More importantly, since when can you trademark a title long before you use it?
There are many movies that have identical titles, and far more that have confusingly similar ones (which is practically equivalent in trademark law). I've never before heard of a lawsuit over it.
I don't think trademark should apply to fiction titles at all. It's simply absurd. Fiction is not supposed to be so important that something like trademark is needed to protect consumers from being tricked into purchasing the wrong product.
For that matter, I still don't see any IP law protecting merchandising rights. It can't be a copyright violation, since a plush toy isn't a copyrightable work. It can't be trademark violation, since characters and locations in a fictional work aren't products. Does anyone out there know why you can't make and sell plush Ewoks without permission from Lucasfilm? ---
The theory of natural selection doesn't suggest that bacteria are the pinnacle of evolution. It doesn't include value judgements of any kind.
If you want to go around claiming that bacteria are the "pinnacle of creation" because there are more of them living in more diverse environments, that is your business, but don't pretend Darwin is on your side. ---
The theory of natural selection is a theory about what happens in the physical world, not a philosophy about what is good.
Furthermore, Darwin specifically pointed out that by "survival of the fittest" he meant "survival of those most suited to the environment". He never meant to imply any general statement about things becoming better able to survive in general, in new environments which the species has not been exposed to. This can happen, but it is a side effect of becoming more adapted to the environments the species has been exposed to. ---
As Darwin himself often pointed out, his theory of natural selection implied a general trend for later generations of creatures to be better suited to the environment of their ancestors (and thus to their own, assuming things hadn't changed much).
"Better" is a value judgement that has no place in discussions of evolution.
There is no "normal process of evolution". Some things die, some live, some reproduce, some don't; mutations occur, and either spread or disappear. Lifeforms today are different from lifeforms that were around a million years ago, due to these chance occurances. That's all there is to evolution. ---
It's a good thing we're dumping all that CO2, then, so that the plants can get carbon to build roots to gather H2O which they can convert (together with the CO2) into hydrocarbons and free oxygen.
ID Software is not likely to sue over this b/c they stand the chance of losing the GPL license over a small case. [...] How can someone release code under the GPL with the knowledge that this won't happen? (taking source, modifying, releasing binary, and saying they will NOT release the source)
So what you're asking is how can we make sure nobody will violate the GPL while carefully avoiding finding out whether its terms are actually legally enforceable?
I dunno...
Adding the clause "You agree to lose any court challenge."?
Roving vigilante squads?
A worldwide network of crack assasins?
Mandatory skull implants that can be remote triggered to explode if the RMS judges that you've violated the GPL?
Self-reproducing, self-improving killing machines? (I think the answer to all the world's problems is self-reproducing, self-improving killing machines, but maybe I'm just being idealistic) ---
To the moderators: THIS WAS NOT OFFTOPIC!!!
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 1
The initial post of the thread was on-topic, relevant to the story. The above post was on-topic to the thread.
I swear, slashdot moderation gets worse by the hour. ---
You're a couple of centuries behind the times.
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 3
I know it sounds fantastic and insane, but I'm not making this up. Go ask an economics professor, or go to the library and do a little research (I'm assuming that you won't believe any webpage I point you to).
At the root of the modern monetary system is the central bank: privately owned but heavily regulated so it is effectively government run.
The central bank has the power to create money directly, without any assets to back it up, but only in the form of loans (and anybody allowed to borrow money from the central bank is so regulated that they must pay it back). While the government may mint cash, if they wish to keep it they must consider it borrowed from the central bank and pay interest on it.
When somebody has a positive balance in a bank account, they are considered to have that much money. So the total amount of money out there is cash plus account balances. Debts are not subtracted (if they were, there would always be a negative total amount of money). When somebody takes out a loan, their account balance is increased, but nobody's account balance is reduced. If the loan-created money is withdrawn as cash or transferred to another bank, then the bank's holdings are reduced, but another bank's are increased by the same amount. When the loan is "paid off" from the borrower's account, the banker simply strikes off the liability from their record books and only takes the interest as profit that remains spendable "money" (the reason why has to do with the "fractional reserve" rules and regulations that prevent them from just giving themselves a billion dollars whenever they feel like it). The total amount of money is thus reduced.
