It's hard to take your rhetoric seriously when the newest and fastest growing segment of the PC industry, netbooks, include linux installs.
This is the first time linux has ever been presented as a serious choice. For something whose market share is supposedly dropping, that's a pretty massive win.
It's great that you have a bunch of proprietary tools to allow you access the proprietary binary file after using a set of proprietary recovery disks you can't make yourself.
It's a shame though, that you let your smug sense of superiority get the better of you, though. You completely missed the point.
It's meaningful in that we've got legislators trying to take away first amendment rights on the basis of protecting children from video games because they cause violent crime, while all relevant violent crime statistics have dropped substantially while the violent video game market has grown by almost 6x.
This hypothesis that video games cause violent crime predicts a rise in violent crime with an increase in proliferation of violent video games, and this prediction isn't found in the available data.
3. Humans are neither good nor evil, simply human. Our emotions and instincts are a library of genetic data spanning millennia, driving us to act in selfish ways sometimes, selfless ways other times. Sometimes people have a mind which is ill, and doesn't act in ways society considers beneficial. These people are considered monsters.
Enjoy the clothes sewed for you by the tiny fingers of a 10 year old from China, the computer powered by dumping radioactive waste from coal into the air, the food bought for pennies from farmers who can barely afford to feed themselves, and all the other little atrocities we ignore while attacking video games inconsequential link to violence.
The thing about a hypothesis is that it must generate a testable hypothesis.
If violent video games were a statistically significant source of violent crime, then violent crime statistics should show spikes when particularly violent video games are released, or violent crime should increase in proportion to the amount of the population that has been exposed to violent video games.
Violent crime hasn't increased at any point over the time span from the month Doom was released to the end of statistics provided by the DoJ. Violent crime has fallen in half since the release of Doom, consistently falling every year. The predicted increase in violent crime with increase in population exposed to violent video games never materialised. The supposed violence caused by video games isn't statistically significant.
For me, they help re-enforce the folly of using violence to solve problems. A truly good game will make you look back and hate yourself for killing your enemies, or they'll make you want to solve things without violence. When you press that mouse button and virtually pull the trigger, all options end. There are many cases in these games where I'm trapped using a solution I don't want to use against an enemy I don't want to fight.
Considering the sheer volume of violent video games I play, you might expect I'm all gung-ho about war and getting the chance to see real people die. I'm not. I'm against all wars, in part because the act of virtually killing a cardboard cut-out of a person makes you think very hard about the consequences of real violence.
In the game, the role of that cut-out was to be killed, but in real life, where I'm not a superhero: I can't shoot someone from one-hundred meters away using a mouse, I can't run for an hour at top speed by pressing the W button, if I'd pulled the trigger for real on a real person, that would be one person with a life, with a family, with friends, with a whole world that I'd just ended.
Experiencing virtual violence forces the idea of violence into the forefront, forcing you to confront your own views on it. If it's forever something outside of our context, then we won't ever be forced to try to understand it. If we never have to understand it, we end up with war fought the way the baby boomers did it: War is a football game, let's root for the home team.
Why, then, do certain game publishers keep pushing the limits of violent content?
They don't.
You're constantly being brainwashed with this message that games have never been more violent, that they couldn't possibly be more violent. This is utter tripe.
Game violence, in my view, is greatly reduced from the height we saw with games like Postal(Shooting an innocent person to hear them screaming "Oh my god! I can't feel my legs!"), the first GTA(which glorified killing far more than any of the 3d games do, right down to the satisfying "squish" and colourful blood stain they leave behind), or Carmageddon(Which made killing old ladies a sport) back in the late 90s. Today, GTA is more about having play dates with your cousin than killing innocent people for fun.
I think, if you actually had to witness truly violent, or truly vile content in a video game, you'd come to realise how mollycoddled you are. It'd be nice if we started with making people fun to run over and cars fun to drive again in the GTA series.
I'm reminded of two games which sold a lot of copies because of the demo: Starcraft and Unreal Tournament. The demos were both so incredible, we immediately wanted the real thing.
I'm aware that the price has gone down in some markets, but it's still 700 dollars for a PS3 where I live. That's a lot of money. I could buy a used car and insure it for that amount of money.
With previous versions of windows, and with current versions of linux, it's easy for a saavy computer user to make changes, and implement fixes to a broken system from outside the system via bootdisk. It's effectively impossible to implement such fixes to a broken Windows system because of the inherently broken nature of having configuration values stored in a proprietary binary file.
