So while we're studying things, how about the people driving and talking to passengers? I bet they suck too.
I'm sure being distracted by passengers does reduce a driver's attention. However, a passenger can, you know, see the road and is likely to shout "Stop!" if the driver isn't paying attention and ignores something important. The guy on the other end of a cell can't do that.
You wanna lump hate on somebody in the games industry? Smack Broussard around for his publically insulting other games and talking about how DNF will be better than them.
People don't hate Romero, we just mock him. And we do mock Broussard and DNF. Indeed, we do it for exactly the same reason Romero earned his mocking: too much hype, too little shipped product. There is no hope that DNF will be good enough to justify the hype and the wait. Just like Diakatana failed to be good enough to justify the hype and the Romero. Romero wanted to be a rock star. He went wildly over budget, in part by doing stupid things like getting an expensive penthouse office. He earned his mocking. It was a long time coming. His antics burned his name into gamers minds. So now he needs to live with the situation he's created. Don't worry, Broussard will be enjoying his mocking for at least as long. (Mind you, in the unlikely event that DNF is actually a good game, gamers are very forgiving. Indeed, a new popular game out of Romero would be a shortcut to respect.)
That's not how the scientific process works. You can't prove a negative. The onus is on the supporters of the global warming theory to come up with extremely strong evidence for their claims, they just haven't done so.
That's also not how the scientific process works. This isn't about "proving a negative", it's about "invalidating an existing hypothesis" which is the basis of scientific progress. Scientists spend lots of time running experiments trying to prove than an opponents theory is wrong. Part of becoming a generally accepted "theory" is having lots of people try to invalidate your hypothesis and failing to do so. Indeed, the thing that's impossible to prove is that the hypothesis is valid. "Oh, sure, it looks like solar radiation can cause skin cancer, but can you prove that some as-yet unfound and undetected external force isn't responsible?"
Yes, if you're going to advance a hypothesis you need to find some evidence to support it, but if you're waiting for "extremely strong evidence" you're in for a long, long wait in just about any scientific endeavor.
With the power of today's computers, gamers can now enjoy Dragon's Lair the way it was meant to be seen.
Played off a laserdisc, output on a standard definition video monitor mounted inside of an arcade cabinet surrounded by the flashing and noises of other video games?
Google and MySpace are big enough to get away with whatever they want. If service gets slowed down, they can IP ban everyone from whatever provider is trying to slow their traffic.
Nonsense.
"Hi, SBC? I can't visit MySpace. My inter-ma-tron viewer thingy says to call you to get it fixed."
"Thanks for calling. This is entirely MySpace's fault. We are not doing anything to block you from MySpace. You should probably ask them why they're not letting you on. If MySpace won't help, you might want to give FaceBook a try; we haven't gotten any complaints about them." And the outsourced tech support monkey will be being completely honest when they say it.
So now poor MySpace has to explain to their largely non-technical audience why they refuse to let you see your profile. I'm sure Joe Drunken Fratboy is going to be plently sympathetic when MySpace tells him they can just flip a switch and it will work again, but refuse to until SBC removes the "500-milli-seca-whatever delay-thingy from the inter-ma-tron." They need to explain why it's a better idea to cancel his SBC contract and pay installation fees to get a different broadband provider instead of just jumping to FaceBook.
Refusing to do business with your very customers is a bad idea.
In a free market where everyone has perfect information the situation would
quickly self balance. But not everyone has perfect information. Say SBC
penalizes Google with bandwidth throttling. Nothing big, just a slight
slowdown. Google starts responding more slowly. Videos stutter a bit more.
While techies might notice and get angry and switch providers, is Joe Random
User going to? Is MySpace slow because MySpace sucks, or because MySpace
refused to pay protection money to AT&T? How can you be sure?
Ultimately these are industries which are already heavily regulated, both on
a local and national level. The net neutrality provision is a relatively minor
regulation.
