i have never managed to find a store How actively have you tried?
What was your criteria for deciding they wouldn't? That they have a little sign up by the counter saying they card?
Most of the studies I've seen send a kid in to attempt to purchase an M rated title and verify whether they actually apply the policy they claim to.
Several years ago, the figures were way down around 30%. With increased awareness, more recent figures seem to sit around 70-80% overall with most major chains being higher still.
However, one loop hole that a lot of the studies seem to find is the garden center trick. Go to a checkout at a specialized part of a big store where the employees know nothing about gaming. Attempt to buy a game there and they often have no clue they're meant to card. Garden centers as part of a larger Walmart are one option, jewelry counters at Target are another.
Business: Well, $x is less than $y and 90% is still a lot of people. Do the first thing. An observation:
You'll generally see figures like: "In Europe, non IE browsers are approaching 25% market share." or "Non IE browsers now account for 15% of web traffic."
How many of that 15-25% (depending on figures) truly don't have the option to open IE if they need to?
Don't get me wrong, I accept that it's still bad form to force your users to switch to an app they don't want to use and you'll certainly not win any friends that way...
But are you truly excluding Firefox and Opera users if they have IE bundled with their OS (which is still true for, what, 95%? of home users) but simply choose not to open it?
If a restaurant in a racist area decides to serve people regardless of race, are they truly excluding the racists who have elitist views, think the other race harbour viruses, etc. and therefore won't eat there? Or are the racists, who absolutely have the option to eat there, excluding themselves because of their elitism?
Sure, a few users truly don't have the option to use IE and it's certainly bad form to force people to use something they don't want to, even if they do already have it... But are you necessarily excluding them when they do still have the option?
What he's targeting is the sale of violent games to minors, in the manner of R-rated movies. Except movie theaters, from what I understand, are self regulated.
The MPAA ratings and their adherence came about specifically to stop this kind of legislation. By creating their own voluntary code and then getting theaters to agree to uphold it, they maintained control of what movies got what ratings (thus no NC-17 rating for documentaries the government doesn't like, etc.)
Fortunately for the MPAA, theater owners were smart enough to get that they didn't want government control and smart enough to realize adherence was the way to avoid it. Enough theaters abided by the code, the problem went away. Now, years later, everyone assumes it's some kind of law.
That's what the ESRB ratings were supposed to be. Unfortunately, unlike movie theaters, videogames get sold anywhere and everywhere and their sellers aren't that smart. It gets even worse when stores like Walmart get involved and now you have checkout clerks in the garden center who know and care absolutely nothing about avoiding imposed legislation for the industry.
As theaters have it, the government cannot decide a movie doesn't suit the ruling party of the time and thus raise its rating to the point where it's unprofitable. Over zealous police captains who are going for promotion in a conservative town can't start sending sixteen year olds who look thirty in to movies in order to levy fines and show they're tough on crime.
Unfortunately, due to the ESRB's inability to regulate stores that sell the games, we are most likely going to see government control of rating and enforcement. We already have total dross forced on us because games have become so expensive to develop that the might of publishers like EA is mandatory and they're not interested in taking risks. Now imagine a world in which anything remotely approaching edgy content or political expression gets regarded as a risk to ratings, thus a risk to sales, and something they won't fund development of. Now add in small conservative towns where there are no videogame stores because the sheriff's mounted a bunch of stings to curry favor in elections.
That's absolutely not the manner in which R-rated movies to minors is regulated. The differences are subtle and often overlooked (or assumed not to exist at all) but they make all the difference in the world.
This really annoys me. They can go **** themselves if they think I'm going to spend 40 hours programming something interesting for a game I enjoy just to have them take it and make money out of it to subsidise the inadequacies of their retarded business model. How many copies of Doom were sold because everyone wanted the full version that would allow them to play the WADs everyone else were creating?
How many people with both an X360 and a PC chose to buy the PC version of Oblivion because they could get a ton of free mods to upgrade the PC version whereas Microsoft insisted the publisher charge a couple of bucks for every "upgrade" that really should have been a patch?
How many people bought the original Half Life so they could play the free mods that came out for it?
A publisher doesn't have to charge for mods in order to make money. They can make an easily modable game, let people download the mods for free, then rake in the extra sales of the original product.
It's a shame that Microsoft seems hellbent on forcing "microtransactions" that aren't that micro, demanding 500 XBL points for things that should really be free and closing the doors on things that normally would be.
Hopefully, the quote was about making extra revenues in original media sales that are spurred by free mod content.
Sadly, after reading previews of the forthcoming Tiger Woods game, I don't trust EA with that for one moment.
Their model is apparently to let users share their best games, etc. in order for others to try beating various aspects of the game like number of spectators hit, fewest shots to the green, etc. This content that enhances the game and thus, hopefully, drives EA sales is only free for three uploads. After that, you have to start paying to make their game more valuable to others.
This follows Battlefield 2 where they figured out how to charge people for the most interesting servers and make people feel grateful for it and Test Drive Unlimited where Microsoft made people fork out for Gold XBL service in order to share user created challenges.
So... User created content is a great way to make more money by selling more copies of the original media. Sadly, much as that's a viable model on its own, it really is becomming yet another area to try charging people more for something the publisher simply enabled but certainly never created.
Funny how free mods in Doom, Half Life, Morrowind and Oblivion has turned them in to beloved games that kept selling WAY past their shelf life while screwing every last penny out of their users turns games like X360's Morrowind, Test Drive Unlimited and the upcoming Tiger Woods in to resented money sinks with short shelf lives.
The sad thing is, I actually started this post to protest there was a more innocent interpretation but then, realizing the sad state of consoles where you're locked in - plus Microsoft's plans for XBL's port to Vista - and I kind of lost faith. It'd be great if they showed a little forethought and built valuable franchizes rather than raping every last dollar - sadly I don't believe that of them anymore.
1) US and European phone systems operate on different frequencies The violet end of the visible spectrum has a wavelength* of ~400nm. The red end is ~700nm.
Whether light's red of blue, enough of it will still blind you. Quite a bit of one frequency will still disrupt your ability to register other nearby frequencies.
Unless of course we can be absolutely certain that this proposed system we aren't sure of and thus can't be absolutely certain about involves bees only able to work on one frequency rather than a range like we can.
