It's only hypocrisy if Bush's ideas of what constitutes freedom are contradictory to his actions. The fact that his actions are contradictory to what your ideas of what constitutes freedom does not make him a hypocrite. It makes him a political opponent.
Sorry, but yes, this is a semantic argument. In the case that you prefer the word "protect" to "enforce", those protections must be enforced.
Unless you believe that anarchy can work (and I admit, there are people who do), you must acknowledge that any free society must be governed. Our government exists (in theory) to enforce laws and policies that protect our freedom.
No matter what lengths he goes through to prove that he only cares about vaccinating children, I'll never believe that Arvin Sloan --er-- Bill Gates has really changed his evil ways. Omnifam my ass!
Your comment suggests another obstacle to anybody offering online movie downloads: region-encoding. The movie studios will insist on extreme measures to prevent anyone in countries besides the U.S. from downloading movies "early" (before their overseas release date).
The DRM on movie downloads will have to be extreme, and I doubt that Napster is prepared with sufficient technology. On the other hand, it doesn't sound like they are preparing to distribute Hollywood movies just yet. Maybe they can start with movie trailers, game previews, and independent films while they work out the details of their DRM. Most likely, Napster will be the pioneers in a field where Apple, or possibly MS, will learn from Napster's mistakes and proceed to secure the market.
I genuinely can't recall a situation where a little more compression would have allowed me to send all the photos I wanted to via e-mail.
And obviously, if you have never needed this, then nobody will ever need it.
Bah!
I work at a print shop, and we regularly send proofs of artwork back and forth with customers and outside specialty printers. Sending uncompressed images is out of the question, and usually the files we send for proofs end up being PDFs with JPEG compression.
Often, we zip our proofs even if they aren't over the size limit for our e-mail server because archiving the file decreases the odds that it will become corrupted during transfer. If we could get 30% additional compression at the same time, we'd save a lot of bandwidth over the course of a month.
The problem isn't that warez dealers are getting sentences that are too harsh, it's that violent criminals are getting sentences that aren't harsh enough. I say give the warez dealer 10 or 15 years, then the prosecution at a homicide trial can say "Your honor, even software pirates receive 10 years in prison. Doesn't this murderer deserve longer than that?"
Actually, while the techniques sound similar based on the article summary, they are actually completely different. Sky Captain used green screens to drop actually real human actors into completely CG environments. Polar Express is using motion capture to drop CG characters into CG environments. I haven't read the article to see how this differs from traditional motion capture, but the end result is quite different from Sky Captain.
Is anyone actually paying attention to the point of the article? This is not a checklist of the elements to make a good MMOG. Player death is ONE example, and he is not claiming that adding it would automatically improve the gaming experience in every game. He's not advocating adding permanent death to modern, treadmill-driven MMOGs.
What he is saying is that all MMOGs suffer from a conflict between what features would actually improve gameplay and the features that their players demand. The article is about players and developers, not about games. The only reason he even brought up permanent death is that it's a feature with promise that has been suggested/requested by many hardcore players and tried by a number of developers, but nobody can get it to fly. It's a perfect illustration of his "short-term-bad, long-term-good" feature argument. I don't know why so many posters are latching onto this one section of the article and acting like it somehow undermines the whole argument.
Did you even read the article? Sounds like you skimmed it. In the case of permanent death, he never said that it was a more successful concept than the alternatives. He said it was a better concept, but that it would always be rejected by newbies and thus cause a game to wither away financially. The same thing applies to your second point. The point of the article is not "make your game this way and it will be more successful". The point of the article is "if you try to do things differently and better, your game will be awesome but nobody will play it." Very different than the point you accuse him of trying to make.
Actually, you're supporting his point. The reason you get so attached to a character is that you are allowed to get attached. If the game had included permanent death, you would never have a character for 8 months unless you were really really good. Now, because you've grown accustomed to having non-permanent death, you demand it in all of your games. When he talks about players that reject short-term-bad, long-term-good features, he's talking about you, and the fact that you disagree with him actually supports his argument.
I've considered building a PVR system of my own, but I don't care quite enough to do all of the research and parts-gathering required for a project like that. Is there currently anyone who sells pre-made mythTV or Freevo boxes? It would be a great luxury to be able to buy a box that was pre-tested for compatability with the PVR software, and not having to track down all the parts separately would be great. Then I could get into its guts if I wanted to upgrade later on.
