A new expac announcement inside a year of the last being brought out.
A race and class that's been begged for since the beginning. And was once a April-fools joke.
An additional game, gratis, for long term subscribers.
Is it just me or does this have the reek of desperation? They reported a drop in numbers earlier this year, and it makes me wonder if that drop has been steady all year long. Why else bait the hook with so much junk? It doesn't feel like Blizz has the same confidence in the game they had before.
It's simple. The companies FB has partnered with to mine that data want their jobs to be easier. So it's now up to the users to put the connections in there that they either couldn't (due to too much noise, legal concerns, what have you) or didn't want to spend the money on developing. That's what this is all about. Make it voluntary and in most instances you've made it legal. Make it necessary and you have the users doing the hard work for you.
Given how much effort it takes just to get a simple feed of stuff from friends, the way it used to be, I have the feeling that this portends the end of usefulness for the facebook. Perhaps the Oatmeal is right, by 2014 it's nothing but old women playing games who have the time to put those connections together.
If, by law, you mean someone is not prevented from doing it, then you are correct.
However, to become a HFT there are a number of substantial barriers to entry you have to overcome. Not the least of which is that many of the privately held markets require you to buy a seat on them. The price of a seat on the NYSE is currently four million dollars. Not exactly change you can find in the sofa cushions. And then there is the capital outlay for the computer systems, the rental for where to house them, the fiber to the market and whatever it will cost to hook up to their computers, and so on and so forth.
In short, it is for elites only. It is for those who can afford it. It is, in fact, something that you are prevented from doing if you are so inclined to do so.
I think they use a number of financial tools and hold a number of positions on a given stock, none of which look at the long term stability, profitability, or sustainability of the company but instead focus on the day to day noise in order to maximize when to trade which option they currently hold the most money in.
These people look for the gaps. The gaps of knowledge, the gaps of valuation, and the gaps of naivety of those just getting into that sort of trading. They at not looking at the value of the employees, the value of the products, or the value of the actual company.
Just look at the oil markets and how volatile and uncoupled from supply and demand they've become. We're sitting at the lowest demand for gasoline in fifty years but it's still being traded at two to three times what many feel is the actual value of the good. Look at what it has done to demand for the product and for the larger economy. That is what speculation has gotten us.
Why else would they be crippling themselves by making going to the movies even worse than it was before? It certainly can't be because they're making tons of money by showing the films to begin with. And it certainly isn't because of skyrocketing ticket and concession stand prices. Or that they're fighting to keep calorie counts off the menus.
They'd have a good reason for making people not want to go, right? Right?
The real problem being is that those in charge of making decisions at the newspapers don't have the desire to go along with this sort of change. And let's not be coy about it. They need to change and we need them to as well. All of us need good, solid reporting of all sorts.
So far, these sorts of changes have been happening right along without them. This is yet another stop on the grand train to the digital future which most of them are willing to ignore in hopes of something else happening.
Let's see if this time they'll get their collective heads out of the sand.
Part of the copyright provision is that you are prevented from importing goods which are being sold first-hand in the US by a licensee or manufacturer. This has historically been applied to books, movies, and music. More recently to games. But thanks to this court ruling it now applies to anything with a copyrighted logo.
Mind you, last I checked logos and their like are the domain of trademarks. How they got a copyright for something that should, by all rights, be a trademark is something that seems to be missing from this conversation.
and even stoop to things like paperless tickets that you can't resell. Granted there are more people without money, but that's not important, because as long as there are enough people in each city on the tour to buy the tickets, it doesn't matter how much the real fans can afford.
It's simple market economics. You price a good at a level the market will bear. If you sell tickets for $100 apiece and the show sells out in 6 minutes, you price the next show at $120. If it also sells out in under 10 minutes you know your good is priced below market value and you make future pricing decisions accordingly.
The notion that "real fans" are people who have no money and must go to shows only on half price pint night is rather insulting. I'm a music lover and I assure you I am not poor.
If you don't like your lot in life, change it. If you don't want to change your lot in life, quit bitching about it.
You see, the problem with this attitude is that our culture doesn't belong to just those with money. It belongs to everyone. That's the point of having a shared culture in the first place. By saying that those who want to see the latest and greatest in concert have to pay up, or as you so quaintly put it, "...change their lot in life...", you have essentially created a division that only artificially exists. That artificial division then goes on to create ones which cause the real problems.
This is not to say there isn't an issue with the way shows and concerts are priced. There obviously is if entire industries are created around little pieces of paper being traded for ever greater amounts of money. The solution, however, is not cutting people out of the cultural conversation and telling them that they need to STFU and to go away if they don't have the funds to participate.
