I would love it if abandonware games were GPLed, but as the law stands, there pretty much is a fat chance of that happening, right now it still rests on the consumers trust of the company to live up to its promises while going through its death throes.
I doubt we will be able to have internet everywhere, affordable, and in a platform that can handle games soon. And still we rely on the trust of who ever is hosting it allowing us to enjoy it years down the road. I don't even trust Valve/Steam, since I thought that Interplay would be around forever just a couple years ago. All things are temporary, no matter how solvent they are today.
As for your sig, Agnosticism would be the absence of knowledge, not decisiveness.
The CEO of the RIAA is doing what he/she is legally obligated to do: maximize profits.
Which is the problem. Most reasonable people put people above inhuman constructs. The fact that this "legal obligation" to maximize profits is antagonistic (or at best agnostic) to common ethics and morality is a grave problem, which causes more problems today than just the RIAA being legally allowed to run an extortion racket.
It is, though, a nice example against the nutjob fringe of libertarians and Ayn Randians who somehow think that greed leads to ethics and morality, while skipping the hardwork of actually being ethical or moral. Corporations who act against the good of individuals should be forcibly disbanded. The ultimate ends of any society is for good of the people who comprise it, and any entity acting against this has no right to exist.
Sorry, going go sit in my corner and quietly reread John Locke and Kant now.
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality. And as a creative artist and distributor myself, that's what annoyed me so much about the RIAA lawsuits - it made something that was realistic and reasonable look in the public eye like some sort of club for extorting money from dead grandmothers.
People might be more mindful of copyright, if copyright was actually a "creator" thing and not a "publisher" (i.e. faceless corporate) thing. How many artists actually hold their own copyrights? If you really could make the argument that every time you download a MP3 your stealing money from an actual group of dirty guys with guitars which you are somewhat attached to via your fandom, then you could drum up some popular sympathy. But right now all you can say is that your stealing from a faceless multi-billion-dollar multinational with a well know propensity of stealing from artists.
Its easier to sympathize with real people, than it is with economic constructs. I personally couldn't give a damn if BMI gets a cent of my money on a personal level.
This also leads to the absurdity of artists not actually being connected to their copyright, either through death, or through selling rights. Can I really feel a moral (or ethical) qualm for downloading The Beatles? I'm depriving Micheal Jackson of money, which might be sad, but that has nothing to do with supporting Ringo, or anyone else who actually put work into the product itself.
Can I consider myself a thief for downloading an Ella Fitzgerald recording? She's dead, she sees no benefit of my purchase. I really don't care ethically about supporting her children (say), since they didn't actually DO anything towards the work I'm enjoying.
Copyright law is NOT rational, and does not match reality or the public's expectations. Copyright should not extent past the artists life, it makes no sense. It was instituted to ensure individual creativity, not financial solvency, or corporate profit margins in perpetuity. It was limited to ensure motivation for further creative acts, it was a limited monopoly on your own creative product.
It makes no sense to be there to support the artists great grandchildren, they should be capable of holding a job like the rest of us. Having a creative relative should not ensure their financial solvency for life. This argument is bogus, having copyright extend past life is only there for corporations to milk money from it, which is not the goal of copyright. We, the people, are not here to keep Universal, or Virgin, in the black, and the government shouldn't be able to mandate it, at the cost of the communal good that copyright was instituted to ensure.
Hell, I don't even think copyright should exist for life. Perhaps 20 years after creation, with a renewal (not a free one, but one that requires effort/money). Why the hell should I support someone for making something 50 years ago, when they were young and creative, just so they can rest on their laurels now? Artists should work for a living too, by being artists. If I get a job and assemble a widget, can I be expected to make a living off that widget for my whole adult life, and the life of my children, and the life of my grandchildren, and most of the life of their children? Why is art any different? You should have to continually produce to earn an honest living.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
Doubtful. While piracy may be around 1/3rd of internet traffic (which I do somewhat doubt), I'm guessing that most piracy is music and 600mb-ish avi rips of movies. Games are a rather steep and time consuming thing to pirate. Which isn't to say that it isn't common, just not to the volume of other "lighter" forms of media.
Also in my experience, most people are limited to what they can pirate from Soulseek and Rapidshare links, since Bittorrent is slightly too geeky for the hoi polloi. This is based on my college experiences a few years ago. The only people I knew who used BT to pirate things were the actual nerds, which your average business or art major being stuck with the simpler (and thus less able to handle a 5gb+ file) solutions.
Heck, I can hardly get my gf to use Bittorrent, and she is slightly more computer literate than most.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
No. Games like Monkey Island died because the demand for them dried up. How well did the recent Sam and Max games do on the console? Not very. I pick the console versions because it is harder to pirate these games, so the numbers are more likely to be unsullied by piracy. The adventure genre is pretty much dead. I'm not sure why, and anything I'd advance would be largely supposition, but I'm guessing it has to do with the console market bringing more action "players" to the scene, which causes development houses to focus more on them. Also, perhaps, they just don't meet the needs of modern gamers. Adventure elements are perhaps best blended into a more immersible game genre, and seem rather antiquated on their own.
All blatant supposition. But the fact remains that I'm pretty sure that piracy wasn't the main actor in the death of that genre.
My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net
Which would further kill game sales. I wouldn't buy anymore computer games if they were all hosted online. I like the idea of being able to replay my games whenever I want to, tomorrow to 10 years in the future. This is why I'm dubious towards Steam, and the MMO phenomena. We can call Steam a success, but when we look at the total gaming market, it still is dominated by games based on physical media (console games), and will probably stay that way. If you spend $60 for a game, most people want a physical copy to sit on their shelf.
