"Making users want to give back" doesn't seem to have worked so well either, given the current situation. The carrot has its place, but so does the stick.
And while you might wonder if this is just an excuse to get iPhone gamers to dip into their wallets even more often, it's actually a hugely positive thing for several reasons. Downloadable content, virtual items, subscription billing and fast-track social advancement are some of them...
Um, in what way are any of these things positive? I look at these things and see only scams: more ways to nickel-and-dime gamers to death.
As long as Wikipedia's "power" does not have force of law, it is not censorship. You don't have to give them this power over you, and you can take that power away from them very easily by ceasing to go there. Make your own "Freepedia" if it really bothers you so much.
Exactly. I understand that classifying states of mind such as these can be useful, but this is not an illness by any sane stretch of the imagination. Not every state other than blissful, meditative obedience is an illness; many, in fact, are quite healthy reactions to the normal disappointments and unpleasantnesses that creep into our lives from time to time.
People aren't "stealing" their stuff for the sake of stealing it. They're doing it because they want more control and use out of their media than Sony and others provide.
That's what they tell themselves. A handful may even walk the walk. But for most, frankly it's stealing to steal: they just want to watch without paying.
The best thing that the champions of fair use -which is a legitimate and important balancing factor to the power of copyright- can do right now is to stop kidding themselves about this. The overwhelming majority of "copyfighters" are just kiddies with a warped sense of entitlement looking to get something for nothing. Fair use must be preserved, but something has to be done about the thieves.
Why can't the ethical debate be side stepped, by using cord blood cells? I never hear this mentioned when the topic of federal funding for stem cells comes up. I figured someone here could explain the pros and cons of these cells from a research point of view.
Because waiting for this and other nonlethal methods of gathering stem cells to mature is inconvenient for the researchers, and certain other groups find the idea of nonlethal stem cell harvesting to be counter to their own political agendas.
Achievements are a terrible thing to add to a game: a mere gimmick to get people to overplay their games to death, get bored as quickly as possible, and run out to buy more games for MOAR POINTZ. They harm quality by taking developer effort away from things that matter, and they provide a cover for killing real replay value: an unprofitable thing that has been a thorn in developers' sides for years.
Shame on Microsoft for introducing this scourge, however brilliantly it may have worked for its attach rates. Shame on Sony for copying them. Shame on Nintendo for its flirtation with the concept, even if they have stayed away from them in the core system.
A precompiled solution would be interesting, but it requires a standard for the bytecode. While there seems to be a move toward bytecode compilation in the new crop of JavaScript engines, actually getting them to agree on a standard for this will be difficult.
If you can get that done, though, then there's no need for a new tag. Just add it as a possible MIME type ("application/ecmascript-bytecode" perhaps?) on the script tag.
There's a reason that even Hollywood still relies on external sensors for motion capture: machine vision is decades away from being able to do stuff like this. There is simply no way this will be any good, but then, I think that's part of the point: reinforce the 360 fanboys' perception that motion is bad by giving them a bad controller for motion.
Abstraction of buttons? I'd prefer buttons instead of simply moving my hand to simulate pressing them.
What I mean is that buttons provide a layer of abstraction: you tell the onscreen character what to do, and the character does it properly. This is far superior to 1:1, which limits the onscreen character to what the player is capable of doing: not exactly conducive to any the epic feats game characters are known for performing several times a minute. With 1:1, you have two choices: dumb the game down severely or everybody dies, because no gamer will ever, for example, be as good with a sword as Link needs to be.
Better still, though, is to combine the abstraction which was the strength of buttons with the immersion that motion provides: gesture-based control, or as I prefer to call it, expressive motion control. Ultimately, this is what most of the people clamoring for 1:1 really want -Do What I Mean, not Do As I Do- but are mistaken in thinking that 1:1 will actually provide. The Wii Remote is more than capable of handling this even without WM+. It just requires a little developer effort.
Depth and complexity are entirely different things, and the attempt to tie them together has driven more people away from gaming than quite possibly any other aspect of the downhill slide gaming has suffered from over the last ten years.
Depth is good, but can and should be achieved without gratuitous complexity. Fortunately, it's been done many times throughout the history of gaming, video and otherwise, so there are plenty of examples from which one can draw inspiration. It's just a matter of letting go of the ridiculous idea that learning the basic moves of a game should take more than five minutes.
After the disaster that was Pippin, I very much doubt that Apple will be going into that business again. Steve Jobs' animosity toward computer gaming is well-documented, and it is unlikely that he would about-face on something like this, as he would have to have done back when this project started.