Sorry, I'm more of a hot-rodder than a passive consumer.
So, wait, presumably that means you believe "passive consumption" is somehow a bad thing? That, say, looking at art pieces at a museum, or watching a great film, is somehow a negative thing? Interesting.
If you do nothing more than passively watch, then yes, it is a very negative thing. That means the artwork hasn't touched you. It has failed to be art.
If it otherwise inspires you to create, discuss, or otherwise think about the world around then no, that is not passive and, in IMHO is the point of art.
That aside. I hate that word used in this context. I "consume" nothing when I listen to music, see artwork, or watch a file. All of those things are left in their previous state, not changed in the least. It's lazy phrasing.
Re:Big SG1 fan, not impressed.
on
Stargate Universe
·
· Score: 2, Informative
FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe. (suspension of disbelief just broke)
While release date wise, that does seem right, the question really is one of how much has the public embraced the last release. Excepting for a few hard-core players I know, 3.5 is only a recent purchase with the 3.0 version and its books being replaced slowly. My complaint is that outside a very loud, core group of people, I just haven't anybody express a desire for this sort of change.
One would hope that in answering this sort of question that those who made the decision would be able to cite something beyond the desire for more cash as the reason for doing so.
This is the one question that came leaping to mind at GenCon this past year which really hasn't been answered to my personal satisfaction. I really want to move away from the cynical thoughts and hope that this more than just a video-game like (multi-)year cycle but the fact that they are selling preview modules (selling me an advertisement?) for the next edition does not leave me much hope.
what version is passed by the House or the Senate. It will come down to the conference committee which creates the final bill that is sent to the president to sign. Whatever those people want is what we will get. As the reference says this is an ad-hoc committee so there is no telling who will be seated for it.
How is it not an essential liberty to be anonymous and not identify myself outright?
How is it not an essential liberty to be unworried that my government is constantly watching me without reason?
It makes no difference if I am in public or private. The point is that unless I have done something contravening of the law there should be no suspecting of me of any crime. Constant surveillance with cameras in public chooses to flip that. It assumes that people will break the law without the evidence that they have done so.
That is the crux of the argument for such cameras. That people are evil. That they will do wrong. And the only way to stop them is to record every action they take just in case they are breaking the law.
Just because it can be abused? Yes, because all possible abuses of technology must be fought.
The questions we face with the emergence of this surveillance society are not nearly as simple as you have attempted to frame them here. It is not enough to simply fight when the abuse happens, but we must also fight the possible abuse that can occur. It must be fought against, if for no other reason, then to make other people aware of what could happen should these sorts of plans go through. This is not to create a sort of "I told you so" syndrome, but to raise awareness.
I can, in some ways, sympathize with those who want to expand the abilities of law enforcement by using this technology but they are, as we ourselves do, using this technology as a shortcut to do the work that is needed. But the simple truth of the matter is that the policing of the laws has never once benefited a society by going through shortcuts. The only conclusive method of stopping crime is a hard one to accept because of the human cost of it. It involves putting people at risk. It involves getting them to go into these places that we do not want to go ourselves. It does not and cannot involve people looking at the world through remote eyes.
We may want to believe that we can create safety through constant, unrelenting surveillance. But all this does is to create a situation much like censorship laws do: It only drives those who we want to keep close to the surface underground and makes them that much harder to find when something bad does happen.
Once again, it's not old content. The contracts have to be renegotiated on a new platform, and it's also involving digital distribution, so there's a lot of things involved.
Why are there a lot of things involved? And what "things" exactly?
Look. The whole point to the music business is to get the music to the consumer. This makes it sound like they're falling over themselves to keep it from me. I have the version of the game this music is coming from. I have already paid them their extortion money. Why do I have to pay them even more now? Because the toy I'm playing it on is different?
If you want to develop for it, don't you think it's reasonable for Sony to ask you to buy a developer kit? Actually, no I don't. If I have the time and talent and the capital to buy up one or two of these things to figure out how to do it all on my own, then I should be able to reap the rewards of that labor. Such has even been supported by the courts via decisions against Nintendo and Atari in the past. Sony is simply wasting money attempting to stop this sort of thing which could be spent on endevours which may actually be profitable, like, I don't know, putting out good first party games for the device that shows off its strengths. Besides which, if their user base can find new and exciting ways to use the device it may lead to increased sales and *gasp* new revenue streams which they hadn't thought of before.
