They should not be faced with a "Hobson's choice" of "Confess, and pay this meerly ruinous fine - or defend yourself and hope your parents don't mind selling their house & one of your little sister's kidneys if you loose."
Agreed, but that's more an issue with our legal system than an issue with the RIAA itself, right?
Any large corporation can threaten to sue, and given that simply taking a case to trial is prohibitively expensive for most people, the corporations have all the power. I don't like the RIAA any more than the next guy, but if you're doing something illegal like blatantly violating copyright, it's certainly within their rights to sue you. They're going to get it wrong sometimes -- nothing's perfect -- but if the system is set up so that they feel little pain for getting it wrong and the falsely accused feel huge pain, then the system needs to be fixed, not whoever's doing the suing.
A barber has costs too, but they're included in the price he charges. If he charges me $15 for a haircut, some of that goes into his pocket to compensate him for his time, and some of it goes to keeping the lights and heat on in his shop, buying equipment, etc. He doesn't need any special legal treatment to make his business model work. Why would it be any different if his service were writing books instead of cutting hair?
I half-think you're just trolling because it's blindingly obvious that this analogy doesn't apply to IP, but whatever, I'll humor you.
It would be different if his service were writing books/software/music because that would mean that after he's sold a haircut to the first person, everyone else in the world could just "click on" that instance of a haircut and poof their hair would be shorter too. IP development isn't a one-on-one service industry like being a barber is -- it's one-to-many, and in the era of digital replication without copyright, you're unable to aggregate payments from the many to you, so any endeavor that requires serious funding stands virtually no chance of being made.
Look, I think there are broken business models out there, and copyright is dumb in some circumstances, sure. It's stupid that I can't download a TV show that I forgot to record, when it was beamed, for free, through my house last night. Or was piped through a service that I pay for last night. The advertising model is largely broken, and was dependent on people's inability to skip advertisements, which is obviously no longer the case. These things need to be fixed.
But throwing out the concept of copyright as a whole is just ridiculous.
If you want to consume media, it has to be produced first. In order for that to happen, you have to find someone who has the skills to produce it and convince him to do that work (most likely by offering him money). If no one pays him, there won't be any media to consume. That looks like a pretty direct incentive to me.
But it's not, because you need the development funded. If I wanted to go make a movie, I won't be asking people to pay for the privilege of watching a movie, I'll be asking them to pay to watch a movie a year down the line. Or asking them to pay to watch a current movie in the hopes that I'll make another one. But again, that's paying for future hopes, not the actual thing in front of them.
Of course I could go to a bank and get a loan based on expected future revenue from my movie, but I imagine most lending institutions would laugh in your face if you told them you'd pay them back with the proceeds from something that consumers optionally pay for.
I agree, but what do any of those have to do with the business model I've proposed?
What IS the business model you've proposed? I still don't see how it works. Is it just direct contributions/donations to the developers/artists? Is that it? If so, you're going to find virtually all of today's media massively underfunded.
Labor still has value. You don't need to create a salable object in order to get paid: every time I go to the barber, I leave with less in my physical possession than when I came in, but the barber still provides a valuable service and gets paid for it.
Okay, fine, if you want to be pedantic: replace "non-physical" with "non-physical non-service" creations. My question still stands.
Popularity has very little to do with it. By analogy, a road worker gets paid for the time he spends repairing the highway. Assuming the same amount of work is involved, he doesn't have any inherent right to get paid twice as much for working on a road that carries 20,000 cars a day as one that only carries 10,000.
But building a road is not a creative endeavor, so it's not the same thing. The quality of creative works are gauged by how many people enjoyed them. The quality of roads are gauged by smoothness and durability (and companies that are known for making good-quality roads can charge more).
So, if popularity doesn't matter, should media creators be compensated at a flat rate? If so, I'm going to start a solo career with my casio keyboard and I'd like the same as what Justin Timberlake is getting, please.
