Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
She's assuming that music listeners want to be moral when they're being entertained. They don't. Much music is meant to help people unwind, or even bring out their darker feelings that they accumulate in life, where it's taboo to discuss. The same goes for movies, video games, Slashdot, and other entertainment. Entertainment often glamourizes theft, sex and murder, so it should be no surprise that so many music fans enjoy the much milder crime of CD ripping and burning. Yet if she tells her artists to make morally correct music, she'll lose her customers.
Back in the late 1700s when society moved and changed much slower than it did today, copyrights were granted for 15 years. Today, with lightspeed communication and accelerating rate of change, copyrights are granted for 75 years. Long copyrights are the antithesis of change. Copyrights should last no longer than 5 years.
Major barriers to adoption of the paperless office are electricity and ergonomics.
Reading info off a screen takes lots of electricity, even from a backlit LCD. What are some more efficient display technologies?
Reading info off a screen is uncomfortable. We need electronic user interfaces that are just as comfortable and intuitive as paper. What in development is striving for that goal?
I know you mean well, but unfortunately your opinion is effectively as bad as approving of censorship in principle. The guys who cart people off to death camps use the same excuse: "I don't approve of censorship, I'm just killing users of free speech who incite censorship."
Don't dismiss MTV so quickly, their web site currently features O-Town. Now your knee-jerk reaction might be to catapult them all into the gutter, but would you believe that Ashley Angel, the prettiest of all pretty boys, starred in the Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, arguably the best written Japanese RPG? It's true. Lunar is a real fan favorite amongst console gamers, so it's a neat twist that one of the nerdiest games links to one of the hippest bands.
Consider the facts: AOL wants to rule the information biz, AOL wants to topple Microsoft, AOL's client causes all sorts of havoc on Windows and MacOS because it wants to be the OS, AOL wants their wants their client to be simple, and AOL wants their customers to get off the internet and stay on company grounds. All this could lead to only one thing. Actually, it could lead to many things, but here's one that could make a splash in a hurry:
AOL will make their own Linux for the sole purpose of logging on.
It's simple. AOL could pack their own OS (possibly based on Linux because it would be free and take only a bit of tinkering) on every one of those millions of CDs they hand out each year. It would not only make the whole computing experience much "simpler" (for their own purposes, of course) but by giving away the OS, AOL would wipe out MicrosoftÕs market share as quickly as Microsoft wiped out NetscapeÕs (sweet revenge). It would be little more than a client, but it would have just enough offline functionality (for composing e-mails and pictures, etc.) to not tie up the phone line. After giving out a few million copies of AOLinux (they'd probably just call it AOL 9.0), they'd start selling PCs with it preloaded, which would be cheaper than Windows PCs because AOL wants customers spending money on subscriptions and content, and because theyÕd cut back on unnecessary hardware (just how game console design works). For the millions of Road Runner customers out there, theyÕd build a card reader (credit, debit, smart, or whateverÕs popular) into each AOL PC for video on demand. In fact, just for Road Runner customers, they could sell a special version of the AOL PC with a small hard drive, no monitor, and shaped to fit into the entertainment center and watch streaming movies from the couch. Then, with Windows and its metaphors declining, they could start packing in new user interface features like a touchscreen and voice activation (into the self-contained iMac-shaped AOL PC), then start downplaying the keyboard and mouse. ThereÕd be no OS conflicts since AOL would be the OS, and getting customers to upgrade to later versions would be so simple: it would be mandatory, automatic and free! For customers on 56k modems, the OS would just lock up and wait for them to get a free upgrade CD.
I think PJ's FotR is overrated, but I think it deserves to be. Even though the movie severely abridges the story, it's also getting many people to read the book, which is selling 400% better this year than last year. The ideal is for the movie to teach all newcomers everything there is to know about Middle Earth and make them excited about it. The movie hasn't accomplished that, but it's done the next best thing.
It seems that every genre gets overrated at least once. Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Matrix were overrated high-tech action movies, Gone With the Wind and Titanic were overrated expensive action-romance movies, Disney makes overrated cartoons, and now PJ's FotR is an overrated swords and sorcery action movie.
