It's not that cut and dry - some people are mature enough at 14 to handle such a game, and some people wouldn't be able to handle it at 30. If I had a kid, and he was 14-15, and I felt he was mature enough to play GTA:SA, then I should be able to buy it for him, and not have somebody telling me "you shouldn't do that, he's not mature enough to handle it". What you're suggesting is just another step towards a nanny-state, where the government can tell parents how to raise their kids. People like you are the reason that in some areas, it is ILLEGAL to spank your own kids (and I'm not talking punching and beating senseless, I'm talking things like being spanked by hands or belts).
Just because some kids are fucked up in the head to begin with, doesn't mean that you have the right to tell a parent "you can't buy that for your kid because I said so". Plus, what happens when one of these fucked up kids buys such a game used from a friend? How will you tell the difference between that and a game that the parent bought for him?
When a kid shoots people and says "the violent games made me do it", he's trying to pass his behavior off onto an inanimate object. That reminds me of a case where there was a woman, who happened to smoke pot, and she hit a person with her vehicle. Said person went through the windshield, and for whatever reason she just drove home with the person still in the windshield. When she was on trial, she testified, and said that "the drugs made me do it". BULLSHIT. She was fucked up in the head, pot or not pot. Everytime someone blames an inanimate object for their own actions, we lose a little bit of freedom. People should not be able to say "the game made me do it", they should be responsible for what they do, period (unless they're seriously mentally retarded or something).
No, he said that they don't have a right to profit. They have a right to try to profit, but there is no conceivable way that someone could give corporations a right to profit without running counter to basic human freedoms and property rights.
"rip into other people's work and modify it however they see fit"
THEY DIDN'T FUCKING MODIFY OR RIP ANYTHING! THEY WROTE THEIR OWN COPYRIGHTED CODE TO REPLICATE THE BEHAVIOR OF BATTLE.NET. THEY EVEN CONTACTED BLIZZARD IN AN EFFORT TO ENSURE THAT THEIR KEY AUTHENTICATION WOULD WORK, AND WERE DENIED.
"rightly earned profit"? What the fuck? How does the ability to run a private LAN game over TCP/IP (which nearly every modern computer has installed by default) impede at all on Blizzard's profits?
If Blizzard would allow bnetd to authenticate the players' CD keys, then that would prevent illegal copies from working with bnetd. Instead, they say "no, you don't get to authenticate CD keys" and then sue with the reasoning "it doesn't authenticate CD keys, therefore it allows people to pirate the game and play".
It's not the cable and satellite providers who are responsible for that, it's the programming providers who force the cable and satellite providers to get X number of channels in order to get things like ESPN.
You really didn't read the article, did you? And this makes it much worse than just Perfect 10 not being indexed:
"Perfect 10 first became aware of Google serving up
text links to other Web sites that allegedly carried copyright images of Perfect 10 models back in 2001, Zada said in an interview on Thursday. The company then sent notices to Google, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asking the search giant to discontinue linking to the other sites.
In other words, they are suing Google for not policing Perfect 10's copyright. Not for indexing Perfect 10's sites, but rather for indexing other sites who happen to have stolen Perfect 10's images. And they're not suing the other sites - they're suing Google. This would be like if the *AA immediately started suing all ISPs as if they were knowingly involved in large-scale copyright infringement.
This is scary, and I hope Perfect 10 falls flat on their ass. It's not Google's job to police everyone else's copyright and make sure that they don't index images in such a manner.
If not, Nintendo could potentially swoop in and take them out, or just take over the company on threat or stopping the product altogether.
Nope. Patents that would protect the NES are long expired. Famiclones are legal as long as there aren't pirated games included. Nintendo could try to get Messiah to stop, and Messiah could legally tell Nintendo to "fuck off".
The point is, the terminology "time attack" is completely unrelated to TAS runs. "Time attack" is already used by many games to refer to a mode where records are kept for the best time through a level, and so shouldn't be used in order to help prevent confustion (after all, look at the mess some of the more vocal speedrunners and TASrunners participated in when people just called them "speedruns").