Windows and the underlying OS have been moving progressively from a system where you pretty much needed to understand the underlying architecture to effectively set up your machine, to a system where you cannot understand the underlying architecture because it goes out of it's way to stop you from figuring it out.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this: The day a dos boot disk stopped being an effective tool for fixing a broken machine, Windows became a much more claustrophobic existence.
Consoles are a shitty idea for protecting your works.
All it takes is one hacked savegame, and suddenly every game for that console is hacked. My Xbox, which I hacked more for the multimedia aspects than any game piracy(the dvd drive is a thompson and thus doesn't work), can copy any game to the hard drive and play it indefinitely. I can download any game off the internet, copy it to the hard drive, and play it. If I were to hack my PSP, I'd have instant access to the entire psp catalog, and could play every game for free. If I were to hack my 360, I'd have instant access to the entire 360 library, and could play every game for free.
If I hack a PC game, I've hacked one PC game.
The solution to piracy doesn't come in an iron fist. It comes in providing value and building a positive relationship with your customers.
I've been in the same situation. I'm in Canada, I wanted to buy a subscription to The Daily Show on iTunes. I had my credit card in my hand, I filled out the form, and what did they say? "No, we're not going to sell to Canadians". Well screw that, I went out and downloaded the show from torrentspy. If you don't want my money, I'm not going to force you to take it. It's a sick sense of entitlement that says "We deserve your money even though we refused to take it". Morally, I pay for cable TV so I'm not that upset about downloading a show I could watch but don't feel like sitting down at a certain time for. Today, it's available online legally for free so I'm not too concerned.
Maybe these jackass executives worrying about piracy should make sure people who are willing to spend money on their products actually can.
Following this logic, the Chevy Aveo and Ford Ranger should be the only vehicles sold in North America, since they're the cheapest car and truck.
Cost isn't the only piece of the puzzle. Valve gets this. That's why they get my money, while companies like EA don't.
HL2 cost me more than Mass Effect(about twice as much), but I bought HL2, and when I realised Mass Effect by was published by EA, I returned it without even opening the box.
Valve has actually shown very well what can be added. If I want to buy the Orange Box (and I did), I know I can find it on Steam, it comes with a set of high availability tools connected to a common server, I can get out my credit card, download it, and be playing within an hour or two. I don't need to worry about whether the download will work, I don't need to worry about seeds, I don't need to worry about whether the download is a rick roll, I don't need to worry about whether it's a trojan horse, and whenever I want to play the game, I can just install steam, enter my username and password and download it.
By contrast, if I steal a copy of spore, I have the same problems with the p2p download, but by contrast, a legitimate copy requires me to hunt one down in a store (very difficult where I live in the far north), is ALWAYS a trojan horse, and will ALWAYS restrict the number of times I can install it. God help me if I lose the CD or key.
Valve got my money. EA didn't. EA has published a lot of incredible games, but they fail miserably at making me want to buy them.
Nothing about Valve's approach stops piracy. There's no reason why a person who wants to play HL2 for free can't go out and download it tomorrow. What it DOES do, and this is critical, is it makes owning a legitimate copy more valuable than pirating.
This is analogous to making sure there are opportunities for inner city youth to get education and career opportunities. It doesn't stop gang violence, but it dramatically reduces the value in joining a gang, which will directly reduce gang violence.
The RIAA's approach is more like trying to lock up the entire population of the inner city to stop gang violence. Frankly, I think the Valve approach is better. Make it so making the right decision is better than making the wrong one.
Frankly, I see it as an incredible sense of entitlement that says customers should be willing to wait for months on end and should be willing to pay premiums and should be willing to have their computers hacked by draconian DRM and should be willing to jump through a bunch of hoops just to buy your product. Getting this moronic mindset out of the way, Valve has said "Hey, if we make it possible to buy our product, people will buy it and won't pirate it instead", and as the summary shows, they were right.
It's really simple. Most people DO want to pay for their games.
When I'm paying a game I paid for that I really like and I helped support the people who made it, it gives me a big rubbery one.
The problem is, companies want to make it too much trouble to buy their damn software. Stores where I live don't carry most software, and I'm not about to pay 30 dollars shipping for a 30 dollar game CD. Even if I get the game, some distributors, like EA, think I'm going to tolerate not being able to install my game more than 3 times (I've already installed every game I've bought this year more than 3 times. Get over it.) With Steam, I can say "Hey, I want to play Half Life Blue shift. I've never tried it.", and 4.99 on my mastercard and a 1GB download later, I'm playing it. If I re-install and want to play some more, I just download steam, download the game, and enjoy.
