This smacks of the same great scientific thinking as "Decrease in Pirates Cause Global Warming."
Piracy has gone up. Temperatures still rising. That Correlation is not that strong. Correlation != Causation; Correlation != for all cases no relationship.
By the same token, Correlation => some sort of relationship most of the time. It could be coincidence, it could be a general trend in legislation, could be random coincidence.
You say that one thing we might wish to keep private is which porn sits we subscribe to. I say the reason one might want to keep such a thing private is very indirect. You aren't worried that others will you look at porn or porn of type $(?). You are worried that there will be a societal backlash. The problem is that society doesn't accept common thoughts and behavior as normal. The problem is not that you are losing your privacy. Privacy in and of itself has no value.
Porn is really prevalent with men and semi-prevalent with women. Although it's a short coming of society that such behavior can be seen as a liability even though it is common, it none the less is true. Thus If you wish to keep your subscription to "Norwegian obese midget sex" to yourself it really ought to be up to you. You are judged for the majority of the things you do. Thus many pieces of information may be used to paint you in a negative light. The right to privacy helps you release only the information you wish.
I think you got that wrong. Who is to judge on which laws to abide? Keep the democratic principles, even if they sometime bother you.
The other direction is right. Not everything that is allowed by law is ethically justified.
I think it swings both ways, sometimes things allowed by law are unethical and something disallowed by law aren't always unethical. Legalist systems represent one idea of morality and their complexity often results in unintended consequences.
The concept of tecnobrega as discussed in the article is an interesting one. If you are planning on being a stage band and making your money off of the shows you perform then it's great. However what happens if that's not our thing. For a hugely sucesful artist who's shows are sold out they are being stolen from with no added benefit at all. This "tecnobrega" only favours the new or the unsuccesful.
And this is bad because? If your already successful and you can fill the biggest venue in any city then more money is the difference between a Rolls Royce or a Maybach. You can always set up endorsements for more money, sell media with added features, private shows etc... When your struggling to start any hand up will help. Right now it's a lottery mentality, 100 starving artists to each journeyman who lives off the industry. With a more distributed model there would be more people who can make a living off of music and less of a lottery. I'd imagine with more people making a living at it this would increase the amount of creativity.
Clearly there's a problem with this system, but is socialized health care going to do anything other than shift your insurance premium into your taxes? By all means, let's provide the means for healthcare for those who otherwise can't afford it, but involve the private market, and make the market fucking compete. The competition that exists now is a joke, and everyone's paying for it.
A little known fact, Canada's "socialized" health care is a "single payer" partly private industry. The various GP and Labs compete with each other to provide services. Major institutions like hospitals are public but many of the medi-centres are private. It's not open competition as such since demand is far out stripped by supply right now due to demographics, as well as having the price regulated but we do get fairly reasonable care for our dollar while the US spends x2 in total for a worser average, median, and modal performance. The only upside is the US gets better care if your at the top. All other segments would have done better in Canada. The increased cost is mostly due to the "profit" margin on products and your right there isn't that much competition in the US market. When I hear of people pushing for privatized Canadian health care I have to point out all the parties pushing for it can be linked backed to the highly corrupt, inefficient, and inhumanr US health care industry.
So I still don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to use these mod chips and play their copied games here.
The US is trying their damnedest to make it universal via the WIPO treaty that it's pressuring it's trade partners to sign. Although I think Nintendo's actions are neutral. The primary usage of those devices are piracy not backing up.
The problem is the expense of creating the graphics and sound effects people expect... This wasn't a problem years ago, because graphics capabilities were very limited anyway. Nowadays people expect a 3d game with fancy graphics and top quality surround sound. People can still come up with innovative ideas, but they often can't bring enough of the right people together to make a successful game.
That problem is vastly overstated. Check out how pretty flow it. Made by two people. Many of the smaller Ps3 and Xbox 360 games are made by smaller teams. If you want a gameplay focused non glitzy fun time start there. There is a large diverse market. The complaint of about large teams really only apply to AAA major studio titles. Their the equivalent of the summer block buster in Hollywood. The smaller downloadable games are closer to the art house indie fare.