I agree it's likely fearmongering. Just pointing out that different frequencies don't suddenly mean no effect.
*As the speed of light is consistent, wavelength and frequency have a direct relationship to each other - before anyone complains wavelength isn't frequency.
There's a reason why history grads often go on to very successful careers in apparently completely unrelated fields: It's because a good education in history is an education in thinking.
I didn't follow it through to university level but I still value one specific history class I took as the most important part of my education.
Studying World War II history, we weren't taught to memorize the dates of the outbreak of war, the dates of the conferences between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and a bunch of other statistical but semi meaningless information when taken out of context.
Instead we were taught to look at the different sources, to embrace the fact that German propaganda ministry materials were biased, look at the just as biased British accounts of the time, the histories written (as Churchill said) by the victor after the event, form our own conclusions about where the truth likely lay and still appreciate the value that the slanted perspective would have had on the respective populations.
By understanding the broader picture, not only did I find a hell of a lot more interest in the period but I also got taught how to think independently, to analyze sources and form my own opinions.
Wikipedia isn't a perfect source of truth. Then again, most textbooks that cover their nation's wars with another country aren't either.
In an ideal world, you teach students how to assess the truth of what they're told, how to think and how to form their own opinions.
Unfortunately, America seems hell bent on raising children that believe the sanctioned news source is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When they grow up and start watching something like Fox News as their source of truth, look at the wonderful mess a country that had no idea about the real facts can get in to when the majority of voters think what they're told to and need four years of death and a demolished "liberated" country to make them stop and question.
Now imagine what would have happened if the average American had learned in highschool to listen to what Fox was saying, flick over to the Daily Show for a humorous counter, go on line to a non American news source like the BBC for a third perspective, then Wikipedia for a potentially somewhat inaccurate but still useful grounding in the region's politics and history.
Sure, they might reasonably have concluded Iraq had chemical weapons - after all, we still had the recepits from when we sold them to them in the 80s. They might have weighed up the national interest and judged it higher than the concerns voiced elsewhere in the world. I don't care whether they would have agreed with me or not - but at least they would have thought rather than spat venom at anyone being "unpatriotic," leaving all rational thought at the door.
So, in short: A source doesn't have to be accurate to be valuable. Often, in learning to appreciate the inaccuracies, we learn vastly more. If nothing else, at least we engage our brains - which seems like a good thing to encourage school children to do if you're going to call yourselves educators.
You can't do away with the police's right to abuse their authority...
Let's face it, the only reason anyone donates to the frequent calls from the various police related funds is because you get a nice bumper sticker that they all but outright state will let officers know you've given them money and thus should be exempted from most traffic tickets.
If they had to start abiding by the law, no longer selectively applying it when it comes to their friends and those who effectively bribe them, they couldn't make those exceptions. Without those exceptions, who would give them money? Without that source of income, how would they replace that revenue stream? More taxes.
So, really, unless you want more taxes, you have to support our felonious friends in blue. Sure, there are some irksome moral questions about their honesty here... but more taxes would be... unAmerican!
> > And lying is a perfectly legal activity when it is not done to further a crime.
Try that one when giving a testimony under oath. Even if what you lied about has no relevance to the case at hand, does not further any crimes or anything, it is still punishable. There are many more cases where lying has been made explicitly illegal. Except this specific case of lying, lying under oath is perjury: a crime. Thus, lying under oath is furthering a crime - its own crime of perjury.
Microsoft's share raised relative to Apple's for computers connected to the Internet...
Step 1: Release buggy O.S. Step 2: Require users to constantly go on line to get patches. Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit.
It turns out Step 3 reads, "Wait for market share to be calculated by number of machines going on line."
Broadband usage figures are hard to track down but seem to sit around 40% of households and 70% of active internet users. That's a hell of a lot of home computing users that still use dial up. 0.3% variation is pretty easily explained during a period where those dial up users are forced on line for hours at a time to get their Microsoft OS patched while the Apple users can just log in to get their mail then go about their day.
'Rock Band Wireless Guitar Controller' will retail at $79.99 (40 quid approx)
Cheap wireless guitar system: $99 plus the cost of the guitar below.
'Rock Band Guitar Controller' at $59.99 (30 quid approx)
Cheap real guitar: $99 Decent: Several hundred
'Rock Band Drum Set' $79.99
Cheap real drum kit: $200 Decent: Half a grand plus.
'Rock Band Microphone' at $39.99 (20 quid approx)."
Cheap mic: $20
With the exception of the mic, every piece is cheaper than the traditional version.
Total, to put a complete band together, for a pair of wired guitars, a drum set and mic, it's $240. That buys one starter guitar/amp set. To put those same real instruments together would set you back a thousand dollars plus by the time you added amps.
Granted, it's comparing apples to oranges:
You can't be as creative with the game as you can with real instruments - but then most people will never sound as good on a real instrument as they will in game and certainly won't get the instant reward.
The game looks likely to require microtransactions to add new songs - but then again, tab books are $19.99 each in many cases).
The game will likely never get you a record deal - but then how many people play instruments vs. actually get deals?
Real instruments don't let you play with people across the country and across the world - though some hardware/software solutions somewhat let you do that.
Neither is necessarily better or worse, different rewards for different value sets. If it's just about having fun, chasing the fantasy of being in a band even though you know it's just a fantasy, the controllers are a hell of a lot cheaper than any other option (besides air guitar).
If it still seems expensive, try getting in to hardcore flight simulations: $149 for basic pedals, $149 for a yoke, $199 for a throttle quadrant, $179 for head tracking.
I adored the original Ghost Recon. Whilst by no means perfect, few games have impressed me as much as setting up a careful ambush, watching an enemy squad come down the hill on the first map, walking casually, looking around but little more... then I sprung my trap too soon, half their squad dropped to one knee to provide covering fire whilst the others ran forward then they swapped, moving in on me, defending themselves.
A quick reload and a substantially different fire fight later and I was sold.
Then there was the squad mate AI. They may or may not have been the smartest I've ever come across. It didn't matter because I finally had proper control in the greatest squad mate control system I've yet found. Absolutely no pure AI squad mate system to date can handle the nuances of you telling everyone to go prone, only fire if fired upon, then move in to circling positions around an enemy entrenchment while one guy readies his anti tank launcher, pops up, fires, then drops down while his squad mates mop up the survivors.