If every genre is destined to be overrated at least once, swords & sorcery genre might as well get it now. If it causes audiences to read the best book in the genre and movie-makers to make more other-worldly movies, then I think it's succeeded.
Since the iBook and a flatscreen iMac would be almost the same product, I think Apple should kill the iMac and make the iBook more ergonomic; give it a desktop-sized keyboard and optical trackball. They should make the backlight in the screen switchable on or off for extended battery life. All combined, those changes should make Apple's cheapest system far more attractive.
The web site www.Everything2.com seems just like how Douglas Adams described the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: full of information about everything, but often silly and informal.
Yes, but that would be easy to establish with speed limits, especially on highways. If you need the audience driving at 75 MPH, just set the speed limit to 70 and put the soundtrack a half mile after an onramp.
Few people deny that web sites can be art, not because they are art, but because there's a web site for everybody, and thus everybody likes the web, so they'll defend it just because they like it.
Many people deny that video games are art, not because video games aren't artistic, but because they mainly appeal only to 15 to 30 year old males who are in the mood for violence (and more recently, sex). Thus, video games exclude, confuse, intimidate, bore and offend most of the population.
I have never doubted that video games are art, but I have always doubted that anybody else believed they were art. And it's a shame that the web got there first because video games had a 25 year head start. Just like any other art form, technology and sport, video games have potential to appeal to every demographic.
Most of us Slashdot "youngsters" consider video games to be art because...
1:...they are art.
2:...we grew up with them, and thus like them and will defend them.
But once we are old, will we consider that days art forms to be new? Once all of us are 60 there will be many new art forms, like genetically engineered pets (buy Pokemon-like creatures at a pet store), genetically engineered national forests, sky movies (raster scanning lasers aimed at clouds at night), moon carvings (ads visible to the earth could be cut into the moon), talking roads (asphault could be cut like an analog record to make your car buzz spoken words when driven over) and many other things. All of these things I mentioned will surely be art, but, 15 to 45 years from now, when we are 60 and crotchety, will our minds still be open enough to accept these new art forms as art?
That's the question to help you understand why art establishments, run by 60 year olds themselves, would consider rejecting video games as art. Their opinion would be wrong, but it would be popular.
Wielding the Brush, Wielding the Patron
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Video games aren't art in the traditional sense that the patron/consumer can alter it. Most art - paintings, sculpture, music, drama - is alterable by its creator, but not by the patron. However, we could consider video games to be a play where the players are the actors and the developers are the playwrights. And the value of the video game could be the degree to which the developers can excite the players to perform. An unplayed game would be an incomplete composition; a complete composition of a video game would have to include players.
Thus, in the classical definition of art, the value and quality of video games would be defined by their popularity. They would be most valuable while popular, and worthless once pasee. They would not accumulate value over time.
From http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=art :
1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.
2.
a. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.
b. The study of these activities.
c. The product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group.
3. High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.
4. A field or category of art, such as music, ballet, or literature.
5. A nonscientific branch of learning; one of the liberal arts.
6.
a. A system of principles and methods employed in the performance of a set of activities: the art of building.
b. A trade or craft that applies such a system of principles and methods: the art of the lexicographer.
7.
a. Skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation: the art of the baker; the blacksmith's art.
b. Skill arising from the exercise of intuitive faculties: ÒSelf-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practiceÓ (Joyce Carol Oates).
8.
a. arts Artful devices, stratagems, and tricks.
b. Artful contrivance; cunning.
The answer is pay per view video on demand, which should be common once broadband and smart card readers are in most homes. With that, we'll be buying the right to have uninterupted content.
Slashdot Mirror
Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
She's assuming that music listeners want to be moral when they're being entertained. They don't. Much music is meant to help people unwind, or even bring out their darker feelings that they accumulate in life, where it's taboo to discuss. The same goes for movies, video games, Slashdot, and other entertainment. Entertainment often glamourizes theft, sex and murder, so it should be no surprise that so many music fans enjoy the much milder crime of CD ripping and burning. Yet if she tells her artists to make morally correct music, she'll lose her customers.