More likely, this is an extension of the Apple TV into a more full-fledged set-top PC. Jobs hates games, but he's learned the hard way that games sell computers, so of course he's going to have Apple put some thought into the interface. But this will not be marketed as a game console, and ultimately it will not compete with game consoles.
On the other hand, it's good to see that they're leaning towards Wiimote-like gesture-based control as opposed to 1:1 motion mapping. It's the best of both worlds: the abstraction of buttons alongside the immersion of motion.
So you get people hooked in with a free release, then hijack them after a year with no good downgrade path and thus no access to their data (modulo switching operating systems) unless they pay up?
I'm impressed. I didn't think MS could sink any lower.
A good detection tool understands that some duplication, as with the coincidences and quotations you mention, is going to be inevitable. But such tools also understand that coincidences and quotations can only go so far without raising eyebrows.
The best a detection tool can do is flag those papers which seem to have an unusually high proportion of duplication -say, 20% or more- and present these to the teacher along with the works most likely to have been plagiarized from. In the end, the teacher needs to make the final judgment call: all these tools can do is red-flag the relatively likely cases.
These evil word bastards are perpetuating non-Cubic myth. Only Dr. Gene Ray, wisest human, can possibly understand the depth and importance of this harmonic system with 4 simultaneous days in a single rotation...
Oh, wait; Crime Tube? Um, err, sorry about that. My bad.
Defenses based on copyright shouldn't even be applicable.
Uh... Beavis started it.
No, really. Read up on the case; it was the plaintiffs (i.e. the students), not the teachers, who first brought up copyright. In fact, the lawsuit hinged on it: the students were trying to keep their work out of anti-plagiarism tools based on copyright defense. I agree that copyright shouldn't have been used in this case, but not for the same reasons you do.
There is a reasonable expectation when you turn in a paper for school that a teacher will take measures to detect plagiarism. That is nothing more or less than what happened here, and some plagiarists (or perhaps plagiarist-enablers) wanted to get around that expectation. Too bad for them.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels.
I think it's more because your "preferred distribution channels" are known-failing paths for anyone trying to make money. For all that you claim you wouldn't steal music if it were sold in an unsustainable commercial model, there is no reason whatsoever to believe you, and even if there were, no one could sustain a market on the tiny proportion of those who claim they'd go honest that would actually do so.
Basically they are assholes twice over. First to their customers (us), and then to their shareholders (why aren't we making money? Oh, because the distributers are assholes who don't want to *sell* our products).
Just one problem with this: iTunes is making money hand over fist, so your shareholder question is moot.
As for being an asshole to the customers, the actual customers don't seem to agree with you if the continued rampant success of iTunes is any indication. The only ones who seem to call Apple assholes over this are people who think they are entitled to some specific sales model.
Set the distribution rights free, drop DRM, and make the products available in the preferred way (internet, and no, that do *NOT* mean through some crap IE webbrowser crap solution with sub par quality), yadda, yadda, yadda.
iTunes has already dropped DRM. The software is irrelevant.
Most of you guys on slashdot gets this.
Most of understand this perversion of the idea of information freedom: namely, a warped sense of entitlement. We simply don't agree with it.
JavaScript does OOP in a sane manner. It's not the same manner as many traditional OO languages, to be true -it's prototype-based instead of class-based- but it's every bit as sane in its own way. It's just different.
The major reason you find OOP in JavaScript to be "insane" is that you are tearing your hair out trying to shoehorn in this particular paradigm that the language wasn't designed to use: sure, you can do it, but it's a lot of extra effort for very little gain in the end. That's not a problem with the language, but with programmers who resist the flow of that language. Just let JavaScript be JavaScript, and you'll find that things get much saner, or at least a lot less maddening.
Seriously: what harm ever came from learning new ways to do things?
Naaa you know what, its not being cheap to complain about over priced products. Just because your used to getting gouged doesn't mean its ok.
The market's success with a luxury item at the current price point is convincing evidence that people are not, in fact, getting gouged. This is what the market will bear with no pressure to buy, and thus, what it is worth.
Used is much worse for the developer than tail pricing. The developer will not benefit from a second-hand sale.
A small amount, or even just a better reputation for sales with their publisher, is probably better than the zero that a second-hand sale represents.
And this is relevant... why? The developer already got all the money they're entitled to from that copy. This is what's known as the first-sale doctrine, and among other things it's what makes libraries legal.
Slashdot Mirror
"Making users want to give back" doesn't seem to have worked so well either, given the current situation. The carrot has its place, but so does the stick.
And while you might wonder if this is just an excuse to get iPhone gamers to dip into their wallets even more often, it's actually a hugely positive thing for several reasons. Downloadable content, virtual items, subscription billing and fast-track social advancement are some of them...