I design industrial control systems for a living. We have to follow human engineering principles all the time. For example, if an instrument is lower than a person's knees or higher than their face, odds are it won't get maintained. Therefore, you can get all moralistic about how tradesmen are lazy and they should do their jobs, or you can do the right thing and design your plant so people naturally are inclined to maintain the most important equipment. If you get all moralistic, though, be prepared to do it while your plant is down and you're losing tens of thousands of dollars of production per hour.
This is no different. Companies like the RIAA member companies, who want to bitch and whine, who want to sue their customers, who don't want to make the experience of buying music any easier, they're going to see their profits fall, and piracy skyrocket. Companies like Valve who design their systems so it's easier to buy than to pirate, they'll see their profits rise, and piracy fall (as this article says they've seen).
That bad attitude costs sales. Valve Software here did away with the useless moralistic crap and said "You know, maybe they're telling the truth", and lo and behold, the piracy rate went down.
We'll have to see how Valve does vs. the music companies. Different philosophies, different ways of treating piracy, and I'm sure different results. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Valve software's products in the past year. I haven't bought a CD in years. Just one example, but I wonder if I'm typical?
"We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly," meaning the prediction that piracy rates would go down when release dates became the same as other countries was proven true with hard data.
Hey, you get your fill of praise, I'm sure, but good work out there so I'm going to add to it.
There are so many forces in the world that just want to break the legal system, to turn it into force of corporate totalitarian control by fiat. "We gave you a big thick sheet of paper, now we own you", or "We don't like you so you disappear".
The little guy doesn't have money, but we've got a soul, something a corporation will never have no matter how heavily "corporate personhood" is legislated. Thanks for standing up for him.
I can file marriage papers to marry that cute press secratary of Bushs, it doesn't mean I've married her. It's impossible to marry her, because she's already married, and also because she doesn't know me and didn't consent to it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to take your rhetoric seriously when the newest and fastest growing segment of the PC industry, netbooks, include linux installs.
This is the first time linux has ever been presented as a serious choice. For something whose market share is supposedly dropping, that's a pretty massive win.
It's great that you have a bunch of proprietary tools to allow you access the proprietary binary file after using a set of proprietary recovery disks you can't make yourself.
It's a shame though, that you let your smug sense of superiority get the better of you, though. You completely missed the point.
It's meaningful in that we've got legislators trying to take away first amendment rights on the basis of protecting children from video games because they cause violent crime, while all relevant violent crime statistics have dropped substantially while the violent video game market has grown by almost 6x.
This hypothesis that video games cause violent crime predicts a rise in violent crime with an increase in proliferation of violent video games, and this prediction isn't found in the available data.
3. Humans are neither good nor evil, simply human. Our emotions and instincts are a library of genetic data spanning millennia, driving us to act in selfish ways sometimes, selfless ways other times. Sometimes people have a mind which is ill, and doesn't act in ways society considers beneficial. These people are considered monsters.
Enjoy the clothes sewed for you by the tiny fingers of a 10 year old from China, the computer powered by dumping radioactive waste from coal into the air, the food bought for pennies from farmers who can barely afford to feed themselves, and all the other little atrocities we ignore while attacking video games inconsequential link to violence.
The thing about a hypothesis is that it must generate a testable hypothesis.
If violent video games were a statistically significant source of violent crime, then violent crime statistics should show spikes when particularly violent video games are released, or violent crime should increase in proportion to the amount of the population that has been exposed to violent video games.
Violent crime hasn't increased at any point over the time span from the month Doom was released to the end of statistics provided by the DoJ. Violent crime has fallen in half since the release of Doom, consistently falling every year. The predicted increase in violent crime with increase in population exposed to violent video games never materialised. The supposed violence caused by video games isn't statistically significant.
Violent video games ARE good for you.
For me, they help re-enforce the folly of using violence to solve problems. A truly good game will make you look back and hate yourself for killing your enemies, or they'll make you want to solve things without violence. When you press that mouse button and virtually pull the trigger, all options end. There are many cases in these games where I'm trapped using a solution I don't want to use against an enemy I don't want to fight.
Considering the sheer volume of violent video games I play, you might expect I'm all gung-ho about war and getting the chance to see real people die. I'm not. I'm against all wars, in part because the act of virtually killing a cardboard cut-out of a person makes you think very hard about the consequences of real violence.