Banks only need to have a small percentage of their liabilities (the money in accounts at their bank) as cash in their vaults or in their account at the central bank. So they can "lend" money by simply increasing someone's account in their records. There is no "pot" to fund other loans. Unless your bank has recently experienced a run, they have no effective limit on how much money they may lend out (i.e. they don't need to have it to lend it). Though if they need to transfer funds to another bank or hand out cash they may need to take out loans of their own from the central bank, and pay interest on it. They are protected from being unable to pay out what they are owed (in cash or as transfers to another bank) because the central bank always has more and never refuses to loan a bank in good legal standing money they need (which is why it is called the "lender of last resort").
As for burning physical cash when loans are paid off (specifically loans to the central bank, which is the root source of all cash, and is drawing interest on all of it in circulation at all times), that is done quite commonly. This is called "taking it out of circulation", and there isn't always exactly the same amount of new cash minted (in fact, there is no direct connection between cash destroyed and cash printed, other than that they go through the same institution). In anticipation of Y2K panic, the government had extra cash printed up. After the scare was over, the cash supply was reduced by printing less cash than was collected.
The rules and regulations needed to make such an insane system work at all are far, far too complicated to get into here. ---
Don't laugh so hard. I'm not pulling your leg.
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 1
It's really not that funny. Our monetary system is screwed up beyond belief. This is why a country can have a bad year or two and suddenly people are using wheelbarrows to carry enough bills to buy a loaf of break.
Don't think it can't happen here. Incompetent management is only one of the factors that can cause catastrophic inflation. Even if you assume that your government knows better, they can still be beaten by market factors entirely beyond their control. ---
Why don't you go out and test this theory yourself. The Disney company no longer distributes Song of the South, and they intend to keep it that way. By their own admission, they will never again make a profit off that movie. By your reasoning, you should now be free under copyright law to take your old videotape of the show and start running off your own copies for sale. Go ahead and try it and see how far Disney makes it in court before the case is thrown out.
Disney has giant lawyers with sharp pointy teeth and a hundred arms each. They would come charging across the courtroom hurling boulders and screaming their terrifying battlecry, which no man can abide with soul intact.
Most of the restrictions in shrinkwraps are equivalent to the restrictions on an owned copy (the law was tweaked to allow software sales without licenses some time ago). Losing the license is not that big a deal.
I've never really heard of the terms against reverse-engineering (the only real thing that differs from simply purchasing a copy) being enforced.
I think they're mostly there for scare value, like the "FBI warning" at the start of movies. It also serves as a reminder to people that they aren't allowed to give copies to their friends; something that is a little counter-intuitive and many people didn't seem to understand in the early days of computing. ---
You probably work with computers, so naturally you have a logical view of the law as hard, inflexible rules that are applied with machine-like precision, except corrupt judges or incompetent jurors.
Your mechanistic predictions support this theory.
You honestly think a judge is going to say "Okay now, everyone using GPL'd software has to stop immediately." just because that is the simplest interpretation of copyright law? Judges are charged with coming up with practical interpretations of the law. They don't like to cause chaos if they can find a way to weasel out of it (and I mean "weasel" in the nicest way possible:) ). They are entirely free to come to the conclusion that the intent of the GPL is to release something into the public domain, except for an attack on commercial software developers.
Let me put it this way: if you went to court over what you thought was an unfair and illegal term in your apartment rental contract, would you expect the judge to simply say the contract was broken and therefore you must move out immediately or face trespassing charges (since the landlord owns the apartment)? Of course not, you'd expect him to change the contract, possibly nullifying odious restrictions, without asking for your landlord's permission. Judges can do that when presented with an illegal contract.
If they decide that the GPL isn't entirely kosher, they might very well decide that the permissions of the GPL stand without the restrictions. ---
...that courts will rule that GPL'd software is in the public domain, especially GPL'd software that doesn't properly specify contact information to negociate other terms or even who actually owns the copyright.
I mean, shrink-wrap licenses are weak enough when they explicitly state who you're forming a contract with.