When any non-government agency is supposed to collect any money for the government, they usually get a cut of the money. That's how it works for sales tax, which is analogous to a fine here.
What are you talking about? Sales tax is nothing like this fine.
Sales tax is owed by a business to the government. You're not involved at all. However, to make prices seem lower businesses advertise a lower price that doesn't include the percentage they will eventually owe to the government. While common, this is hardly required. Indeed businesses like vendor carts often simply advertise the full price and don't charge extra for the sales tax (it helps keep the math simple). They still need to pay up to the city, county, and state. The business isn't getting a cut of the sales tax. They're just labelling the percentage of the real price of the product that will eventually be handed to the government. If they want a bigger "cut" they simply increase their prices (and the sales tax that goes to the government goes up proportionally). If anyone is getting a "cut", it's the government getting a cut of the business's revenue.
In either case, every time you buy CD-Rs or any sort of digital audio "recording machine", you have compensated the copyright holders.
Incorrect. There are special "Audio CD-Rs" that do include the fee. If you own a dedicated audio CD recording device (something designed to sit in your stereo cabinet, not a computer), they're built to require these Audio CD-Rs for exactly this reason. however, the plain old cheap CD-R you buy to stick into your computer aren't charged this fee. The reality is that almost no one purchased these special CDs; most people burning audio CDs are just buying the non-compensated data CDs and burning them on their computer.
Hell, I just saw a Cirque du Soliel show in Vegas and spent $125 for two hours of entertainment. So clearly entertainment should be priced at $60 an hour. So clearly HL2:E1 should have been about $240 and the original HL2 is worth more than $600. My copy of Freakonomics, which I got for $18 and took me about 3 hours to read is grossly underpriced; why wasn't I charged ten-fold more?
Perhaps on the other hand, why are video games so expensive? Why does anyone buy them at all? Instead of dropping $50 on the newest video game (about 15 hours of entertainment), you could buy 6 paperback novels (about 24 hours)!
Different forms of entertainment isn't directly exchangible. You need to compare games to games. Market forces have set games at roughly $50 for 15 hours of play. That's what other games roughly charge. The competition for HL2:E1 isn't a few movies: it's Far Cry Preditor.
(And keep in mind that for both examples you gave, there are cheaper and quite popular options. I rent far more movies (about $3/movie; watched by 2 people) than I see in theatres. I purchase far more books in paperback than hardcover. I even sometimes use the library or borrow books from friends.)
Just because the information you get is flawed doesn't mean the information is worthless. Most data is the real world is deeply flawed, and yet useful information can be extracted, useful trends determined. Sure, your log files will be skewed by who choses the participate (That is, who isn't caught by caches and proxies. If you're using Javascript, who is allowing the javascript in question). But any survey is skewed by those who chose to participate.
Throwing your hands up in the air and declaring that because you cannot be sure it's all garbage is foolishness. Know the limitations of your tools, accept the error, and take what you can get.
At 50 games for each console, the PS3 only costs 11% more.
At 50 games for a console, all apparently paid for at full price (which you see fond of), you have an insane amount of disposable income, and money doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, 20 games remains a respectable personal library. Many people will pay less than full price, buying some used, getting some as gifts, getting some from friends who are tired of the game. Those 20 games will be spread out over 2 or so years, so a game purchased 2 years after the purchase of the console is effectively much cheaper because that $50 was sitting in a bank account earning a few percent interest instead of having been spent on a more expensive system. Finally, you're assuming that most Wii games are going to run $50. Given Nintendo's goals (to make the Wii mass-market in far beyond any other game console ever), this seem unlikely.
Ultimately, Sony is asking for $500 right now. (Well, when it ships) For many people this means saving up to purchase a PS3 ($500 for the low end) and a single game ($50). For that same amount of saving, someone can purchase a Wii (Let's use the pessimistic $250 estimate), a second controller so they can play with a friend (say $50), and five games (using your pessimistic $50 estimate = $250). They can swap games for controllers, so if they'd rather be able to support a four player game immediately, that still leaves them with two games. Or, if saving up $550 in a single shot is a bit much, they can buy the console and a single game ($300), then purchase more games as they save enough to purchase them.
