You're right on-- and beyond all that, it improves the game's shelf life.
When the game is first released, only the enthusiasts are going to be able to run it well. But, say, a year later, your average consumer-level Dell system is going to be sporting the card that the enthusiasts were using a year ago. Id wants their games to last long enough to ensure that the company always has a presence on the shelves between games.
Making the engine work on today's mid-level graphics cards would leave you with graphics that will look dated before long. And those developers that pay $250,000 for an id engine for a game that'll be out in six months don't want to look like everybody else.
AGP isn't the barrier in this case, IIRC
on
Tackling AGP 8X
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If I remember the press release correctly from a few weeks back, nVidia introduced AGP 8X in some of their cards-- but inexplicably not in their top-of-the-line.
As such, if you get AGP 8x running up to speed, isn't it possible you're testing the limitations of the cards that are available now, and not of the bus? I would think you'd want to flood the bus with data, and then see how it holds up.
See the press release. The GeForce4 Ti4600 is current king of the family, and it's nowhere to be found.
In July, shortly before the measure was adopted, a Senate committee led by Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, passed a $750.5 million appropriations measure for the commission...
Uh-oh. Isn't he one of the Slashdot Bad Guys (tm)? And if it's him against Bush and his administration, other Slashdot Bad Guys (tm)...
I don't know which side to take! It's like Dracula vs. the Wolfman!
No, wait, it's like a corrupt, money-driven Dracula vs. an embarassingly incompetent, bald-faced lying Wolfman! This one's going to break my brain!
I felt terrible when I blew someone's head into a bunch of tiny pink chunks in Counter-Strike.
You did realize that the head, and those pink chunks, were pixels, right? Because that's the kind of distinction that most people can make by the time they're, you know, five.
People are not as stupid as the knee-jerk reactionaries would like to think. If a kid doesn't know how to handle the images he sees in the world, then it's the fault of the parents for not preparing him to see them, and then allowing him to be exposed to such things anyways.
To make one of those mistakes is a shame; to make two, irresponsible.
Walmart isn't responsible for what you let your kids see. They are not raising your kid. It's galling of you to assume that.
...we're going to raise an entire generation of sociopaths that are going to make the droogs in A Clockwork Orange look like a choir boys.
The message I got out of Clockwork Orange was that a rabidly controlling society is just as bad, if not worse, than an out-of-control one, and it leaves the youth unprepared to handle the world. Watch more than the first twenty minutes next time.
Apple, I should think, will select the company which will allow it to compete most effectively in the marketplace.
Which marketplace did you mean? It seems to me that the only marketplace of which Apple is a part is the Apple marketplace.
You're right, there aren't really any certainties until it comes out of Steve Jobs' mouth-- and even then, take it with a grain of salt. But he does get excited about shiny new things, and this sounds like it would be up his alley. Unless Motorola's keeping some secrets, I wouldn't be surprised if this is what's coming next.
...Somebody ought to put together a little DVD collection of the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts that would now be public domain. And donate proceeds to the EFF.
A little thanks to Lessig, and a little fsck you to Disney.
I spent some time working at a Hollywood Video, so I'm familiar with their policies (and those of Blockbuster, because they're basically the same).
Both stores claim to be "family" stores. Thus, they do not stock movies rated NC-17. For this reason, you're missing out on, say, Todd Solondz's Happiness, and Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream.
(Wonder Boys was a special case, as I'm sure somebody has pointed out. Director Curtis Hanson consented to trimming a bit out of Tobey Maguire's celebrity suicide scene out of respect for the family of the deceased.)
Studios realize that they're not going to make money in the after-market if they're not available at Blockbuster, though. And so sometimes they'll impose cuts on a movie to get a lower rating.
Censorship is just about my only hot-button issue, so this always frustrated me immensely. Anytime a customer asked me about one of the movies above, I'd fill them in on the situation and tell them which independent video stores had the uncut version available, if they were interested.