In the game, the role of that cut-out was to be killed, but in real life, where I'm not a superhero: I can't shoot someone from one-hundred meters away using a mouse, I can't run for an hour at top speed by pressing the W button, if I'd pulled the trigger for real on a real person, that would be one person with a life, with a family, with friends, with a whole world that I'd just ended.
Experiencing virtual violence forces the idea of violence into the forefront, forcing you to confront your own views on it. If it's forever something outside of our context, then we won't ever be forced to try to understand it. If we never have to understand it, we end up with war fought the way the baby boomers did it: War is a football game, let's root for the home team.
Why, then, do certain game publishers keep pushing the limits of violent content?
They don't.
You're constantly being brainwashed with this message that games have never been more violent, that they couldn't possibly be more violent. This is utter tripe.
Game violence, in my view, is greatly reduced from the height we saw with games like Postal(Shooting an innocent person to hear them screaming "Oh my god! I can't feel my legs!"), the first GTA(which glorified killing far more than any of the 3d games do, right down to the satisfying "squish" and colourful blood stain they leave behind), or Carmageddon(Which made killing old ladies a sport) back in the late 90s. Today, GTA is more about having play dates with your cousin than killing innocent people for fun.
I think, if you actually had to witness truly violent, or truly vile content in a video game, you'd come to realise how mollycoddled you are. It'd be nice if we started with making people fun to run over and cars fun to drive again in the GTA series.
I'm reminded of two games which sold a lot of copies because of the demo: Starcraft and Unreal Tournament. The demos were both so incredible, we immediately wanted the real thing.
No, you're doing it the only right way.
I think you're an astroturfer.
"It's not expensive! It's value-riffic!"
I'm aware that the price has gone down in some markets, but it's still 700 dollars for a PS3 where I live. That's a lot of money. I could buy a used car and insure it for that amount of money.
With previous versions of windows, and with current versions of linux, it's easy for a saavy computer user to make changes, and implement fixes to a broken system from outside the system via bootdisk. It's effectively impossible to implement such fixes to a broken Windows system because of the inherently broken nature of having configuration values stored in a proprietary binary file.
Windows and the underlying OS have been moving progressively from a system where you pretty much needed to understand the underlying architecture to effectively set up your machine, to a system where you cannot understand the underlying architecture because it goes out of it's way to stop you from figuring it out.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this: The day a dos boot disk stopped being an effective tool for fixing a broken machine, Windows became a much more claustrophobic existence.
Consoles are a shitty idea for protecting your works.
All it takes is one hacked savegame, and suddenly every game for that console is hacked. My Xbox, which I hacked more for the multimedia aspects than any game piracy(the dvd drive is a thompson and thus doesn't work), can copy any game to the hard drive and play it indefinitely. I can download any game off the internet, copy it to the hard drive, and play it. If I were to hack my PSP, I'd have instant access to the entire psp catalog, and could play every game for free. If I were to hack my 360, I'd have instant access to the entire 360 library, and could play every game for free.
If I hack a PC game, I've hacked one PC game.
The solution to piracy doesn't come in an iron fist. It comes in providing value and building a positive relationship with your customers.
I've been in the same situation. I'm in Canada, I wanted to buy a subscription to The Daily Show on iTunes. I had my credit card in my hand, I filled out the form, and what did they say? "No, we're not going to sell to Canadians". Well screw that, I went out and downloaded the show from torrentspy. If you don't want my money, I'm not going to force you to take it. It's a sick sense of entitlement that says "We deserve your money even though we refused to take it". Morally, I pay for cable TV so I'm not that upset about downloading a show I could watch but don't feel like sitting down at a certain time for. Today, it's available online legally for free so I'm not too concerned.
Maybe these jackass executives worrying about piracy should make sure people who are willing to spend money on their products actually can.
Following this logic, the Chevy Aveo and Ford Ranger should be the only vehicles sold in North America, since they're the cheapest car and truck.
Cost isn't the only piece of the puzzle. Valve gets this. That's why they get my money, while companies like EA don't.
HL2 cost me more than Mass Effect(about twice as much), but I bought HL2, and when I realised Mass Effect by was published by EA, I returned it without even opening the box.
Valve has actually shown very well what can be added. If I want to buy the Orange Box (and I did), I know I can find it on Steam, it comes with a set of high availability tools connected to a common server, I can get out my credit card, download it, and be playing within an hour or two. I don't need to worry about whether the download will work, I don't need to worry about seeds, I don't need to worry about whether the download is a rick roll, I don't need to worry about whether it's a trojan horse, and whenever I want to play the game, I can just install steam, enter my username and password and download it.