I think the viral licensing clause puts it on very shakey legal ground.
I also think that it could well be argued that the license is prejudicial against commercial software developers with malicious intent. The FSF propaganda supports this ("It's exhilarating standing up to an evil empire." anyone?). This might be enough to break the GPL legally.
I just don't think the GPL will stand up in court against a serious attack by a large commercial interest. It really stretches the bounds of contract law, and was, after all, designed to attack proprietary software developers.
Then there's the question of whether a lawsuit against a GPL violator could actually be awarded damages. The copyright holder is not using his copyright to secure a profit for himself, and it's damage to just such a profit that's supposed to be reimbursed in a copyright suit; you're not supposed to be awarded damages just because you don't like the way the violator makes his living. The courts might very well toss out all cases as frivolous. ---
My point isn't that she did it wrong, that her sample was too small, or she didn't know enough statistics to manipulate the data and get a good result.
My point was that her hypothesis included assumptions about the reasons why people did things, and the experiment couldn't gather data on it. It is psuedoscience, like much of psychology, economics, and sociology, an offense against true science which knows its own limits.
The experiment could have been done on a national scale by renouned sociologists or psychologists working with trained statisticians, and it still would have been psuedoscience as long as the people who did it claimed to gain insight into why people chose one doll over the other.
Far too many opinions and untestable theories based on subjective assumptions are stamped "SCIENCE" and thereby given more respect than they should. ---
He's not going to prove that it's impractical to store all bits transmitted forever, he's going to assume it, just as the OTP security proof assumes a true random source and a perfectly secure early communication.
Anything like this always has some pretty sweeping assumptions. ---
What you're saying is equivalent to saying that just because we can prove that 1+1=2 doesn't mean that taking 1 penny and taking 1 other penny means that we have taken 2 pennies. After all, someone might screw up the process, and not correctly take the pennies correctly, thus ending up with some other number of pennies.
It's just the old "Math only proves math" argument. You've been reading that jackass Ritter's page, haven't you? He's just cutting down methods that use math that he can't handle to promote his own (often patented) products with a blend of hand waving and cargo-cult nonsense.
What you're really doing is just screwing around with semantics to make other people's statements seem wrong. You merely betray your ignorance of how mathematics interacts with the real world, and how such interactions are discussed in common parlance.
Furthermore, a message isn't just "secure or insecure", it either leaks all bits, leaks some bits, or leaks no bits. There are special advantages to having a random key that grows with the message, such as security degrading gracefully: having one part of the message cracked does not mean that other parts are also cracked. ---
After all, it's not supposed to be a cargo-cult science fair.
I really don't think that there are any deeper conclusions you can draw from such an experiment. It is set up in the form of a scientific experiment, but the raw data is meaningless in itself and so subject to different interpretations as to be useless in forming other conclusions.
It might be interesting to hear the result, and entertaining to speculate on their meaning, but it's not real science. There are far too many people who treat such things as real science, and it's a bad trend that should be discouraged.
Okay, maybe that's not their motive here, but discouraging political statements camoflaged (intentionally or through ignorance) as science does help explain to the children what is and isn't science. ---
He says he liked "Shooting Star Manager", with the main character Ouji, who played music when he was young, but turned out as a middle-aged salaryman whose biggest problem is finding a seat on public transportation. Apparently it's a sadly profound statement about real life, and now I'm tempted to read it (even if there's no English translation, I'm learning to read Japanese).
Google's not much help here. Can anybody come up with the correct name of this manga? ---
As demonstrated here, there is nothing so bizarrely inexplicable in any game that it can't be explained in a reasonable fashion with enough misspent contemplation.
In all seriousness, it is good that most "representational" games are just a thin layer over an abstract game. Reality doesn't make a good game. Games where you blow up enemies and pick up the little piece of fruit they leave behind can be a lot of fun.