Anyone who thinks it's worth paying for the creation of that work. For a movie, that might include consumers (who benefit from getting another movie to watch), theater operators (who can make money by providing a comfortable, social environment in which to watch movies), video player manufacturers (who can sell hardware at a profit, but only if there's content to watch with it), and perhaps others. Everyone who benefits from the existence of more works has an incentive to pay for their production.
They have a fairly indirect incentive to pay for their production. The have an immediate way to consume that media for free. How successful is shareware? How many free albums are financially successful? How many movies, released on a donation-basis, would cover their costs? I'd wager not very many.
The concept of absolutely no IP rights is absurd. If you think that all non-physical creations have no inherent value and should not be salesworthy, how do you expect that anyone will create anything that has any amount of monetary risk?
Copyright, however, links the author's compensation to the number of copies he can sell -- which makes little sense on its face
It makes total sense -- you'd obviously like to compensate authors for the popularity of their works, right? Copyright is intended to do that.
What exactly are you proposing here? A flat fee for creation of a work? Paid for by who? You can say "new business model" until you're blue in the face, but what would this business model be?
What I was saying is that a materialist would think that consciousness is transferred along with the brain. Because, to a materialist, there is no part of what we call consciousness that is immaterial. Thus, it's absurd to think consciousness isn't transferred along with the brain, unless you're not a materialist.
Yes, as a materialist you'd assume that consciousness is transferred along with the brain -- but you'd also assume that if the teleport didn't actually move the original atoms that the transfer is actually a copy rather than a move. And that the original was destroyed to make it appear as if a move happened.
Kind of like the way that perforce does file renames.
I wouldn't consider having all of your atoms disassembled within a millisecond to be death
On the contrary, I think that's quite likely to be fatal.
Though I'm not as hostile as 4Dwhatever, I have to agree with him, and it's not about a "soul", it's about continuation of consciousness. If you make a copy of me, presumably that forks my consciousness, so we both think we're the original, but at that point we're both completely independent and our consciousnesses go their own directions. Killing one of us is still killing a consciousness, regardless if we'd been previously forked or not.
The fact that we replace our cells gradually over time is a red herring, because our consciousness is able to carry on just fine with a few cells here and there dying out and being replaced. It's entirely different than a complete disintegration that would clearly destroy my consciousness.
The interesting part is that I'm not sure there's any way to tell whether something's been teleported or copied-and-destroyed. As far as the subject at the destination is concerned, it was a perfect teleportation.
You can't have it both ways though -- you claim that increasing mileage will hurt road maintenance revenue, but then also say that taxes for road maintenance from other buckets. If we become more mileage efficient, we'll just have to adjust the allocations from other sources, or make more roads toll based.
I like the free market just fine for making broad adjustments, but it pretty clearly breaks down in actual practice. The goverment is certainly not hands off -- they're subsidizing road construction maintenance from tax sources that have nothing to do with the usage of roads. They provide tax breaks to oil companies. Their fingers are everywhere throughout the process.
Generally speaking, an SUV driver affects you about as much as Jane Doe aborting a baby affects me.
Hopefully we can skirt the actual abortion issue now that you've brought it up, but that's hardly the case. Regardless of your stance on abortion, it's clear that SUV drivers have far more practical impact on my day than a random woman having an abortion. All of these are far more immediate, personal, quantifiable concerns than any I can think of from an abortion:
- Visibility concerns. I can't see over or through most SUVs, so even with HMRBLs I often can't tell if the car ahead of the SUV is breaking. More than once I've been following an SUV and had them swerve around a slow/stopped vehicle that I didn't know was there until the SUV was halfway through its swerve.
- Gas usage. Drives my prices up when there's a shortage. Pollutes my air, leading more high-pollution days, increasing the chances that my city is going to have state/federal money withheld, and/or speed limits lowered. Increases my country's involvement in unstable and dangerous parts of the world.