Um, in what way are any of these things positive? I look at these things and see only scams: more ways to nickel-and-dime gamers to death.
As long as Wikipedia's "power" does not have force of law, it is not censorship. You don't have to give them this power over you, and you can take that power away from them very easily by ceasing to go there. Make your own "Freepedia" if it really bothers you so much.
Whoa. Godwinned in only three posts.
Exactly. I understand that classifying states of mind such as these can be useful, but this is not an illness by any sane stretch of the imagination. Not every state other than blissful, meditative obedience is an illness; many, in fact, are quite healthy reactions to the normal disappointments and unpleasantnesses that creep into our lives from time to time.
People aren't "stealing" their stuff for the sake of stealing it. They're doing it because they want more control and use out of their media than Sony and others provide.
That's what they tell themselves. A handful may even walk the walk. But for most, frankly it's stealing to steal: they just want to watch without paying.
The best thing that the champions of fair use -which is a legitimate and important balancing factor to the power of copyright- can do right now is to stop kidding themselves about this. The overwhelming majority of "copyfighters" are just kiddies with a warped sense of entitlement looking to get something for nothing. Fair use must be preserved, but something has to be done about the thieves.
Why can't the ethical debate be side stepped, by using cord blood cells? I never hear this mentioned when the topic of federal funding for stem cells comes up. I figured someone here could explain the pros and cons of these cells from a research point of view.
Because waiting for this and other nonlethal methods of gathering stem cells to mature is inconvenient for the researchers, and certain other groups find the idea of nonlethal stem cell harvesting to be counter to their own political agendas.
Achievements are a terrible thing to add to a game: a mere gimmick to get people to overplay their games to death, get bored as quickly as possible, and run out to buy more games for MOAR POINTZ. They harm quality by taking developer effort away from things that matter, and they provide a cover for killing real replay value: an unprofitable thing that has been a thorn in developers' sides for years.
Shame on Microsoft for introducing this scourge, however brilliantly it may have worked for its attach rates. Shame on Sony for copying them. Shame on Nintendo for its flirtation with the concept, even if they have stayed away from them in the core system.
A precompiled solution would be interesting, but it requires a standard for the bytecode. While there seems to be a move toward bytecode compilation in the new crop of JavaScript engines, actually getting them to agree on a standard for this will be difficult.
If you can get that done, though, then there's no need for a new tag. Just add it as a possible MIME type ("application/ecmascript-bytecode" perhaps?) on the script tag.
There's a reason that even Hollywood still relies on external sensors for motion capture: machine vision is decades away from being able to do stuff like this. There is simply no way this will be any good, but then, I think that's part of the point: reinforce the 360 fanboys' perception that motion is bad by giving them a bad controller for motion.
Abstraction of buttons? I'd prefer buttons instead of simply moving my hand to simulate pressing them.
What I mean is that buttons provide a layer of abstraction: you tell the onscreen character what to do, and the character does it properly. This is far superior to 1:1, which limits the onscreen character to what the player is capable of doing: not exactly conducive to any the epic feats game characters are known for performing several times a minute. With 1:1, you have two choices: dumb the game down severely or everybody dies, because no gamer will ever, for example, be as good with a sword as Link needs to be.
Better still, though, is to combine the abstraction which was the strength of buttons with the immersion that motion provides: gesture-based control, or as I prefer to call it, expressive motion control. Ultimately, this is what most of the people clamoring for 1:1 really want -Do What I Mean, not Do As I Do- but are mistaken in thinking that 1:1 will actually provide. The Wii Remote is more than capable of handling this even without WM+. It just requires a little developer effort.
Depth and complexity are entirely different things, and the attempt to tie them together has driven more people away from gaming than quite possibly any other aspect of the downhill slide gaming has suffered from over the last ten years.
Depth is good, but can and should be achieved without gratuitous complexity. Fortunately, it's been done many times throughout the history of gaming, video and otherwise, so there are plenty of examples from which one can draw inspiration. It's just a matter of letting go of the ridiculous idea that learning the basic moves of a game should take more than five minutes.
After the disaster that was Pippin, I very much doubt that Apple will be going into that business again. Steve Jobs' animosity toward computer gaming is well-documented, and it is unlikely that he would about-face on something like this, as he would have to have done back when this project started.
More likely, this is an extension of the Apple TV into a more full-fledged set-top PC. Jobs hates games, but he's learned the hard way that games sell computers, so of course he's going to have Apple put some thought into the interface. But this will not be marketed as a game console, and ultimately it will not compete with game consoles.