If all games were hosted online, think of all the gems we would be denied access to today. The first two gems of the Fallout series comes to mind, as does Total Annihilation.
Basically you are suggesting a draconian DRM scheme, worse than the one built into games like Spore. Instead of having to phone home sometimes, it has to constantly phone home. Which doesn't work for me, at least, since I often feel like playing on my laptop, which by its very nature isn't always in a play with convenient free wifi. Many people are like this.
The future of gaming is consoles, and craptacular services like Steam, which are wholly based on your trust of the solvency of the company involved.
Part of the problem is pricing. $60 a game is beginning to border on absurd. I find it hard to fit them into my spending cycle. Yes, development costs are as high as movies now, but the developers don't have to spend that much to make a quality game (as the history of gaming tells us). When the price is higher than the market can bare, then bad things happen. Right now they have a crutch of blaming piracy, but it just obfuscates the more basic facts.
That said, I do think that the optimal medium for modern adventure games would be flash, or some other web based scheme. It fits the genre better than $300 worth of video hardware.
Yes BitTorrent has a real need, but until these protocols are managed to stop piracy nothing will change.
Er... your breaking one of the prime laws of geekdom, regulating the internet is a no-no. Plus regulation of a protocol means a massive loss of privacy, this entails some third party making sure I'm downloading a WoW patch, and not the Beatle's Greatest Hits, something I doubt you'd find many geeks actually ever endorsing, since being a geek and being a privacy advocate generally goes hand in hand.
Hell, I'd say being a good citizen and being a privacy advocate goes hand and hand.
Here is the thing, I hate the drug laws, despise them actually. But I can't go out and start smoking pot because today it is STILL ILLEGAL.... The solution is to legalize pot, not smoke it and yell at the top of my lungs and say how dumb the laws are (they are...) How do I legalize pot? Work with the system and get it legalized.
If you disagree with drug laws, then by all means go and protest, write letters and such. But just because it is a law, does not mean you have a moral imperative to follow it. Smoke pot all you want, but you also must face the consequences of your actions. Actually, I would say that you SHOULD go out and smoke pot (again accepting the consequences), especially because you disagree with drug laws. There is no message louder than actions.
How did we confuse morals with laws on/. lately? The state is here for me, and not I for them.
True, and that distracts me to no end. Especially when you see super-secret government organizations using outdated iBooks.
But just because your competitor whores themselves, doesn't make your own whoring any better. Whoring is whoring, no matter who does it. I'd be pissed off to see a computer completely dominated by Dell's running Ubuntu with Compiz.
That said, I refuse to watch the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and as vehemently as I refused to watch the craptacular remakes of the Flight of the Phoenix, and the Poseidon Adventure. They have nothing to add to these classics, and being that they are classics there is nothing to add. Adding a bunch of wizzbang special effects, and bad modern "pretty boy" actors doesn't improve them one bit. Obviously if they still have a large following, special effects are not necissary (blasphemy in hollywood).
I wish everyone who went to see this movie would get terminal eye cancer for supporting this derivative shite.
In that case, it makes sense that its sponsored by Microsoft, and has Vista crapping forth from every monitor. Crap attracts its like.
Free nationwide internet access would be just like what happens with free nationwide health service.
Good troll, but... We can definitely compare it to free nationwide health service, since NEITHER EXIST. But being that neither exist, we must then put your comparison firmly into the land of fantasy.
I like the government competing with business. I don't see a problem with it. I would like the government providing some minimum of heath care to those who need it (most people not pulling in 6 figures) at some basic level. Those who want higher level services can then use private resources. I also oddly like the government providing basic net access, perhaps at dial-up speeds. People who want decent connections will pay their local monopoly, while the poor won't be completely disenfranchised from something that is rapidly becoming a necessity.
It also would be nice to check my email on the go, for free, without worrying about legal repercussions.
I'm getting sick of people who view property as a right OVER the well being of others. Why the hell isn't health considered a right? It seems much more important to me than your money. I know the answer boils down to some ad-hoc justification of pure greed.
To actually address your creeping crud example; I don't see any country with national healthcare that doesn't have private practice doctors, insurance companies, HMOs, and such. You name one country where there is nationalized health, and no private doctors. Generally nationalized health takes care of the poor, and the people that our beloved insurance companies would have screwed to death because of their bottom line, and people who can't get insurance because their employers are greedy, the middle class and privileged portions of society who can afford better healthcare, get it.
My State is one of the few states with a state wide free healthcare system (mostly for the poor), and I haven't seen a huge decline in nasty insurance companies, or private doctors.
I don't understand the civil rights group's position. I can understand being against censorship, but this seems rather moronic. Being totally against free internet access because of censorship seems like a "biting off your nose" moment.
I'd rather have free wifi with censorship, than no free wifi at all. It isn't like this is going to replace home connection, or completely censor the full internet. It just sounds like another case of blind idealism leading to absurd consequences, once again. If anyone is a member of these groups, please stop funding them, they are harmful to the common good.
It has to be my way, or no one can play.
Oh well, I thought it was an awesome idea. It would have been nice to check my email on the run, without having to pay a wifi company huge amounts of money, using an uber expensive wireless internet service, or worrying about the legality of the signals I grab. That is special interests for you.
