Since you seem to know better than all of us "morons" complaining about the endings, perhaps you could step off your pedestal for a second and enlighten us? Just how were the endings so very different?
It seems that in every case, no matter how many war assets you have or what is chosen at the end, the mass effect network is destroyed. Synthetics survive regardless. Your crew is randomly stranded on another planet. No further details are given about the force behind the reapers or why synthetics and organics cannot live together.
A huge point actually is that even if you broker peace between the quarian and the geth, it has absolutely no effect on this major plot point.
That's the issue people have. Not with the artists choice to tell the story and end the mass relays. But with the decisions made over 3 games played over a minimum of 60 hours are essentially inconsequential.
Tell me. Does a female Renegade shephered who saved Wrex, Exiled Tali, destroyed the heretics, brokered peace between the quarian and the geth, romanced liara, let kaidan die, destroyed the collector base have a different ending from a male paragon shepherd who let wrex die, prevented tali from being exiled, chose the geth over the quarian, saved the collector base, romanced ashley and chose to control the reapers?
Because if the endings are different, I, and thousands of others can not reasonably see how. That is why we feel cheated. That is why we feel the product does not deliver as it was advertised.
A revamp of all JS code. Minimialize it. It should be fast and snappy, not.....what it is. For example, no code needs to be run when I just want to close the tab.
UNICODE support. Slashdot is US Centric. It's users are not. Even if they were, not all stories are.
Don't require manual HTML paragraphs to break up text. Allow HTML, but don't mandate it just to get readable text.
Automatically expand or disallow URL shortness. They are not needed and only used for malicious purposes on this site.
Submit stories of note. Stop submitting slashvertisments or trolling articles to get hits. Incorporate some basic editing. Hire an editor if necessary.
I drink about a liter of soda a day and have done for almost 10 years, and don't seem to have any health effects. Still, as I get older, I have tried looking into the actual known health affects past all the FUD. I would really appreciate a succinct summary of known harmful effects from soda intake, if you have time/can be bothered. Cheers,
Not at all. I've lived in the US and spent significant amounts of time in Austin and other places. As well I have many friends from there.
Just because you don't like my opinion does not make it invalid. It's kind of hard to quantify anyway. My point is that as a city Austin strives (and often succeeds) to embody the formulaic cool that Apple has become associated with.
Not Texan or even American, just widely traveled through the US. I don't hate Austin, but that is very much the impression I and many people took away from there.
I don't think there is a city in the USA that is more fitting to liking Apple. Liberal and progressive yet at the same time having looking and appearing cool as priorities.
In a city that is in part defined by adherence to trends, Apple having a huge base there is fitting. Very fitting.
I'm not American. I don't think it is seriously ignorant for someone not from the US to know the history behind the term Columbia . Assuming it was related to the capital seemed reasonable.
If anything, I would say you are showing your ignorance by assuming that most people would know the history related to that term.
By that flawed logic, an African is always someone from South Africa too.
It isn't flawed logic, it's how things are. Given how many people don't have a problem understanding the current system, it is anything but flawed.
You can't compare Africa and the Americas in this context. While I get your point, it is irrelevant. It would eb relevant for an argument if we were designing how people should refer to citizens and countries/continents, but we are not. We are talking about how people do refer to citizens and countries and currently there is no ambiguity.
How about someone from either North or South America?
You refer to people of the Americas. Which is sufficient for the rare times that you need to refer to the people from two continents as one group.
If you want to use a term for citizens and residents of USA which isn't based on an abbreviation of "United States of America", you already have one: Columbian.
That makes as much sense as calling South Africans Capetownians. It's beyond dumb.
Americans is the accepted term. Using any other term like USian or USAn is idiotic and tries to solve a problem that does not exist.
It is always clear from context that Americans refers to people from the USA, not lease because it is the only country that has the word America in it's title. Mexico doesn't count as we are talking about English here.
In the rare times you need to refer to people from both north and south America it will be clear from the context, otherwise prefixing north or south to Americans makes it clear.