But I do agree in general that there should be a line drawn between special strangely hidden bonuses and strangely hidden essential parts of the game. However, look at Metroid! Everything is hidden, nothing is explained, yet it's one of the greatest classics around. ---
the fact that some people really, really like certain genres. Computer games aren't High Art (meaning that they would be paid for by people who have been carefully trained to like certain things), they are commercial art, and the goal is to make games that people enjoy (and pay for). Originality is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
As for a lack of imagination and creativity, face it: those are scarce resources. People don't come along and make something like Metal Gear Solid as the first CRPG ever. There are better first-person shooters than Wolfenstein. Dune 2 and Herzog Zwei were barely playable.
Creating a new genre is one of the hardest things to do, and the results are rarely particularly popular or profitable. Few people are so utterly bored with new variants of Rogue that they're willing to start over on a new genre at the "Rogue" level of development. ---
So, 99% of games released now are crap. 99% of games released for Atari were crap. 99% of everything is crap! Ignore that 99%, you're not going to get rid of it.
There are still some absolutely terrific games coming out all the time. Including plenty of new 2D games.
No set of rules is going to make lousy game developers make great games, and it's damned hard to keep truly original game developers from somehow releasing their innovations.
Also, people rarely get things right the first time. Derivative works tend to be better than completely original ones. There's been a more-or-less smooth progression from Rogue to the newest unbelieveably cool RPGs, each borrowing heavily from the last generation.
Just as accepting the limited technology of a platform gives you freedom within it, accepting the limits and cliches of a genre gives you a base on which to build your own contribution. ---
If you don't want to be ignored on/. you have to make a strong statement, with no space wasted on quibbling over details. My post was moderated up because it presents an interesting idea in a short enough form to not waste the reader's time with strong enough language to break through the simplistic "standards == good" mindset. Like most successful posts on complicated subjects, it lacks balance and annoys a lot of people.
Readers can control how much balance they get by how many replies they choose to read. You make good points, but try to imagine slashdot as a debate, where people stick to their assigned premise and refuse to be shaken from it regardless of any arguments or whether it's at all a rational viewpoint; offensive things naturally come out of it and nobody means it personally.
It's a strange day when I fully agree with one of my own/. posts. I usually come out of it a bit like this. ---
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, since when can you trademark a title long before you use it?
There are many movies that have identical titles, and far more that have confusingly similar ones (which is practically equivalent in trademark law). I've never before heard of a lawsuit over it.
I don't think trademark should apply to fiction titles at all. It's simply absurd. Fiction is not supposed to be so important that something like trademark is needed to protect consumers from being tricked into purchasing the wrong product.
For that matter, I still don't see any IP law protecting merchandising rights. It can't be a copyright violation, since a plush toy isn't a copyrightable work. It can't be trademark violation, since characters and locations in a fictional work aren't products. Does anyone out there know why you can't make and sell plush Ewoks without permission from Lucasfilm?
---
the SNO ball!
---
The theory of natural selection doesn't suggest that bacteria are the pinnacle of evolution. It doesn't include value judgements of any kind.
If you want to go around claiming that bacteria are the "pinnacle of creation" because there are more of them living in more diverse environments, that is your business, but don't pretend Darwin is on your side.
---
Yes.
The theory of natural selection is a theory about what happens in the physical world, not a philosophy about what is good.
Furthermore, Darwin specifically pointed out that by "survival of the fittest" he meant "survival of those most suited to the environment". He never meant to imply any general statement about things becoming better able to survive in general, in new environments which the species has not been exposed to. This can happen, but it is a side effect of becoming more adapted to the environments the species has been exposed to.
---
As Darwin himself often pointed out, his theory of natural selection implied a general trend for later generations of creatures to be better suited to the environment of their ancestors (and thus to their own, assuming things hadn't changed much).
"Better" is a value judgement that has no place in discussions of evolution.
There is no "normal process of evolution". Some things die, some live, some reproduce, some don't; mutations occur, and either spread or disappear. Lifeforms today are different from lifeforms that were around a million years ago, due to these chance occurances. That's all there is to evolution.
---
It's a good thing we're dumping all that CO2, then, so that the plants can get carbon to build roots to gather H2O which they can convert (together with the CO2) into hydrocarbons and free oxygen.
Save the environment! Burn coal today!