Can the government really change the contract after the fact? Wouldn't there be some legal issue involved in this?
How like whoring yourself out? She'd be paying all the money. All it would take is me spending a month or two in Florida, before flying back home and getting on with my life. Then after her enlistment was up, divorce.
I would have gotten a free, all expenses paid vacation, and I also would have been a favor for a friend. Don't see the whoring in that.
Messing around on Dells site (yes, I'm no longer hardcore), you can get a 2.66ghz quad core, with 3gigs of ram, a 360gb HDD, and a 24" monitor for 750$-ish. Through down $100 for a last gen 512 videocard and your up to 850.
Getting the best of the best is rather pointless these days.
You argued that consoles are ADEQUATE for MMOs, not superior, like you claimed. You haven't mentioned anything that consoles have that PCs don't that would make an MMO experience better.
Personally I think the PC will lead that for awhile. More screen real estate for text, items, bars, etc... Better support for 3rd party development (look at any WoW player's Addon directory). Consoles have a small screen (its across the room, thus distance makes it smaller than the 15.5" laptop screen I'm hunched over currently), and generally crappy resolution, with almost nonexistent 3rd party support (I mean independent, not paid for and licensed), and no real means to supply it.
When my dad remarried, the ring was cast from gold he dug up himself, with a small gold nugget on top. Nothing says romance like something personalized, unique, and requiring actual thought (unlike going to a store, buying a premade ring, with a silly stone that everyone else must have).
Some of us don't take it that seriously. I almost married my ex-girlfreind so she could get a better off-base housing allowance, before that we almost got married for financial aid (when we were still dating). The odd thing is that my current girlfreind was okay with the idea as long as it was temporary, and there was no sex.
We also have an open agreement that we can marry Europeans or Canadians for citizenship, as long as its non-sexual, and we can arrange it at the same time.
I already told my long-term girlfriend (roughly 4 years now) that if we ever get married she's getting a emerald ring, not a diamond one, emeralds are the rarest gem stone in the world, and IMO the most aesthetically pleasing (though I prefer opals, which aren't gemstones, per se).
If she really bought into the almost century long advertising campaign, then she can take a hike, or if she just wants to be with me as some "status symbol", then she can most assuredly go away.
I think she may have felt compelled to say that because so many pro-life people act as though anybody who's pro-choice thinks that casual abortion is just another form of birth control, and that having one is "no big thing."
While not universal, I know a couple women who've had several abortions, with one clocking into an amazing 5 abortions in 10 years. To me this sounds like an idiotic form of birth control, that can't be accounted to a really bad couple batches of the pill, or a lot of failed condoms.
That said, I think life would be a lot better for everyone if society was really as accepting of teenage pregnancy as they were in the oddly unreal world depicted in the movie "Juno".
I can understand the preasure. As a teenager you are incapable of raising the resulting child, both due to maturity issues, and financial ones. So this kid you'd be having is going to be a burden on your parents, grandparents, and perhaps even the rest of us tax-payers.
I can see our right to express some concern over it, since in the long run the grandparents will be the actual caregivers, and will have to shoulder the complete financial burden of an unwanted child.
Your child is basically yours in genetics alone, since everyone else will have to do the work. Sure, you can quit school on your own, and if your old enough try to support it on your own. But then think of the quality of life of the child.
The teenager proves the fact that they can't make adult decisions by getting knocked up in the first place, and thus probably wouldn't provide a child with a nurturing environment. It really isn't hard to not get pregnant, doing so is either evidence of that.01% chance of the pill/condoms failing, or a sign of gross irresponsibility. The type of person who gets pregnant on "accident" isn't the type of person I'd have raising children.
While I'm on the fence with abortion (marginally against it, but not strong enough to force my views on others), I don't find much pity for people who choose to get knocked up, and then have regrets. Its consequences, live with it. It is the logical end point to sex, it isn't an unforseen event. If you lack the ability or desire to think of the obvious consequences you deserve no pity from me.
I think his point was that not all families are as equal as yours. I voted at my girlfriend's house, with much drunken debate over issues, but it was consensual, and we didn't influence each others votes over what you get with a spirited debate (and much Googleing), we still voted differently than each other.
In more patriarchal structures though, the man's will is law. Traditional (hardline)Mormonism, Islam, and Catholics fall into this, where women are viewed as inferior. Thus a woman deviating from the husbands opinion can be seen as a bad thing, a very serious action of disobedience. With home voting this opens up coercion, then.
I think he overstates a bit, since we're only talking about the minority of religious extremists, and old fashioned idiots. I don't think it threatens free elections, but it does have a small impact. It more represents a social problem, than a political one though. Trying to solve the archaic views of gender should be of higher priority than making the rest of us suffer because of them.
I'd also hazard that mail in voting has increased the number of voters, since polling places generally suck.
I went to Northern AZ, and we had the same problem. Both my roommate and I had large gaming rigs, I had a laptop. Then we had an Xbox on a PS2, plus an old NES sitting in a sock drawer. Then add two televisions, two stereos, etc...
Not only did it get REALLY hot, but we could actually blow the wing's fuses by turning them all on. Once we were both doing a UT game, and the lights actually dimmed when someone turned on the TV or the fridge compressor turned on.
We got hit with a bad winter (-12 with the wind chill), and I still had my window open. We were lucky, though, our radiators had valves. They went from off (bloody freezing), to high (heat stroke in dead winter), with no middle ground.