There is really no problem to be solves except by pissy PC people who think the US somehow claimed a title it doesn't deserve.
disclaimer: not american in any sense of the word.
To play devils advocate, given the lack of opposition to the bill in Ireland, what makes you think the Irish politicians are not representing the public in this case?
If only 80,000 protested then that means the majority is either OK are at least apathetic towards the legislation.
In that case, there is nothing wrong with it going ahead. The problem lies with the rest of the population who didn't do their part to protest, not the government passing a law.
The marginal cost of distribution can be near zero, for sure. The fixed costs, however, certainly aren't.
They can be. Consider the situation of the india game developer who uploads his game via p2p or to a website and that's it. That is his only cost of distribution which depending on his internet plan, would not have been an additional cost. Just one example.
I am not sure why you mentioned the profit of Avatar and GTA4 as points. I don't really see what it has to do with my point that an economic model where copying with 0 cost is not possible, need not be the same when copying with 0 cost is possible. For every game someone downloads from steam, that's 1 less case, disc and manual that has to be manufactured, shrink-wrapped and shipped. The digital revolution changes things. The old model is not necessarily applicable in its entirety.
At the end of the day, any way you dress it up, someone is spending real time and money to produce this content. If someone else is enjoying that content but doesn't contribute anything in return, that's a one-sided bargain.
I feel you have ignored my point that I have made a few times above, so let me reiterate it. Just because someone is not contribute back to the copyright holder, does not mean they are not contributing back to society. If I can't afford Photoshop because I'm below the poverty line and pirate it, you could argue that is bad for Adobe. If I learn skills and then go on to be a highly paid professional who who offers a useful service, gets people to spend their money and then buys every subsequent version of CS, I would argue that is a very positive thing for society. So much that it unquestionably trumps Adobe not getting money for the copy I pirated which I would not have EVER bought in the first place.
I don't see how to back that argument up with "sources"; it's an appeal to basic human decency and sense of fair play.
This is part of the problem. Too many people argue from emotion (not accusing you of doing so) and find it hard to look at piracy as anything other than stealing. Anecdotally it seems most of the new generation don't share this view. The question then becomes if piracy for personal use causes damage or is perhaps a good thing. Morals and emotion should be left out of it, IMHO.
In other words, they acknowledged that someone was losing out big time, but it wasn't in their country and meant their own people could spend more of their entertainment budget within their own economy, so they didn't care.
I would guess we are talking about the same study, although I don't know where you got that from. I didn't get the impression that they had that selfish attitude. I understood it as they accepted piracy is not doing any damage so saw no reason to allow it. Could you perhaps quote a passage that supports your interpretation?
Also, PC Magazine reports that the government then looked at 22 studies analyzing the effects of piracy on the music industry, with five showing a positive impact on sales and three showing no correlation [pcmag.com]. Would anyone like to guess what the other 14/22 studies showed?
I think you may have linked to the wrong thing. That link goes to a story about swiss keeping downloads legal.
In Canada, it is legal to download material for personal use, but it is still illegal to upload it. They're just making the person doing the sharing responsible, which is fair enough.
Well, I see that as a type of semantics. Back before P2P stuff I did everything through downloading only. The fact is in canada I can download say, Adobe CS5 and Avatar from Rapidshare and it is legal. That is what I think is important and good.
The link you provided for the Netherlands doesn't seem to say what you claim it does. I think maybe you posted the wrong link?
Firstly, it breaks the fundamental incentive underlying our entire economy: you have to produce value to earn money before you can enjoy value produced by other people when you spend that money.
I have two problems with this line of reasoning (not mocking yo, sorry if it sounds that way).
First, as I said before, old ways of thinking don't necessarily apply to the new digital world, where distribution and/or manufacturing costs can be 0, or negligible.
Secondly, Our society does not necessarily reward producing value with money. lottery winners, heirs, people on welfare etc. Having money by no means you have produced or contributed something useful.
Secondly, we have only someone's word for it that they would never really have paid for something even if there was no other way to enjoy it. I find that claim preposterous in many cases.