---
ID Software is not likely to sue over this b/c they stand the chance of losing the GPL license over a small case. [...] How can someone release code under the GPL with the knowledge that this won't happen? (taking source, modifying, releasing binary, and saying they will NOT release the source)
So what you're asking is how can we make sure nobody will violate the GPL while carefully avoiding finding out whether its terms are actually legally enforceable?
I dunno...
Adding the clause "You agree to lose any court challenge."?
Roving vigilante squads?
A worldwide network of crack assasins?
Mandatory skull implants that can be remote triggered to explode if the RMS judges that you've violated the GPL?
Self-reproducing, self-improving killing machines? (I think the answer to all the world's problems is self-reproducing, self-improving killing machines, but maybe I'm just being idealistic)
---
The initial post of the thread was on-topic, relevant to the story. The above post was on-topic to the thread.
I swear, slashdot moderation gets worse by the hour.
---
I know it sounds fantastic and insane, but I'm not making this up. Go ask an economics professor, or go to the library and do a little research (I'm assuming that you won't believe any webpage I point you to).
At the root of the modern monetary system is the central bank: privately owned but heavily regulated so it is effectively government run.
The central bank has the power to create money directly, without any assets to back it up, but only in the form of loans (and anybody allowed to borrow money from the central bank is so regulated that they must pay it back). While the government may mint cash, if they wish to keep it they must consider it borrowed from the central bank and pay interest on it.
When somebody has a positive balance in a bank account, they are considered to have that much money. So the total amount of money out there is cash plus account balances. Debts are not subtracted (if they were, there would always be a negative total amount of money). When somebody takes out a loan, their account balance is increased, but nobody's account balance is reduced. If the loan-created money is withdrawn as cash or transferred to another bank, then the bank's holdings are reduced, but another bank's are increased by the same amount. When the loan is "paid off" from the borrower's account, the banker simply strikes off the liability from their record books and only takes the interest as profit that remains spendable "money" (the reason why has to do with the "fractional reserve" rules and regulations that prevent them from just giving themselves a billion dollars whenever they feel like it). The total amount of money is thus reduced.
Banks only need to have a small percentage of their liabilities (the money in accounts at their bank) as cash in their vaults or in their account at the central bank. So they can "lend" money by simply increasing someone's account in their records. There is no "pot" to fund other loans. Unless your bank has recently experienced a run, they have no effective limit on how much money they may lend out (i.e. they don't need to have it to lend it). Though if they need to transfer funds to another bank or hand out cash they may need to take out loans of their own from the central bank, and pay interest on it. They are protected from being unable to pay out what they are owed (in cash or as transfers to another bank) because the central bank always has more and never refuses to loan a bank in good legal standing money they need (which is why it is called the "lender of last resort").
As for burning physical cash when loans are paid off (specifically loans to the central bank, which is the root source of all cash, and is drawing interest on all of it in circulation at all times), that is done quite commonly. This is called "taking it out of circulation", and there isn't always exactly the same amount of new cash minted (in fact, there is no direct connection between cash destroyed and cash printed, other than that they go through the same institution). In anticipation of Y2K panic, the government had extra cash printed up. After the scare was over, the cash supply was reduced by printing less cash than was collected.
The rules and regulations needed to make such an insane system work at all are far, far too complicated to get into here.
---
It's really not that funny. Our monetary system is screwed up beyond belief. This is why a country can have a bad year or two and suddenly people are using wheelbarrows to carry enough bills to buy a loaf of break.
Don't think it can't happen here. Incompetent management is only one of the factors that can cause catastrophic inflation. Even if you assume that your government knows better, they can still be beaten by market factors entirely beyond their control.
---
I was establishing the general principle that a judge can modify illegal contracts.
---
Why don't you go out and test this theory yourself. The Disney company no longer distributes Song of the South, and they intend to keep it that way. By their own admission, they will never again make a profit off that movie. By your reasoning, you should now be free under copyright law to take your old videotape of the show and start running off your own copies for sale. Go ahead and try it and see how far Disney makes it in court before the case is thrown out.
Disney has giant lawyers with sharp pointy teeth and a hundred arms each. They would come charging across the courtroom hurling boulders and screaming their terrifying battlecry, which no man can abide with soul intact.