The correct, and accepted, terminology is "tool-assisted speed run". I've also seen "superplays" used, although TAS run is more common now.
TAS runs take just as much skill as realtime runs. You have to know an entire game inside and out to even begin making a quality TAS, just as you do to make a quality realtime run.
The people making the TAS runs are NOT lumping them in with realtime runs. If someone does that, jump all over their ass, not the people that make the TAS runs.
Also, quit calling them "time attacks", because they're not in any way, shape, or form, time attacks. They are "tool-assisted speed runs" or TAS runs.
Um, that's not secure in the least. Change/dev/zero to/dev/urandom and do it about 6 or 7 times consecutively to securely wipe your drives (and it should be sufficient to do just hdx without worrying about the partition number).
Actually, most news and talk shows are 60 fields per second. Lower vertical resolution during motion, but faster refresh of that lower resolution, with full resolution during still shots.
And just why in the fuck would Sony care about emulators for competitors' systems? Sure, they'll never officially endorse them (since N for one would probably sue), but I can't imagine they'd think "OMG PSP CAN BE USED TO EMULATE NES GAMES FUCKING PIRATES"
No, it was a machine that someone had built for their daughter and then for some reason didn't keep it, so I bought it. Paid $2300 for it sometime in 1995.
Oh, I definitely remember that. How fun it was when you couldn't even seek through the song.
My first MP3s were played on a P133 with 8MB of RAM. Couldn't do much else simultaneously, but it didn't stutter or lag due to lack of CPU time. Once I upgraded that machine to 16MB RAM I could actually do stuff while listening to music.
I understand that. I'm not talking about the number of stations you can broadcast I'm talking about the way the spectrum is divvied up amongst the various stations in a market. As it stands, many stations have both a 6MHz NTSC allotment (or two in the case of a duopoly), and a 6MHz ATSC allotment (which can be split up as the station wishes). This story is all about the reclaiming of the former. I see no difference in terms of 'saving spectrum bandwidth' between giving a station a 6MHz NTSC allotment and giving that station a 6MHz ATSC allotment instead. Either way, the station got a full 6MHz.
Now, as I said earlier, if the FCC was giving SD-only ATSC allotments to smaller stations, rather than the whole 6MHz, then they could possibly save bandwidth. As it stands, the FCC is taking away stations' 6MHz NTSC allotments and giving them back a 6MHz ATSC allotment. Only in a duopoly situation is any spectrum actually freed up (since they would have 12MHz of NTSC bandwidth but only 6MHz of ATSC).
I think the fundamental differece in our arguments is what we're actually referring to. You're speaking of the program content held within those 6MHz ATSC allotments - I'm only referring to the fact that an ATSC allotment is 6MHz, just like an NTSC allotment, and the fact that the exact same amount of bandwidth will be used in all but duopoly situations, where the bandwidth allotment is half that of NTSC.
Actually, I don't think DTV takes up any less than analog. Here's why:
If I understand correctly, each 19Mb/s allotment that stations receive is 6MHz wide. How much bandwidth does a current single analog signal take? 6MHz, right? How does that lead to "DTV takes up far less of the spectrum", when it clearly doesn't?
It's not like the FCC is going to offer smaller, SD-only licenses where you only get 1 or 2MHz, enough for a single SD stream or two, is it? I've never heard anything about this...the only savings I see right now are in the case of duopolies, which currently have 12MHz of bandwidth (6MHz per station), only getting a total 19Mb/s 6MHz digital allotment.
Actually, no, there are analog HD standards, although they're not being used widely. I remember that one of the first HD demos was an analog 1125-line format (in fact, that's sort of a basis for the 1080i resolution, since an 1125-line format would have around 1080 visible lines due to overscan and sync).