It bothers me on two distinct levels. As stated elsewhere in this thread the first point of contention is put best as: I bought this game. It is mine now, and it had best give me everything for which I bought it. Car analogies are quite apt in illustrating this particular tension. Would you be upset if the car you just bought wouldn't let you get on the highway or go faster than 35mph until you had drove it around for 20 hours or stopped at 40 red lights? I think most people would, even it was claimed by the car industry that "it is a normal driving experience" and that "all car companies do this". The second is that it breaks down the immersion one has via vis the game world. Any sort of message from the game to the User telling them they are unable to go into zone X or have character Y in their party breaks the immersion. Hiding zone X or character Y does nothing to allivate this problem due to the fact that more often than not the ability to do these things is stated somewhere on the game box or in its literature. Making it a complete "surprise" is a bit better but it does leave the user asking why such wasn't available from the start again breaking the immersion.
GH as an exmaple: The sandbox/practice mode does allivate some of this issue of immersion -- however not being able to access the complete songlist in it is somewhat paradoxical. It is supposed to be a practice mode. Last time I checked I was able to go down to my local music store and pick up the sheets for anything I wanted to take home and practice. Why cannot the user of the game practice anything from the game they want? It is the reason they bought the game, right? To "play" the guitar along to some of their favorite, rockin' tunes? It make some sense in the career mode of the game but only to the extent that the venue owners are going to want certain songs played before others, but making the career mode completetion a condition to access the songs to play in practice doesn't.
As for locked/hidden endings, I have heard more than a few complaints at such things. My wife being the most recent when it came to Kingdom Hearts. The same problems with locked content crop up there as well. Why shouldn't she be able to see all of the endings? She bought the game.
I must hartily disagree. It is not a fair critism of any game in which all posibilities are open and presented to the player from the beginning.
Progress, like so many things in life, depends entirely on the person persuing it. Given a game, a story, a movie, anything, in which the basic investment is time a person will come up with any sort of measure of how far they have made it through. Some look at points, some at pages, some at the characters, but in the end the underlying mesaure is completely made up by the person persuing it. There isn't anything more needed. The given example of Guitar Hero is the same. In playing it, I am challenging myself; no additional prodding is needed to get better. I could not give a damn about the points, persentage, or any of the other artificial and imposed progress measure. I want to do better because I get a better experience out of playing it that way; The music goes smother, sounds better, and in general far more fun.
And that is the failing of the unlockables in such games. Most people just don't need them to enjoy the game itself or even to try to get better. If the game is designed correctly then the player does this all for themselves. If it wasn't for the unlockables in GH I'd say that they got it almost perfect in that respect.
Slashdot Mirror
A new expac announcement inside a year of the last being brought out.
A race and class that's been begged for since the beginning. And was once a April-fools joke.
An additional game, gratis, for long term subscribers.
Is it just me or does this have the reek of desperation? They reported a drop in numbers earlier this year, and it makes me wonder if that drop has been steady all year long. Why else bait the hook with so much junk? It doesn't feel like Blizz has the same confidence in the game they had before.
It's simple. The companies FB has partnered with to mine that data want their jobs to be easier. So it's now up to the users to put the connections in there that they either couldn't (due to too much noise, legal concerns, what have you) or didn't want to spend the money on developing. That's what this is all about. Make it voluntary and in most instances you've made it legal. Make it necessary and you have the users doing the hard work for you.
Given how much effort it takes just to get a simple feed of stuff from friends, the way it used to be, I have the feeling that this portends the end of usefulness for the facebook. Perhaps the Oatmeal is right, by 2014 it's nothing but old women playing games who have the time to put those connections together.
If, by law, you mean someone is not prevented from doing it, then you are correct.
However, to become a HFT there are a number of substantial barriers to entry you have to overcome. Not the least of which is that many of the privately held markets require you to buy a seat on them. The price of a seat on the NYSE is currently four million dollars. Not exactly change you can find in the sofa cushions. And then there is the capital outlay for the computer systems, the rental for where to house them, the fiber to the market and whatever it will cost to hook up to their computers, and so on and so forth.
In short, it is for elites only. It is for those who can afford it. It is, in fact, something that you are prevented from doing if you are so inclined to do so.
I think they use a number of financial tools and hold a number of positions on a given stock, none of which look at the long term stability, profitability, or sustainability of the company but instead focus on the day to day noise in order to maximize when to trade which option they currently hold the most money in.
These people look for the gaps. The gaps of knowledge, the gaps of valuation, and the gaps of naivety of those just getting into that sort of trading. They at not looking at the value of the employees, the value of the products, or the value of the actual company.