Here's the really odd thing-- movies that were originally rated R, and were then released in director's cuts in unrated form, or sometimes even released unrated in the first place, seem to slip through the stores' filters. Just this weekend I rented Romero's Dawn of the Dead from Hollywood Video, which is probably the most grotesque horror movie I've ever seen.
Chalk it up to ignorance on the part of the stores. There's probably no way to pick up on each special case, and so they institute the blanket "no NC-17" policy without regard for the details.
Here we go-- this is as I understand it, and trimmed down considerably.
The background:
-Todd McFarlane is a comic writer and artist. He and six others left Marvel Comics in 1992 and cofounded a company called Image Comics, based on creative rights and ownership and whatnot. (He's the creator of "Spawn," if you're familiar with the comic, movie, or cartoon.)
-Neil Gaiman is a writer. He's worked mostly for DC Comics, and created the wildly popular "Sandman" series. He's since left comics, mostly, and these days writes novels that win lots of awards.
-Miracleman is an old character published by some of the big companies. In the 80s two writers took a swing at him-- Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman-- and created some very, very good work out of it, stories whose reputations have only grown in time. It was work for hire, though, and so reprint rights remained with DC Comics. Reprint rights since then have been shuffled about here and there for whatever reasons, and eventually landed in Todd McFarlane's lap.
The History:
-In 1992 Gaiman wrote an issue of "Spawn" for McFarlane. In doing this, he created several characters for the series that grew very popular. The characters continued to appear in "Spawn" and were even given their own series. McFarlane promised Gaiman a cut of the profits, but never wrote the check.
-In 1995 McFarlane and Gaiman reached an agreement (the "Oakland agreement"). Gaiman would give up most of his interests in the "Spawn" characters he created (except for a small percentage of profit), and in exchange, McFarlane would hand over his rights to Miracleman (which Gaiman wanted so that he could allow somebody to reprint the old stories). Again, McFarlane never bothered to cut a check, and apparently denies the agreement was made altogether.
-And so Gaiman filed suit. And he won yesterday. Apparently the punishment will be handed down next. From the sound of things, he's going to be basically asking that the terms of the Oakland agreement are held up. What Gaiman has wanted from the beginning has been reprint rights to some of his old stories.
So there you have it, basically. You can follow the links in the original story for updates. If you're interested, Gaiman keeps a very pleasant online journal.
If I may throw in my two cents-- McFarlane here has been greedy and hypocritical. He co-founded Image Comics as a creator's haven, and then proceeded to do to exactly what he'd always complained about during his time at Marvel. At least Marvel is up-front about their contracts.
It's not like McFarlane doesn't have the money. He dropped something like two million bucks for Mark McGwire's historic home run ball way back when. He runs a little publishing mini-empire, fueled by "Spawn's" success.
To the poster that called Gaiman the "little guy," that's a little distorted. Gaiman is about as big a name is comics as they come-- but he's also a reasonable fellow, and wished it wouldn't have come to this.
So that's that. Most of the comics industry these days thinks of McFarlane as a bloated, success-spoiled asshole, because of things like this. Yesterday, he got what's coming to him.
You know what? Portable music probably isn't such an important topic, in and of itself. The specifics of any of the little toys are probably negligible in the grand scheme of things.
But there are ramifications to the issues surrounding them. DRM is a pretty important topic, because it leads to fair use, which is slightly more important, because it leads to copyright, which is immensely important. And so on.
Just give us the link. The frontpage is for stories, the comment section is for opinions.
I don't think the fact that it's open source is what's going to keep your family away from Linux. It probably has more to do with the fact that, for the unititiated, Linux can be confusing as hell.
My computer usage is pretty much limited to games, web browsing, office work, and some image and video editing for school. I'm all for the idea of open source-- Mozilla's my browser of choice-- but installing and configuring Linux is beyond me. And I'm 20, so I've been using computers for about half my life.