Is someone already doing this? Is it even practical?
I would guess there are liability issues involved for content as well. When the MPAA or RIAA come a-knockin', they send their letters to the ISP who owns an offending IP address, not the end user (at least that's how it happened when I finally got caught with Firefly on BitTorrent).
If they offer you web space and a limited amount of web hosting features, it's a simple matter for them to shut down your site if you are distributing the latest Hollywood bootlegs, and you can only fit one of them on your site anyway. They can even deny access to a particular file or directory without shutting down the whole site. If each user gets 100MB of web storage, that's (No. of users) x 100MB worth of data that they need to monitor to keep themselves legally safe. Their liablility is the same as any web host's (or it would be if it weren't for P2P).
On the other hand, if they let you run your own web server, you can host or run any malicious or illegal software, movies, games, etc. you want and they have to police it all to cover their butts. That's (No. of users) x ???GB that they have to keep track of, which is impossible. If they DO catch you, they can't remove the offending content or deny access to particular files or directories, they have to block the user's access completely. Messy business.
If the ISP were not held responsible for the actions of their users, this wouldn't be a problem. However, legally defensible or not, the ISPs are the ones who get intimidated by the big boys, and they usually cave to avoid legal expenses.
Maybe it is more "accurate" to use more cussing (and maybe it's not-- I didn't live in Southern California in the mid-90s), but accuracy is not the end goal of entertainment. If it were, most movie dialogue would be in overlapping sentence fragments and Romeo and Juliet would be Shakespeare's greatest play in Italian. The idea is to communicate with your audience in a way that helps them better understand the story or mood that you're trying to convey. If you're going to use foul language in a game (or book or movie or song) for American audiences, you have to acknowledge from the start that it's offensive to at least some of your audience. It's whining to say "but it's essential to the meaning!" You'll have actually compromised your meaning by putting off your audience, and that's a failing of you as an entertainer, not of the audience.
My original point still stands: four-letter words are intended to offend, so you shouldn't get all high-and-mighty when people are offended by them.
When people use offensive language for impact or to add "meaning" to what they are saying, they would do well to remember that those words would have no effect at all if they offended nobody. It's pretty pretentious to say "it's all about the meaning of what I'm saying, people need to look past the words" when the meaning is affected by the words themselves and depends upon the fact that at least some people are offended by them.
As for the "accuracy" argument, none of these characters actually existed or said any of the things that they say in the game. Unless you're quoting someone, you can make them say anything you want, so Rockstar was in no way obligated to include any particular language.
1.) Should hacking software be protected by the 2nd Amendment? Neal: Nah.
2.) Does it bother you that Science Fiction doesn't get as much respect as other types of literature? Neal: Not really.
3.) [Question about some geeky theory of human development] Neal: Software sucks too much for that to happen.
4.) In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win? Neal:[Makes up a funny story about fighting William Gibson]
5.) What do you read these days? Neal: Mostly books.
6.) Do you still program? Neal: Not very much.
7.) What will money be like in the future? Neal: Same old, same old.
8.) Do you still use BeOS? Neal: No.
9.) What tips do you have for world travellers? Neal: Don't be a dumbass when you travel.
10a.) [Nigerian e-mail scammer joke] Neal:[Responds in kind]
10b.) Should there be a data haven? Neal: I dunno. Maybe?
11.) You're an advisor for a group that's building a spaceship. Care to comment? Neal: No.
12.) Will digital publishing replace traditional publishing? Neal: Nope.
There you have it!
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
If you look at American history, it seems like there is a certain equilibrium of freedom vs. regulation that our society can tolerate and remain stable. However, we are never actually at that equilibrium. Instead we waver back and forth across the line, alternating from periods when the government imposes too many restrictions on our freedoms on the one hand to periods when people use their abundant rights to infringe upon those of others on the other hand.
Right now it appears we are on the downswing. It's happened before, it will happen again, but the nature of our society is such that when the restrictions become intolerable to a majority of people (and it will, we're very accustomed to our freedoms), the backlash will carry it back up over the hump.
This hypothesis is meaningless to anyone who believes that there is no such thing as too much freedom. I happen to believe that as long as there are strong people who use "freedom" as an excuse to prey upon the weak, there needs to be regulation, and that's why this "equilibrium" idea makes sense.