On the other hand, it's good to see that they're leaning towards Wiimote-like gesture-based control as opposed to 1:1 motion mapping. It's the best of both worlds: the abstraction of buttons alongside the immersion of motion.
So you get people hooked in with a free release, then hijack them after a year with no good downgrade path and thus no access to their data (modulo switching operating systems) unless they pay up?
I'm impressed. I didn't think MS could sink any lower.
My, how compassionate and humanitarian of you. Aren't those things supposed to be core underpinnings of liberal values?
A good detection tool understands that some duplication, as with the coincidences and quotations you mention, is going to be inevitable. But such tools also understand that coincidences and quotations can only go so far without raising eyebrows.
The best a detection tool can do is flag those papers which seem to have an unusually high proportion of duplication -say, 20% or more- and present these to the teacher along with the works most likely to have been plagiarized from. In the end, the teacher needs to make the final judgment call: all these tools can do is red-flag the relatively likely cases.
These evil word bastards are perpetuating non-Cubic myth. Only Dr. Gene Ray, wisest human, can possibly understand the depth and importance of this harmonic system with 4 simultaneous days in a single rotation...
Oh, wait; Crime Tube? Um, err, sorry about that. My bad.
Man, that sucks.
Defenses based on copyright shouldn't
even be applicable.
Uh... Beavis started it.
No, really. Read up on the case; it was the plaintiffs (i.e. the students), not the teachers, who first brought up copyright. In fact, the lawsuit hinged on it: the students were trying to keep their work out of anti-plagiarism tools based on copyright defense. I agree that copyright shouldn't have been used in this case, but not for the same reasons you do.
There is a reasonable expectation when you turn in a paper for school that a teacher will take measures to detect plagiarism. That is nothing more or less than what happened here, and some plagiarists (or perhaps plagiarist-enablers) wanted to get around that expectation. Too bad for them.
who cares.. he's been dead for years anyway.
I'm not sure he'd agree with you on that.
If they could figure out a voice-command interface to this, "Talk to the hand" could get a whole new meaning.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels.
I think it's more because your "preferred distribution channels" are known-failing paths for anyone trying to make money. For all that you claim you wouldn't steal music if it were sold in an unsustainable commercial model, there is no reason whatsoever to believe you, and even if there were, no one could sustain a market on the tiny proportion of those who claim they'd go honest that would actually do so.
Basically they are assholes twice over. First to their customers (us), and then to their shareholders (why aren't we making money? Oh, because the distributers are assholes who don't want to *sell* our products).
Just one problem with this: iTunes is making money hand over fist, so your shareholder question is moot.
As for being an asshole to the customers, the actual customers don't seem to agree with you if the continued rampant success of iTunes is any indication. The only ones who seem to call Apple assholes over this are people who think they are entitled to some specific sales model.
Set the distribution rights free, drop DRM, and make the products available in the preferred way (internet, and no, that do *NOT* mean through some crap IE webbrowser crap solution with sub par quality), yadda, yadda, yadda.
iTunes has already dropped DRM. The software is irrelevant.
Most of you guys on slashdot gets this.
Most of understand this perversion of the idea of information freedom: namely, a warped sense of entitlement. We simply don't agree with it.
I tend to boycott Apple MP3 players mainly because of their proprietary formats and hardware lock-in.
Hardware lock-in I'll give you, but their formats are no more proprietary than MP3, WMA, or the other formats used by current online music stores.
JavaScript does OOP in a sane manner. It's not the same manner as many traditional OO languages, to be true -it's prototype-based instead of class-based- but it's every bit as sane in its own way. It's just different.
The major reason you find OOP in JavaScript to be "insane" is that you are tearing your hair out trying to shoehorn in this particular paradigm that the language wasn't designed to use: sure, you can do it, but it's a lot of extra effort for very little gain in the end. That's not a problem with the language, but with programmers who resist the flow of that language. Just let JavaScript be JavaScript, and you'll find that things get much saner, or at least a lot less maddening.
Seriously: what harm ever came from learning new ways to do things?
Naaa you know what, its not being cheap to complain about over priced products. Just because your used to getting gouged doesn't mean its ok.
The market's success with a luxury item at the current price point is convincing evidence that people are not, in fact, getting gouged. This is what the market will bear with no pressure to buy, and thus, what it is worth.
Used is much worse for the developer than tail pricing. The developer will not benefit from a second-hand sale.
A small amount, or even just a better reputation for sales with their publisher, is probably better than the zero that a second-hand sale represents.
And this is relevant... why? The developer already got all the money they're entitled to from that copy. This is what's known as the first-sale doctrine, and among other things it's what makes libraries legal.