Isn't Bioshock part of the problem instead of part of the solution? As much hype as the game has got, it is basically just System Shock all over again, just this time under water. It might still be cool and awesome, but it already was done before.
Like they say, there really is only 17 stories to tell. The rest is up to implementation. I'm sure when there was only 3 stories, you could really innovate with stories but now aways you just get rehashes of those 17 stories. You know rehashes like the old man and the sea, Catcher in the rye or the heavily derivative lord of the rings. Give me the Epic of Gilgamesh any day...
If you need a game to start a new genre before it's good I'm afraid your time has gone by. There are some interesting new games (new is relative) like Ico, Shadow of the colossus, MGS 1, 2, 3, etc.. A well done game can innovate in small ways or even just in technical ways and still be fun. Genre starting is much harder at this point in the game. You can mix them. Puzzle RPG, FPS RPG, Action RPG, Racing RPG, Racing puzzle? But genuienly starting one is harder.
Now let's say that in the present day average game quality is a 1 on the Pong scale. Wow! We've made an improvement! The average game of today is markedly, measurably better! But the beancounters from Corporate hate that sigma; sigma is something that an engineering process is supposed to reduce, after all. So while games today are markedly better on average, with a sigma of 0.5, only one game in a million will hit the +4 or -4 of Oregon Trail or Custer's Revenge.
That sort of right except we still occasionally get something like Bioshock and the frequency between hasn't changed. So it's more like the floor has been raised but the variance is the same.
IMHO, that's the reason why games today for the most part suck. Games these days are multimillion dollar affairs. And that's even before the movie is released. There is so much money at stake that no sane person would ever risk making a game without a market study and focus groups. Large projects demand it.
And that's the problem - innovation gets lost in that process. Put another way, innovation isn't safe.
Back In The Day(tm), it was just a couple of guys sitting around thinking up wacky ideas. Sometimes they stuck, and sometimes they didn't. If it failed, who cares? It's just a half a dozen guys that are already on the payroll. But if it worked, you could get innovation - and that made the difference. That's why guys my age sit around playing MAME and not giving a crap about Madden 07. How different could is possibly be from Madden 06?
Nolan is a product of the Golden Age. That's why he's disappointed with today's games. Innovation was the thing back then. A half a dozen mad mavericks could easily turn the world upside down with a really great idea.
Sadly, not possible today. That's why despite all the beautifully rendered cut scenes, bazillions of vertexes per second and obscene piles of money thrown at new titles these days the games are just simply missing that magic spark. And just plain fall flat for guys from our time.
Indie != Good. Innovative != good. Small != Good. Generally it's nostalgia clouding your judgment. You look back and remember xcom, pacman, supermario, rygar, etc.. and forgot all the dreck. There was always derivative dreck, innovation usually sucked, and golden ages are more about you then what ever you are reminiscing about. Nolan was part of the original video game collapse. It was partly his fault for letting the really dumb people run Atari.
A good idea getting to a good organization can still make a good game. KOTOR, BioShock, FFXII, Halo, Warcraft 3, Disgea, etc.. were all non too original games that achieved success by doing it right and fun. Even now small developers can still make games. IF you criteria is that a good idea ought to be enough then the newest gen of consoles will fit your bill. Wii is intrinsically cheaper to develop for and the PS3 and 360 all have smaller scale downloadable games. Try Flow, theres just an idea, one guy, and a ton of oddly addictive fun. Try any of the XNA titles, try Most DS game. This is the true golden age.
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."- Douglas Adams
Mr. Bushnell has a serious case of retroism. Pong objectively sucks. If you gain any enjoyment out of it I assure you it's purely nostalgia. It was innovative but it's not a terribly good game. By the same token a youngun now would say FF6 sucked, any enjoyment i get out of it is from pure nostalgia. By the same token for my kids kid Halo 3 sucks, any enjoyment my kid gets from....etc..
I am going to try to not come off as a prick in this post.
Vgchart(s|z) is shit. Worth nothing. I'm a member of an extremely passionate video game forum, and posting vgcharts is enough to get you banned. NPD and Media Create are really the only two accurate sources. Wherever the vgcharts numbers come from, they are not even good estimates.