By contrast, if I steal a copy of spore, I have the same problems with the p2p download, but by contrast, a legitimate copy requires me to hunt one down in a store (very difficult where I live in the far north), is ALWAYS a trojan horse, and will ALWAYS restrict the number of times I can install it. God help me if I lose the CD or key.
Valve got my money. EA didn't. EA has published a lot of incredible games, but they fail miserably at making me want to buy them.
Nothing about Valve's approach stops piracy. There's no reason why a person who wants to play HL2 for free can't go out and download it tomorrow. What it DOES do, and this is critical, is it makes owning a legitimate copy more valuable than pirating.
This is analogous to making sure there are opportunities for inner city youth to get education and career opportunities. It doesn't stop gang violence, but it dramatically reduces the value in joining a gang, which will directly reduce gang violence.
The RIAA's approach is more like trying to lock up the entire population of the inner city to stop gang violence. Frankly, I think the Valve approach is better. Make it so making the right decision is better than making the wrong one.
Frankly, I see it as an incredible sense of entitlement that says customers should be willing to wait for months on end and should be willing to pay premiums and should be willing to have their computers hacked by draconian DRM and should be willing to jump through a bunch of hoops just to buy your product. Getting this moronic mindset out of the way, Valve has said "Hey, if we make it possible to buy our product, people will buy it and won't pirate it instead", and as the summary shows, they were right.
It's really simple. Most people DO want to pay for their games.
When I'm paying a game I paid for that I really like and I helped support the people who made it, it gives me a big rubbery one.
The problem is, companies want to make it too much trouble to buy their damn software. Stores where I live don't carry most software, and I'm not about to pay 30 dollars shipping for a 30 dollar game CD. Even if I get the game, some distributors, like EA, think I'm going to tolerate not being able to install my game more than 3 times (I've already installed every game I've bought this year more than 3 times. Get over it.) With Steam, I can say "Hey, I want to play Half Life Blue shift. I've never tried it.", and 4.99 on my mastercard and a 1GB download later, I'm playing it. If I re-install and want to play some more, I just download steam, download the game, and enjoy.
I design industrial control systems for a living. We have to follow human engineering principles all the time. For example, if an instrument is lower than a person's knees or higher than their face, odds are it won't get maintained. Therefore, you can get all moralistic about how tradesmen are lazy and they should do their jobs, or you can do the right thing and design your plant so people naturally are inclined to maintain the most important equipment. If you get all moralistic, though, be prepared to do it while your plant is down and you're losing tens of thousands of dollars of production per hour.
This is no different. Companies like the RIAA member companies, who want to bitch and whine, who want to sue their customers, who don't want to make the experience of buying music any easier, they're going to see their profits fall, and piracy skyrocket. Companies like Valve who design their systems so it's easier to buy than to pirate, they'll see their profits rise, and piracy fall (as this article says they've seen).
That bad attitude costs sales. Valve Software here did away with the useless moralistic crap and said "You know, maybe they're telling the truth", and lo and behold, the piracy rate went down.
We'll have to see how Valve does vs. the music companies. Different philosophies, different ways of treating piracy, and I'm sure different results. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Valve software's products in the past year. I haven't bought a CD in years. Just one example, but I wonder if I'm typical?
Science works, bitches.
"We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly," meaning the prediction that piracy rates would go down when release dates became the same as other countries was proven true with hard data.
Yes, my reaction was a similar "Holy fucking shit!".
Valve gets it. They're going to make a lot of money.
I still think he's an astroturfer. My all my Belkin Gender Changer kit came with was a knife and a can of ether.
Well, there's an astroturfer.
Insidious, you'd never expect it, since his uid is so low! ;)
Actually, they DO mention the limits on skype's webpage. If you spend more than 7 straight days on the phone, they'll be very upset with you.
And you need to lay off the energy drinks.
(as an aside, if you count it by continent, skype is available on every continent but Africa, which is braggable. :P)
Hey, you get your fill of praise, I'm sure, but good work out there so I'm going to add to it.
There are so many forces in the world that just want to break the legal system, to turn it into force of corporate totalitarian control by fiat. "We gave you a big thick sheet of paper, now we own you", or "We don't like you so you disappear".
The little guy doesn't have money, but we've got a soul, something a corporation will never have no matter how heavily "corporate personhood" is legislated. Thanks for standing up for him.
I can file marriage papers to marry that cute press secratary of Bushs, it doesn't mean I've married her. It's impossible to marry her, because she's already married, and also because she doesn't know me and didn't consent to it.