As I and others have said countless times, this has absolutely nothing to do with HDTV. This deals solely with digital TV, which does include standard-definition 480i. Perhaps a better title would be "Jan 2009 Deadline for Analog TV Cutoff", since the title insinuates that January 2009 is some date set to shut down HDTV broadcasts.
Regardless of how many people knew about this beforehand, with this being made such a big deal of (I even saw it featured on fucking ABC News last night), there are millions of people who do know about it now, and went straight to Google and typed in "san andreas hot coffee". Great move, guys! You don't want something available to a large subset of gamers, and now you've told them exactly what to search for to find the actual mod itself! Fucking brilliant!
Gazuga could whip CM's ass anyday, though. Did you do your part and send Bill 500 dollars in small, unmarked bills? If not, then it's YOUR fault that the Army of the Undead and Possibly Brain Damaged never fought in The Cleansing! On behalf of Bill, I hereby demote you to Mortar Shell Catcher. Now get out of here before you get a chance to eat my Skullbat!
That's a stark contrast to what I've witnessed in this area. There is one duopoly that owns both ABC and UPN affiliates. The UPN affiliate is acquired primarily from the DTV signal (in fact, the analog broadcast is actually just a digital receiver tuned to the right channel), including by all but one cable system (which acquires both NTSC channels via fiber). Also, the way I understand it, some cablecos are actually taking the ABC station's HD signal OTA (upconverted to 720p), cropping it back to 4:3, and downconverting it back to 480i. Apparently, ABC requires all programs to keep important graphical elements in the middle 4:3 area. As well, from what I understand, 99% of all local HD signals broadcast on cable (and probably DBS too) are directly sourced from the OTA signal. It's probably more widespread than you realise, albeit maybe not so in your area.
"cannot sell airtime on"? Why not? 99% of all digital transmitters are simulcasting with analog broadcasts, which means that the airtime is ALREADY sold. In fact, depending on the numbers in this area, one could potentially charge more for such simulcasted airtime, although that probably isn't feasible in many areas due to lack of DTV adoption in the home.
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It's not that cut and dry - some people are mature enough at 14 to handle such a game, and some people wouldn't be able to handle it at 30. If I had a kid, and he was 14-15, and I felt he was mature enough to play GTA:SA, then I should be able to buy it for him, and not have somebody telling me "you shouldn't do that, he's not mature enough to handle it". What you're suggesting is just another step towards a nanny-state, where the government can tell parents how to raise their kids. People like you are the reason that in some areas, it is ILLEGAL to spank your own kids (and I'm not talking punching and beating senseless, I'm talking things like being spanked by hands or belts).
Just because some kids are fucked up in the head to begin with, doesn't mean that you have the right to tell a parent "you can't buy that for your kid because I said so". Plus, what happens when one of these fucked up kids buys such a game used from a friend? How will you tell the difference between that and a game that the parent bought for him?
When a kid shoots people and says "the violent games made me do it", he's trying to pass his behavior off onto an inanimate object. That reminds me of a case where there was a woman, who happened to smoke pot, and she hit a person with her vehicle. Said person went through the windshield, and for whatever reason she just drove home with the person still in the windshield. When she was on trial, she testified, and said that "the drugs made me do it". BULLSHIT. She was fucked up in the head, pot or not pot. Everytime someone blames an inanimate object for their own actions, we lose a little bit of freedom. People should not be able to say "the game made me do it", they should be responsible for what they do, period (unless they're seriously mentally retarded or something).
Another proof - look at this image. See where it says "1,99 TB"? Look carefully at the position of those 9's as compared to the 1.
No, he said that they don't have a right to profit. They have a right to try to profit, but there is no conceivable way that someone could give corporations a right to profit without running counter to basic human freedoms and property rights.
"rip into other people's work and modify it however they see fit"
THEY DIDN'T FUCKING MODIFY OR RIP ANYTHING! THEY WROTE THEIR OWN COPYRIGHTED CODE TO REPLICATE THE BEHAVIOR OF BATTLE.NET. THEY EVEN CONTACTED BLIZZARD IN AN EFFORT TO ENSURE THAT THEIR KEY AUTHENTICATION WOULD WORK, AND WERE DENIED.