Add in a stealth system that actually involved differing perception ranges for the enemy and you had an amazing AI simulation whether much of it was AI in the classical sense or not.
And then, after XBox users couldn't wrap their paws around the controller properly, they wrecked the entire series for more commercial appeal. A true shame, ruining the nuances of a truly great game.
Oh, and one round was all it took - meaning that AI felt like it mattered. If you can run in to a horde of enemies and keep shooting because you're frenzied, have a ton of armor and are doing quad damage with a rocket launcher, enemies carefully flanking you don't matter in the least. If a single enemy creeps around behind you and puts the one round that matters in to you, the AI becomes vastly more dramatic.
'An airport camera can be programmed to know what a departure hall should look like, with thousands of separate movements. A single suitcase left for any length of time would trigger an alarm.'
This reminds me of the famous story of the neural net that learned to identify tanks in pictures with 100% accuracy... right up until someone realized all the pictures of tanks were taken on sunny days and those without were taken on cloudy days and all the system could really do was tell if the weather was nice out. (source).
A system that can identify a suitcase left in the same spot for too long at Heathrow isn't detecting terrorism, it's detecting that Spanish air traffic control is on strike yet a gain and passengers have been stranded at the airport for three days.
I look forward to the chance of life immitating stupid when it identifies the air traffic controller strike's symptoms (luggage in the same place for days) as a terrorist attack, delays flights by several more days as a terror lockdown starts up, then identifies the luggage held up by its own terror lock down as a terrorist attack - getting in to an endless feedback loop of stupid.
With a known system, it's simple for terrorists to defeat it (put a small set of powered wheels on the bottom of your bomb so it moves itself too slowly for people to spot but enough that the system doesn't see it as stationary over time). There are just two crimes I can see it spotting: the state of the passenger airline industry and government willingness to believe that automating things is a solution. Sadly, though they both probably should be classified as crimes, neither has shown any signs of being acted on yet.
Then I took a good look at my listening habits, and realized I never actually _need_ that kind of capacity.
You don't need an MP3 player, period.
The only question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. In your case, a 4GB nano and ~1,000 songs is plenty and the benefits your listening patterns gain from adding the extra ~6,500 songs of a 30GB or ~19,000 songs of an 80GB player are much smaller than the cost/bulk benefits you get from a smaller player.
I, on the other hand, gain a lot of my self definition from my love and knowledge of music. For me, the 80GB player is as small as I want my fat fingers to deal with in the first place so size isn't an issue. Cost would certainly be nice to drop. Getting to have discussions about what Punk-Country sounds like in the form of the Meat Puppets, have cheesy Roxette/Erasure 80's flashbacks with my wife on a Monday morning drive AND be able to listen to the core 1,000 songs in my main playlists is worth a fortune to me - way in excess of the $200 extra price.
Now add in the ~20 movies that can run picture in picture on my monitor while I code, the ability to figure out what certain lyrics are because I ran an app to grab them from the net, the ability to keep samples of my photography handy... For me it's a no brainer.
The capacity is a HUGE issue for the retarded (meant in the true sense of the word) iPhone. For my 320x240 iPod, I tend to rip movies at around the 400MB point (granted I go slightly over 320 wide so I can either zoom in on the center at 1:1 or zoom out and letterbox on a square screen). 4GB for the great new "widescreen movie capable" iPhone lets me put maybe 7-8 movies on there so long as I put no music on and minimal extra apps. That's barely enough for an intercontinental flight and back and now my iPhone's useless for music. Sure there's an 8GB version... giving maybe that small set of movies and a very limited music library.
For users like yourself, the iPhone will be the latest and greatest new gadget, able to do all kinds of quirky things that you can't do on other phones and save space in your pocket for your willingly limited music library - albeit for a very high price. For a user like myself, the biggest feature is the great new touch sensitive screen. Finally getting a movie big enough to be worth watching is huge and the same goes for easy navigation of bigger playlists - both of which are massively hampered by too little capacity to store much.
So, it's all about personal definitions. At its simplest, no one needs a cool movie and MP3 playing phone. At the other extreme, people who're excited by those features and have the libraries to really use them are massively hampered by the tiny storage in the first generation. In the middle, there are people like yourself - though the cheaper price argument falls flat on its face there.
Fortunately for Apple, they only ever aimed for 1% market saturation and, whilst tying it to signup with a provider could have dropped the price and a bigger drive could have upped the appeal to maybe 20-30% market saturation, Apple are evidently more than happy with 1% on their own terms rather than 20-30% on other people's terms with smaller margins. Going for that 1%, they can dictate whatever they like and accept that most of us won't take it but enough will.
'I think if we can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,' Wright said, a game could detect patterns of what the player wants, and adjust music, lighting, and other immersive elements to reflect the story that a player wants to play.
Ten minutes later, Jack Thompson goes before a court, "Look what happens when I play this game determined to get my rocks off over baby mutilation! It was certified T for Teen but a learning AI and my talent for deviency means it's now hardcore porn. These game makers need to be sued!"
We're already seeing lawsuits and potential new laws over the fact that games are so complex the ESRB can't possibly see everything (though the potential new laws would require that anyway). Add in an AI that modifies the game to suit you and you're in for a whole world of hurt when it modifies in ways no one ever expected.
Spore will be an interesting one. It'll be one thing when horny teenagers figure out how to create a creature that looks like a naked woman but and edge case in the procedural animation system causes to move by pelvic thrusting it's way around the world. Now imagine what it'll be like when Spore's other great feature - sharing content between players - gets pulled in and eight year old little Johnny sees it and his mother decides to go to the media with the apparent porn her child was exposed to.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of emergent behaviors, advanced AI, true neural networks, adaptive gameplay and automatic content sharing. I just sadly see those same great features giving ammunition to those who'd love to hurt the industry for their own political gain.
Interestingly, if you pick up the O'Reilly book on Game AI, they discuss the notion that game developers are already shying away from what's possible for fear of what it might decide to do once they're no longer watching. We're already at the point where it's no longer about what we know how to do but what our lawyers will let us do.