- Collision concerns. Much more likely to do serious damage to a vehicle it hits, especially those SUV with high bumpers that tend to go over my bumpers and are more likely to seriously impact my windshield and windows. They're much more likely to roll over, causing serious injury to their passengers. Both impact my safety, as well as overall insurance premiums.
I don't have any particular "moral" objection to SUVs. I just think they're not good for society as a whole, and that most people are being selfish and exhibit a "looking out for #1" kind of thinking that I find pretty distasteful, and all too common.
The players that raid 40+ hours a week, that progress the fastest, tend to make up a very low % of the population.
For the record, I don't know any guild that raids 40+ hours a week.
Nihilum, maybe, in the couple weeks where they were blazing through world firsts in Black Temple. But my guild is a top-20 worldwide guild and we raid, when we're pushing the absolute hardest, ~30 hours a week (5 hours per raid, 6 days a week). A typical "solid raiding" week is more like 5 days a week (fri/sat with no raids) for 4 hours per raid, so 20 hours a week. Now that we've cleared everything, it's more like 4 days a week and a lot of raids are closer to 3 hours than 4, so it's probably more like 15 hours a week. And of course not everyone has 100% attendance, so many people are doing less.
Anyways, just wanted to point out that the top guilds don't necessarily raid THAT much more than average raiding guilds. They just play better, analyze better, and are more efficient with their time.
To start the quest, you had to raid Molten Core (40 man raid, all level 60s specced to the max in gear and skills) and beat the 2nd to last boss to get a 20% chance he would drop the quest item to start the quest...All and all, it could take 6 months to get the bow.
You certainly didn't need to be "specced to the max in skills and gear" to raid MC. It was the first raid instance, so everyone started in blues/greens that they got from questing/crafting/running 5/10 dungeons. And the chance for him to drop the hunter item was 50%, not 20%. It would always drop either the hunter leaf or the eye for the priest epic staff. Even if you were in a hunter-heavy raid (say, 5 hunters), and you were the last to get it, you'd on average have it in less than 3 months.
They belong to the public, and the people have spoken - through Congress - about what they want to hear on radio and see on tv.
Even granting your (laughable) assumption that Congress accurately reflects the wishes of the people, that's not the way the country works. Majority (or plurality) rule doesn't trump all. The majority of the people in the country might also want to establish Christianity as the official religion of the US, but unless they want to amend the Constitution, they're not allowed to do so.
Like it or not, there are certain principles, established in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, that trump mob rule.
In this day and age, who actually goes out of their way to not let their children hear curse words?
I'm not that old so I pretty much could get access to anything that I wanted when I was a kid, but I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. In my opinion there's value in parents establishing what's accepted and what isn't, even though they know that their kids will probably circumvent their wishes sometimes. My parents by and large didn't let me watch rated R movies until I was 14 or so, and even then some of them were off-limits until I was older. I wasn't allowed to swear, or have porn. Pretty normal stuff, I think.
That's not to say that I didn't watch R-rated movies at friends houses or swear like only a 14-year-old trying to act older can. But I knew that I was pushing boundaries of what my parents thought was acceptable, and there was value in that. If they'd just let me watch whatever and swear as much as I wanted, I don't think I would have respected them as much as authority figures, and it would have been easier to cross other, more significant parental boundaries.
I'm not saying that's the way to go for everyone, clearly people need to make their own parenting decisions. But the whole "they're just going to hear swearing at school anyways" meme always struck me as defeatist and abdicating a sigificant parental responsibility.
Try going to an airport and announcing that you have a bomb strapped to your chest. Try calling your neighbor a child molester just because you feel like it. And yes, try shouting "FIRE" in a theater where people can be killed in the resulting stampede - just because you wierdly think the writers of the Constitution said you could. Try shouting "KILL" to your trained dog and then watch as he does kill someone. Your idea that there can be no restrictions on speech, period, is frankly at about the intellectual level of a three year old.