In any case, the PS3 is not selling as well as the 360.
You come off as a prick. Passionate != right. although vg chartz is often wrong. The PS3 outsells the 360 in japan. In the US the 360 sells better. in other markets? not covered by those two so your point?
I find my emotions being toyed with via the music more often then anything else. As well crafted as the plot is in planescape, Deionarra Theme did more then any words. FF6 may have had a nice interesting story but it would not have been ass successful with a lesser sound track. I find thats what fails about other games for me. Oblivion never moved me at all because of it's rather generic sound track. ditto for the fallout games.
I liked oblivion a lot. it's a lot better with some of the user mods applied to it (PC only). Like the high res textures pack, the anti-checkering mod, the none auto-leveling enemies mod, beautiful people mod etc.. I definitely prefer the PC version.
I know a few Eve players but I didn't get on board myself. With all the notable controversies I find it astonishing it's still in business. I suppose if the game play is addictive in the flavor that is right for you, you'll put up with a lot.
You know, for all the bitching people have done about games like Oblivion and Bioshock being "dumbed down" because they were also released on the console, I absolutely cannot see where they get this. I played Morrowind, and Oblivion's UI makes MORE sense to me than Morrowind's. I didn't play SS2, but Bioshock itself is not a dumbed-down game. It might be less complex than SS2, but Bioshock's interface and controls are on par with what one expects from a PC game. Someone, please, explain this new phenomenon of whining to me if you can. Be specific.
PC gamers are just used to nethack. Any game that doesn't utilize 103 keys is obviously not trying and is inefficient.
Unbelievable - "better position to compete"? Are they so incredibly afraid of Sony, then, despite their enormous lead? Or are things not quite as rosy for the XBox as various sources would have us believe?
World wide the lead is eroding. In the US the lead is stable if not growing.
But the PS2 didn't cost $500. Don't you see the difference. PS2 was able to include the DVD player without adding much to the cost of the console. The PS3 or XBox 360 with HD-DVD are much more expensive than the standard console. So, while it's true that it would be a cheaper HD player, it's still more than most people are willing to pay for HD video. Also, everyone seems to forget that VHS to DVD was a huge leap. DVD to HD, not so much.
Nice to know I can think about getting a 360 during the Holiday Season 2008 (three years after launch), and hopefully get a stable hardware platform.:/
even then only on their top of the line model. As well there is some FUD about the halo package being the falcon chip. It's not. Neither is any retail unit in the system right now.
Right.... The lesser greenhouse gas (both in amount and effectiveness) being the thing driving temperature is not absurd but the sun doing it is absurd? Lets wait and see what happens over a protracted period of time... I'm not sold on one theory or the other but to swear off either at this point it the equivalent of a blinding religious crusade.
Is is if it's producing the least solar radiance in the 11 year cycle. Data is always good. Keep a fluid position, absorb information as it comes. The "lesser" gas is the only one that has a correlation to the temp thus far. indeed we need more data but the trends are there for now.
Yep, and the rules we use to frame the arguments about this crap change very quickly, just as they have with movies. Look at "Barbarella" (1968) - full frontal nudity on a number of occasions with a PG rating; no modern movie could get away with that (I remember there being some brouhaha about one tit shown in "Titanic"). 40 years later and we've gone through many iterations of subjectivity in the MPAA... it's no shock that the relatively young ESRB would have some issues. The real problem here is the level of import placed on these scores in political circles when they are intended simply be used as a guideline for a concerned parent, at which they more or less succeed.
I am, however, going to enjoy looking back in 39 years and saying "Can you believe they tried to ban Manhunt 2?"
I don't think society as a whole has gotten any more pruddish in the last 30 years but the MPAA ratings board is being run by a highly conservative tyrant. Film makers now have to make a outrageous version so they can trim things. Big studios can pay the MPAA off to get a softer rating for big projects. A whole documentary full of things are going wrong with the MPAA.
I'm so glad I live in Canada where extreme violence gets you a 18a while a film about life that has some nudity rightly gets a 14a.
If anyone hasn't seen This Film is not yet Rated which the Gamasutra article's title alludes to I would recommend it as an eye opening look into the ratings process.