In short, open source isn't the roadblock to Linus usage. Just a thought.
Talk about a mountain of information! Who needs gameplay details? Why even bother telling us it'll be out "when it's done?!?"
(I think this is the one Slashdot story where you probably won't have anything more interesting or insightful to contribute if you bother to follow the link.)
The date's a bit off. I live in Minneapolis and I know it starts here tomorrow (at the Uptown Theater, for anybody that knows the area. Probably the biggest screen in town).
I would imagine New York, LA, etc. would start tomorrow then, too. All part of the big eight or ten markets, if I'm not mistaken-- the above-mentioned three, plus, I dunno, Boston, Miami, Toronto.
So check your listings, gang, and see it early. Who knows how long it'll stick around?
Don't think that these companies are fighting for the privacy of their users. The companies are fighting so that they don't have to take responsibility for what their users do.
It's in their own best interests to help out the little guy on this one, but don't assume everybody's motivations align so well.
You're only counting the Florida votes in your math.
If memory serves, Gore won the popular election-- meaning he had far more votes than Bush.
The deciding factor was those 500 votes you mention in Florida, because of the screwed-up way our system uses an electoral college (and also the screwed-up way the Supreme Court basically decided who would win the election). In a "one man, one vote" system, Gore would be our president now. You can call Bush the winner, but he certainly won no election.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I'm against Bush, but I'm not exactly for Gore. But any way you cut it, I'm pretty sure the numbers don't lie.)
But you're right. To permit a 2% margin of error is absurd. Nothing quite so disillusioning as knowing you've got a 1 in 50 chance of simply losing your vote, is there?
If you'll check out my original post, I said that we have to ask for identification *when we don't know the person.*
Perhaps I should have elaborated in my original post on that point: we're more likely to remember a person who makes our day a little better, even if it's just because of a smile and a friendly comment.
And if we know that person, we can put our initials on their check instead of their driver's license number to indicate to our over-worked fraud department that yes, we know it's the right name on the check.
On another note, your disdain for rules in place "for your protection" is, in this case, unjustified. What would happen if a bank never asked for I.D.? A lot of empty accounts and a lot of pissed-off customers. There's no way every teller is going to know every customer-- there's a few hundred tellers in my regional bank, and thousands and thousands of accounts spread across three states.
Do you get pissed off every time the ATM asks for your PIN?
Thank you very, very much. Yours was the most insightful, level-headed comment I've read in this whole topic.
I've worked at a bank for over a year now; policy at the bank, if you don't personally know any customer who's getting cash from any transaction, is to take a driver's license.
Commence bitching and moaning.
"I've been coming to this bank for thirty years." "I'm depositing half that check, why do I need to show I.D.?" "It's my account."
The proper answers, in order: "I haven't worked here long enough to know you." "How do I know the check is real?" "Would you prefer if I NEVER asked for I.D. to withdraw money from this account?"
The answer we tellers always give, for all of them: "Sorry." Then we sigh, and it's just one more hassle in a day full of bullshit, because people think they should be exempt from the rules that are, in this case, there for THEIR PROTECTION.
For non-customers cashing on-us checks, we get fingerprints. There are regular people that come in every other week that have to do this, and they understand, and they're cool with it. The amazing thing is that if you're friendly to us, we're going to remember that, and you, and stop needing I.D. before long.
Please, people. Don't do what the parent post suggests. The cashier didn't write the policy, and they would certainly rather not bother getting prints. Have some consideration for somebody other than yourself-- employees are people, too, they just happen to wear a uniform.
An article bemoaning the absurdity of linking games to real-world violence is obviously preaching to the choir here on Slashdot, but it's worth reading for anybody with an interest in media (and media bias). It's unfortunate that Jenkins' ideas weren't given air, but worse is that they probably never will, as long as video games are "for kids."