Roughly. V1 pretty much represents what hits the back of your retina, reversed, fuzzy, and I think upside down. This is still before the actual perception of the image, that happens when your brain does "post processing" later on.
Its been awhile since I took classes on this, so I may be off.
The beauty is that you don't have to maintain secrecy. Our willingness to believe that all is right with the world and to have faith in our leaders leads people to selectively filter out truths which don't gibe with that world view.
Generally true, but not universal. Even when we were ramping up for invading Iraq, there were dissenters, and generally critical individuals and groups. I actually won $50 from a classmate, since I bet that there were no WMDs. Its an single self-serving example, but thats all we need to show that critical thought is possible.
If it isn't a secret, and true, then it would have been exposed long ago. And even with the groupthink of the time, it would have exploded sometime in the last 3 years, with our confidence and agreement with the government at an all time low.
Are you kidding? We've just left a century which saw the Armenian massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the Rwandan genocide, Central American death squads and many more than I can remember. We are currently seeing Robert Mugabe slowly starve his people to death.
The difference here is that these events, we perpetrated by dehumanizing the victims, the perpetrators of these actions saw their victims as less than human, as aliens. They weren't killing people, they were killing "vermin". This process wouldn't be possible with 9/11, since we would have been killing people who we accord humanity to.
I'm not saying that there is no chance of there being a conspiracy, but that there isn't enough evidence to prove that there was one. I generally don't believe in anything that doesn't have proof. Right now the burden of proof is on the "Truth" crowd (a rather heavy one at that), and they have failed to meet it. Bring me the smoking gun, and I will happily believe and be convinced.
The conspiracy crowd, though, keeps having their points disproven, then they change their standard. They operate as if it MUST be true, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the fact it happened. This discredits it.
To me one of the biggest things invalidating the hypothesis of the "Truth" movement is that WE SAW IT COMING. We knew (or at least some people smarter than those our administration listens to) that there was a plot, we knew it involved planes, we knew who planned it, etc... The coincidence is too much for me, that an alien organization was plotting to do the exact same thing as the US government was plotting to do to itself, at the exact same times, with the same MO, etc...
Yes, we can disregard US intelligence to this ends for the sake of paranoia, but we also have foreign intelligence. To accept that the US controls all intelligence is a leap that I can't take without a HUGE burden of proof.
This , if true , will have HUGE implications - we'll be able to see what people THINK.
Data in V1/V2 does not constitute cognition, those areas constitute pretty much a visual map of data gathered by the eye (roughly). Its doubtful that imagined visuals are even represented in these areas. This, in other words, doesn't provide any insight into thoughts, just what people see.
I admit, though, that this is awesome. If we can read it, we theoretically could write to it, which would allow for direct neural interfaces.
I'm being called crazy for simply asking for the proof.
Not calling you crazy, and you have every right to ask for proof. But... Most people who believe in things like this have a constantly moving idea of proof. Anytime you disprove a statement, they move the target, and thus remain correct. A theory is only valid if it can be disproven. I'm not saying your in this boat, but you must admit that many are, which really hurts the credibility of the theory, and its adherents.
PNAC
I am aware of that, but I still think that Bush could have sold the war in an simpler manner. Looking at his view of politics, he would have just invaded anyways, 9/11 or no. He doesn't need a reason, ever. If he just invaded Iraq for shits and giggles (without 9/11), the American people would probably have supported it anyways, the patriotic idiots that we are.
Its only a secret to those who refuse to look into it. With compartmentalization there is no need to have many people "in" on the whole plot. There have been plenty of people who have spoken out, just go looking for them.
If there was incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy, then the media would be standing on every elevated platform in the country screaming it. So its either a real secret, and the "Truthers" haven't found a smoking gun. Or the smoking gun they found isn't real.
Not every human has the same set of values. There are more psychopaths out there than you'd think, which contradict the majority's view on human nature.
Perhaps. But all it would take is ONE person inside who had a conscience to end the whole affair. People generally only appear as sociopaths to others, but generally lack the actual criteria that would make them one (via the DSM). We forget the existence of others who are not closely tied to us, we abstract them to general scenery. Either that or we are blinded to them by strong ideologies, where people become a means to an end that we see as the supreme cause. These two things are true for all of us. We often forget the human element, when we watch our military operations on cable news how often do we stop and think "all of these 'bad guys' are people, just like me, they have families, loved ones, children who depend on them, etc..."?
That said; for every person blinded by ideology, there is going to be one person who betrays the cause. Especially when it comes to killing people we identify with. We value Americans more than the alien 'bad guys', thus killing a large amount of 'us' would cause some moral qualms. And judging from the scope of 9/11, one of these people would rebel, or at least come forward after the fact.
So, if someone posts something an extremely uninformed request and it gets moderated up, we can expect uninformed policies implemented?
I doubt that he's going to use this as the sole tool of governance, he'll probably have a staffer check it, give him a digest of the general mood, and then use that as a small data point for actions, but generally relying on his opinions, and experts just like usual.
I rather like the idea. Our current president is completely out of touch with the general opinions and will of the people. Our last couple got their view of America from reading the New York Times (which represents pretty much no one but New Yorkers), and faulty opinion polls (not to mention lobbyists).
If you represent a people, then you'd better know what they think. Bush thinks he knows better than us, and we must act accordingly, Obama at least is trying to undo this.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love it if abandonware games were GPLed, but as the law stands, there pretty much is a fat chance of that happening, right now it still rests on the consumers trust of the company to live up to its promises while going through its death throes.