What matter law to such titans?
---
...and it might not matter.
Most of the restrictions in shrinkwraps are equivalent to the restrictions on an owned copy (the law was tweaked to allow software sales without licenses some time ago). Losing the license is not that big a deal.
I've never really heard of the terms against reverse-engineering (the only real thing that differs from simply purchasing a copy) being enforced.
I think they're mostly there for scare value, like the "FBI warning" at the start of movies. It also serves as a reminder to people that they aren't allowed to give copies to their friends; something that is a little counter-intuitive and many people didn't seem to understand in the early days of computing.
---
"I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on TV."
:) ). They are entirely free to come to the conclusion that the intent of the GPL is to release something into the public domain, except for an attack on commercial software developers.
You probably work with computers, so naturally you have a logical view of the law as hard, inflexible rules that are applied with machine-like precision, except corrupt judges or incompetent jurors.
Your mechanistic predictions support this theory.
You honestly think a judge is going to say "Okay now, everyone using GPL'd software has to stop immediately." just because that is the simplest interpretation of copyright law? Judges are charged with coming up with practical interpretations of the law. They don't like to cause chaos if they can find a way to weasel out of it (and I mean "weasel" in the nicest way possible
Let me put it this way: if you went to court over what you thought was an unfair and illegal term in your apartment rental contract, would you expect the judge to simply say the contract was broken and therefore you must move out immediately or face trespassing charges (since the landlord owns the apartment)? Of course not, you'd expect him to change the contract, possibly nullifying odious restrictions, without asking for your landlord's permission. Judges can do that when presented with an illegal contract.
If they decide that the GPL isn't entirely kosher, they might very well decide that the permissions of the GPL stand without the restrictions.
---
...that courts will rule that GPL'd software is in the public domain, especially GPL'd software that doesn't properly specify contact information to negociate other terms or even who actually owns the copyright.
I mean, shrink-wrap licenses are weak enough when they explicitly state who you're forming a contract with.
I think the viral licensing clause puts it on very shakey legal ground.
I also think that it could well be argued that the license is prejudicial against commercial software developers with malicious intent. The FSF propaganda supports this ("It's exhilarating standing up to an evil empire." anyone?). This might be enough to break the GPL legally.
I just don't think the GPL will stand up in court against a serious attack by a large commercial interest. It really stretches the bounds of contract law, and was, after all, designed to attack proprietary software developers.
Then there's the question of whether a lawsuit against a GPL violator could actually be awarded damages. The copyright holder is not using his copyright to secure a profit for himself, and it's damage to just such a profit that's supposed to be reimbursed in a copyright suit; you're not supposed to be awarded damages just because you don't like the way the violator makes his living. The courts might very well toss out all cases as frivolous.
---
My point isn't that she did it wrong, that her sample was too small, or she didn't know enough statistics to manipulate the data and get a good result.
My point was that her hypothesis included assumptions about the reasons why people did things, and the experiment couldn't gather data on it. It is psuedoscience, like much of psychology, economics, and sociology, an offense against true science which knows its own limits.
The experiment could have been done on a national scale by renouned sociologists or psychologists working with trained statisticians, and it still would have been psuedoscience as long as the people who did it claimed to gain insight into why people chose one doll over the other.
Far too many opinions and untestable theories based on subjective assumptions are stamped "SCIENCE" and thereby given more respect than they should.
---
He's not going to prove that it's impractical to store all bits transmitted forever, he's going to assume it, just as the OTP security proof assumes a true random source and a perfectly secure early communication.
Anything like this always has some pretty sweeping assumptions.
---
What you're saying is equivalent to saying that just because we can prove that 1+1=2 doesn't mean that taking 1 penny and taking 1 other penny means that we have taken 2 pennies. After all, someone might screw up the process, and not correctly take the pennies correctly, thus ending up with some other number of pennies.
It's just the old "Math only proves math" argument. You've been reading that jackass Ritter's page, haven't you? He's just cutting down methods that use math that he can't handle to promote his own (often patented) products with a blend of hand waving and cargo-cult nonsense.