According to the company, the new factory will be able to produce 40,000 square meters of semiconductors per year. Given that the whole goal of semiconductors has been to make them smaller and smaller, boasting about how much area you can use up isn't necessarily a good thing.
It's worse when you consider this tech is roughly micrometers to silicon's nanometers. 10^3x10^3 means you're looking at a millionth the area utilization of silicon. Divide 40,000 by a million and you're looking at the equivalent of 0.04 square meters of silicon or roughly that of a single 12" wafer. A whole factory to produce the equivalent of one silicon wafer a year? Not such a great boast.
Yeah, I'm sure I've got meters squared and square meters confused, messed up an area calculation or somesuch... But you get the idea.
If Citizen Kane was filmed in [a garage] with a [cast entirely under the age of 16] whining about how [their mom] is suppressing their artistic style, then maybe it would have some parallel to the Columbine game.
Citizen Kane was filmed in [RKO's lot] with a [director who was the equivalent of a 16 year old*] whining** about how [the media**/RKO execs***] was suppressing their artistic style.
*Filming took place between June 29 and October 23, 1940. Welles, born on May 6, 1915, had barely turned 25. For the film industry, this is exactly the equivalent of a precocious 16 year old. That said, it's worth noting that, while I can't find an age for Danny Ledonne, it certainly appears he was older than 16 when he made the game.
**Welles' career suffered a crippling blow with the box-office failure of Kane, and he spent the rest of his life struggling to make films on his own terms. He lived long enough to see his debut film acknowledged as a classic, and late in life he famously remarked that he'd started at the top and spent the rest of his life working his way down.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_kane#Aftermat h
***Much of the media at the time was owned by William Randolph Hearst. Because the movie was perceived as attacking his mistress, he directed his outlets to attack it.
****Welles prevented studio executives of RKO from visiting the set. He understood their desire to control projects and he knew they were expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his The War of the Worlds radio broadcast.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_kane#Producti on
So, in short: Precocious kid with no track record in the specific media makes a product that many people hate and then spends the rest of their lives talking about how they made a great example of the art form despite barely being able to work int he field again and how that's all the result of malicious people who just don't get it.
It's worth remembering some of the other things humanity's put out in poor taste...
In 1612, there was the righteous outrage at questioning whether God's creation, the Earth, was truly the center of the universe. This was much worse than poor taste or glorifying killing... This was going against God's will and outright seeking damnation. To quote from Wikipedia, "In 1614, from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella, Father Tommaso Caccini (1574-1648) denounced Galileo's opinions on the motion of the Earth, judging them dangerous and close to heresy."
Also in poor taste, a self absorbed director made a movie that was little more than a pretext for ridiculing the life of one of America's most influential people - William Randolph Hearst. There was a massive media backlash against it, the film was a failure in the box office and it pretty much destroyed the career of the director. SCMRPG has nothing on the backlash against this "poor taste" project that tried to pass itself off as art. Of course, today we know it as Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest movie ever made.
Then there was the disgusting picture of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, a burned, naked child in Vietnam. How on earth could we ever describe a picture showing a child burned by napalm as anything other than in poor taste and utterly without merit on artistic grounds? In this case, it went on to be one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century. wikipedia
Time and again, we dismiss anything that makes us uncomfortable. Apparent attacks on powerful people, pictures of burning children, questions about our world's place in the universe. All of these have made us uncomfortable. All of these have been condemned as being in poor taste. It's usually only with the benefit of detachment that we realise that very discomfort they cause is where their value lies.
SCMRPG may be a lousy game. It may have many elements of terribly poor taste to it. But, if it makes us think and question even a little - be it about the massacre, how the massacre has been portrayed in the media, or even what we consider acceptable in an emerging media - then it has value. It's that kernel of value, even if in terribly poor taste, that the founding fathers recognized as so utterly important that they protected it in the first ammendment.
Ideas don't have to be good. They don't have to be well phrased. They don't have to perfectly encapsulate the idea. They simply have to be free to exist, to be judged for their own merits, for us to have a society raised up by daring to think rather than held back by censorship of anything that the majority doesn't find acceptable from their first gut reaction.
If people are determined to obfuscate, they'll find a way to.
You add version control... The first thing they'll do is hire aides to add literally thousands of minute ammendments to every bill for the simple reason that it now becomes impossible to read every minor change log. They may well not sneak anything nefarious in to this bill, the next one or the next ten. Then, one day, fifty bills later, after people have long since given up reading change logs, one of the thousand minor edits will do just what they're currently doing.
With source control for code, you can monitor what goes in because people are rarely actively trying to sneak anything in. If you do have someone who wants that chance and so starts spamming change logs, you can identify their malicious intent, go to your boss and get them fired. In congress, sadly, they've long since turned a blind eye to such pork barrel behavior and, if they turn a blind eye to it in this form, there's no reason not to expect them to turn a blind eye to it in a future form.
The original poster's mistake is thinking that congress somehow wants to not be corrupt. Yes, we can force a fix on one form... not that they actually want that fix... but, as the old saying goes, "Where there's a will, there's a way." and a lot of politicians have a very strong will for sneaking in self serving measures.
Search for a really common job. Let's use, "Web Developer"
Fail to find that job. Instead get offered variants of "Web Software Developer" that appears to describe a web application engineer rather than a general web developer.
Look at the salary range for a job that's markedly different to what you do.
Take offense at how unfairly you now feel you're paid.
Go to manager and demand a raise that you think is only fair.
Feel horribly taken advantage of when the manager, fairly legitimately, claims you're already pretty well compensated for the job you actually do vs. the significantly different job you found on the web.
Fester about the injustice.
Bitch about how the company you used to love is now terrible and evil.
Wonder why your manager who used to love you now sees you as a morale leech and someone they need to deal with.
Now see if you can guess the real reason a lot of managers get irritated by sites like this. Hint: It's nothing about being forced to pay what's fair.
Most sensible managers will want to pay a fair salary for the job they're having done simply because it attracts good applicants and a basis of fairness improves morale and hence productivity. Granted, not all managers are good or sensible but, honestly, most do try to be. Unfortunately, sites like salary.com, through their inherrent generalizations, often give thoroughly skewed impressions of what's fair and can cause all kinds of problems once someone that is fairly treated gets the impression they're being taken advantage of.