I doubt we will be able to have internet everywhere, affordable, and in a platform that can handle games soon. And still we rely on the trust of who ever is hosting it allowing us to enjoy it years down the road. I don't even trust Valve/Steam, since I thought that Interplay would be around forever just a couple years ago. All things are temporary, no matter how solvent they are today.
As for your sig, Agnosticism would be the absence of knowledge, not decisiveness.
The CEO of the RIAA is doing what he/she is legally obligated to do: maximize profits.
Which is the problem. Most reasonable people put people above inhuman constructs. The fact that this "legal obligation" to maximize profits is antagonistic (or at best agnostic) to common ethics and morality is a grave problem, which causes more problems today than just the RIAA being legally allowed to run an extortion racket.
It is, though, a nice example against the nutjob fringe of libertarians and Ayn Randians who somehow think that greed leads to ethics and morality, while skipping the hardwork of actually being ethical or moral. Corporations who act against the good of individuals should be forcibly disbanded. The ultimate ends of any society is for good of the people who comprise it, and any entity acting against this has no right to exist.
Sorry, going go sit in my corner and quietly reread John Locke and Kant now.
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality. And as a creative artist and distributor myself, that's what annoyed me so much about the RIAA lawsuits - it made something that was realistic and reasonable look in the public eye like some sort of club for extorting money from dead grandmothers.
People might be more mindful of copyright, if copyright was actually a "creator" thing and not a "publisher" (i.e. faceless corporate) thing. How many artists actually hold their own copyrights? If you really could make the argument that every time you download a MP3 your stealing money from an actual group of dirty guys with guitars which you are somewhat attached to via your fandom, then you could drum up some popular sympathy. But right now all you can say is that your stealing from a faceless multi-billion-dollar multinational with a well know propensity of stealing from artists.
Its easier to sympathize with real people, than it is with economic constructs. I personally couldn't give a damn if BMI gets a cent of my money on a personal level.
This also leads to the absurdity of artists not actually being connected to their copyright, either through death, or through selling rights. Can I really feel a moral (or ethical) qualm for downloading The Beatles? I'm depriving Micheal Jackson of money, which might be sad, but that has nothing to do with supporting Ringo, or anyone else who actually put work into the product itself.
Can I consider myself a thief for downloading an Ella Fitzgerald recording? She's dead, she sees no benefit of my purchase. I really don't care ethically about supporting her children (say), since they didn't actually DO anything towards the work I'm enjoying.
Copyright law is NOT rational, and does not match reality or the public's expectations. Copyright should not extent past the artists life, it makes no sense. It was instituted to ensure individual creativity, not financial solvency, or corporate profit margins in perpetuity. It was limited to ensure motivation for further creative acts, it was a limited monopoly on your own creative product.
It makes no sense to be there to support the artists great grandchildren, they should be capable of holding a job like the rest of us. Having a creative relative should not ensure their financial solvency for life. This argument is bogus, having copyright extend past life is only there for corporations to milk money from it, which is not the goal of copyright. We, the people, are not here to keep Universal, or Virgin, in the black, and the government shouldn't be able to mandate it, at the cost of the communal good that copyright was instituted to ensure.
Hell, I don't even think copyright should exist for life. Perhaps 20 years after creation, with a renewal (not a free one, but one that requires effort/money). Why the hell should I support someone for making something 50 years ago, when they were young and creative, just so they can rest on their laurels now? Artists should work for a living too, by being artists. If I get a job and assemble a widget, can I be expected to make a living off that widget for my whole adult life, and the life of my children, and the life of my grandchildren, and most of the life of their children? Why is art any different? You should have to continually produce to earn an honest living.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
Doubtful. While piracy may be around 1/3rd of internet traffic (which I do somewhat doubt), I'm guessing that most piracy is music and 600mb-ish avi rips of movies. Games are a rather steep and time consuming thing to pirate. Which isn't to say that it isn't common, just not to the volume of other "lighter" forms of media.
Also in my experience, most people are limited to what they can pirate from Soulseek and Rapidshare links, since Bittorrent is slightly too geeky for the hoi polloi. This is based on my college experiences a few years ago. The only people I knew who used BT to pirate things were the actual nerds, which your average business or art major being stuck with the simpler (and thus less able to handle a 5gb+ file) solutions.
Heck, I can hardly get my gf to use Bittorrent, and she is slightly more computer literate than most.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
No. Games like Monkey Island died because the demand for them dried up. How well did the recent Sam and Max games do on the console? Not very. I pick the console versions because it is harder to pirate these games, so the numbers are more likely to be unsullied by piracy. The adventure genre is pretty much dead. I'm not sure why, and anything I'd advance would be largely supposition, but I'm guessing it has to do with the console market bringing more action "players" to the scene, which causes development houses to focus more on them. Also, perhaps, they just don't meet the needs of modern gamers. Adventure elements are perhaps best blended into a more immersible game genre, and seem rather antiquated on their own.
All blatant supposition. But the fact remains that I'm pretty sure that piracy wasn't the main actor in the death of that genre.
My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net
Which would further kill game sales. I wouldn't buy anymore computer games if they were all hosted online. I like the idea of being able to replay my games whenever I want to, tomorrow to 10 years in the future. This is why I'm dubious towards Steam, and the MMO phenomena. We can call Steam a success, but when we look at the total gaming market, it still is dominated by games based on physical media (console games), and will probably stay that way. If you spend $60 for a game, most people want a physical copy to sit on their shelf.