Just like the MPAA the ESRB is using an anonymous group of individuals with no clearly defined lines between ratings to effectively censor content (since many consoles will not even play AO content similar to many major studios refusing to release NC-17 content).
And here's the quote that the summary should have included in my opinion:
The problem with this article is the ESRB is actually better and closer to the mark then the MPAA. A M rated game is reasonably close to other M rates games while a R rated film varies greatly in it's content. The ESRB seems to be run by fairly knowledgeable and moderate people while the MPAA was run by an active member of the republican party who came out with some fairly explicit statements of bias.
The parallel between AO and NC-17 is close and the lack of any accountability can be disconcerting if things change. But the ESRB does a much better job of rating things then the MPAA at the moment.
You haven't convinced me that it's not a pretty weak commandment. Other religions and philosophies have made the much stronger statement that killing is wrong. What sort of a commandment is it to say you shouldn't kill unless you have reason to. It's a weak moral stance that has allowed countless deaths to be justified by the governments, churches, and individuals that caused them.
All religions (from Buddhists to Zoroastrians) have some varying degree of wrongness assigned to killing. From total wrongness of all killing in Buddhism to virtually promoting it in some variants of Islam. Despite this even Buddhists commit murder. Religion is controlled by those who can seize it. Nothing written can avoid rationalization/distortion/exception. Jesus was a pacifist, The "Christian" American president is a war monger. Belief is not protection against violent behavior. Belief is not the root cause of violent behavior. It's an accessory to other motivations. You can control others with belief but the causes for war, killing, and murder are based on other factors. Disparity in wealth, greed, lust, xenophobia, scapegoating etc... are the real motivators. No amount of philosophical or religious pontification or edicts will change the nature of man. In most of western society killing is abhorred but murder still occurs.
Governments, churches, and individuals will always justify their actions no matter how insane. It's the nature of the human animal.
Slashdot Mirror
This smacks of the same great scientific thinking as "Decrease in Pirates Cause Global Warming."
Piracy has gone up. Temperatures still rising. That Correlation is not that strong. Correlation != Causation; Correlation != for all cases no relationship.
correlation != causation
By the same token, Correlation => some sort of relationship most of the time. It could be coincidence, it could be a general trend in legislation, could be random coincidence.
You say that one thing we might wish to keep private is which porn sits we subscribe to. I say the reason one might want to keep such a thing private is very indirect. You aren't worried that others will you look at porn or porn of type $(?). You are worried that there will be a societal backlash. The problem is that society doesn't accept common thoughts and behavior as normal. The problem is not that you are losing your privacy. Privacy in and of itself has no value.
Porn is really prevalent with men and semi-prevalent with women. Although it's a short coming of society that such behavior can be seen as a liability even though it is common, it none the less is true. Thus If you wish to keep your subscription to "Norwegian obese midget sex" to yourself it really ought to be up to you. You are judged for the majority of the things you do. Thus many pieces of information may be used to paint you in a negative light. The right to privacy helps you release only the information you wish.
I think you got that wrong. Who is to judge on which laws to abide? Keep the democratic principles, even if they sometime bother you.
The other direction is right. Not everything that is allowed by law is ethically justified.
I think it swings both ways, sometimes things allowed by law are unethical and something disallowed by law aren't always unethical. Legalist systems represent one idea of morality and their complexity often results in unintended consequences.
The concept of tecnobrega as discussed in the article is an interesting one. If you are planning on being a stage band and making your money off of the shows you perform then it's great. However what happens if that's not our thing. For a hugely sucesful artist who's shows are sold out they are being stolen from with no added benefit at all. This "tecnobrega" only favours the new or the unsuccesful.
And this is bad because? If your already successful and you can fill the biggest venue in any city then more money is the difference between a Rolls Royce or a Maybach. You can always set up endorsements for more money, sell media with added features, private shows etc... When your struggling to start any hand up will help. Right now it's a lottery mentality, 100 starving artists to each journeyman who lives off the industry. With a more distributed model there would be more people who can make a living off of music and less of a lottery. I'd imagine with more people making a living at it this would increase the amount of creativity.