I'm reminded of the troubles some comic book artists have been given over free speech, and the uphill battle of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. (Check out www.cbldf.org if you have a moment. They're fighting the good fight.)
Anyways. It's too bad such a well-written and insightful article ended up at Salon, rather than some Congressional hearing on the matter; it won't ever be absorbed by hyper-conservative parents and lawmakers who can somehow justify relinquishing responsibility for their children through legislation.
A whole bunch of studios are working out of Australia these days. Fox, if memory serves, recently built some huge, state-of-the-art production studios down under, because the cost of doing business there as opposed to L.A. or even Vancouver is considerably more attractive.
The average big-studio Hollywood production is costing somewhere in the $60 million range (IIRC). And the kind of things they're shooting in the outback are the big damn blockbusters that require the large studio space the new Australian locations provide, so the work they're doing down there is probably even more costly stuff.
Does anybody really think the Australian government is going to throw away literal PILES OF MONEY so that they can toss a few suits into prison for six months? What do they care about some wrong-in-principle-but-okay-by-our-shifty-American -government hacking that's taking place halfway around the world?
(Besides, it can't be too urgent to them anyways; if my memory of the Princess Bride serves me, Australia is entirely peopled with criminals in the first place.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're right on-- and beyond all that, it improves the game's shelf life.
When the game is first released, only the enthusiasts are going to be able to run it well. But, say, a year later, your average consumer-level Dell system is going to be sporting the card that the enthusiasts were using a year ago. Id wants their games to last long enough to ensure that the company always has a presence on the shelves between games.
Making the engine work on today's mid-level graphics cards would leave you with graphics that will look dated before long. And those developers that pay $250,000 for an id engine for a game that'll be out in six months don't want to look like everybody else.
If I remember the press release correctly from a few weeks back, nVidia introduced AGP 8X in some of their cards-- but inexplicably not in their top-of-the-line.
As such, if you get AGP 8x running up to speed, isn't it possible you're testing the limitations of the cards that are available now, and not of the bus? I would think you'd want to flood the bus with data, and then see how it holds up.
See the press release. The GeForce4 Ti4600 is current king of the family, and it's nowhere to be found.
Somebody reply if I'm off in my thinking here.
In July, shortly before the measure was adopted, a Senate committee led by Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, passed a $750.5 million appropriations measure for the commission...
Uh-oh. Isn't he one of the Slashdot Bad Guys (tm)? And if it's him against Bush and his administration, other Slashdot Bad Guys (tm)...
I don't know which side to take! It's like Dracula vs. the Wolfman!
No, wait, it's like a corrupt, money-driven Dracula vs. an embarassingly incompetent, bald-faced lying Wolfman! This one's going to break my brain!
I felt terrible when I blew someone's head into a bunch of tiny pink chunks in Counter-Strike.
...we're going to raise an entire generation of sociopaths that are going to make the droogs in A Clockwork Orange look like a choir boys.
You did realize that the head, and those pink chunks, were pixels, right? Because that's the kind of distinction that most people can make by the time they're, you know, five.
People are not as stupid as the knee-jerk reactionaries would like to think. If a kid doesn't know how to handle the images he sees in the world, then it's the fault of the parents for not preparing him to see them, and then allowing him to be exposed to such things anyways.
To make one of those mistakes is a shame; to make two, irresponsible.
Walmart isn't responsible for what you let your kids see. They are not raising your kid. It's galling of you to assume that.
The message I got out of Clockwork Orange was that a rabidly controlling society is just as bad, if not worse, than an out-of-control one, and it leaves the youth unprepared to handle the world. Watch more than the first twenty minutes next time.
Anybody else notice that the word "Microsoft" appears in four of today's front-page headlines? And that "Linux" appears on two?
Offtopic, maybe, but maybe somebody should keep an eye on this "Microsoft" company. They seem to be extending their monopoly.
Apple, I should think, will select the company which will allow it to compete most effectively in the marketplace.