It's pretty convenient that you can read the candidates minds. What I wouldn't give to be able to tell, when they behave the same way, that their motivations are different. For example: neither candidate will give clear answers to policy questions. How fortunate that you know that Kerry has a good reason for it while Bush is just being a sneaky bastard.
Oh wait! No you don't. You just ascribe positive motivations to the candidate you agree with and negative motivations to the candidate that you disagree with.
When I first read Snow Crash, I was struck by the use of "Nippon" and "Nipponese." In my ignorance at the time, someone had to tell me that Nippon is the "real" name of what most Americans know as Japan. In the Snow Crash universe, I assumed that using the name Nippon instead was a bit of cleverness, revealing that, in this version of the future, the island nation had gained enough international influence to get everyone to call it by the preferred name.
However, in Cryptonomicon you keep up the pattern despite the novel being set in the past and present. Even if soldiers in the Pacific theater of WWII preferred the slang "nips" to "japs," I find it difficult to accept that Randy Waterhouse and his techie friends not only say "Nippon" and "Nipponese", but that Randy even thinks in those terms.
Do you know something that I don't about how people think and talk about Japan/Nippon, or are you trying to bring your readers around to your own preferred terminology through good, old-fashioned immersion?
As an added note to the same basic principle, in our office we have a mix of Macs and PCs. Unfortunately, Windows is a necessary evil because of one application that basically runs our business, but for all of our graphics work (we're a print shop), the employees work on the platform they prefer. At the moment, we have one guy who is a die-hard Windows supporter, but the rest of us are gradually wearing down his resistance by doing little more than getting our work done on our Macs.
Additionally, some of our important legacy software, most notably the RIP (the box that controls our printer), runs on a Mac OS9 box. With each upgrade, Windows becomes less and less compatible with that software, and the Macs just take it in stride because they still speak Appletalk, even if it isn't their first language any more.
Just last week, he had one of us teaching him how to do something on the Mac because it was easier than doing it on his PC.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only hypocrisy if Bush's ideas of what constitutes freedom are contradictory to his actions. The fact that his actions are contradictory to what your ideas of what constitutes freedom does not make him a hypocrite. It makes him a political opponent.
Sorry, but yes, this is a semantic argument. In the case that you prefer the word "protect" to "enforce", those protections must be enforced.
Unless you believe that anarchy can work (and I admit, there are people who do), you must acknowledge that any free society must be governed. Our government exists (in theory) to enforce laws and policies that protect our freedom.
No matter what lengths he goes through to prove that he only cares about vaccinating children, I'll never believe that Arvin Sloan --er-- Bill Gates has really changed his evil ways. Omnifam my ass!
Your comment suggests another obstacle to anybody offering online movie downloads: region-encoding. The movie studios will insist on extreme measures to prevent anyone in countries besides the U.S. from downloading movies "early" (before their overseas release date).
The DRM on movie downloads will have to be extreme, and I doubt that Napster is prepared with sufficient technology. On the other hand, it doesn't sound like they are preparing to distribute Hollywood movies just yet. Maybe they can start with movie trailers, game previews, and independent films while they work out the details of their DRM. Most likely, Napster will be the pioneers in a field where Apple, or possibly MS, will learn from Napster's mistakes and proceed to secure the market.
Don't you mean "/me covers ducts"?
I genuinely can't recall a situation where a little more compression would have allowed me to send all the photos I wanted to via e-mail.
And obviously, if you have never needed this, then nobody will ever need it.
Bah!
I work at a print shop, and we regularly send proofs of artwork back and forth with customers and outside specialty printers. Sending uncompressed images is out of the question, and usually the files we send for proofs end up being PDFs with JPEG compression.
Often, we zip our proofs even if they aren't over the size limit for our e-mail server because archiving the file decreases the odds that it will become corrupted during transfer. If we could get 30% additional compression at the same time, we'd save a lot of bandwidth over the course of a month.
The problem isn't that warez dealers are getting sentences that are too harsh, it's that violent criminals are getting sentences that aren't harsh enough. I say give the warez dealer 10 or 15 years, then the prosecution at a homicide trial can say "Your honor, even software pirates receive 10 years in prison. Doesn't this murderer deserve longer than that?"
You might want to consider factors other than the moderation on your slashdot comments when you determine how insightful you are.
I have GOT to spend more time in England. Best...product names...ever!
Now I'm off to enjoy a lunch of toad-in-the-hole followed by a delicious spotted dick.