The flip side works against employees too... The last thing an employee wants is an ignorant manager finding a far less skilled job that kind of sounds similar and deciding 20% pay cuts or terminations and new hires are merrited.
Sure, they're a useful tool - but be seriously careful about building assumptions off over generalized data.
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What was your criteria for deciding they wouldn't? That they have a little sign up by the counter saying they card?
Most of the studies I've seen send a kid in to attempt to purchase an M rated title and verify whether they actually apply the policy they claim to.
Several years ago, the figures were way down around 30%. With increased awareness, more recent figures seem to sit around 70-80% overall with most major chains being higher still.
However, one loop hole that a lot of the studies seem to find is the garden center trick. Go to a checkout at a specialized part of a big store where the employees know nothing about gaming. Attempt to buy a game there and they often have no clue they're meant to card. Garden centers as part of a larger Walmart are one option, jewelry counters at Target are another.
You'll generally see figures like: "In Europe, non IE browsers are approaching 25% market share." or "Non IE browsers now account for 15% of web traffic."
How many of that 15-25% (depending on figures) truly don't have the option to open IE if they need to?
Don't get me wrong, I accept that it's still bad form to force your users to switch to an app they don't want to use and you'll certainly not win any friends that way...
But are you truly excluding Firefox and Opera users if they have IE bundled with their OS (which is still true for, what, 95%? of home users) but simply choose not to open it?
If a restaurant in a racist area decides to serve people regardless of race, are they truly excluding the racists who have elitist views, think the other race harbour viruses, etc. and therefore won't eat there? Or are the racists, who absolutely have the option to eat there, excluding themselves because of their elitism?
Sure, a few users truly don't have the option to use IE and it's certainly bad form to force people to use something they don't want to, even if they do already have it... But are you necessarily excluding them when they do still have the option?
The MPAA ratings and their adherence came about specifically to stop this kind of legislation. By creating their own voluntary code and then getting theaters to agree to uphold it, they maintained control of what movies got what ratings (thus no NC-17 rating for documentaries the government doesn't like, etc.)
Fortunately for the MPAA, theater owners were smart enough to get that they didn't want government control and smart enough to realize adherence was the way to avoid it. Enough theaters abided by the code, the problem went away. Now, years later, everyone assumes it's some kind of law.
That's what the ESRB ratings were supposed to be. Unfortunately, unlike movie theaters, videogames get sold anywhere and everywhere and their sellers aren't that smart. It gets even worse when stores like Walmart get involved and now you have checkout clerks in the garden center who know and care absolutely nothing about avoiding imposed legislation for the industry.
As theaters have it, the government cannot decide a movie doesn't suit the ruling party of the time and thus raise its rating to the point where it's unprofitable. Over zealous police captains who are going for promotion in a conservative town can't start sending sixteen year olds who look thirty in to movies in order to levy fines and show they're tough on crime.
Unfortunately, due to the ESRB's inability to regulate stores that sell the games, we are most likely going to see government control of rating and enforcement. We already have total dross forced on us because games have become so expensive to develop that the might of publishers like EA is mandatory and they're not interested in taking risks. Now imagine a world in which anything remotely approaching edgy content or political expression gets regarded as a risk to ratings, thus a risk to sales, and something they won't fund development of. Now add in small conservative towns where there are no videogame stores because the sheriff's mounted a bunch of stings to curry favor in elections.
That's absolutely not the manner in which R-rated movies to minors is regulated. The differences are subtle and often overlooked (or assumed not to exist at all) but they make all the difference in the world.
How many people with both an X360 and a PC chose to buy the PC version of Oblivion because they could get a ton of free mods to upgrade the PC version whereas Microsoft insisted the publisher charge a couple of bucks for every "upgrade" that really should have been a patch?
How many people bought the original Half Life so they could play the free mods that came out for it?
A publisher doesn't have to charge for mods in order to make money. They can make an easily modable game, let people download the mods for free, then rake in the extra sales of the original product.
It's a shame that Microsoft seems hellbent on forcing "microtransactions" that aren't that micro, demanding 500 XBL points for things that should really be free and closing the doors on things that normally would be.
Hopefully, the quote was about making extra revenues in original media sales that are spurred by free mod content.
Sadly, after reading previews of the forthcoming Tiger Woods game, I don't trust EA with that for one moment.
Their model is apparently to let users share their best games, etc. in order for others to try beating various aspects of the game like number of spectators hit, fewest shots to the green, etc. This content that enhances the game and thus, hopefully, drives EA sales is only free for three uploads. After that, you have to start paying to make their game more valuable to others.
This follows Battlefield 2 where they figured out how to charge people for the most interesting servers and make people feel grateful for it and Test Drive Unlimited where Microsoft made people fork out for Gold XBL service in order to share user created challenges.
So... User created content is a great way to make more money by selling more copies of the original media. Sadly, much as that's a viable model on its own, it really is becomming yet another area to try charging people more for something the publisher simply enabled but certainly never created.
Funny how free mods in Doom, Half Life, Morrowind and Oblivion has turned them in to beloved games that kept selling WAY past their shelf life while screwing every last penny out of their users turns games like X360's Morrowind, Test Drive Unlimited and the upcoming Tiger Woods in to resented money sinks with short shelf lives.
The sad thing is, I actually started this post to protest there was a more innocent interpretation but then, realizing the sad state of consoles where you're locked in - plus Microsoft's plans for XBL's port to Vista - and I kind of lost faith. It'd be great if they showed a little forethought and built valuable franchizes rather than raping every last dollar - sadly I don't believe that of them anymore.
Whether light's red of blue, enough of it will still blind you. Quite a bit of one frequency will still disrupt your ability to register other nearby frequencies.
Unless of course we can be absolutely certain that this proposed system we aren't sure of and thus can't be absolutely certain about involves bees only able to work on one frequency rather than a range like we can.
I agree it's likely fearmongering. Just pointing out that different frequencies don't suddenly mean no effect.
*As the speed of light is consistent, wavelength and frequency have a direct relationship to each other - before anyone complains wavelength isn't frequency.
There's a reason why history grads often go on to very successful careers in apparently completely unrelated fields: It's because a good education in history is an education in thinking.
I didn't follow it through to university level but I still value one specific history class I took as the most important part of my education.