Which marketplace did you mean? It seems to me that the only marketplace of which Apple is a part is the Apple marketplace.
You're right, there aren't really any certainties until it comes out of Steve Jobs' mouth-- and even then, take it with a grain of salt. But he does get excited about shiny new things, and this sounds like it would be up his alley. Unless Motorola's keeping some secrets, I wouldn't be surprised if this is what's coming next.
...Somebody ought to put together a little DVD collection of the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts that would now be public domain. And donate proceeds to the EFF.
A little thanks to Lessig, and a little fsck you to Disney.
"A woman's mind would bring a different angle to the game." -Spokesman Gary Reading
Does anybody really believe the guys behind Tomb Raider are interested in a woman's mind?
Why not save the few minutes it takes you to download and install the nightly builds of Phoenix in the morning, and, you know, settle for Mozilla?
You'd probably end up with a good thirty seconds more at the end of your day to kick back and enjoy.
I spent some time working at a Hollywood Video, so I'm familiar with their policies (and those of Blockbuster, because they're basically the same).
Both stores claim to be "family" stores. Thus, they do not stock movies rated NC-17. For this reason, you're missing out on, say, Todd Solondz's Happiness, and Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream.
(Wonder Boys was a special case, as I'm sure somebody has pointed out. Director Curtis Hanson consented to trimming a bit out of Tobey Maguire's celebrity suicide scene out of respect for the family of the deceased.)
Studios realize that they're not going to make money in the after-market if they're not available at Blockbuster, though. And so sometimes they'll impose cuts on a movie to get a lower rating.
Censorship is just about my only hot-button issue, so this always frustrated me immensely. Anytime a customer asked me about one of the movies above, I'd fill them in on the situation and tell them which independent video stores had the uncut version available, if they were interested.
Here's the really odd thing-- movies that were originally rated R, and were then released in director's cuts in unrated form, or sometimes even released unrated in the first place, seem to slip through the stores' filters. Just this weekend I rented Romero's Dawn of the Dead from Hollywood Video, which is probably the most grotesque horror movie I've ever seen.
Chalk it up to ignorance on the part of the stores. There's probably no way to pick up on each special case, and so they institute the blanket "no NC-17" policy without regard for the details.
Here we go-- this is as I understand it, and trimmed down considerably.
The background:
-Todd McFarlane is a comic writer and artist. He and six others left Marvel Comics in 1992 and cofounded a company called Image Comics, based on creative rights and ownership and whatnot. (He's the creator of "Spawn," if you're familiar with the comic, movie, or cartoon.)
-Neil Gaiman is a writer. He's worked mostly for DC Comics, and created the wildly popular "Sandman" series. He's since left comics, mostly, and these days writes novels that win lots of awards.
-Miracleman is an old character published by some of the big companies. In the 80s two writers took a swing at him-- Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman-- and created some very, very good work out of it, stories whose reputations have only grown in time. It was work for hire, though, and so reprint rights remained with DC Comics. Reprint rights since then have been shuffled about here and there for whatever reasons, and eventually landed in Todd McFarlane's lap.
The History:
-In 1992 Gaiman wrote an issue of "Spawn" for McFarlane. In doing this, he created several characters for the series that grew very popular. The characters continued to appear in "Spawn" and were even given their own series. McFarlane promised Gaiman a cut of the profits, but never wrote the check.
-In 1995 McFarlane and Gaiman reached an agreement (the "Oakland agreement"). Gaiman would give up most of his interests in the "Spawn" characters he created (except for a small percentage of profit), and in exchange, McFarlane would hand over his rights to Miracleman (which Gaiman wanted so that he could allow somebody to reprint the old stories). Again, McFarlane never bothered to cut a check, and apparently denies the agreement was made altogether.
-And so Gaiman filed suit. And he won yesterday. Apparently the punishment will be handed down next. From the sound of things, he's going to be basically asking that the terms of the Oakland agreement are held up. What Gaiman has wanted from the beginning has been reprint rights to some of his old stories.