"rightly earned profit"? What the fuck? How does the ability to run a private LAN game over TCP/IP (which nearly every modern computer has installed by default) impede at all on Blizzard's profits?
If Blizzard would allow bnetd to authenticate the players' CD keys, then that would prevent illegal copies from working with bnetd. Instead, they say "no, you don't get to authenticate CD keys" and then sue with the reasoning "it doesn't authenticate CD keys, therefore it allows people to pirate the game and play".
It's not the cable and satellite providers who are responsible for that, it's the programming providers who force the cable and satellite providers to get X number of channels in order to get things like ESPN.
Because when I posted this, there were no top-level posts here stating what I did, everyone was talking about "robots.txt" or Google's "remove" page.
In other words, they are suing Google for not policing Perfect 10's copyright. Not for indexing Perfect 10's sites, but rather for indexing other sites who happen to have stolen Perfect 10's images. And they're not suing the other sites - they're suing Google. This would be like if the *AA immediately started suing all ISPs as if they were knowingly involved in large-scale copyright infringement.
This is scary, and I hope Perfect 10 falls flat on their ass. It's not Google's job to police everyone else's copyright and make sure that they don't index images in such a manner.
Nope. Patents that would protect the NES are long expired. Famiclones are legal as long as there aren't pirated games included. Nintendo could try to get Messiah to stop, and Messiah could legally tell Nintendo to "fuck off".
The point is, the terminology "time attack" is completely unrelated to TAS runs. "Time attack" is already used by many games to refer to a mode where records are kept for the best time through a level, and so shouldn't be used in order to help prevent confustion (after all, look at the mess some of the more vocal speedrunners and TASrunners participated in when people just called them "speedruns").
The correct, and accepted, terminology is "tool-assisted speed run". I've also seen "superplays" used, although TAS run is more common now.
No, they're not "time attacks". They're "tool-assisted speed runs".
TAS runs take just as much skill as realtime runs. You have to know an entire game inside and out to even begin making a quality TAS, just as you do to make a quality realtime run.
The people making the TAS runs are NOT lumping them in with realtime runs. If someone does that, jump all over their ass, not the people that make the TAS runs.
Also, quit calling them "time attacks", because they're not in any way, shape, or form, time attacks. They are "tool-assisted speed runs" or TAS runs.
Um, that's not secure in the least. Change /dev/zero to /dev/urandom and do it about 6 or 7 times consecutively to securely wipe your drives (and it should be sufficient to do just hdx without worrying about the partition number).
Actually, most news and talk shows are 60 fields per second. Lower vertical resolution during motion, but faster refresh of that lower resolution, with full resolution during still shots.
And just why in the fuck would Sony care about emulators for competitors' systems? Sure, they'll never officially endorse them (since N for one would probably sue), but I can't imagine they'd think "OMG PSP CAN BE USED TO EMULATE NES GAMES FUCKING PIRATES"
No, it was a machine that someone had built for their daughter and then for some reason didn't keep it, so I bought it. Paid $2300 for it sometime in 1995.
Oh, I definitely remember that. How fun it was when you couldn't even seek through the song.
My first MP3s were played on a P133 with 8MB of RAM. Couldn't do much else simultaneously, but it didn't stutter or lag due to lack of CPU time. Once I upgraded that machine to 16MB RAM I could actually do stuff while listening to music.
I understand that. I'm not talking about the number of stations you can broadcast I'm talking about the way the spectrum is divvied up amongst the various stations in a market. As it stands, many stations have both a 6MHz NTSC allotment (or two in the case of a duopoly), and a 6MHz ATSC allotment (which can be split up as the station wishes). This story is all about the reclaiming of the former. I see no difference in terms of 'saving spectrum bandwidth' between giving a station a 6MHz NTSC allotment and giving that station a 6MHz ATSC allotment instead. Either way, the station got a full 6MHz.