Free Speech doesn't mean that there are no repercussions to the things that you say when they reasonably impede or endanger the rights of others. You can obviously be charge with libel or slander -- it's within your rights to say those things, but if they are damaging to others and untrue, those others have the right to bring suit against you.
Likewise, if you accounce you have a bomb in an airport, that's your right to do so. But the security organization there (even if it's a federal agency) has the right -- hell, the responsibility -- to protect its citizens and react to your assertion.
These straw men are entirely unlike the case of the government simply disallowing the use of "fuck" or "shit" over the airwaves that we collectively own. If uttering these words demonstrates a clear risk to the safety and security of our citizens, then yes, the government can, and should, react to that. But you'd be hard pressed to claim that's the case here.
* Whatever I want to say, about whomever I want to say it, and however I want to say it * Whatever I want to say, about whomever I want to say it * Whatever I want to say.
Those three elements are identical. "Whatever I want to say" includes the others. It is all-encompassing. The government doesn't get to decide whether your particular phrasing is protected, the Constitution already states that it can't abridge your right to say absolutely anything that you want. They may not limit your speech. At all. In any way. I don't see what's so confusing about the statement.
I have a Dell Inspiron e1705 and I've never had the processor clock itself down due to temperature, same with all the other laptops I've owned. If I'm doing something intensive like video compression it'll ramp the fan up to high, sure, but it cools itself quite well and isn't any louder than the average desktop machine.
In fact, the only overheating issues I've ever had were with desktops because the cooling system and routing of air is so much less well controlled. It's very easy to have a fan do basically nothing in a desktop (or at least not circulate any air where it's actually needed), whereas laptops have very controlled and effective cooling designs.
Haven't enough people linked to the IPCC report already in this thread? If you seriously believe that global warming is a "natural cycle" caused by the sun, well, you simply haven't done your homework.
I fully believe that cell-phones can interfere with aircraft nav systems (the fact that they interfere with PC speakers and conference-call microphones is plenty of evidence for me).
However, there's also a restriction on hand-held TVs/radios and GPSs, and I've always wondered why, since they're all receive-only. I don't see how it's possible for them to cause any interference (or at least no more interference than a laptop computer) since they're only picking up on signals that are already passing through the plane from an external source.
So, does anyone have any info on why those are banned as well?
Children learn to differentiate between fantasy and reality.
Of course they do, but they do so at different ages. I snuck a look at some horror movies in my youth, and a couple scenes in particular still stand out as being traumatic for me at the time. Obviously I got over it, but I can't say for certain that they were beneficial to my development. And I can sure wager that being immersed in that kind of stuff wouldn't have helped my development out a whole lot.
Besides, it sounds to me like HE's the one doing the parenting, and you're just letting the ESRB parent for you.
I agree that parents should be a first line of defense, but fully relying on that isn't always practical, so relying on some broad guidelines that you understand is better than nothing when you can't make the first-hand decision.
Your level of snark strikes me as wholly unwarranted.
However, at 21, they are expected to already know how much alcohol they can handle before becoming drunk.
No, they're not. At 21, they're expected to be mature enough to experiment with a drug and make decisions that don't endanger themselves or others.
Hardly the case for most 21-year-olds that I know, but nevertheless, it's absurd to state that the age restriction on drinking is because of some magical knowledge that you gain at your 21st birthday.
Do they promote them as having a extremely high top speed, or having a large acceleration? There are no limits on acceleration.
A developer's perspective...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm a professional game developer, and for the most part I think this guy's a moron. Here's why:
Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
First, many enemies DO adapt their strategy on the fly. Many enemies DO switch weapons when appropriate. Many enemies DO work in teams. The problem is, AI isn't about the NPCs, it's about the player, and for the most part AI advances would be in areas that the player doesn't notice. Getting snuck up on? Not fun. Fun is all about keeping the player informed about what's going on so that they can react and devise and enact their own plans. There are a number of ways that AIs need to be improved, but these aren't really among them.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
You've GOT to be kidding me. In-order instruction hurts the performance of the processors but allows them to be much simpler (and thus allows the Xbox360 to have 3 on a single core). AI is not hurt by this in the least. It's just ridiculous, and it's clear he's got absolutely no clue what he's talking about.