Putting it in other terms, with the money a college student saves buying a Wii instead of a PS3 he can buy a pretty good 27" SDTV to play it on. Assuming he already has a television, he can buy a $40 DVD player and assuming he pays the ridiculous $40 per disc, 5 movies to watch on it. Or even more realistically, he can have himself 50 pints of beer at the local overpriced college bar.
Price matters. To claim that it doesn't means you're lucky enough to have no real money concerns, or you've been drinking Sony's kool-aid.
This, I think, is really the crux of your argument:
The market may be slow to act, but outside of a failure as in the case of monopoly, things will eventually be righted. The manner of the righting will inevitably seem unjust to some, but it must be remembered that the market does not seek for the personal welfare of the participants, but to encourage efficient production by all.
Encouraging efficient production isn't the core of the free market; it's an expected side effect. (The core is personal greed.) But I'll yield what I think if your core idea: most economists would say that a free market is good because it encourages efficient production. Efficient production is a generally good thing. It leads to overall growth: better lifestyles for people as a whole. All great stuff. But at what cost? The participants in a free market have incentive to thwart that very market: to create barriers to entry, to form monopolies, to make serious costs externalities, and actively harm their very customers so long as it increases the bottom line. Sure, maybe you place your faith in market and purchase a medication that is supposed to make you healthier. Oops, turned out it killed you. The market will self correct as it becomes clear that the medication is too dangerous to use, but you (or perhaps someone you loved) is still dead. Perhaps after much research you pick a well respected financial advisor to handle your retirement money. The guy has years of experience. Oops, he's decided it's time to retire and has fled the country with your retirement. The market will adjust, but you're still poor despite having tried to save. Perhaps you worked at a company for your entire life and retired with a good pension. Oops, the company enters bankruptcy and uses the opportunity to drastically cut the pension you've been promised. The market has already adjusted (only a fool trusts a pension program these days), but those people who relied on it before the rules changed are still poor.
As the market self adjusts, people's lives are destroyed. And the market simply cannot adjust quickly enough to cope with the occasionally otherwise honest person who decides to make a money grab and flee.
A free market is only viable economic system we have. It's like cockroaches: you can try and crush it, but it always survives (See: any black market anywhere in the world). But the free market has no morality, no innate "good". The free market, given the existance and behavior of human beings, is more like a force of nature. Some people would argue that the number of people whose lives are destroyed is relatively small; and a price we must pay for efficiency. They would claim that it's more important to have a more free market, to have more efficiency. I think many more (myself included, obviously) would argue that the destruction of a significant minority of people's live is too high of a price to pay, that we should sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for providing various safety nets for people. We'll live best if we accept the free market as a reality, take reasonable individual steps to protect ourselves from the occasional storms (I think everyone will agree with that), and collectively work to set up failsafes when the storm of the century shows up (and that's where the pure libertarians and myself diverge).
No law is needed to protect the customer, because the customer can destroy a business in no time -- if each and every customer who is "hurt" by a previous transaction refuses to make a future one.
Of course, this assumes the customer realizes he's been hurt. Or perhaps knowingly hurting a small percentage of your customers is acceptable because it's more cost effective. Or perhaps you've just taken over a business with a good reputation and are perfectly happy to destroy the business in a year or so, harming many customers in process, in exchange for a short term increase in profit. Or you've got a monopoly through some means and can generally treat your customers like crap because they don't have other viable options.