Now, as I said earlier, if the FCC was giving SD-only ATSC allotments to smaller stations, rather than the whole 6MHz, then they could possibly save bandwidth. As it stands, the FCC is taking away stations' 6MHz NTSC allotments and giving them back a 6MHz ATSC allotment. Only in a duopoly situation is any spectrum actually freed up (since they would have 12MHz of NTSC bandwidth but only 6MHz of ATSC).
I think the fundamental differece in our arguments is what we're actually referring to. You're speaking of the program content held within those 6MHz ATSC allotments - I'm only referring to the fact that an ATSC allotment is 6MHz, just like an NTSC allotment, and the fact that the exact same amount of bandwidth will be used in all but duopoly situations, where the bandwidth allotment is half that of NTSC.
Actually, I don't think DTV takes up any less than analog. Here's why:
If I understand correctly, each 19Mb/s allotment that stations receive is 6MHz wide. How much bandwidth does a current single analog signal take? 6MHz, right? How does that lead to "DTV takes up far less of the spectrum", when it clearly doesn't?
It's not like the FCC is going to offer smaller, SD-only licenses where you only get 1 or 2MHz, enough for a single SD stream or two, is it? I've never heard anything about this...the only savings I see right now are in the case of duopolies, which currently have 12MHz of bandwidth (6MHz per station), only getting a total 19Mb/s 6MHz digital allotment.
Actually, no, there are analog HD standards, although they're not being used widely. I remember that one of the first HD demos was an analog 1125-line format (in fact, that's sort of a basis for the 1080i resolution, since an 1125-line format would have around 1080 visible lines due to overscan and sync).
As I and others have said countless times, this has absolutely nothing to do with HDTV. This deals solely with digital TV, which does include standard-definition 480i. Perhaps a better title would be "Jan 2009 Deadline for Analog TV Cutoff", since the title insinuates that January 2009 is some date set to shut down HDTV broadcasts.
Regardless of how many people knew about this beforehand, with this being made such a big deal of (I even saw it featured on fucking ABC News last night), there are millions of people who do know about it now, and went straight to Google and typed in "san andreas hot coffee". Great move, guys! You don't want something available to a large subset of gamers, and now you've told them exactly what to search for to find the actual mod itself! Fucking brilliant!
He also showed up in the best console gaming mag ever to exist - Game Players. Well, actually, it was Ultra Game Players when CM showed up, but at that time it was still the same twisted humor. Although he originated at PC Gamer, he was also a staple of many a GP/UGP reader's life, at least for a short while.
Gazuga could whip CM's ass anyday, though. Did you do your part and send Bill 500 dollars in small, unmarked bills? If not, then it's YOUR fault that the Army of the Undead and Possibly Brain Damaged never fought in The Cleansing! On behalf of Bill, I hereby demote you to Mortar Shell Catcher. Now get out of here before you get a chance to eat my Skullbat!
That's a stark contrast to what I've witnessed in this area. There is one duopoly that owns both ABC and UPN affiliates. The UPN affiliate is acquired primarily from the DTV signal (in fact, the analog broadcast is actually just a digital receiver tuned to the right channel), including by all but one cable system (which acquires both NTSC channels via fiber). Also, the way I understand it, some cablecos are actually taking the ABC station's HD signal OTA (upconverted to 720p), cropping it back to 4:3, and downconverting it back to 480i. Apparently, ABC requires all programs to keep important graphical elements in the middle 4:3 area. As well, from what I understand, 99% of all local HD signals broadcast on cable (and probably DBS too) are directly sourced from the OTA signal. It's probably more widespread than you realise, albeit maybe not so in your area.
"cannot sell airtime on"? Why not? 99% of all digital transmitters are simulcasting with analog broadcasts, which means that the airtime is ALREADY sold. In fact, depending on the numbers in this area, one could potentially charge more for such simulcasted airtime, although that probably isn't feasible in many areas due to lack of DTV adoption in the home.