Studying World War II history, we weren't taught to memorize the dates of the outbreak of war, the dates of the conferences between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and a bunch of other statistical but semi meaningless information when taken out of context.
Instead we were taught to look at the different sources, to embrace the fact that German propaganda ministry materials were biased, look at the just as biased British accounts of the time, the histories written (as Churchill said) by the victor after the event, form our own conclusions about where the truth likely lay and still appreciate the value that the slanted perspective would have had on the respective populations.
By understanding the broader picture, not only did I find a hell of a lot more interest in the period but I also got taught how to think independently, to analyze sources and form my own opinions.
Wikipedia isn't a perfect source of truth. Then again, most textbooks that cover their nation's wars with another country aren't either.
In an ideal world, you teach students how to assess the truth of what they're told, how to think and how to form their own opinions.
Unfortunately, America seems hell bent on raising children that believe the sanctioned news source is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When they grow up and start watching something like Fox News as their source of truth, look at the wonderful mess a country that had no idea about the real facts can get in to when the majority of voters think what they're told to and need four years of death and a demolished "liberated" country to make them stop and question.
Now imagine what would have happened if the average American had learned in highschool to listen to what Fox was saying, flick over to the Daily Show for a humorous counter, go on line to a non American news source like the BBC for a third perspective, then Wikipedia for a potentially somewhat inaccurate but still useful grounding in the region's politics and history.
Sure, they might reasonably have concluded Iraq had chemical weapons - after all, we still had the recepits from when we sold them to them in the 80s. They might have weighed up the national interest and judged it higher than the concerns voiced elsewhere in the world. I don't care whether they would have agreed with me or not - but at least they would have thought rather than spat venom at anyone being "unpatriotic," leaving all rational thought at the door.
So, in short: A source doesn't have to be accurate to be valuable. Often, in learning to appreciate the inaccuracies, we learn vastly more. If nothing else, at least we engage our brains - which seems like a good thing to encourage school children to do if you're going to call yourselves educators.
Sadly Tijuana already has that one patented.
You can't do away with the police's right to abuse their authority...
Let's face it, the only reason anyone donates to the frequent calls from the various police related funds is because you get a nice bumper sticker that they all but outright state will let officers know you've given them money and thus should be exempted from most traffic tickets.
If they had to start abiding by the law, no longer selectively applying it when it comes to their friends and those who effectively bribe them, they couldn't make those exceptions. Without those exceptions, who would give them money? Without that source of income, how would they replace that revenue stream? More taxes.
So, really, unless you want more taxes, you have to support our felonious friends in blue. Sure, there are some irksome moral questions about their honesty here... but more taxes would be... unAmerican!
Indeed it does. And YouTube apparently has the video.
(Safe for work, not really safe to drink during)
Try that one when giving a testimony under oath. Even if what you lied about has no relevance to the case at hand, does not further any crimes or anything, it is still punishable. There are many more cases where lying has been made explicitly illegal. Except this specific case of lying, lying under oath is perjury: a crime. Thus, lying under oath is furthering a crime - its own crime of perjury.
Microsoft's share raised relative to Apple's for computers connected to the Internet...
Step 1: Release buggy O.S.
Step 2: Require users to constantly go on line to get patches.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.
It turns out Step 3 reads, "Wait for market share to be calculated by number of machines going on line."
Broadband usage figures are hard to track down but seem to sit around 40% of households and 70% of active internet users. That's a hell of a lot of home computing users that still use dial up. 0.3% variation is pretty easily explained during a period where those dial up users are forced on line for hours at a time to get their Microsoft OS patched while the Apple users can just log in to get their mail then go about their day.
'Rock Band Wireless Guitar Controller' will retail at $79.99 (40 quid approx)
Cheap wireless guitar system: $99 plus the cost of the guitar below.
'Rock Band Guitar Controller' at $59.99 (30 quid approx)
Cheap real guitar: $99
Decent: Several hundred
'Rock Band Drum Set' $79.99
Cheap real drum kit: $200
Decent: Half a grand plus.
'Rock Band Microphone' at $39.99 (20 quid approx)."
Cheap mic: $20
With the exception of the mic, every piece is cheaper than the traditional version.
Total, to put a complete band together, for a pair of wired guitars, a drum set and mic, it's $240. That buys one starter guitar/amp set. To put those same real instruments together would set you back a thousand dollars plus by the time you added amps.
Granted, it's comparing apples to oranges:
You can't be as creative with the game as you can with real instruments - but then most people will never sound as good on a real instrument as they will in game and certainly won't get the instant reward.
The game looks likely to require microtransactions to add new songs - but then again, tab books are $19.99 each in many cases).
The game will likely never get you a record deal - but then how many people play instruments vs. actually get deals?
Real instruments don't let you play with people across the country and across the world - though some hardware/software solutions somewhat let you do that.
Neither is necessarily better or worse, different rewards for different value sets. If it's just about having fun, chasing the fantasy of being in a band even though you know it's just a fantasy, the controllers are a hell of a lot cheaper than any other option (besides air guitar).
If it still seems expensive, try getting in to hardcore flight simulations: $149 for basic pedals, $149 for a yoke, $199 for a throttle quadrant, $179 for head tracking.
I adored the original Ghost Recon. Whilst by no means perfect, few games have impressed me as much as setting up a careful ambush, watching an enemy squad come down the hill on the first map, walking casually, looking around but little more... then I sprung my trap too soon, half their squad dropped to one knee to provide covering fire whilst the others ran forward then they swapped, moving in on me, defending themselves.
A quick reload and a substantially different fire fight later and I was sold.
Then there was the squad mate AI. They may or may not have been the smartest I've ever come across. It didn't matter because I finally had proper control in the greatest squad mate control system I've yet found. Absolutely no pure AI squad mate system to date can handle the nuances of you telling everyone to go prone, only fire if fired upon, then move in to circling positions around an enemy entrenchment while one guy readies his anti tank launcher, pops up, fires, then drops down while his squad mates mop up the survivors.
Add in a stealth system that actually involved differing perception ranges for the enemy and you had an amazing AI simulation whether much of it was AI in the classical sense or not.
And then, after XBox users couldn't wrap their paws around the controller properly, they wrecked the entire series for more commercial appeal. A true shame, ruining the nuances of a truly great game.