The market may self-correct, but it doesn't do so instantaneously. During the churn as the market adjusts, innocent people get hurt. A tobacco company willfully suppresses information on the danger of their products. A con artist convinces people to invest in his new company, then skips the country with the money. An automotive manufacturer ships a car with a deadly flaw because it's cheaper to pay off the occasional lawsuit that will result instead of fixing the flaw. A construction firm building a house runs massively late because once construction is underway it's extremely difficult to change companies. A software company ships deeply buggy software because its users are trapped by incompatible file formats, bad standards, or license agreements. If you wait long enough the market will correct, but in the meanwhile people get hurt. And when the market corrects, it's just time for the next dishonest businessman to step to the plate of greed.
A lady exploits her use of the cup holder, spills a McDonald's hot coffee on her lap, and is expecting money?
Bad example. Are you really familiar with the details of case or just the strawman version popular among those in favor of tort reform? McDonald's sold the woman a beverage that, by their own admission is "not fit for consumption" when handed it to a customer. They sold their coffee far hotter than just about anyone else. They had been repeatedly warned about their coffee and serious burns had happened before. This wasn't a woman dangerously mixing drinking coffee and driving; she was a passenger in the vehicle in question. The woman originally contacted McDonald's and only asked for McDonald's to cover her medical expenses. Only when McDonald's refuse did she turn to a lawsuit. Even then she asked for a relatively small amount of money (on the order of $200,000; a reasonable amount considering she had many thousands of dollars of medical bills and now a lawyer's bills). The rest of the judgement was punitive damages assigned by the jury when they learned that how negligent McDonald's was. This wasn't someone greedily trying to get free money. This was a 79-year-old woman trying to cope with sudden large medical bills because McDonald's had sold her a dangerously hot beverage.
...block ALL ip's belonging to those ISP's, or even better redirect to a site with a notice saying "Due to the actions of your ISP we are not going to allow you to use our service."
That's not going to go well. You'll call up your ISP and complain; they'll quite honestly say, "We're not blocking you; they're blocking you. You'll have to take it up with them." As a potential customer of First Bank of Example, it's going to look really bad if I try to visit their web site and get a "we refuse to serve you because you use EvilOnline." Why, EvilOnline works for everything else I do, so it must be FBoE's fault!
I still DO NOT believe that the government of the United States, or any nation for that matter, has any right to legislate what can or cannot be done with regards to the internet.
Doesn't have the right? In what strange way? Sure, we can't regulate an ISP in France, but we're talking about regulating businesses doing business in the US. You want to do business in the US, you have to play by US rules. Telecommunications companies live under piles of regulations.
THAT is true net neutrality.
The government is not the only group we need to be wary of.
Participants in a free market have every incentive to break the free market and make it less free. Imperfect and delayed information, barriers to entry, and natural monopolies mean that the real free market isn't quite a wonderfully self-regulating as theory would suggest.
Now, you've got this ISP throttling some sites, and making others faster, how does this benefit the user?
Ummm, it doesn't? That's the entire net neutrality point. Absent these safeguards companies like SBC have incentive to offer Google and Yahoo special deals: say, whoever pays us more gets 50% more traffic than your competitor. As long as they're careful, the slowdown will be relatively minor. Your average consumer is completely incapable of determining why Google is a bit slower than Yahoo; maybe Google is overloaded. Maybe your ISP is throttling you.
The claims that some sites will be totally blocked off are implausible; if Google stopped working an ISPs customers would be furious. But a slight throttling of a non-compliant site's bandwidth would work just fine.
This isn't about saving the consumer money. Broadband rates are pretty reasonable already. This is about a new source of revenue for ISPs. This is about figuring out how to charge twice for service. I pay my cable company for my broadband. Google pays for its network pipes. My cable company shouldn't be asking Google for more money.
I dunno, I just see this as being more US-centric FUD, ooh the big bad companies are out to make money by "extorting" the "good guys"....
Even if you could, the comparatively low resolution (480p) is going to make it look like a jaggy mess - and there's not exactly much power to spare for fancy AA.