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I worked on Thief, and let me tell you, we did basically this. And guess what? Didn't sell for crap. Action is fun and interesting. The game he's describing sounds like a bore.
And as far as why we don't come up with new genres, well, we do, only it only happens every few years. The whole stealth (Thief/Splinter Cell) genre started 6 or so years ago, and lately we've created the "open city game" (GTA). I honestly find that pretty amazing, particularly given how outrageously expensive games are to develop and how necessarily risk-averse that makes publishers.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Fine, then have a clue and don't fall for it. Killzone released a movie that was blindingly obviously not gameplay footage, and they never claimed it was, and yet at this very site there was huge debate as to whether it was real or not. Take marketing with a grain of salt, eh?
All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Actually, in MS's and Sony's infinite wisdom, they're going to be OPTIONAL hard drives. So we can't count on them. So we can't actually leverage them in our games. Sorry. Don't blame me.
Loading...
Fine, if you don't want loading, expect there to be cuts elsewhere in the game. That's not to say that loadtimes can't hurt the game significantly (including one game that I personally worked on), but we've only got X million dollars and Y years. If you think it's that important, fine, but then don't bitch about the limited scope of games.
YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again...
We do on the Xbox. And it's more like 6GB on the DVD, and that's if we want to deal with the layer switch and the impact on QA-ability of the title. But yeah, I agree a little more variety would be good.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, but that's more an issue with our legal system than an issue with the RIAA itself, right?
Any large corporation can threaten to sue, and given that simply taking a case to trial is prohibitively expensive for most people, the corporations have all the power. I don't like the RIAA any more than the next guy, but if you're doing something illegal like blatantly violating copyright, it's certainly within their rights to sue you. They're going to get it wrong sometimes -- nothing's perfect -- but if the system is set up so that they feel little pain for getting it wrong and the falsely accused feel huge pain, then the system needs to be fixed, not whoever's doing the suing.
I half-think you're just trolling because it's blindingly obvious that this analogy doesn't apply to IP, but whatever, I'll humor you.
It would be different if his service were writing books/software/music because that would mean that after he's sold a haircut to the first person, everyone else in the world could just "click on" that instance of a haircut and poof their hair would be shorter too. IP development isn't a one-on-one service industry like being a barber is -- it's one-to-many, and in the era of digital replication without copyright, you're unable to aggregate payments from the many to you, so any endeavor that requires serious funding stands virtually no chance of being made.
Look, I think there are broken business models out there, and copyright is dumb in some circumstances, sure. It's stupid that I can't download a TV show that I forgot to record, when it was beamed, for free, through my house last night. Or was piped through a service that I pay for last night. The advertising model is largely broken, and was dependent on people's inability to skip advertisements, which is obviously no longer the case. These things need to be fixed.
But throwing out the concept of copyright as a whole is just ridiculous.
But it's not, because you need the development funded. If I wanted to go make a movie, I won't be asking people to pay for the privilege of watching a movie, I'll be asking them to pay to watch a movie a year down the line. Or asking them to pay to watch a current movie in the hopes that I'll make another one. But again, that's paying for future hopes, not the actual thing in front of them.
Of course I could go to a bank and get a loan based on expected future revenue from my movie, but I imagine most lending institutions would laugh in your face if you told them you'd pay them back with the proceeds from something that consumers optionally pay for.
What IS the business model you've proposed? I still don't see how it works. Is it just direct contributions/donations to the developers/artists? Is that it? If so, you're going to find virtually all of today's media massively underfunded.
Okay, fine, if you want to be pedantic: replace "non-physical" with "non-physical non-service" creations. My question still stands.
