile market and instead of trying to enter into the latter with a decent device on its own merits, they decided to try using their PC dominance as a sledge hammer and it failed spectacularly in a way that Vista never did (conceptually at least.. I don't know how the sales figures compare and probably wouldn't trust them anyway as those seem to be based more marketing hype than real numbers.)
Again by the time public beta is well.. public.. its far too late to start from scratch. That said, if we go back to the pre-releases and alphas and such you can hypothesize a difference in mentality -- "we'll solve this by release" vs "whatever its not like they have a choice" when issues were raised. (Then again "it doesn't work with nVidia drivers" is a lot more clear-cut than "I don't like the color of these tiles" so the latter becomes much easier to write off as nostalgia and unwarranted griping by the people who really wanted Metro to succeed.)
Using a tried and true story-telling formula in games is perfectly reasonable. It has to be stretched out some to compensate for the fact that games are generally a lot longer than movies (that is, more highs and lows between the beginning and the end to keep the excitement flowing.)
That's not the problem with modern AAA games. The problem with modern AAA games is that they're not just following a general formula or outline, they're actually to the point of basically cloning each other. All of them are essentially "earth toned hyper-realistic soldier simulator FPS." At least the ones people are usually talking about when making these claims (and justifiably so in a lot of ways.. COD, BF and similar consistently top the bestsellers lists. Of course the fact that people keep buying them suggests that perhaps this is what "we" want, for a suitably large sample of "we.")
The chic flick universe, apparently!
One thing to note though is that much of the time, these guys are actually portrayed as alpha males -- they're just shy for her (or optionally women in general but quite often they're also playboys and she's "the one" to straighten them out.. with an easy line into the conflict phase to boot.) Essentially suggesting the fantasy of having an alpha male without the unfortunately common side effect of being an ass that alpha males often suffer from in real life.
As usual with generalizations, take it with a grain (or sometimes box) of salt when applying to any specific example.
1) The utter crap doesn't get imported, so you don't know about it. Mostly this.
2) Very few foreign film industries invest as much into single movies that Hollywood does. And the less money there is to lose, the more the people putting up the money are willing to risk it on a gamble. A lot of this but not as much as #1 -- even low budget movies are a significant investment (minus the very very low ones like Clerks or Blair Witch.. but the number of movies on that level of budget that are huge hits is staggeringly small. Even if you consistently make a profit on $50k movies, you're not going to get rich fast. 10% profit on a single $5m movie is equal to 100% profit on 5 $50k movies. At that scale, time becomes a measuring commodity as much as money.)
The script wasn't the film's main selling point.
No. The new scripts are sitting in the producers' trash cans because new = risky = bad.
Meanwhile they're reading over the script for 14 Fast 27 Furious and pretty sure that they'll go for it if only the third race scene can be moved from London to Paris because they promised their mistress a trip to France and don't want it to show up on their personal credit card statement.
(Disclaimer: I don't know any actual producers. I'm not even sure if they're the ones responsible for the drudgery or if they're just cogs as well. Replace "producers" with appropriate title of drudge-peddlers.)
I'd say probably a combination of "can't see the forest for the trees" -- ie: so many reality shows and other such mindless crap that you tune out before you hit a good one (or realize that one you've already hit would be good.)
That and TV has been turned into a pretty horrible medium. Being fed 4-10% of a story each week and riddled with commercials at that makes watching even good series painful. I'm sure I'm still in a minority but certainly not alone in just waiting for the dvd/blu-ray releases of shows I want to watch. If I still remember them a year later when the discs are out.
That said, once those discs are available, I generally do enjoy series more than movies. 13-26x 42min episodes allows for a lot more story telling than a single 2 hour movie possibly can and with the discs I have the flexibility to watch them commercial free and on my schedule rather than the network's (which is usually as back-to-back as my free time allows.)
There of course is some downside to this as well. TV shows rarely have a budget anywhere close to a blockbuster movie and have to spread what they've got across a lot more time so the special effects tends to be pretty minimal and weak in comparison. They also run the risk of the writers running out of ideas mid-season and giving you a few hours of boring filler before the finale climax starts getting going. On the other hand, I can generally just avoid shows where that gets too obnoxious (having a year of reviews available makes it somewhat easier to judge whether a show is worth my money or not!)
Name one public media distribution system that isn't plastered with ads? People don't assume they have a right to ad-free viewing because the don't have that right. If you don't like the ads on a site you have the right to not visit that site and (so far) you have the freedom (not right) to attempt to block the ad.