No one (sane) is doing anti-aliasing on the CPU; they're doing it on the GPU. While the Wii's GPU may not be up to it (I really have no idea), you're talking about the CPU. If the Wii's GPU is roughly on par with the GPU in the 360 or PS3 then by only running in lower resolutions it will (potentially) have extra power available to spend on fancy AA.
Indeed, an argument could be made that if you want stunning graphics the GPU is much more important than the CPU. You just need the CPU to do some basic work to keep the GPU busy. (Of course if you want really good AI, physic simulations, and clever optimizations of the world geometry, the CPU is the boss.)
Yes, you can get an HDTV for $300. But for $300 (or, say $340), I can get a giant 32 inch television. This isn't carefully hunting for a sale; this walking into Best Buy or Circuit City with $340 (plus tax) and walking out with a big television. We're (mostly) Americans here. Bigger is better. I like having a big television. For 32 inches of HD I'm paying $700 or more. I've been promised cheap HDTVs for years now, but they keep failing to arrive. HD is nice, but given that most of my signals are SD (vast majority of cable channels, all of my DVDs, all of my current generation video game systems) it's not really worth doubling how much I spent on my television. My existing 30" television (5 years old, $300 off the shelf without a special sale at Best Buy) serves me well.
HDTV is coming. But it's going to be a slow, painful transition. Lots of SD televisions are going to linger on for a long, long time. When the mandatory cut over occurs there will be mostly ED televisions until HD prices fall much, much further. For most people HDTV still remains in the unclear future.
A further comment claimed that in America, companies have the right to lay you off, and stop your pay -tomorrow- Surely that isn't right?
That's America. And in further American fashion, the laws that ensure companies can lay you off with zero notice are sometimes euphemistically called "Right to Work" laws.
Now the theory is that by making it easy to fire or lay people off, companies are more prone to take risks hiring people who may end up being unneeded or not good enough for the position. Thus, if the theory works, more jobs will exist. Indeed, I gather that companise in Europe (to generalize) tend to be more cautious about hiring people because it's so much more expensive to let them go.
We don't totally hose people; newly fired or laid off people can collect unemployment compensation for a short period (on the order of months). Unemployment is a fraction of your pre-unemployed pay. In most (all?) states businesses need to pay a portion of the compensation.
Theory aside, now that employees know they can be dismissed so easily and stories of it happening are quite common, employees are less connected to their employers. Businesses (as a general rule) have no commitment or dedication to their employees, so why should an employee have commitment or dedication to their employers? The result has been an increasingly mercenary job marketplace. Employees and employers are increasingly distrustly of each other. Those people lucky enough to be be in demand have incentive to constantly shop around for a new job. Those people who aren't in demand have incentive to generally do the lowest quality and quantity of work necessary to stay employed. Perhaps this is more efficient in a way that will make some economists happy.
Because of the way they made the game, they can't just use the original recording.
Assuming by "the way they made the game," you mean "as cheaply as possible," true enough. By rerecording the tracks they only need to pay the cover artists a flat fee and the songwriter a percentage. (Indeed, you don't even need their permission to cover the song if you're willing to pay the rates set by the copyright office. Assuming they didn't negotiate better terms, each copy of Guitar Hero sold included $2.73 for the compulsory rights.)
If they used the original tracks or got the original artist to re-record it, most of those artists would have wanted a percentage. It's the same reason that Karaoke Revolution uses covers. This also explains why the bonus songs in Guitar Hero are performed by the original artists: they're all much less famous bands who were willing to accept the free publicity in exchange for their music. For a relatively unknown band that's probably a good call. A group like Rush has no incentive short of being well paid (and perhaps a genuine love of the game); they're not going to get significantly new fans from the game.
We don't want you to just post your briskly jotted down thoughts and abysmal sentence fragments.