But building a road is not a creative endeavor, so it's not the same thing. The quality of creative works are gauged by how many people enjoyed them. The quality of roads are gauged by smoothness and durability (and companies that are known for making good-quality roads can charge more).
So, if popularity doesn't matter, should media creators be compensated at a flat rate? If so, I'm going to start a solo career with my casio keyboard and I'd like the same as what Justin Timberlake is getting, please.
They have a fairly indirect incentive to pay for their production. The have an immediate way to consume that media for free. How successful is shareware? How many free albums are financially successful? How many movies, released on a donation-basis, would cover their costs? I'd wager not very many.
The concept of absolutely no IP rights is absurd. If you think that all non-physical creations have no inherent value and should not be salesworthy, how do you expect that anyone will create anything that has any amount of monetary risk?
It makes total sense -- you'd obviously like to compensate authors for the popularity of their works, right? Copyright is intended to do that.
What exactly are you proposing here? A flat fee for creation of a work? Paid for by who? You can say "new business model" until you're blue in the face, but what would this business model be?
Yes, as a materialist you'd assume that consciousness is transferred along with the brain -- but you'd also assume that if the teleport didn't actually move the original atoms that the transfer is actually a copy rather than a move. And that the original was destroyed to make it appear as if a move happened.
Kind of like the way that perforce does file renames.
On the contrary, I think that's quite likely to be fatal.
Though I'm not as hostile as 4Dwhatever, I have to agree with him, and it's not about a "soul", it's about continuation of consciousness. If you make a copy of me, presumably that forks my consciousness, so we both think we're the original, but at that point we're both completely independent and our consciousnesses go their own directions. Killing one of us is still killing a consciousness, regardless if we'd been previously forked or not.
The fact that we replace our cells gradually over time is a red herring, because our consciousness is able to carry on just fine with a few cells here and there dying out and being replaced. It's entirely different than a complete disintegration that would clearly destroy my consciousness.
The interesting part is that I'm not sure there's any way to tell whether something's been teleported or copied-and-destroyed. As far as the subject at the destination is concerned, it was a perfect teleportation.
I like the free market just fine for making broad adjustments, but it pretty clearly breaks down in actual practice. The goverment is certainly not hands off -- they're subsidizing road construction maintenance from tax sources that have nothing to do with the usage of roads. They provide tax breaks to oil companies. Their fingers are everywhere throughout the process.Hopefully we can skirt the actual abortion issue now that you've brought it up, but that's hardly the case. Regardless of your stance on abortion, it's clear that SUV drivers have far more practical impact on my day than a random woman having an abortion. All of these are far more immediate, personal, quantifiable concerns than any I can think of from an abortion:
- Visibility concerns. I can't see over or through most SUVs, so even with HMRBLs I often can't tell if the car ahead of the SUV is breaking. More than once I've been following an SUV and had them swerve around a slow/stopped vehicle that I didn't know was there until the SUV was halfway through its swerve.
- Gas usage. Drives my prices up when there's a shortage. Pollutes my air, leading more high-pollution days, increasing the chances that my city is going to have state/federal money withheld, and/or speed limits lowered. Increases my country's involvement in unstable and dangerous parts of the world.
- Collision concerns. Much more likely to do serious damage to a vehicle it hits, especially those SUV with high bumpers that tend to go over my bumpers and are more likely to seriously impact my windshield and windows. They're much more likely to roll over, causing serious injury to their passengers. Both impact my safety, as well as overall insurance premiums.
I don't have any particular "moral" objection to SUVs. I just think they're not good for society as a whole, and that most people are being selfish and exhibit a "looking out for #1" kind of thinking that I find pretty distasteful, and all too common.
For the record, I don't know any guild that raids 40+ hours a week.