Just look at the oil markets and how volatile and uncoupled from supply and demand they've become. We're sitting at the lowest demand for gasoline in fifty years but it's still being traded at two to three times what many feel is the actual value of the good. Look at what it has done to demand for the product and for the larger economy. That is what speculation has gotten us.
Why else would they be crippling themselves by making going to the movies even worse than it was before? It certainly can't be because they're making tons of money by showing the films to begin with. And it certainly isn't because of skyrocketing ticket and concession stand prices. Or that they're fighting to keep calorie counts off the menus.
They'd have a good reason for making people not want to go, right? Right?
If it works.
The real problem being is that those in charge of making decisions at the newspapers don't have the desire to go along with this sort of change. And let's not be coy about it. They need to change and we need them to as well. All of us need good, solid reporting of all sorts.
So far, these sorts of changes have been happening right along without them. This is yet another stop on the grand train to the digital future which most of them are willing to ignore in hopes of something else happening.
Let's see if this time they'll get their collective heads out of the sand.
Part of the copyright provision is that you are prevented from importing goods which are being sold first-hand in the US by a licensee or manufacturer. This has historically been applied to books, movies, and music. More recently to games. But thanks to this court ruling it now applies to anything with a copyrighted logo.
Mind you, last I checked logos and their like are the domain of trademarks. How they got a copyright for something that should, by all rights, be a trademark is something that seems to be missing from this conversation.
and even stoop to things like paperless tickets that you can't resell. Granted there are more people without money, but that's not important, because as long as there are enough people in each city on the tour to buy the tickets, it doesn't matter how much the real fans can afford.
It's simple market economics. You price a good at a level the market will bear. If you sell tickets for $100 apiece and the show sells out in 6 minutes, you price the next show at $120. If it also sells out in under 10 minutes you know your good is priced below market value and you make future pricing decisions accordingly.
The notion that "real fans" are people who have no money and must go to shows only on half price pint night is rather insulting. I'm a music lover and I assure you I am not poor.
If you don't like your lot in life, change it. If you don't want to change your lot in life, quit bitching about it.
You see, the problem with this attitude is that our culture doesn't belong to just those with money. It belongs to everyone. That's the point of having a shared culture in the first place. By saying that those who want to see the latest and greatest in concert have to pay up, or as you so quaintly put it, "...change their lot in life...", you have essentially created a division that only artificially exists. That artificial division then goes on to create ones which cause the real problems.
This is not to say there isn't an issue with the way shows and concerts are priced. There obviously is if entire industries are created around little pieces of paper being traded for ever greater amounts of money. The solution, however, is not cutting people out of the cultural conversation and telling them that they need to STFU and to go away if they don't have the funds to participate.
Sorry, I'm more of a hot-rodder than a passive consumer.
So, wait, presumably that means you believe "passive consumption" is somehow a bad thing? That, say, looking at art pieces at a museum, or watching a great film, is somehow a negative thing? Interesting.
If you do nothing more than passively watch, then yes, it is a very negative thing. That means the artwork hasn't touched you. It has failed to be art.
If it otherwise inspires you to create, discuss, or otherwise think about the world around then no, that is not passive and, in IMHO is the point of art.
That aside. I hate that word used in this context. I "consume" nothing when I listen to music, see artwork, or watch a file. All of those things are left in their previous state, not changed in the least. It's lazy phrasing.
FLAW: It's only about 50 million LYs from here to the edge of the universe. (suspension of disbelief just broke)
You're off by a factor of a thousand.
Stop things like this from working?
You didn't happen to see where the SCotUSA decided that doesn't apply anymore today, did you?
From yahoo.
While release date wise, that does seem right, the question really is one of how much has the public embraced the last release. Excepting for a few hard-core players I know, 3.5 is only a recent purchase with the 3.0 version and its books being replaced slowly. My complaint is that outside a very loud, core group of people, I just haven't anybody express a desire for this sort of change.
One would hope that in answering this sort of question that those who made the decision would be able to cite something beyond the desire for more cash as the reason for doing so.
This is the one question that came leaping to mind at GenCon this past year which really hasn't been answered to my personal satisfaction. I really want to move away from the cynical thoughts and hope that this more than just a video-game like (multi-)year cycle but the fact that they are selling preview modules (selling me an advertisement?) for the next edition does not leave me much hope.
what version is passed by the House or the Senate. It will come down to the conference committee which creates the final bill that is sent to the president to sign. Whatever those people want is what we will get. As the reference says this is an ad-hoc committee so there is no telling who will be seated for it.
How is it not an essential liberty to be anonymous and not identify myself outright?
How is it not an essential liberty to be unworried that my government is constantly watching me without reason?