Unless by "we" you mean "me and my multiple personalities", you're being a bit bold to speak for the entire games.slashdot.org audience. Indeed, Zonk's posting these things as he's dashing from talk to talk. He's trying to post timely content because of an endless stream of complaints that Slashdot is constantly getting scooped by other sites. Many Slashdot readers are very vocally saying that they prefer the "jotted down thoughts and abysmal sentence fragments" of say, digg, and want Slashdot to be more timely. They may be wrong, but it's hardly Zonk making this decision totally divorced from what his readers want.
"Like, did you even go to journalism school?"
Did any of the Slashdot editors and writers go to journalism school? If you're looking for some sort of credential that the writers are good enough to bother spending your time reading, you're at the wrong web site. Come of to think of it, I doubt you'll find any site or magazine that focuses on covering the game industry (as games.slashdot.org does) that is entirely or even mostly j-school graduates.
Your might also consider how you phrase your feedback. "Do you get paid for this shit? Can you give us more than this half-assed effort next time?" is not a good way to provide feedback. It makes the recipient more likely to brush you off as a troll. I suggest something like, "This was rushed and low quality. It harms Slashdot's reputation as a polished news organization when drafts are posted as final articles. I'd really prefer more polished articles, even if it means waiting longer to get them." Obviously that's just a hypothetical example, as no one who has read Slashdot for more than a day or two would confuse it with a "polished news organization."
As a general guideline, you don't make a game better by adding more rules.
Indeed, by adding more rules and systems, you can drive away more casual players because they have no chance of understanding what is going on and making reasonable decisions.
"This armor makes my armor 3 better (15% chance to avoid damage), but will make my ability to sneak around 2 worse (10% worse)." That's a trade off most people can appreciate.
"Wearing the right shoulder guard on this armor gives me an 18.32% bonus against attacks aimed at my shoulder, but enemies familiar with that piece of armor can target thier attacks in a way that reduces it to 7.20%. Against those enemies who do mostly downward attacks, the armor actually glances blows into my neck, increasing the likelyhood of a neck hit by 3.12%. Fortunately those blows are weakened by the deflection and do 42.33% less damage. The armor reduces my shoulder motion by 5.01%, which will harm my ability to accurately aim bows by 23.43%, and crossbows by 7.52%." That's not fun for anyone but stat mongers.
If you're going to propose more complex simulations, you have to explain why that more complex simulation translates into fun.
Long boat rides? Big experience point penalties? Bah! You kids these days! Back in the good old days if you made a mistake, your character was deleted, often costing 40 or more hours of play! The better games would reformat your hard drive! In the cream of the crop the game's administrator would fly to your city, drive to your house, and personally kick you in the balls every time your character was seriously injured. Sure, some whiny crybabies didn't like it, but our games were meaningful! By making the lows really low, it meant the highs were all the higher! Sure, it drove off anyone who didn't have months of time to play, replay, and re-replay sections of content when a character died, but those were wimps who didn't deserve to play games. If you can't afford to play for 40 to 60 hours a week, well, you have no right to playing a video game! If you're not playing the game the way I think you should, well, clearly you're playing it wrong!
Bogus comparisons. Magazine and book publishers don't specifically add things to their products to make them harder to copy. They don't charge me for the "privlege" of blocking me from the information I've purchased. I'm not owed an easy way to get the data. I'm saying that media companies want to make it extremely difficult, effectively impossible for the average person to engage in some types of fair use. That will spell the effective end of fair use. Instead of the digital age becoming an era when people have increasing freedom to engage in commentary on other works, we'll be restricting people further. That's a step backward for humanity. For the potential (but not certain) benefit of additional income to companies, we're trading social progress as a whole. That bullshit.