So there you have it, basically. You can follow the links in the original story for updates. If you're interested, Gaiman keeps a very pleasant online journal.
If I may throw in my two cents-- McFarlane here has been greedy and hypocritical. He co-founded Image Comics as a creator's haven, and then proceeded to do to exactly what he'd always complained about during his time at Marvel. At least Marvel is up-front about their contracts.
It's not like McFarlane doesn't have the money. He dropped something like two million bucks for Mark McGwire's historic home run ball way back when. He runs a little publishing mini-empire, fueled by "Spawn's" success.
To the poster that called Gaiman the "little guy," that's a little distorted. Gaiman is about as big a name is comics as they come-- but he's also a reasonable fellow, and wished it wouldn't have come to this.
So that's that. Most of the comics industry these days thinks of McFarlane as a bloated, success-spoiled asshole, because of things like this. Yesterday, he got what's coming to him.
They are:
1. "Woohoo!"
3. Some more obscure quote from the show;
2. Diatribe about the show's declining quality in recent seasons; or
4. "Worst movie ever."
Take your pick. (Of course, if anybody can figure out a Beowulf cluster joke to shoehorn into the topic at hand, I'm willing to add a #5.)
Way to editorialize, buddy.
You know what? Portable music probably isn't such an important topic, in and of itself. The specifics of any of the little toys are probably negligible in the grand scheme of things.
But there are ramifications to the issues surrounding them. DRM is a pretty important topic, because it leads to fair use, which is slightly more important, because it leads to copyright, which is immensely important. And so on.
Just give us the link. The frontpage is for stories, the comment section is for opinions.
I don't think the fact that it's open source is what's going to keep your family away from Linux. It probably has more to do with the fact that, for the unititiated, Linux can be confusing as hell.
My computer usage is pretty much limited to games, web browsing, office work, and some image and video editing for school. I'm all for the idea of open source-- Mozilla's my browser of choice-- but installing and configuring Linux is beyond me. And I'm 20, so I've been using computers for about half my life.
In short, open source isn't the roadblock to Linus usage. Just a thought.
Talk about a mountain of information! Who needs gameplay details? Why even bother telling us it'll be out "when it's done?!?"
(I think this is the one Slashdot story where you probably won't have anything more interesting or insightful to contribute if you bother to follow the link.)
The date's a bit off. I live in Minneapolis and I know it starts here tomorrow (at the Uptown Theater, for anybody that knows the area. Probably the biggest screen in town).
I would imagine New York, LA, etc. would start tomorrow then, too. All part of the big eight or ten markets, if I'm not mistaken-- the above-mentioned three, plus, I dunno, Boston, Miami, Toronto.
So check your listings, gang, and see it early. Who knows how long it'll stick around?
Don't think that these companies are fighting for the privacy of their users. The companies are fighting so that they don't have to take responsibility for what their users do.
It's in their own best interests to help out the little guy on this one, but don't assume everybody's motivations align so well.
You're only counting the Florida votes in your math.
If memory serves, Gore won the popular election-- meaning he had far more votes than Bush.
The deciding factor was those 500 votes you mention in Florida, because of the screwed-up way our system uses an electoral college (and also the screwed-up way the Supreme Court basically decided who would win the election). In a "one man, one vote" system, Gore would be our president now. You can call Bush the winner, but he certainly won no election.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I'm against Bush, but I'm not exactly for Gore. But any way you cut it, I'm pretty sure the numbers don't lie.)
But you're right. To permit a 2% margin of error is absurd. Nothing quite so disillusioning as knowing you've got a 1 in 50 chance of simply losing your vote, is there?
I know Episode II wasn't the greatest of flicks, but that's a whole huge flamewar waiting to happen. Moving on...
The real question: The CNN story doesn't list cities where it'll be playing. Anybody find any stories elsewhere that list venues?