Clearly there's a problem with this system, but is socialized health care going to do anything other than shift your insurance premium into your taxes? By all means, let's provide the means for healthcare for those who otherwise can't afford it, but involve the private market, and make the market fucking compete. The competition that exists now is a joke, and everyone's paying for it.
A little known fact, Canada's "socialized" health care is a "single payer" partly private industry. The various GP and Labs compete with each other to provide services. Major institutions like hospitals are public but many of the medi-centres are private. It's not open competition as such since demand is far out stripped by supply right now due to demographics, as well as having the price regulated but we do get fairly reasonable care for our dollar while the US spends x2 in total for a worser average, median, and modal performance. The only upside is the US gets better care if your at the top. All other segments would have done better in Canada. The increased cost is mostly due to the "profit" margin on products and your right there isn't that much competition in the US market. When I hear of people pushing for privatized Canadian health care I have to point out all the parties pushing for it can be linked backed to the highly corrupt, inefficient, and inhumanr US health care industry.
Yup, but not in the rest of the world.
So I still don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to use these mod chips and play their copied games here.
The US is trying their damnedest to make it universal via the WIPO treaty that it's pressuring it's trade partners to sign. Although I think Nintendo's actions are neutral. The primary usage of those devices are piracy not backing up.
The problem is the expense of creating the graphics and sound effects people expect...
This wasn't a problem years ago, because graphics capabilities were very limited anyway. Nowadays people expect a 3d game with fancy graphics and top quality surround sound. People can still come up with innovative ideas, but they often can't bring enough of the right people together to make a successful game.
That problem is vastly overstated. Check out how pretty flow it. Made by two people. Many of the smaller Ps3 and Xbox 360 games are made by smaller teams. If you want a gameplay focused non glitzy fun time start there. There is a large diverse market. The complaint of about large teams really only apply to AAA major studio titles. Their the equivalent of the summer block buster in Hollywood. The smaller downloadable games are closer to the art house indie fare.
Isn't Bioshock part of the problem instead of part of the solution? As much hype as the game has got, it is basically just System Shock all over again, just this time under water. It might still be cool and awesome, but it already was done before.
Like they say, there really is only 17 stories to tell. The rest is up to implementation. I'm sure when there was only 3 stories, you could really innovate with stories but now aways you just get rehashes of those 17 stories. You know rehashes like the old man and the sea, Catcher in the rye or the heavily derivative lord of the rings. Give me the Epic of Gilgamesh any day...
If you need a game to start a new genre before it's good I'm afraid your time has gone by. There are some interesting new games (new is relative) like Ico, Shadow of the colossus, MGS 1, 2, 3, etc.. A well done game can innovate in small ways or even just in technical ways and still be fun. Genre starting is much harder at this point in the game. You can mix them. Puzzle RPG, FPS RPG, Action RPG, Racing RPG, Racing puzzle? But genuienly starting one is harder.
Now let's say that in the present day average game quality is a 1 on the Pong scale. Wow! We've made an improvement! The average game of today is markedly, measurably better! But the beancounters from Corporate hate that sigma; sigma is something that an engineering process is supposed to reduce, after all. So while games today are markedly better on average, with a sigma of 0.5, only one game in a million will hit the +4 or -4 of Oregon Trail or Custer's Revenge.
That sort of right except we still occasionally get something like Bioshock and the frequency between hasn't changed. So it's more like the floor has been raised but the variance is the same.
is games that have lived on because they have infinite ways of being played....
/pedantry
ping pong
chess
tennis
sudoko, ect
Chess and Sudoko are finite state systems. if string theory is correct so is tennis and ping pong.
IMHO, that's the reason why games today for the most part suck.
Games these days are multimillion dollar affairs. And that's even before the movie is released. There is so much money at stake that no sane person would ever risk making a game without a market study and focus groups. Large projects demand it.
And that's the problem - innovation gets lost in that process. Put another way, innovation isn't safe.
Back In The Day(tm), it was just a couple of guys sitting around thinking up wacky ideas. Sometimes they stuck, and sometimes they didn't. If it failed, who cares? It's just a half a dozen guys that are already on the payroll. But if it worked, you could get innovation - and that made the difference. That's why guys my age sit around playing MAME and not giving a crap about Madden 07. How different could is possibly be from Madden 06?