If all games were hosted online, think of all the gems we would be denied access to today. The first two gems of the Fallout series comes to mind, as does Total Annihilation.
Basically you are suggesting a draconian DRM scheme, worse than the one built into games like Spore. Instead of having to phone home sometimes, it has to constantly phone home. Which doesn't work for me, at least, since I often feel like playing on my laptop, which by its very nature isn't always in a play with convenient free wifi. Many people are like this.
The future of gaming is consoles, and craptacular services like Steam, which are wholly based on your trust of the solvency of the company involved.
Part of the problem is pricing. $60 a game is beginning to border on absurd. I find it hard to fit them into my spending cycle. Yes, development costs are as high as movies now, but the developers don't have to spend that much to make a quality game (as the history of gaming tells us). When the price is higher than the market can bare, then bad things happen. Right now they have a crutch of blaming piracy, but it just obfuscates the more basic facts.
That said, I do think that the optimal medium for modern adventure games would be flash, or some other web based scheme. It fits the genre better than $300 worth of video hardware.
Yes BitTorrent has a real need, but until these protocols are managed to stop piracy nothing will change.
Er... your breaking one of the prime laws of geekdom, regulating the internet is a no-no. Plus regulation of a protocol means a massive loss of privacy, this entails some third party making sure I'm downloading a WoW patch, and not the Beatle's Greatest Hits, something I doubt you'd find many geeks actually ever endorsing, since being a geek and being a privacy advocate generally goes hand in hand.
Hell, I'd say being a good citizen and being a privacy advocate goes hand and hand.
Here is the thing, I hate the drug laws, despise them actually. But I can't go out and start smoking pot because today it is STILL ILLEGAL.... The solution is to legalize pot, not smoke it and yell at the top of my lungs and say how dumb the laws are (they are...) How do I legalize pot? Work with the system and get it legalized.
If you disagree with drug laws, then by all means go and protest, write letters and such. But just because it is a law, does not mean you have a moral imperative to follow it. Smoke pot all you want, but you also must face the consequences of your actions. Actually, I would say that you SHOULD go out and smoke pot (again accepting the consequences), especially because you disagree with drug laws. There is no message louder than actions.
How did we confuse morals with laws on /. lately? The state is here for me, and not I for them.
True, and that distracts me to no end. Especially when you see super-secret government organizations using outdated iBooks.
But just because your competitor whores themselves, doesn't make your own whoring any better. Whoring is whoring, no matter who does it. I'd be pissed off to see a computer completely dominated by Dell's running Ubuntu with Compiz.
That said, I refuse to watch the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and as vehemently as I refused to watch the craptacular remakes of the Flight of the Phoenix, and the Poseidon Adventure. They have nothing to add to these classics, and being that they are classics there is nothing to add. Adding a bunch of wizzbang special effects, and bad modern "pretty boy" actors doesn't improve them one bit. Obviously if they still have a large following, special effects are not necissary (blasphemy in hollywood).
I wish everyone who went to see this movie would get terminal eye cancer for supporting this derivative shite.
In that case, it makes sense that its sponsored by Microsoft, and has Vista crapping forth from every monitor. Crap attracts its like.
Free nationwide internet access would be just like what happens with free nationwide health service.
Good troll, but... We can definitely compare it to free nationwide health service, since NEITHER EXIST. But being that neither exist, we must then put your comparison firmly into the land of fantasy.
I like the government competing with business. I don't see a problem with it. I would like the government providing some minimum of heath care to those who need it (most people not pulling in 6 figures) at some basic level. Those who want higher level services can then use private resources. I also oddly like the government providing basic net access, perhaps at dial-up speeds. People who want decent connections will pay their local monopoly, while the poor won't be completely disenfranchised from something that is rapidly becoming a necessity.
It also would be nice to check my email on the go, for free, without worrying about legal repercussions.
I'm getting sick of people who view property as a right OVER the well being of others. Why the hell isn't health considered a right? It seems much more important to me than your money. I know the answer boils down to some ad-hoc justification of pure greed.
To actually address your creeping crud example; I don't see any country with national healthcare that doesn't have private practice doctors, insurance companies, HMOs, and such. You name one country where there is nationalized health, and no private doctors. Generally nationalized health takes care of the poor, and the people that our beloved insurance companies would have screwed to death because of their bottom line, and people who can't get insurance because their employers are greedy, the middle class and privileged portions of society who can afford better healthcare, get it.
My State is one of the few states with a state wide free healthcare system (mostly for the poor), and I haven't seen a huge decline in nasty insurance companies, or private doctors.
I don't understand the civil rights group's position. I can understand being against censorship, but this seems rather moronic. Being totally against free internet access because of censorship seems like a "biting off your nose" moment.
I'd rather have free wifi with censorship, than no free wifi at all. It isn't like this is going to replace home connection, or completely censor the full internet. It just sounds like another case of blind idealism leading to absurd consequences, once again. If anyone is a member of these groups, please stop funding them, they are harmful to the common good.
It has to be my way, or no one can play.
Oh well, I thought it was an awesome idea. It would have been nice to check my email on the run, without having to pay a wifi company huge amounts of money, using an uber expensive wireless internet service, or worrying about the legality of the signals I grab. That is special interests for you.
Can the government really change the contract after the fact? Wouldn't there be some legal issue involved in this?