It's a tiny point, and I'm sure nobody cares, but:
No class-action lawsuit will ever result in somebody going to prison, as they are civil suits. Only criminal cases can result in incarceration.
Oddly enough, IANAL.
Nice to see Slashdot isn't getting more than a few stories a day from the Register at this point.
m l
But just in case you love the vulture, they still beat 'em to it:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27028.ht
Not at all, really.
If you'll check out my original post, I said that we have to ask for identification *when we don't know the person.*
Perhaps I should have elaborated in my original post on that point: we're more likely to remember a person who makes our day a little better, even if it's just because of a smile and a friendly comment.
And if we know that person, we can put our initials on their check instead of their driver's license number to indicate to our over-worked fraud department that yes, we know it's the right name on the check.
On another note, your disdain for rules in place "for your protection" is, in this case, unjustified. What would happen if a bank never asked for I.D.? A lot of empty accounts and a lot of pissed-off customers. There's no way every teller is going to know every customer-- there's a few hundred tellers in my regional bank, and thousands and thousands of accounts spread across three states.
Do you get pissed off every time the ATM asks for your PIN?
Thank you very, very much. Yours was the most insightful, level-headed comment I've read in this whole topic.
I've worked at a bank for over a year now; policy at the bank, if you don't personally know any customer who's getting cash from any transaction, is to take a driver's license.
Commence bitching and moaning.
"I've been coming to this bank for thirty years." "I'm depositing half that check, why do I need to show I.D.?" "It's my account."
The proper answers, in order: "I haven't worked here long enough to know you." "How do I know the check is real?" "Would you prefer if I NEVER asked for I.D. to withdraw money from this account?"
The answer we tellers always give, for all of them: "Sorry." Then we sigh, and it's just one more hassle in a day full of bullshit, because people think they should be exempt from the rules that are, in this case, there for THEIR PROTECTION.
For non-customers cashing on-us checks, we get fingerprints. There are regular people that come in every other week that have to do this, and they understand, and they're cool with it. The amazing thing is that if you're friendly to us, we're going to remember that, and you, and stop needing I.D. before long.
Please, people. Don't do what the parent post suggests. The cashier didn't write the policy, and they would certainly rather not bother getting prints. Have some consideration for somebody other than yourself-- employees are people, too, they just happen to wear a uniform.
It really was.
An article bemoaning the absurdity of linking games to real-world violence is obviously preaching to the choir here on Slashdot, but it's worth reading for anybody with an interest in media (and media bias). It's unfortunate that Jenkins' ideas weren't given air, but worse is that they probably never will, as long as video games are "for kids."
I'm reminded of the troubles some comic book artists have been given over free speech, and the uphill battle of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. (Check out www.cbldf.org if you have a moment. They're fighting the good fight.)
Anyways. It's too bad such a well-written and insightful article ended up at Salon, rather than some Congressional hearing on the matter; it won't ever be absorbed by hyper-conservative parents and lawmakers who can somehow justify relinquishing responsibility for their children through legislation.
And here's why:
n -government hacking that's taking place halfway around the world?
A whole bunch of studios are working out of Australia these days. Fox, if memory serves, recently built some huge, state-of-the-art production studios down under, because the cost of doing business there as opposed to L.A. or even Vancouver is considerably more attractive.
The average big-studio Hollywood production is costing somewhere in the $60 million range (IIRC). And the kind of things they're shooting in the outback are the big damn blockbusters that require the large studio space the new Australian locations provide, so the work they're doing down there is probably even more costly stuff.
Does anybody really think the Australian government is going to throw away literal PILES OF MONEY so that they can toss a few suits into prison for six months? What do they care about some wrong-in-principle-but-okay-by-our-shifty-America
(Besides, it can't be too urgent to them anyways; if my memory of the Princess Bride serves me, Australia is entirely peopled with criminals in the first place.)