Nolan is a product of the Golden Age. That's why he's disappointed with today's games. Innovation was the thing back then. A half a dozen mad mavericks could easily turn the world upside down with a really great idea.
Sadly, not possible today. That's why despite all the beautifully rendered cut scenes, bazillions of vertexes per second and obscene piles of money thrown at new titles these days the games are just simply missing that magic spark. And just plain fall flat for guys from our time.
Indie != Good. Innovative != good. Small != Good. Generally it's nostalgia clouding your judgment. You look back and remember xcom, pacman, supermario, rygar, etc.. and forgot all the dreck. There was always derivative dreck, innovation usually sucked, and golden ages are more about you then what ever you are reminiscing about. Nolan was part of the original video game collapse. It was partly his fault for letting the really dumb people run Atari.
A good idea getting to a good organization can still make a good game. KOTOR, BioShock, FFXII, Halo, Warcraft 3, Disgea, etc.. were all non too original games that achieved success by doing it right and fun. Even now small developers can still make games. IF you criteria is that a good idea ought to be enough then the newest gen of consoles will fit your bill. Wii is intrinsically cheaper to develop for and the PS3 and 360 all have smaller scale downloadable games. Try Flow, theres just an idea, one guy, and a ton of oddly addictive fun. Try any of the XNA titles, try Most DS game. This is the true golden age.
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."- Douglas Adams
.etc..
Mr. Bushnell has a serious case of retroism. Pong objectively sucks. If you gain any enjoyment out of it I assure you it's purely nostalgia. It was innovative but it's not a terribly good game. By the same token a youngun now would say FF6 sucked, any enjoyment i get out of it is from pure nostalgia. By the same token for my kids kid Halo 3 sucks, any enjoyment my kid gets from...
I am going to try to not come off as a prick in this post.
Vgchart(s|z) is shit. Worth nothing. I'm a member of an extremely passionate video game forum, and posting vgcharts is enough to get you banned. NPD and Media Create are really the only two accurate sources. Wherever the vgcharts numbers come from, they are not even good estimates.
In any case, the PS3 is not selling as well as the 360.
You come off as a prick. Passionate != right. although vg chartz is often wrong. The PS3 outsells the 360 in japan. In the US the 360 sells better. in other markets? not covered by those two so your point?
I find my emotions being toyed with via the music more often then anything else. As well crafted as the plot is in planescape, Deionarra Theme did more then any words. FF6 may have had a nice interesting story but it would not have been ass successful with a lesser sound track. I find thats what fails about other games for me. Oblivion never moved me at all because of it's rather generic sound track. ditto for the fallout games.
I liked oblivion a lot. it's a lot better with some of the user mods applied to it (PC only). Like the high res textures pack, the anti-checkering mod, the none auto-leveling enemies mod, beautiful people mod etc.. I definitely prefer the PC version.
I know a few Eve players but I didn't get on board myself. With all the notable controversies I find it astonishing it's still in business. I suppose if the game play is addictive in the flavor that is right for you, you'll put up with a lot.
You know, for all the bitching people have done about games like Oblivion and Bioshock being "dumbed down" because they were also released on the console, I absolutely cannot see where they get this. I played Morrowind, and Oblivion's UI makes MORE sense to me than Morrowind's. I didn't play SS2, but Bioshock itself is not a dumbed-down game. It might be less complex than SS2, but Bioshock's interface and controls are on par with what one expects from a PC game. Someone, please, explain this new phenomenon of whining to me if you can. Be specific.
PC gamers are just used to nethack. Any game that doesn't utilize 103 keys is obviously not trying and is inefficient.
Unbelievable - "better position to compete"? Are they so incredibly afraid of Sony, then, despite their enormous lead? Or are things not quite as rosy for the XBox as various sources would have us believe?
World wide the lead is eroding. In the US the lead is stable if not growing.