Oh, and one round was all it took - meaning that AI felt like it mattered. If you can run in to a horde of enemies and keep shooting because you're frenzied, have a ton of armor and are doing quad damage with a rocket launcher, enemies carefully flanking you don't matter in the least. If a single enemy creeps around behind you and puts the one round that matters in to you, the AI becomes vastly more dramatic.
Not sure it's my favorite... but props to Microsoft for having the balls to market Windows ME as one giant bug-as-a-feature.
'An airport camera can be programmed to know what a departure hall should look like, with thousands of separate movements. A single suitcase left for any length of time would trigger an alarm.'
This reminds me of the famous story of the neural net that learned to identify tanks in pictures with 100% accuracy... right up until someone realized all the pictures of tanks were taken on sunny days and those without were taken on cloudy days and all the system could really do was tell if the weather was nice out.
(source).
A system that can identify a suitcase left in the same spot for too long at Heathrow isn't detecting terrorism, it's detecting that Spanish air traffic control is on strike yet a gain and passengers have been stranded at the airport for three days.
I look forward to the chance of life immitating stupid when it identifies the air traffic controller strike's symptoms (luggage in the same place for days) as a terrorist attack, delays flights by several more days as a terror lockdown starts up, then identifies the luggage held up by its own terror lock down as a terrorist attack - getting in to an endless feedback loop of stupid.
With a known system, it's simple for terrorists to defeat it (put a small set of powered wheels on the bottom of your bomb so it moves itself too slowly for people to spot but enough that the system doesn't see it as stationary over time). There are just two crimes I can see it spotting: the state of the passenger airline industry and government willingness to believe that automating things is a solution. Sadly, though they both probably should be classified as crimes, neither has shown any signs of being acted on yet.
Then I took a good look at my listening habits, and realized I never actually _need_ that kind of capacity.
You don't need an MP3 player, period.
The only question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. In your case, a 4GB nano and ~1,000 songs is plenty and the benefits your listening patterns gain from adding the extra ~6,500 songs of a 30GB or ~19,000 songs of an 80GB player are much smaller than the cost/bulk benefits you get from a smaller player.
I, on the other hand, gain a lot of my self definition from my love and knowledge of music. For me, the 80GB player is as small as I want my fat fingers to deal with in the first place so size isn't an issue. Cost would certainly be nice to drop. Getting to have discussions about what Punk-Country sounds like in the form of the Meat Puppets, have cheesy Roxette/Erasure 80's flashbacks with my wife on a Monday morning drive AND be able to listen to the core 1,000 songs in my main playlists is worth a fortune to me - way in excess of the $200 extra price.
Now add in the ~20 movies that can run picture in picture on my monitor while I code, the ability to figure out what certain lyrics are because I ran an app to grab them from the net, the ability to keep samples of my photography handy... For me it's a no brainer.
The capacity is a HUGE issue for the retarded (meant in the true sense of the word) iPhone. For my 320x240 iPod, I tend to rip movies at around the 400MB point (granted I go slightly over 320 wide so I can either zoom in on the center at 1:1 or zoom out and letterbox on a square screen). 4GB for the great new "widescreen movie capable" iPhone lets me put maybe 7-8 movies on there so long as I put no music on and minimal extra apps. That's barely enough for an intercontinental flight and back and now my iPhone's useless for music. Sure there's an 8GB version... giving maybe that small set of movies and a very limited music library.
For users like yourself, the iPhone will be the latest and greatest new gadget, able to do all kinds of quirky things that you can't do on other phones and save space in your pocket for your willingly limited music library - albeit for a very high price. For a user like myself, the biggest feature is the great new touch sensitive screen. Finally getting a movie big enough to be worth watching is huge and the same goes for easy navigation of bigger playlists - both of which are massively hampered by too little capacity to store much.
So, it's all about personal definitions. At its simplest, no one needs a cool movie and MP3 playing phone. At the other extreme, people who're excited by those features and have the libraries to really use them are massively hampered by the tiny storage in the first generation. In the middle, there are people like yourself - though the cheaper price argument falls flat on its face there.
Fortunately for Apple, they only ever aimed for 1% market saturation and, whilst tying it to signup with a provider could have dropped the price and a bigger drive could have upped the appeal to maybe 20-30% market saturation, Apple are evidently more than happy with 1% on their own terms rather than 20-30% on other people's terms with smaller margins. Going for that 1%, they can dictate whatever they like and accept that most of us won't take it but enough will.
Why isn't a PC without it's case screwed on considered a naked PC?
:(
As a safety note: Before attempting to screw a naked PC, make sure all sharp metal edges are filed down. Learned that one the hard way.
'I think if we can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,' Wright said, a game could detect patterns of what the player wants, and adjust music, lighting, and other immersive elements to reflect the story that a player wants to play.
Ten minutes later, Jack Thompson goes before a court, "Look what happens when I play this game determined to get my rocks off over baby mutilation! It was certified T for Teen but a learning AI and my talent for deviency means it's now hardcore porn. These game makers need to be sued!"
We're already seeing lawsuits and potential new laws over the fact that games are so complex the ESRB can't possibly see everything (though the potential new laws would require that anyway). Add in an AI that modifies the game to suit you and you're in for a whole world of hurt when it modifies in ways no one ever expected.
Spore will be an interesting one. It'll be one thing when horny teenagers figure out how to create a creature that looks like a naked woman but and edge case in the procedural animation system causes to move by pelvic thrusting it's way around the world. Now imagine what it'll be like when Spore's other great feature - sharing content between players - gets pulled in and eight year old little Johnny sees it and his mother decides to go to the media with the apparent porn her child was exposed to.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of emergent behaviors, advanced AI, true neural networks, adaptive gameplay and automatic content sharing. I just sadly see those same great features giving ammunition to those who'd love to hurt the industry for their own political gain.
Interestingly, if you pick up the O'Reilly book on Game AI, they discuss the notion that game developers are already shying away from what's possible for fear of what it might decide to do once they're no longer watching. We're already at the point where it's no longer about what we know how to do but what our lawyers will let us do.
It's worse when you consider this tech is roughly micrometers to silicon's nanometers. 10^3x10^3 means you're looking at a millionth the area utilization of silicon. Divide 40,000 by a million and you're looking at the equivalent of 0.04 square meters of silicon or roughly that of a single 12" wafer. A whole factory to produce the equivalent of one silicon wafer a year? Not such a great boast.