Actually, while the techniques sound similar based on the article summary, they are actually completely different. Sky Captain used green screens to drop actually real human actors into completely CG environments. Polar Express is using motion capture to drop CG characters into CG environments. I haven't read the article to see how this differs from traditional motion capture, but the end result is quite different from Sky Captain.
Is anyone actually paying attention to the point of the article? This is not a checklist of the elements to make a good MMOG. Player death is ONE example, and he is not claiming that adding it would automatically improve the gaming experience in every game. He's not advocating adding permanent death to modern, treadmill-driven MMOGs.
What he is saying is that all MMOGs suffer from a conflict between what features would actually improve gameplay and the features that their players demand. The article is about players and developers, not about games. The only reason he even brought up permanent death is that it's a feature with promise that has been suggested/requested by many hardcore players and tried by a number of developers, but nobody can get it to fly. It's a perfect illustration of his "short-term-bad, long-term-good" feature argument. I don't know why so many posters are latching onto this one section of the article and acting like it somehow undermines the whole argument.
Did you even read the article? Sounds like you skimmed it. In the case of permanent death, he never said that it was a more successful concept than the alternatives. He said it was a better concept, but that it would always be rejected by newbies and thus cause a game to wither away financially. The same thing applies to your second point. The point of the article is not "make your game this way and it will be more successful". The point of the article is "if you try to do things differently and better, your game will be awesome but nobody will play it." Very different than the point you accuse him of trying to make.
Actually, you're supporting his point. The reason you get so attached to a character is that you are allowed to get attached. If the game had included permanent death, you would never have a character for 8 months unless you were really really good. Now, because you've grown accustomed to having non-permanent death, you demand it in all of your games. When he talks about players that reject short-term-bad, long-term-good features, he's talking about you, and the fact that you disagree with him actually supports his argument.
I've considered building a PVR system of my own, but I don't care quite enough to do all of the research and parts-gathering required for a project like that. Is there currently anyone who sells pre-made mythTV or Freevo boxes? It would be a great luxury to be able to buy a box that was pre-tested for compatability with the PVR software, and not having to track down all the parts separately would be great. Then I could get into its guts if I wanted to upgrade later on.
Is someone already doing this? Is it even practical?
I would guess there are liability issues involved for content as well. When the MPAA or RIAA come a-knockin', they send their letters to the ISP who owns an offending IP address, not the end user (at least that's how it happened when I finally got caught with Firefly on BitTorrent).
If they offer you web space and a limited amount of web hosting features, it's a simple matter for them to shut down your site if you are distributing the latest Hollywood bootlegs, and you can only fit one of them on your site anyway. They can even deny access to a particular file or directory without shutting down the whole site. If each user gets 100MB of web storage, that's (No. of users) x 100MB worth of data that they need to monitor to keep themselves legally safe. Their liablility is the same as any web host's (or it would be if it weren't for P2P).
On the other hand, if they let you run your own web server, you can host or run any malicious or illegal software, movies, games, etc. you want and they have to police it all to cover their butts. That's (No. of users) x ???GB that they have to keep track of, which is impossible. If they DO catch you, they can't remove the offending content or deny access to particular files or directories, they have to block the user's access completely. Messy business.
If the ISP were not held responsible for the actions of their users, this wouldn't be a problem. However, legally defensible or not, the ISPs are the ones who get intimidated by the big boys, and they usually cave to avoid legal expenses.
Maybe it is more "accurate" to use more cussing (and maybe it's not-- I didn't live in Southern California in the mid-90s), but accuracy is not the end goal of entertainment. If it were, most movie dialogue would be in overlapping sentence fragments and Romeo and Juliet would be Shakespeare's greatest play in Italian. The idea is to communicate with your audience in a way that helps them better understand the story or mood that you're trying to convey. If you're going to use foul language in a game (or book or movie or song) for American audiences, you have to acknowledge from the start that it's offensive to at least some of your audience. It's whining to say "but it's essential to the meaning!" You'll have actually compromised your meaning by putting off your audience, and that's a failing of you as an entertainer, not of the audience.
My original point still stands: four-letter words are intended to offend, so you shouldn't get all high-and-mighty when people are offended by them.
When people use offensive language for impact or to add "meaning" to what they are saying, they would do well to remember that those words would have no effect at all if they offended nobody. It's pretty pretentious to say "it's all about the meaning of what I'm saying, people need to look past the words" when the meaning is affected by the words themselves and depends upon the fact that at least some people are offended by them.