How like whoring yourself out? She'd be paying all the money. All it would take is me spending a month or two in Florida, before flying back home and getting on with my life. Then after her enlistment was up, divorce.
I would have gotten a free, all expenses paid vacation, and I also would have been a favor for a friend. Don't see the whoring in that.
Messing around on Dells site (yes, I'm no longer hardcore), you can get a 2.66ghz quad core, with 3gigs of ram, a 360gb HDD, and a 24" monitor for 750$-ish. Through down $100 for a last gen 512 videocard and your up to 850.
Getting the best of the best is rather pointless these days.
You argued that consoles are ADEQUATE for MMOs, not superior, like you claimed. You haven't mentioned anything that consoles have that PCs don't that would make an MMO experience better.
Personally I think the PC will lead that for awhile. More screen real estate for text, items, bars, etc... Better support for 3rd party development (look at any WoW player's Addon directory). Consoles have a small screen (its across the room, thus distance makes it smaller than the 15.5" laptop screen I'm hunched over currently), and generally crappy resolution, with almost nonexistent 3rd party support (I mean independent, not paid for and licensed), and no real means to supply it.
When my dad remarried, the ring was cast from gold he dug up himself, with a small gold nugget on top. Nothing says romance like something personalized, unique, and requiring actual thought (unlike going to a store, buying a premade ring, with a silly stone that everyone else must have).
Some of us don't take it that seriously. I almost married my ex-girlfreind so she could get a better off-base housing allowance, before that we almost got married for financial aid (when we were still dating). The odd thing is that my current girlfreind was okay with the idea as long as it was temporary, and there was no sex.
We also have an open agreement that we can marry Europeans or Canadians for citizenship, as long as its non-sexual, and we can arrange it at the same time.
If this happens you picked the wrong woman.
I already told my long-term girlfriend (roughly 4 years now) that if we ever get married she's getting a emerald ring, not a diamond one, emeralds are the rarest gem stone in the world, and IMO the most aesthetically pleasing (though I prefer opals, which aren't gemstones, per se).
If she really bought into the almost century long advertising campaign, then she can take a hike, or if she just wants to be with me as some "status symbol", then she can most assuredly go away.
Thank you for that. You just made my day!
In before the humorless pedants.
I think she may have felt compelled to say that because so many pro-life people act as though anybody who's pro-choice thinks that casual abortion is just another form of birth control, and that having one is "no big thing."
While not universal, I know a couple women who've had several abortions, with one clocking into an amazing 5 abortions in 10 years. To me this sounds like an idiotic form of birth control, that can't be accounted to a really bad couple batches of the pill, or a lot of failed condoms.
Some != all
That said, I think life would be a lot better for everyone if society was really as accepting of teenage pregnancy as they were in the oddly unreal world depicted in the movie "Juno".
I can understand the preasure. As a teenager you are incapable of raising the resulting child, both due to maturity issues, and financial ones. So this kid you'd be having is going to be a burden on your parents, grandparents, and perhaps even the rest of us tax-payers.
I can see our right to express some concern over it, since in the long run the grandparents will be the actual caregivers, and will have to shoulder the complete financial burden of an unwanted child.
Your child is basically yours in genetics alone, since everyone else will have to do the work. Sure, you can quit school on your own, and if your old enough try to support it on your own. But then think of the quality of life of the child.
The teenager proves the fact that they can't make adult decisions by getting knocked up in the first place, and thus probably wouldn't provide a child with a nurturing environment. It really isn't hard to not get pregnant, doing so is either evidence of that .01% chance of the pill/condoms failing, or a sign of gross irresponsibility. The type of person who gets pregnant on "accident" isn't the type of person I'd have raising children.
While I'm on the fence with abortion (marginally against it, but not strong enough to force my views on others), I don't find much pity for people who choose to get knocked up, and then have regrets. Its consequences, live with it. It is the logical end point to sex, it isn't an unforseen event. If you lack the ability or desire to think of the obvious consequences you deserve no pity from me.
I think his point was that not all families are as equal as yours. I voted at my girlfriend's house, with much drunken debate over issues, but it was consensual, and we didn't influence each others votes over what you get with a spirited debate (and much Googleing), we still voted differently than each other.
In more patriarchal structures though, the man's will is law. Traditional (hardline)Mormonism, Islam, and Catholics fall into this, where women are viewed as inferior. Thus a woman deviating from the husbands opinion can be seen as a bad thing, a very serious action of disobedience. With home voting this opens up coercion, then.
I think he overstates a bit, since we're only talking about the minority of religious extremists, and old fashioned idiots. I don't think it threatens free elections, but it does have a small impact. It more represents a social problem, than a political one though. Trying to solve the archaic views of gender should be of higher priority than making the rest of us suffer because of them.
I'd also hazard that mail in voting has increased the number of voters, since polling places generally suck.
I went to Northern AZ, and we had the same problem. Both my roommate and I had large gaming rigs, I had a laptop. Then we had an Xbox on a PS2, plus an old NES sitting in a sock drawer. Then add two televisions, two stereos, etc...
Not only did it get REALLY hot, but we could actually blow the wing's fuses by turning them all on. Once we were both doing a UT game, and the lights actually dimmed when someone turned on the TV or the fridge compressor turned on.
We got hit with a bad winter (-12 with the wind chill), and I still had my window open. We were lucky, though, our radiators had valves. They went from off (bloody freezing), to high (heat stroke in dead winter), with no middle ground.