Back in the late 1700s when society moved and changed much slower than it did today, copyrights were granted for 15 years. Today, with lightspeed communication and accelerating rate of change, copyrights are granted for 75 years. Long copyrights are the antithesis of change. Copyrights should last no longer than 5 years.
Major barriers to adoption of the paperless office are electricity and ergonomics.
Reading info off a screen takes lots of electricity, even from a backlit LCD. What are some more efficient display technologies?
Reading info off a screen is uncomfortable. We need electronic user interfaces that are just as comfortable and intuitive as paper. What in development is striving for that goal?
How about using a gun to invent cold fusion?
Movies alone can verify why schools should prefer art over tech:
Shrek:
$47M cost
noticably imperfect animation
cool plot and voice acting
made $600M global (including DVD and VHS purchase and rental).
Spirits Within:
$140M cost
near-perfect animation
lifeless plot and voice acting
made $100M global (including DVD and VHS purchase and rental)
The numbers alone prove what our schools should teach.
I know you mean well, but unfortunately your opinion is effectively as bad as approving of censorship in principle. The guys who cart people off to death camps use the same excuse: "I don't approve of censorship, I'm just killing users of free speech who incite censorship."
I'd like to see that "Organic Electro Luminescent display." So OLEDs are here?
Don't dismiss MTV so quickly, their web site currently features O-Town. Now your knee-jerk reaction might be to catapult them all into the gutter, but would you believe that Ashley Angel, the prettiest of all pretty boys, starred in the Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, arguably the best written Japanese RPG? It's true. Lunar is a real fan favorite amongst console gamers, so it's a neat twist that one of the nerdiest games links to one of the hippest bands.
Consider the facts: AOL wants to rule the information biz, AOL wants to topple Microsoft, AOL's client causes all sorts of havoc on Windows and MacOS because it wants to be the OS, AOL wants their wants their client to be simple, and AOL wants their customers to get off the internet and stay on company grounds. All this could lead to only one thing. Actually, it could lead to many things, but here's one that could make a splash in a hurry:
AOL will make their own Linux for the sole purpose of logging on.
It's simple. AOL could pack their own OS (possibly based on Linux because it would be free and take only a bit of tinkering) on every one of those millions of CDs they hand out each year. It would not only make the whole computing experience much "simpler" (for their own purposes, of course) but by giving away the OS, AOL would wipe out MicrosoftÕs market share as quickly as Microsoft wiped out NetscapeÕs (sweet revenge). It would be little more than a client, but it would have just enough offline functionality (for composing e-mails and pictures, etc.) to not tie up the phone line. After giving out a few million copies of AOLinux (they'd probably just call it AOL 9.0), they'd start selling PCs with it preloaded, which would be cheaper than Windows PCs because AOL wants customers spending money on subscriptions and content, and because theyÕd cut back on unnecessary hardware (just how game console design works). For the millions of Road Runner customers out there, theyÕd build a card reader (credit, debit, smart, or whateverÕs popular) into each AOL PC for video on demand. In fact, just for Road Runner customers, they could sell a special version of the AOL PC with a small hard drive, no monitor, and shaped to fit into the entertainment center and watch streaming movies from the couch. Then, with Windows and its metaphors declining, they could start packing in new user interface features like a touchscreen and voice activation (into the self-contained iMac-shaped AOL PC), then start downplaying the keyboard and mouse. ThereÕd be no OS conflicts since AOL would be the OS, and getting customers to upgrade to later versions would be so simple: it would be mandatory, automatic and free! For customers on 56k modems, the OS would just lock up and wait for them to get a free upgrade CD.
I think PJ's FotR is overrated, but I think it deserves to be. Even though the movie severely abridges the story, it's also getting many people to read the book, which is selling 400% better this year than last year. The ideal is for the movie to teach all newcomers everything there is to know about Middle Earth and make them excited about it. The movie hasn't accomplished that, but it's done the next best thing.
It seems that every genre gets overrated at least once. Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Matrix were overrated high-tech action movies, Gone With the Wind and Titanic were overrated expensive action-romance movies, Disney makes overrated cartoons, and now PJ's FotR is an overrated swords and sorcery action movie.