It makes no difference if I am in public or private. The point is that unless I have done something contravening of the law there should be no suspecting of me of any crime. Constant surveillance with cameras in public chooses to flip that. It assumes that people will break the law without the evidence that they have done so.
That is the crux of the argument for such cameras. That people are evil. That they will do wrong. And the only way to stop them is to record every action they take just in case they are breaking the law.
The questions we face with the emergence of this surveillance society are not nearly as simple as you have attempted to frame them here. It is not enough to simply fight when the abuse happens, but we must also fight the possible abuse that can occur. It must be fought against, if for no other reason, then to make other people aware of what could happen should these sorts of plans go through. This is not to create a sort of "I told you so" syndrome, but to raise awareness.
I can, in some ways, sympathize with those who want to expand the abilities of law enforcement by using this technology but they are, as we ourselves do, using this technology as a shortcut to do the work that is needed. But the simple truth of the matter is that the policing of the laws has never once benefited a society by going through shortcuts. The only conclusive method of stopping crime is a hard one to accept because of the human cost of it. It involves putting people at risk. It involves getting them to go into these places that we do not want to go ourselves. It does not and cannot involve people looking at the world through remote eyes.
We may want to believe that we can create safety through constant, unrelenting surveillance. But all this does is to create a situation much like censorship laws do: It only drives those who we want to keep close to the surface underground and makes them that much harder to find when something bad does happen.
No redundant, just not under their control.
Considering the goth sex orgies that were going on instead of the creation/maintanence of good games, they weren't doing so hot.
Can I make my vote for the shooting range?
Why are there a lot of things involved? And what "things" exactly?
Look. The whole point to the music business is to get the music to the consumer. This makes it sound like they're falling over themselves to keep it from me. I have the version of the game this music is coming from. I have already paid them their extortion money. Why do I have to pay them even more now? Because the toy I'm playing it on is different?
I call bullshit.
Are you saying that Dark Matter is why we have fire?
It bothers me on two distinct levels. As stated elsewhere in this thread the first point of contention is put best as: I bought this game. It is mine now, and it had best give me everything for which I bought it. Car analogies are quite apt in illustrating this particular tension. Would you be upset if the car you just bought wouldn't let you get on the highway or go faster than 35mph until you had drove it around for 20 hours or stopped at 40 red lights? I think most people would, even it was claimed by the car industry that "it is a normal driving experience" and that "all car companies do this". The second is that it breaks down the immersion one has via vis the game world. Any sort of message from the game to the User telling them they are unable to go into zone X or have character Y in their party breaks the immersion. Hiding zone X or character Y does nothing to allivate this problem due to the fact that more often than not the ability to do these things is stated somewhere on the game box or in its literature. Making it a complete "surprise" is a bit better but it does leave the user asking why such wasn't available from the start again breaking the immersion.
GH as an exmaple: The sandbox/practice mode does allivate some of this issue of immersion -- however not being able to access the complete songlist in it is somewhat paradoxical. It is supposed to be a practice mode. Last time I checked I was able to go down to my local music store and pick up the sheets for anything I wanted to take home and practice. Why cannot the user of the game practice anything from the game they want? It is the reason they bought the game, right? To "play" the guitar along to some of their favorite, rockin' tunes? It make some sense in the career mode of the game but only to the extent that the venue owners are going to want certain songs played before others, but making the career mode completetion a condition to access the songs to play in practice doesn't.
As for locked/hidden endings, I have heard more than a few complaints at such things. My wife being the most recent when it came to Kingdom Hearts. The same problems with locked content crop up there as well. Why shouldn't she be able to see all of the endings? She bought the game.
I must hartily disagree. It is not a fair critism of any game in which all posibilities are open and presented to the player from the beginning.
Progress, like so many things in life, depends entirely on the person persuing it. Given a game, a story, a movie, anything, in which the basic investment is time a person will come up with any sort of measure of how far they have made it through. Some look at points, some at pages, some at the characters, but in the end the underlying mesaure is completely made up by the person persuing it. There isn't anything more needed. The given example of Guitar Hero is the same. In playing it, I am challenging myself; no additional prodding is needed to get better. I could not give a damn about the points, persentage, or any of the other artificial and imposed progress measure. I want to do better because I get a better experience out of playing it that way; The music goes smother, sounds better, and in general far more fun.
And that is the failing of the unlockables in such games. Most people just don't need them to enjoy the game itself or even to try to get better. If the game is designed correctly then the player does this all for themselves. If it wasn't for the unlockables in GH I'd say that they got it almost perfect in that respect.