Nihilum, maybe, in the couple weeks where they were blazing through world firsts in Black Temple. But my guild is a top-20 worldwide guild and we raid, when we're pushing the absolute hardest, ~30 hours a week (5 hours per raid, 6 days a week). A typical "solid raiding" week is more like 5 days a week (fri/sat with no raids) for 4 hours per raid, so 20 hours a week. Now that we've cleared everything, it's more like 4 days a week and a lot of raids are closer to 3 hours than 4, so it's probably more like 15 hours a week. And of course not everyone has 100% attendance, so many people are doing less.
Anyways, just wanted to point out that the top guilds don't necessarily raid THAT much more than average raiding guilds. They just play better, analyze better, and are more efficient with their time.
You certainly didn't need to be "specced to the max in skills and gear" to raid MC. It was the first raid instance, so everyone started in blues/greens that they got from questing/crafting/running 5/10 dungeons. And the chance for him to drop the hunter item was 50%, not 20%. It would always drop either the hunter leaf or the eye for the priest epic staff. Even if you were in a hunter-heavy raid (say, 5 hunters), and you were the last to get it, you'd on average have it in less than 3 months.
Even granting your (laughable) assumption that Congress accurately reflects the wishes of the people, that's not the way the country works. Majority (or plurality) rule doesn't trump all. The majority of the people in the country might also want to establish Christianity as the official religion of the US, but unless they want to amend the Constitution, they're not allowed to do so.
Like it or not, there are certain principles, established in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, that trump mob rule.
I'm not that old so I pretty much could get access to anything that I wanted when I was a kid, but I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. In my opinion there's value in parents establishing what's accepted and what isn't, even though they know that their kids will probably circumvent their wishes sometimes. My parents by and large didn't let me watch rated R movies until I was 14 or so, and even then some of them were off-limits until I was older. I wasn't allowed to swear, or have porn. Pretty normal stuff, I think.
That's not to say that I didn't watch R-rated movies at friends houses or swear like only a 14-year-old trying to act older can. But I knew that I was pushing boundaries of what my parents thought was acceptable, and there was value in that. If they'd just let me watch whatever and swear as much as I wanted, I don't think I would have respected them as much as authority figures, and it would have been easier to cross other, more significant parental boundaries.
I'm not saying that's the way to go for everyone, clearly people need to make their own parenting decisions. But the whole "they're just going to hear swearing at school anyways" meme always struck me as defeatist and abdicating a sigificant parental responsibility.
Free Speech doesn't mean that there are no repercussions to the things that you say when they reasonably impede or endanger the rights of others. You can obviously be charge with libel or slander -- it's within your rights to say those things, but if they are damaging to others and untrue, those others have the right to bring suit against you.
Likewise, if you accounce you have a bomb in an airport, that's your right to do so. But the security organization there (even if it's a federal agency) has the right -- hell, the responsibility -- to protect its citizens and react to your assertion.
These straw men are entirely unlike the case of the government simply disallowing the use of "fuck" or "shit" over the airwaves that we collectively own. If uttering these words demonstrates a clear risk to the safety and security of our citizens, then yes, the government can, and should, react to that. But you'd be hard pressed to claim that's the case here.
* Whatever I want to say, about whomever I want to say it, and however I want to say it
* Whatever I want to say, about whomever I want to say it
* Whatever I want to say.
Those three elements are identical. "Whatever I want to say" includes the others. It is all-encompassing. The government doesn't get to decide whether your particular phrasing is protected, the Constitution already states that it can't abridge your right to say absolutely anything that you want. They may not limit your speech. At all. In any way. I don't see what's so confusing about the statement.
I have a Dell Inspiron e1705 and I've never had the processor clock itself down due to temperature, same with all the other laptops I've owned. If I'm doing something intensive like video compression it'll ramp the fan up to high, sure, but it cools itself quite well and isn't any louder than the average desktop machine.
In fact, the only overheating issues I've ever had were with desktops because the cooling system and routing of air is so much less well controlled. It's very easy to have a fan do basically nothing in a desktop (or at least not circulate any air where it's actually needed), whereas laptops have very controlled and effective cooling designs.