What you're really doing is just screwing around with semantics to make other people's statements seem wrong. You merely betray your ignorance of how mathematics interacts with the real world, and how such interactions are discussed in common parlance.
Furthermore, a message isn't just "secure or insecure", it either leaks all bits, leaks some bits, or leaks no bits. There are special advantages to having a random key that grows with the message, such as security degrading gracefully: having one part of the message cracked does not mean that other parts are also cracked.
---
After all, it's not supposed to be a cargo-cult science fair.
I really don't think that there are any deeper conclusions you can draw from such an experiment. It is set up in the form of a scientific experiment, but the raw data is meaningless in itself and so subject to different interpretations as to be useless in forming other conclusions.
It might be interesting to hear the result, and entertaining to speculate on their meaning, but it's not real science. There are far too many people who treat such things as real science, and it's a bad trend that should be discouraged.
Okay, maybe that's not their motive here, but discouraging political statements camoflaged (intentionally or through ignorance) as science does help explain to the children what is and isn't science.
---
He says he liked "Shooting Star Manager", with the main character Ouji, who played music when he was young, but turned out as a middle-aged salaryman whose biggest problem is finding a seat on public transportation. Apparently it's a sadly profound statement about real life, and now I'm tempted to read it (even if there's no English translation, I'm learning to read Japanese).
Google's not much help here. Can anybody come up with the correct name of this manga?
---
As demonstrated here, there is nothing so bizarrely inexplicable in any game that it can't be explained in a reasonable fashion with enough misspent contemplation.
In all seriousness, it is good that most "representational" games are just a thin layer over an abstract game. Reality doesn't make a good game. Games where you blow up enemies and pick up the little piece of fruit they leave behind can be a lot of fun.
But I do agree in general that there should be a line drawn between special strangely hidden bonuses and strangely hidden essential parts of the game. However, look at Metroid! Everything is hidden, nothing is explained, yet it's one of the greatest classics around.
---
the fact that some people really, really like certain genres. Computer games aren't High Art (meaning that they would be paid for by people who have been carefully trained to like certain things), they are commercial art, and the goal is to make games that people enjoy (and pay for). Originality is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
As for a lack of imagination and creativity, face it: those are scarce resources. People don't come along and make something like Metal Gear Solid as the first CRPG ever. There are better first-person shooters than Wolfenstein. Dune 2 and Herzog Zwei were barely playable.
Creating a new genre is one of the hardest things to do, and the results are rarely particularly popular or profitable. Few people are so utterly bored with new variants of Rogue that they're willing to start over on a new genre at the "Rogue" level of development.
---
So, 99% of games released now are crap. 99% of games released for Atari were crap. 99% of everything is crap! Ignore that 99%, you're not going to get rid of it.
There are still some absolutely terrific games coming out all the time. Including plenty of new 2D games.
No set of rules is going to make lousy game developers make great games, and it's damned hard to keep truly original game developers from somehow releasing their innovations.
Also, people rarely get things right the first time. Derivative works tend to be better than completely original ones. There's been a more-or-less smooth progression from Rogue to the newest unbelieveably cool RPGs, each borrowing heavily from the last generation.
Just as accepting the limited technology of a platform gives you freedom within it, accepting the limits and cliches of a genre gives you a base on which to build your own contribution.
---
If you don't want to be ignored on /. you have to make a strong statement, with no space wasted on quibbling over details. My post was moderated up because it presents an interesting idea in a short enough form to not waste the reader's time with strong enough language to break through the simplistic "standards == good" mindset. Like most successful posts on complicated subjects, it lacks balance and annoys a lot of people.
/. posts. I usually come out of it a bit like this.
Readers can control how much balance they get by how many replies they choose to read. You make good points, but try to imagine slashdot as a debate, where people stick to their assigned premise and refuse to be shaken from it regardless of any arguments or whether it's at all a rational viewpoint; offensive things naturally come out of it and nobody means it personally.
It's a strange day when I fully agree with one of my own
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If you think there is more to design than flashy looking web-pages then you are very wrong.
"I have only one prayer: God grant that my enemies be ridiculous."
-Voltaire
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