Roughly. V1 pretty much represents what hits the back of your retina, reversed, fuzzy, and I think upside down. This is still before the actual perception of the image, that happens when your brain does "post processing" later on.
Its been awhile since I took classes on this, so I may be off.
This must be a different version from the one I read awhile back, before losing interest; that the CIA/TLA did it covertly.
I really doubt, though, that we'd have to pay AQ to attack us. I think they would do so joyously.
The beauty is that you don't have to maintain secrecy. Our willingness to believe that all is right with the world and to have faith in our leaders leads people to selectively filter out truths which don't gibe with that world view.
Generally true, but not universal. Even when we were ramping up for invading Iraq, there were dissenters, and generally critical individuals and groups. I actually won $50 from a classmate, since I bet that there were no WMDs. Its an single self-serving example, but thats all we need to show that critical thought is possible.
If it isn't a secret, and true, then it would have been exposed long ago. And even with the groupthink of the time, it would have exploded sometime in the last 3 years, with our confidence and agreement with the government at an all time low.
Are you kidding? We've just left a century which saw the Armenian massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the Rwandan genocide, Central American death squads and many more than I can remember. We are currently seeing Robert Mugabe slowly starve his people to death.
The difference here is that these events, we perpetrated by dehumanizing the victims, the perpetrators of these actions saw their victims as less than human, as aliens. They weren't killing people, they were killing "vermin". This process wouldn't be possible with 9/11, since we would have been killing people who we accord humanity to.
I'm not saying that there is no chance of there being a conspiracy, but that there isn't enough evidence to prove that there was one. I generally don't believe in anything that doesn't have proof. Right now the burden of proof is on the "Truth" crowd (a rather heavy one at that), and they have failed to meet it. Bring me the smoking gun, and I will happily believe and be convinced.
The conspiracy crowd, though, keeps having their points disproven, then they change their standard. They operate as if it MUST be true, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the fact it happened. This discredits it.
To me one of the biggest things invalidating the hypothesis of the "Truth" movement is that WE SAW IT COMING. We knew (or at least some people smarter than those our administration listens to) that there was a plot, we knew it involved planes, we knew who planned it, etc... The coincidence is too much for me, that an alien organization was plotting to do the exact same thing as the US government was plotting to do to itself, at the exact same times, with the same MO, etc...
Yes, we can disregard US intelligence to this ends for the sake of paranoia, but we also have foreign intelligence. To accept that the US controls all intelligence is a leap that I can't take without a HUGE burden of proof.
This , if true , will have HUGE implications - we'll be able to see what people THINK.
Data in V1/V2 does not constitute cognition, those areas constitute pretty much a visual map of data gathered by the eye (roughly). Its doubtful that imagined visuals are even represented in these areas. This, in other words, doesn't provide any insight into thoughts, just what people see.
I admit, though, that this is awesome. If we can read it, we theoretically could write to it, which would allow for direct neural interfaces.
I'm being called crazy for simply asking for the proof.
Not calling you crazy, and you have every right to ask for proof. But... Most people who believe in things like this have a constantly moving idea of proof. Anytime you disprove a statement, they move the target, and thus remain correct. A theory is only valid if it can be disproven. I'm not saying your in this boat, but you must admit that many are, which really hurts the credibility of the theory, and its adherents.
PNAC
I am aware of that, but I still think that Bush could have sold the war in an simpler manner. Looking at his view of politics, he would have just invaded anyways, 9/11 or no. He doesn't need a reason, ever. If he just invaded Iraq for shits and giggles (without 9/11), the American people would probably have supported it anyways, the patriotic idiots that we are.
Its only a secret to those who refuse to look into it. With compartmentalization there is no need to have many people "in" on the whole plot. There have been plenty of people who have spoken out, just go looking for them.
If there was incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy, then the media would be standing on every elevated platform in the country screaming it. So its either a real secret, and the "Truthers" haven't found a smoking gun. Or the smoking gun they found isn't real.
Not every human has the same set of values. There are more psychopaths out there than you'd think, which contradict the majority's view on human nature.
Perhaps. But all it would take is ONE person inside who had a conscience to end the whole affair. People generally only appear as sociopaths to others, but generally lack the actual criteria that would make them one (via the DSM). We forget the existence of others who are not closely tied to us, we abstract them to general scenery. Either that or we are blinded to them by strong ideologies, where people become a means to an end that we see as the supreme cause. These two things are true for all of us. We often forget the human element, when we watch our military operations on cable news how often do we stop and think "all of these 'bad guys' are people, just like me, they have families, loved ones, children who depend on them, etc..."?
That said; for every person blinded by ideology, there is going to be one person who betrays the cause. Especially when it comes to killing people we identify with. We value Americans more than the alien 'bad guys', thus killing a large amount of 'us' would cause some moral qualms. And judging from the scope of 9/11, one of these people would rebel, or at least come forward after the fact.
So, if someone posts something an extremely uninformed request and it gets moderated up, we can expect uninformed policies implemented?
I doubt that he's going to use this as the sole tool of governance, he'll probably have a staffer check it, give him a digest of the general mood, and then use that as a small data point for actions, but generally relying on his opinions, and experts just like usual.
I rather like the idea. Our current president is completely out of touch with the general opinions and will of the people. Our last couple got their view of America from reading the New York Times (which represents pretty much no one but New Yorkers), and faulty opinion polls (not to mention lobbyists).
If you represent a people, then you'd better know what they think. Bush thinks he knows better than us, and we must act accordingly, Obama at least is trying to undo this.