But the PS2 didn't cost $500. Don't you see the difference. PS2 was able to include the DVD player without adding much to the cost of the console. The PS3 or XBox 360 with HD-DVD are much more expensive than the standard console. So, while it's true that it would be a cheaper HD player, it's still more than most people are willing to pay for HD video. Also, everyone seems to forget that VHS to DVD was a huge leap. DVD to HD, not so much.
Actually up here in Canada it did.
Nice to know I can think about getting a 360 during the Holiday Season 2008 (three years after launch), and hopefully get a stable hardware platform. :/
even then only on their top of the line model. As well there is some FUD about the halo package being the falcon chip. It's not. Neither is any retail unit in the system right now.
Right.... The lesser greenhouse gas (both in amount and effectiveness) being the thing driving temperature is not absurd but the sun doing it is absurd? Lets wait and see what happens over a protracted period of time... I'm not sold on one theory or the other but to swear off either at this point it the equivalent of a blinding religious crusade.
Is is if it's producing the least solar radiance in the 11 year cycle. Data is always good. Keep a fluid position, absorb information as it comes. The "lesser" gas is the only one that has a correlation to the temp thus far. indeed we need more data but the trends are there for now.
Yep, and the rules we use to frame the arguments about this crap change very quickly, just as they have with movies. Look at "Barbarella" (1968) - full frontal nudity on a number of occasions with a PG rating; no modern movie could get away with that (I remember there being some brouhaha about one tit shown in "Titanic"). 40 years later and we've gone through many iterations of subjectivity in the MPAA ... it's no shock that the relatively young ESRB would have some issues. The real problem here is the level of import placed on these scores in political circles when they are intended simply be used as a guideline for a concerned parent, at which they more or less succeed.
I am, however, going to enjoy looking back in 39 years and saying "Can you believe they tried to ban Manhunt 2?"
I don't think society as a whole has gotten any more pruddish in the last 30 years but the MPAA ratings board is being run by a highly conservative tyrant. Film makers now have to make a outrageous version so they can trim things. Big studios can pay the MPAA off to get a softer rating for big projects. A whole documentary full of things are going wrong with the MPAA.
I'm so glad I live in Canada where extreme violence gets you a 18a while a film about life that has some nudity rightly gets a 14a.
If anyone hasn't seen This Film is not yet Rated which the Gamasutra article's title alludes to I would recommend it as an eye opening look into the ratings process.
Just like the MPAA the ESRB is using an anonymous group of individuals with no clearly defined lines between ratings to effectively censor content (since many consoles will not even play AO content similar to many major studios refusing to release NC-17 content).
And here's the quote that the summary should have included in my opinion:
The problem with this article is the ESRB is actually better and closer to the mark then the MPAA. A M rated game is reasonably close to other M rates games while a R rated film varies greatly in it's content. The ESRB seems to be run by fairly knowledgeable and moderate people while the MPAA was run by an active member of the republican party who came out with some fairly explicit statements of bias.
The parallel between AO and NC-17 is close and the lack of any accountability can be disconcerting if things change. But the ESRB does a much better job of rating things then the MPAA at the moment.
You haven't convinced me that it's not a pretty weak commandment. Other religions and philosophies have made the much stronger statement that killing is wrong. What sort of a commandment is it to say you shouldn't kill unless you have reason to. It's a weak moral stance that has allowed countless deaths to be justified by the governments, churches, and individuals that caused them.
All religions (from Buddhists to Zoroastrians) have some varying degree of wrongness assigned to killing. From total wrongness of all killing in Buddhism to virtually promoting it in some variants of Islam. Despite this even Buddhists commit murder. Religion is controlled by those who can seize it. Nothing written can avoid rationalization/distortion/exception. Jesus was a pacifist, The "Christian" American president is a war monger. Belief is not protection against violent behavior. Belief is not the root cause of violent behavior. It's an accessory to other motivations. You can control others with belief but the causes for war, killing, and murder are based on other factors. Disparity in wealth, greed, lust, xenophobia, scapegoating etc... are the real motivators. No amount of philosophical or religious pontification or edicts will change the nature of man. In most of western society killing is abhorred but murder still occurs.
Governments, churches, and individuals will always justify their actions no matter how insane. It's the nature of the human animal.