Haven't enough people linked to the IPCC report already in this thread? If you seriously believe that global warming is a "natural cycle" caused by the sun, well, you simply haven't done your homework.
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM040507.pdf
I fully believe that cell-phones can interfere with aircraft nav systems (the fact that they interfere with PC speakers and conference-call microphones is plenty of evidence for me).
However, there's also a restriction on hand-held TVs/radios and GPSs, and I've always wondered why, since they're all receive-only. I don't see how it's possible for them to cause any interference (or at least no more interference than a laptop computer) since they're only picking up on signals that are already passing through the plane from an external source.
So, does anyone have any info on why those are banned as well?
Children learn to differentiate between fantasy and reality.
Of course they do, but they do so at different ages. I snuck a look at some horror movies in my youth, and a couple scenes in particular still stand out as being traumatic for me at the time. Obviously I got over it, but I can't say for certain that they were beneficial to my development. And I can sure wager that being immersed in that kind of stuff wouldn't have helped my development out a whole lot.
Besides, it sounds to me like HE's the one doing the parenting, and you're just letting the ESRB parent for you.
I agree that parents should be a first line of defense, but fully relying on that isn't always practical, so relying on some broad guidelines that you understand is better than nothing when you can't make the first-hand decision.
Your level of snark strikes me as wholly unwarranted.
However, at 21, they are expected to already know how much alcohol they can handle before becoming drunk.
No, they're not. At 21, they're expected to be mature enough to experiment with a drug and make decisions that don't endanger themselves or others.
Hardly the case for most 21-year-olds that I know, but nevertheless, it's absurd to state that the age restriction on drinking is because of some magical knowledge that you gain at your 21st birthday.
Well said.
Someone with mod points, please mod Parent up!
Do they promote them as having a extremely high top speed, or having a large acceleration? There are no limits on acceleration.
I'm a professional game developer, and for the most part I think this guy's a moron. Here's why:
Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
First, many enemies DO adapt their strategy on the fly. Many enemies DO switch weapons when appropriate. Many enemies DO work in teams. The problem is, AI isn't about the NPCs, it's about the player, and for the most part AI advances would be in areas that the player doesn't notice. Getting snuck up on? Not fun. Fun is all about keeping the player informed about what's going on so that they can react and devise and enact their own plans. There are a number of ways that AIs need to be improved, but these aren't really among them.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
You've GOT to be kidding me. In-order instruction hurts the performance of the processors but allows them to be much simpler (and thus allows the Xbox360 to have 3 on a single core). AI is not hurt by this in the least. It's just ridiculous, and it's clear he's got absolutely no clue what he's talking about.
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I worked on Thief, and let me tell you, we did basically this. And guess what? Didn't sell for crap. Action is fun and interesting. The game he's describing sounds like a bore.
And as far as why we don't come up with new genres, well, we do, only it only happens every few years. The whole stealth (Thief/Splinter Cell) genre started 6 or so years ago, and lately we've created the "open city game" (GTA). I honestly find that pretty amazing, particularly given how outrageously expensive games are to develop and how necessarily risk-averse that makes publishers.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Fine, then have a clue and don't fall for it. Killzone released a movie that was blindingly obviously not gameplay footage, and they never claimed it was, and yet at this very site there was huge debate as to whether it was real or not. Take marketing with a grain of salt, eh?
All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Actually, in MS's and Sony's infinite wisdom, they're going to be OPTIONAL hard drives. So we can't count on them. So we can't actually leverage them in our games. Sorry. Don't blame me.
Loading...
Fine, if you don't want loading, expect there to be cuts elsewhere in the game. That's not to say that loadtimes can't hurt the game significantly (including one game that I personally worked on), but we've only got X million dollars and Y years. If you think it's that important, fine, but then don't bitch about the limited scope of games.
YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again...
We do on the Xbox. And it's more like 6GB on the DVD, and that's if we want to deal with the layer switch and the impact on QA-ability of the title. But yeah, I agree a little more variety would be good.