Yeah, I'm sure I've got meters squared and square meters confused, messed up an area calculation or somesuch... But you get the idea.
If Citizen Kane was filmed in [a garage] with a [cast entirely under the age of 16] whining about how [their mom] is suppressing their artistic style, then maybe it would have some parallel to the Columbine game.
t h
i on
Citizen Kane was filmed in [RKO's lot] with a [director who was the equivalent of a 16 year old*] whining** about how [the media**/RKO execs***] was suppressing their artistic style.
*Filming took place between June 29 and October 23, 1940. Welles, born on May 6, 1915, had barely turned 25. For the film industry, this is exactly the equivalent of a precocious 16 year old. That said, it's worth noting that, while I can't find an age for Danny Ledonne, it certainly appears he was older than 16 when he made the game.
**Welles' career suffered a crippling blow with the box-office failure of Kane, and he spent the rest of his life struggling to make films on his own terms. He lived long enough to see his debut film acknowledged as a classic, and late in life he famously remarked that he'd started at the top and spent the rest of his life working his way down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_kane#Afterma
***Much of the media at the time was owned by William Randolph Hearst. Because the movie was perceived as attacking his mistress, he directed his outlets to attack it.
****Welles prevented studio executives of RKO from visiting the set. He understood their desire to control projects and he knew they were expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_kane#Product
So, in short: Precocious kid with no track record in the specific media makes a product that many people hate and then spends the rest of their lives talking about how they made a great example of the art form despite barely being able to work int he field again and how that's all the result of malicious people who just don't get it.
It's worth remembering some of the other things humanity's put out in poor taste...
In 1612, there was the righteous outrage at questioning whether God's creation, the Earth, was truly the center of the universe. This was much worse than poor taste or glorifying killing... This was going against God's will and outright seeking damnation. To quote from Wikipedia, "In 1614, from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella, Father Tommaso Caccini (1574-1648) denounced Galileo's opinions on the motion of the Earth, judging them dangerous and close to heresy."
Also in poor taste, a self absorbed director made a movie that was little more than a pretext for ridiculing the life of one of America's most influential people - William Randolph Hearst. There was a massive media backlash against it, the film was a failure in the box office and it pretty much destroyed the career of the director. SCMRPG has nothing on the backlash against this "poor taste" project that tried to pass itself off as art. Of course, today we know it as Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest movie ever made.
Then there was the disgusting picture of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, a burned, naked child in Vietnam. How on earth could we ever describe a picture showing a child burned by napalm as anything other than in poor taste and utterly without merit on artistic grounds? In this case, it went on to be one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century. wikipedia
Time and again, we dismiss anything that makes us uncomfortable. Apparent attacks on powerful people, pictures of burning children, questions about our world's place in the universe. All of these have made us uncomfortable. All of these have been condemned as being in poor taste. It's usually only with the benefit of detachment that we realise that very discomfort they cause is where their value lies.
SCMRPG may be a lousy game. It may have many elements of terribly poor taste to it. But, if it makes us think and question even a little - be it about the massacre, how the massacre has been portrayed in the media, or even what we consider acceptable in an emerging media - then it has value. It's that kernel of value, even if in terribly poor taste, that the founding fathers recognized as so utterly important that they protected it in the first ammendment.
Ideas don't have to be good. They don't have to be well phrased. They don't have to perfectly encapsulate the idea. They simply have to be free to exist, to be judged for their own merits, for us to have a society raised up by daring to think rather than held back by censorship of anything that the majority doesn't find acceptable from their first gut reaction.
If people are determined to obfuscate, they'll find a way to.
You add version control... The first thing they'll do is hire aides to add literally thousands of minute ammendments to every bill for the simple reason that it now becomes impossible to read every minor change log. They may well not sneak anything nefarious in to this bill, the next one or the next ten. Then, one day, fifty bills later, after people have long since given up reading change logs, one of the thousand minor edits will do just what they're currently doing.
With source control for code, you can monitor what goes in because people are rarely actively trying to sneak anything in. If you do have someone who wants that chance and so starts spamming change logs, you can identify their malicious intent, go to your boss and get them fired. In congress, sadly, they've long since turned a blind eye to such pork barrel behavior and, if they turn a blind eye to it in this form, there's no reason not to expect them to turn a blind eye to it in a future form.
The original poster's mistake is thinking that congress somehow wants to not be corrupt. Yes, we can force a fix on one form... not that they actually want that fix... but, as the old saying goes, "Where there's a will, there's a way." and a lot of politicians have a very strong will for sneaking in self serving measures.
What's the difference between the Library of Congress and the House of Representatives?
In the Library of Congress, you're not allowed to lick the pages.
- Go to salary.com
- Search for a really common job. Let's use, "Web Developer"
- Fail to find that job. Instead get offered variants of "Web Software Developer" that appears to describe a web application engineer rather than a general web developer.
- Look at the salary range for a job that's markedly different to what you do.
- Take offense at how unfairly you now feel you're paid.
- Go to manager and demand a raise that you think is only fair.
- Feel horribly taken advantage of when the manager, fairly legitimately, claims you're already pretty well compensated for the job you actually do vs. the significantly different job you found on the web.
- Fester about the injustice.
- Bitch about how the company you used to love is now terrible and evil.
- Wonder why your manager who used to love you now sees you as a morale leech and someone they need to deal with.
Now see if you can guess the real reason a lot of managers get irritated by sites like this. Hint: It's nothing about being forced to pay what's fair.Most sensible managers will want to pay a fair salary for the job they're having done simply because it attracts good applicants and a basis of fairness improves morale and hence productivity. Granted, not all managers are good or sensible but, honestly, most do try to be. Unfortunately, sites like salary.com, through their inherrent generalizations, often give thoroughly skewed impressions of what's fair and can cause all kinds of problems once someone that is fairly treated gets the impression they're being taken advantage of.
The flip side works against employees too... The last thing an employee wants is an ignorant manager finding a far less skilled job that kind of sounds similar and deciding 20% pay cuts or terminations and new hires are merrited.
Sure, they're a useful tool - but be seriously careful about building assumptions off over generalized data.