If every genre is destined to be overrated at least once, swords & sorcery genre might as well get it now. If it causes audiences to read the best book in the genre and movie-makers to make more other-worldly movies, then I think it's succeeded.
Since the iBook and a flatscreen iMac would be almost the same product, I think Apple should kill the iMac and make the iBook more ergonomic; give it a desktop-sized keyboard and optical trackball. They should make the backlight in the screen switchable on or off for extended battery life. All combined, those changes should make Apple's cheapest system far more attractive.
Capcom hired SNK's 80 best people and bought their franchises. So SNK's logo may be dead, but their people and franchises live on.
Capcom hires SNK.
The web site www.Everything2.com seems just like how Douglas Adams described the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: full of information about everything, but often silly and informal.
Isn't Pentium sounding kind of old after 8 years? And Windows, after 12 years? Macintosh, after 17? Disney, after 90? Nintendo, after 112?
...then only outlaws will have knowledge.
If there was ever a reason to use Freenet, this is it.
How close did you get to completing this? Was it really possible?
Yes, but that would be easy to establish with speed limits, especially on highways. If you need the audience driving at 75 MPH, just set the speed limit to 70 and put the soundtrack a half mile after an onramp.
Some web sites and most video games are art.
Few people deny that web sites can be art, not because they are art, but because there's a web site for everybody, and thus everybody likes the web, so they'll defend it just because they like it.
Many people deny that video games are art, not because video games aren't artistic, but because they mainly appeal only to 15 to 30 year old males who are in the mood for violence (and more recently, sex). Thus, video games exclude, confuse, intimidate, bore and offend most of the population.
I have never doubted that video games are art, but I have always doubted that anybody else believed they were art. And it's a shame that the web got there first because video games had a 25 year head start. Just like any other art form, technology and sport, video games have potential to appeal to every demographic.
They just have chosen not to.
Most of us Slashdot "youngsters" consider video games to be art because...
...they are art.
...we grew up with them, and thus like them and will defend them.
1:
2:
But once we are old, will we consider that days art forms to be new? Once all of us are 60 there will be many new art forms, like genetically engineered pets (buy Pokemon-like creatures at a pet store), genetically engineered national forests, sky movies (raster scanning lasers aimed at clouds at night), moon carvings (ads visible to the earth could be cut into the moon), talking roads (asphault could be cut like an analog record to make your car buzz spoken words when driven over) and many other things. All of these things I mentioned will surely be art, but, 15 to 45 years from now, when we are 60 and crotchety, will our minds still be open enough to accept these new art forms as art?
That's the question to help you understand why art establishments, run by 60 year olds themselves, would consider rejecting video games as art. Their opinion would be wrong, but it would be popular.
Video games aren't art in the traditional sense that the patron/consumer can alter it. Most art - paintings, sculpture, music, drama - is alterable by its creator, but not by the patron. However, we could consider video games to be a play where the players are the actors and the developers are the playwrights. And the value of the video game could be the degree to which the developers can excite the players to perform. An unplayed game would be an incomplete composition; a complete composition of a video game would have to include players.
Thus, in the classical definition of art, the value and quality of video games would be defined by their popularity. They would be most valuable while popular, and worthless once pasee. They would not accumulate value over time.
From http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=art :
1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.
2.
a. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.
b. The study of these activities.
c. The product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group.
3. High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.
4. A field or category of art, such as music, ballet, or literature.
5. A nonscientific branch of learning; one of the liberal arts.
6.
a. A system of principles and methods employed in the performance of a set of activities: the art of building.
b. A trade or craft that applies such a system of principles and methods: the art of the lexicographer.
7.
a. Skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation: the art of the baker; the blacksmith's art.
b. Skill arising from the exercise of intuitive faculties: ÒSelf-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practiceÓ (Joyce Carol Oates).
8.
a. arts Artful devices, stratagems, and tricks.
b. Artful contrivance; cunning.
Dictionary.com thinks video games are art.
Let's just hope there aren't any soul stealers aboard.
The answer is pay per view video on demand, which should be common once broadband and smart card readers are in most homes. With that, we'll be buying the right to have uninterupted content.
No, it should be "Lady, Gentlemen, and My Fellow Slashdotters."