Well, that's much harder to prove. I know that a lot of the movies I downloaded there is no way in hell I would have paid for. I got them because I was curious or simply wanted to pass the time. I I couldn't download then I would do something else. There is simply no way in hell a lot of the stuff I choose to waste my time with is even worth renting for $1 from redbox. Likewise with some games I play, I have absolutely zero interest on playing online. When a game is $70 with a focus on multiplayer and I only want to play the single player campaign that is about 5 hours long, there is no chance I will ever pay for that. If they offered the campaign separately then I would.
If piracy is decriminalised, then surely there is no such thing as piracy any more by definition, so I don't know what you mean here.
It isn't that simple. If Switzerland decriminalized piracy that doesn't mean corporations in the US don't consider it piracy. You can still infringe copyright without permission from the copyright holder, even if you can't be held accountable for doing so.
You've made similar claims several times in this discussion. There are more than 150 members of the World Trade Organisation, including pretty much the entire developed world, and under TRIPS all of those have basic minimum standards for things like legal copyright protections. There are only 200 or so countries in the world. So where is it that you claim piracy is legal, and how do their creative and consumption economies look compared to places like the US and Europe?
Their creative and consumption economies are not impacted by piracy, as that was often the reason to make it legal in the first place.
The trouble is, as any researcher can tell you, what people say and what they do are frequently different things, whether intentionally or otherwise.
Oh, sure. Except we have overwhelming evidence that people will still pay for stuff when it is offered for free. Look at the various games or CDs released for free or without any DRM, people still pay for it. They have a choice not to and still chose to do so, to the point that the content creator can make a nice profit.
The only way to know for sure what people consider worth paying for is to give them no choice but to pay for it if they want it and see who pays. That will tell you, by definition, who really thinks it's worth the asking price.
Done and done.
They're only making those millions because of all the people who actually pay to see the movie or play the game. The pir
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any kind of evidence for people being in prison for their thoughts? I'd be interested. Thanks.
Since you seem to know better than all of us "morons" complaining about the endings, perhaps you could step off your pedestal for a second and enlighten us? Just how were the endings so very different?
It seems that in every case, no matter how many war assets you have or what is chosen at the end, the mass effect network is destroyed. Synthetics survive regardless. Your crew is randomly stranded on another planet. No further details are given about the force behind the reapers or why synthetics and organics cannot live together.
A huge point actually is that even if you broker peace between the quarian and the geth, it has absolutely no effect on this major plot point.
That's the issue people have. Not with the artists choice to tell the story and end the mass relays. But with the decisions made over 3 games played over a minimum of 60 hours are essentially inconsequential.
Tell me. Does a female Renegade shephered who saved Wrex, Exiled Tali, destroyed the heretics, brokered peace between the quarian and the geth, romanced liara, let kaidan die, destroyed the collector base have a different ending from a male paragon shepherd who let wrex die, prevented tali from being exiled, chose the geth over the quarian, saved the collector base, romanced ashley and chose to control the reapers?
Because if the endings are different, I, and thousands of others can not reasonably see how. That is why we feel cheated. That is why we feel the product does not deliver as it was advertised.
Well...then I must be doing something wrong. This should be a new paragraph. But it clearly is not.
Frankfurt to Montreal does not cross US airspace.
I drink about a liter of soda a day and have done for almost 10 years, and don't seem to have any health effects. Still, as I get older, I have tried looking into the actual known health affects past all the FUD. I would really appreciate a succinct summary of known harmful effects from soda intake, if you have time/can be bothered. Cheers,
Just because you don't like my opinion does not make it invalid. It's kind of hard to quantify anyway. My point is that as a city Austin strives (and often succeeds) to embody the formulaic cool that Apple has become associated with.
Good luck with that. Iran isn't to be underestimated here.
Not Texan or even American, just widely traveled through the US. I don't hate Austin, but that is very much the impression I and many people took away from there.
I don't think there is a city in the USA that is more fitting to liking Apple. Liberal and progressive yet at the same time having looking and appearing cool as priorities.