But you have absolutely no right to tell the site owner that they aren't allowed to put an ad up on their own site any more than you can tell the cable company or radio station that they aren't allowed to include ads in their programming.
I think you are not speaking pedantically and are instead making an offhand reference to literal interpretation creationism.
Not offhand -- I mentioned on several occasions that I was referring specifically to literal creation theories (and even more specifically to the zealotous creationists that make the most media noise.) I have no problem with you or anyone else reconciling religion's ancient teachings with what modern science has taught us about the world. I have a problem when you claim that religion's teachings deny scientific fact.
As for your examples -- I have never claimed science is infallible. In fact I explicitly stated an example where that's not the case (Newton's gravity which is a hell of a lot more accurately measured than anything from the Earth's history -- and still found to be wrong 400 years later.)
The difference is that science can be proven wrong. The religious zealots I've been discussing on the other hand do not believe that the Bible (and to be specific since apparently reading between the lines is hard, I mean their interpretation of the Bible) can be proven wrong in even the slightest context.
God created scientists who claim God does not exist, therefore God does not exist? That's your argument in a nutshell.
Way to rip out context. No, God created scientists who claim specific parts of the Bible are incorrect. For those people who believe the Bible must be 100% correct, having proof to the contrary is equivalent "God does not exist." The scientists who came up with such a proof are not making that claim -- the zealots are the one claiming that the proof must be wrong because of this (false) logic.
If you want a good historic example -- the number zero was banned from mathematics for a few hundred years because some zealot in the church decided that zero == void == no God and since the assumption was that God existed, zero obviously could not exist (it was church ruled time after all -- anyone who didn't agree with that assumption was shown "proof" in the form of a whip if not a gallows.)
Nowadays not even the craziest zealot (well ok, maybe the craziest one) would believe zero == no God, but that wasn't just a whacky theory at one point it was a fundamental belief.
In science these are called "assumptions". Belief in things unseen. Nobody was around to measure the rate of radioactive decay 10,000 years ago, yet the assumption is that it was the same as what is measured today. From this faith comes the age of the Earth. Assumptions are all around us in science, yet few seem to understand (or just admit) their significance.
Absolutely, but this goes back to having the ability to prove the assumptions wrong. That is a critical component of any scientific theory and the major feature that distinguishes a scientific theory from a faith-based one. The faith-based one can by nature never be disproved which intrinsically makes it non-scientific. Few people and no legitimate scientists would claim science is complete and 100% correct.
No, it wouldn't take a great "margin of error" in a measurement that is based on flawed assumptions for it to be completely wrong.
Right, which is why you need multiple independent sources for verification. Yes its possible that they're ALL wrong but the more you have the less likely that possibility is. You're absolutely correct that we don't have a 100% accurate estimate for the age of our planet -- but we've got enough estimates from various sources that all put it way way beyond 6000 years that we can be fairly certain a literal interpretation of the Bible's timeline is incorrect.
Hm.. my quoting of your post is getting out of order, but I'm not going to worry about that on a day+ old thread, so continuing on...
And yet, scientists do this every day of their lives. Well, almost. If I
I can't disagree with your examples. What I disagree with is the premise the people haven't always been that fucking stupid. I think the biggest difference we're seeing isn't an increase in stupidity and irresponsibility (at least not a great disastrous one,) but an increase of general knowledge of these things.
Reality shows are to life what porn is to sex -- over-the-top appeals to the senses. Different senses generally but nonetheless. What they do have in common is that neither of them are particularly realistic. Sure if you look hard enough, you can find someone who fits a reality show to a T (hell they find those people somewhere..) but if you look hard enough you can find a girl who wants to fuck like a porn star too. But because they exist doesn't mean they're particularly common.
Lets take a fun example of humanity's "responsibility" and "common sense" over history -- The royal families in many nations! Inbred so much that their blood doesn't clot and half of them are functionally insane. Yet even without knowledge of genetics, practically any good animal breeder from any point in history could have told them the likely outcome of too much incest. And these are the people who ruled our nations, sacrificed our lives in wars the average person knew or cared nothing about and so on.
I'd wager to say that humanity has always been just as stupid as we are now, on average. We've just invented better ways (social, technological, political) for the extremely stupid to make a name for themselves in ways that were previously unheard of. Its just too bad that the extremely smart (some of whom built those "better ways!") rarely get the same public attention -- watching the act of inventing a better TV isn't nearly as exciting as watching some moron make an ass of themselves in front of it.)