As for the "accuracy" argument, none of these characters actually existed or said any of the things that they say in the game. Unless you're quoting someone, you can make them say anything you want, so Rockstar was in no way obligated to include any particular language.
My mail-order lungs from Korea arrived just fine, but UPS left my heart in San Fransisco.
Ha! If I had mod points and could mod in the same thread I posted in, you'd get a +1 Funny from me.
Here you go:
1.) Should hacking software be protected by the 2nd Amendment?
Neal: Nah.
2.) Does it bother you that Science Fiction doesn't get as much respect as other types of literature?
Neal: Not really.
3.) [Question about some geeky theory of human development]
Neal: Software sucks too much for that to happen.
4.) In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?
Neal: [Makes up a funny story about fighting William Gibson]
5.) What do you read these days?
Neal: Mostly books.
6.) Do you still program?
Neal: Not very much.
7.) What will money be like in the future?
Neal: Same old, same old.
8.) Do you still use BeOS?
Neal: No.
9.) What tips do you have for world travellers?
Neal: Don't be a dumbass when you travel.
10a.) [Nigerian e-mail scammer joke]
Neal: [Responds in kind]
10b.) Should there be a data haven?
Neal: I dunno. Maybe?
11.) You're an advisor for a group that's building a spaceship. Care to comment?
Neal: No.
12.) Will digital publishing replace traditional publishing?
Neal: Nope.
There you have it!
If you look at American history, it seems like there is a certain equilibrium of freedom vs. regulation that our society can tolerate and remain stable. However, we are never actually at that equilibrium. Instead we waver back and forth across the line, alternating from periods when the government imposes too many restrictions on our freedoms on the one hand to periods when people use their abundant rights to infringe upon those of others on the other hand.
Right now it appears we are on the downswing. It's happened before, it will happen again, but the nature of our society is such that when the restrictions become intolerable to a majority of people (and it will, we're very accustomed to our freedoms), the backlash will carry it back up over the hump.
This hypothesis is meaningless to anyone who believes that there is no such thing as too much freedom. I happen to believe that as long as there are strong people who use "freedom" as an excuse to prey upon the weak, there needs to be regulation, and that's why this "equilibrium" idea makes sense.
It's pretty convenient that you can read the candidates minds. What I wouldn't give to be able to tell, when they behave the same way, that their motivations are different. For example: neither candidate will give clear answers to policy questions. How fortunate that you know that Kerry has a good reason for it while Bush is just being a sneaky bastard.
Oh wait! No you don't. You just ascribe positive motivations to the candidate you agree with and negative motivations to the candidate that you disagree with.
When I first read Snow Crash, I was struck by the use of "Nippon" and "Nipponese." In my ignorance at the time, someone had to tell me that Nippon is the "real" name of what most Americans know as Japan. In the Snow Crash universe, I assumed that using the name Nippon instead was a bit of cleverness, revealing that, in this version of the future, the island nation had gained enough international influence to get everyone to call it by the preferred name.
However, in Cryptonomicon you keep up the pattern despite the novel being set in the past and present. Even if soldiers in the Pacific theater of WWII preferred the slang "nips" to "japs," I find it difficult to accept that Randy Waterhouse and his techie friends not only say "Nippon" and "Nipponese", but that Randy even thinks in those terms.
Do you know something that I don't about how people think and talk about Japan/Nippon, or are you trying to bring your readers around to your own preferred terminology through good, old-fashioned immersion?
Funny, I thought it was Dan Rather's apology speech after the Bush service record snafu.
As an added note to the same basic principle, in our office we have a mix of Macs and PCs. Unfortunately, Windows is a necessary evil because of one application that basically runs our business, but for all of our graphics work (we're a print shop), the employees work on the platform they prefer. At the moment, we have one guy who is a die-hard Windows supporter, but the rest of us are gradually wearing down his resistance by doing little more than getting our work done on our Macs.
Additionally, some of our important legacy software, most notably the RIP (the box that controls our printer), runs on a Mac OS9 box. With each upgrade, Windows becomes less and less compatible with that software, and the Macs just take it in stride because they still speak Appletalk, even if it isn't their first language any more.
Just last week, he had one of us teaching him how to do something on the Mac because it was easier than doing it on his PC.