In a city that is in part defined by adherence to trends, Apple having a huge base there is fitting. Very fitting.
That people can be hurt doing foolish thing does not a sport make.
Owen Hart didn't die from the sport, he died because of a stunt that went wrong. The "sport" is a joke.
I'm not American. I don't think it is seriously ignorant for someone not from the US to know the history behind the term Columbia . Assuming it was related to the capital seemed reasonable.
If anything, I would say you are showing your ignorance by assuming that most people would know the history related to that term.
By that flawed logic, an African is always someone from South Africa too.
It isn't flawed logic, it's how things are. Given how many people don't have a problem understanding the current system, it is anything but flawed.
You can't compare Africa and the Americas in this context. While I get your point, it is irrelevant. It would eb relevant for an argument if we were designing how people should refer to citizens and countries/continents, but we are not. We are talking about how people do refer to citizens and countries and currently there is no ambiguity.
How about someone from either North or South America?
You refer to people of the Americas. Which is sufficient for the rare times that you need to refer to the people from two continents as one group.
If you want to use a term for citizens and residents of USA which isn't based on an abbreviation of "United States of America", you already have one: Columbian.
That makes as much sense as calling South Africans Capetownians. It's beyond dumb.
Then that is your fault for using a well accepted term in a different manner without explaining the difference.
Americans is the accepted term. Using any other term like USian or USAn is idiotic and tries to solve a problem that does not exist.
It is always clear from context that Americans refers to people from the USA, not lease because it is the only country that has the word America in it's title. Mexico doesn't count as we are talking about English here.
In the rare times you need to refer to people from both north and south America it will be clear from the context, otherwise prefixing north or south to Americans makes it clear.
There is really no problem to be solves except by pissy PC people who think the US somehow claimed a title it doesn't deserve.
disclaimer: not american in any sense of the word.
He is 100% right.
It's a representative democracy, not a direct democracy.
To play devils advocate, given the lack of opposition to the bill in Ireland, what makes you think the Irish politicians are not representing the public in this case?
How is the Vatican any different from other long-lived companies? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
Ireland has a population of about 5 million.
If only 80,000 protested then that means the majority is either OK are at least apathetic towards the legislation.
In that case, there is nothing wrong with it going ahead. The problem lies with the rest of the population who didn't do their part to protest, not the government passing a law.
Yet another strike against democracy.
It's not getting old. It's lack of practice.
The marginal cost of distribution can be near zero, for sure. The fixed costs, however, certainly aren't.
They can be. Consider the situation of the india game developer who uploads his game via p2p or to a website and that's it. That is his only cost of distribution which depending on his internet plan, would not have been an additional cost. Just one example.
I am not sure why you mentioned the profit of Avatar and GTA4 as points. I don't really see what it has to do with my point that an economic model where copying with 0 cost is not possible, need not be the same when copying with 0 cost is possible. For every game someone downloads from steam, that's 1 less case, disc and manual that has to be manufactured, shrink-wrapped and shipped. The digital revolution changes things. The old model is not necessarily applicable in its entirety.
At the end of the day, any way you dress it up, someone is spending real time and money to produce this content. If someone else is enjoying that content but doesn't contribute anything in return, that's a one-sided bargain.
I feel you have ignored my point that I have made a few times above, so let me reiterate it. Just because someone is not contribute back to the copyright holder, does not mean they are not contributing back to society. If I can't afford Photoshop because I'm below the poverty line and pirate it, you could argue that is bad for Adobe. If I learn skills and then go on to be a highly paid professional who who offers a useful service, gets people to spend their money and then buys every subsequent version of CS, I would argue that is a very positive thing for society. So much that it unquestionably trumps Adobe not getting money for the copy I pirated which I would not have EVER bought in the first place.
I don't see how to back that argument up with "sources"; it's an appeal to basic human decency and sense of fair play.
This is part of the problem. Too many people argue from emotion (not accusing you of doing so) and find it hard to look at piracy as anything other than stealing. Anecdotally it seems most of the new generation don't share this view. The question then becomes if piracy for personal use causes damage or is perhaps a good thing. Morals and emotion should be left out of it, IMHO.
In other words, they acknowledged that someone was losing out big time, but it wasn't in their country and meant their own people could spend more of their entertainment budget within their own economy, so they didn't care.
I would guess we are talking about the same study, although I don't know where you got that from. I didn't get the impression that they had that selfish attitude. I understood it as they accepted piracy is not doing any damage so saw no reason to allow it. Could you perhaps quote a passage that supports your interpretation?
Also, PC Magazine reports that the government then looked at 22 studies analyzing the effects of piracy on the music industry, with five showing a positive impact on sales and three showing no correlation [pcmag.com]. Would anyone like to guess what the other 14/22 studies showed?
I think you may have linked to the wrong thing. That link goes to a story about swiss keeping downloads legal.
In Canada, it is legal to download material for personal use, but it is still illegal to upload it. They're just making the person doing the sharing responsible, which is fair enough.
Well, I see that as a type of semantics. Back before P2P stuff I did everything through downloading only. The fact is in canada I can download say, Adobe CS5 and Avatar from Rapidshare and it is legal. That is what I think is important and good.
The link you provided for the Netherlands doesn't seem to say what you claim it does. I think maybe you posted the wrong link?
I was not even aware I loa
Firstly, it breaks the fundamental incentive underlying our entire economy: you have to produce value to earn money before you can enjoy value produced by other people when you spend that money.
I have two problems with this line of reasoning (not mocking yo, sorry if it sounds that way).
First, as I said before, old ways of thinking don't necessarily apply to the new digital world, where distribution and/or manufacturing costs can be 0, or negligible.
Secondly, Our society does not necessarily reward producing value with money. lottery winners, heirs, people on welfare etc. Having money by no means you have produced or contributed something useful.
Secondly, we have only someone's word for it that they would never really have paid for something even if there was no other way to enjoy it. I find that claim preposterous in many cases.
Well, that's much harder to prove. I know that a lot of the movies I downloaded there is no way in hell I would have paid for. I got them because I was curious or simply wanted to pass the time. I I couldn't download then I would do something else. There is simply no way in hell a lot of the stuff I choose to waste my time with is even worth renting for $1 from redbox. Likewise with some games I play, I have absolutely zero interest on playing online. When a game is $70 with a focus on multiplayer and I only want to play the single player campaign that is about 5 hours long, there is no chance I will ever pay for that. If they offered the campaign separately then I would.
If piracy is decriminalised, then surely there is no such thing as piracy any more by definition, so I don't know what you mean here.
It isn't that simple. If Switzerland decriminalized piracy that doesn't mean corporations in the US don't consider it piracy. You can still infringe copyright without permission from the copyright holder, even if you can't be held accountable for doing so.
You've made similar claims several times in this discussion. There are more than 150 members of the World Trade Organisation, including pretty much the entire developed world, and under TRIPS all of those have basic minimum standards for things like legal copyright protections. There are only 200 or so countries in the world. So where is it that you claim piracy is legal, and how do their creative and consumption economies look compared to places like the US and Europe?
It's It's legal in Switzerland
It's It's legal in Canada
It's It's legal in The Netherlands
Their creative and consumption economies are not impacted by piracy, as that was often the reason to make it legal in the first place.
The trouble is, as any researcher can tell you, what people say and what they do are frequently different things, whether intentionally or otherwise.
Oh, sure. Except we have overwhelming evidence that people will still pay for stuff when it is offered for free. Look at the various games or CDs released for free or without any DRM, people still pay for it. They have a choice not to and still chose to do so, to the point that the content creator can make a nice profit.
The only way to know for sure what people consider worth paying for is to give them no choice but to pay for it if they want it and see who pays. That will tell you, by definition, who really thinks it's worth the asking price.
Done and done.
They're only making those millions because of all the people who actually pay to see the movie or play the game. The pir
For that to work any records of email address would have to protected. Not really a practical solution.