Re:There needs to be a "Fun" score in every review
on
Black Review
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· Score: 1
You're completely missing the point. Sure, Zonk could have added a "fun" score. And Black would have gotten a low score being Zonk determined that it wasn't fun. He's reviewing a game, of course he's going to seek out the fun. However instead of handwaving, "Hey, it's fun!" or "This isn't fun!" a review has to explain why. Zonk took eight paragraphs to explain his position. He summarized gameplay and had positive things to say about parts of the experience. But for him it didn't come together and he concluded that it wasn't fun. We know that he didn't find it fun. If he's good reviewer, we can conclude that much of his readership will agree. No reviewer is so good as to be able to saw a game is fun or not-fun such that that rating will apply for all of their readers. If you're looking for a particular sort of game, you should be able to read a well written review, positive or negative, and see the parts that matter to you. You're not looking for a well written review, you're looking for a reviewer whose idea of fun matches yours.
Slashdot Mirror
People don't hate Romero, we just mock him. And we do mock Broussard and DNF. Indeed, we do it for exactly the same reason Romero earned his mocking: too much hype, too little shipped product. There is no hope that DNF will be good enough to justify the hype and the wait. Just like Diakatana failed to be good enough to justify the hype and the Romero. Romero wanted to be a rock star. He went wildly over budget, in part by doing stupid things like getting an expensive penthouse office. He earned his mocking. It was a long time coming. His antics burned his name into gamers minds. So now he needs to live with the situation he's created. Don't worry, Broussard will be enjoying his mocking for at least as long. (Mind you, in the unlikely event that DNF is actually a good game, gamers are very forgiving. Indeed, a new popular game out of Romero would be a shortcut to respect.)
That's also not how the scientific process works. This isn't about "proving a negative", it's about "invalidating an existing hypothesis" which is the basis of scientific progress. Scientists spend lots of time running experiments trying to prove than an opponents theory is wrong. Part of becoming a generally accepted "theory" is having lots of people try to invalidate your hypothesis and failing to do so. Indeed, the thing that's impossible to prove is that the hypothesis is valid. "Oh, sure, it looks like solar radiation can cause skin cancer, but can you prove that some as-yet unfound and undetected external force isn't responsible?"
Yes, if you're going to advance a hypothesis you need to find some evidence to support it, but if you're waiting for "extremely strong evidence" you're in for a long, long wait in just about any scientific endeavor.
Played off a laserdisc, output on a standard definition video monitor mounted inside of an arcade cabinet surrounded by the flashing and noises of other video games?
Nonsense.
"Hi, SBC? I can't visit MySpace. My inter-ma-tron viewer thingy says to call you to get it fixed."
"Thanks for calling. This is entirely MySpace's fault. We are not doing anything to block you from MySpace. You should probably ask them why they're not letting you on. If MySpace won't help, you might want to give FaceBook a try; we haven't gotten any complaints about them." And the outsourced tech support monkey will be being completely honest when they say it.
So now poor MySpace has to explain to their largely non-technical audience why they refuse to let you see your profile. I'm sure Joe Drunken Fratboy is going to be plently sympathetic when MySpace tells him they can just flip a switch and it will work again, but refuse to until SBC removes the "500-milli-seca-whatever delay-thingy from the inter-ma-tron." They need to explain why it's a better idea to cancel his SBC contract and pay installation fees to get a different broadband provider instead of just jumping to FaceBook.
Refusing to do business with your very customers is a bad idea.
This is hardly hypothetical. The CEO of AT&T pretty much announced that as soon as he can get away with it, he's going to hit up Google for money. The CTO for BellSouth said much the same thing.
In a free market where everyone has perfect information the situation would quickly self balance. But not everyone has perfect information. Say SBC penalizes Google with bandwidth throttling. Nothing big, just a slight slowdown. Google starts responding more slowly. Videos stutter a bit more. While techies might notice and get angry and switch providers, is Joe Random User going to? Is MySpace slow because MySpace sucks, or because MySpace refused to pay protection money to AT&T? How can you be sure?
Ultimately these are industries which are already heavily regulated, both on a local and national level. The net neutrality provision is a relatively minor regulation.
What are you talking about? Sales tax is nothing like this fine.
Sales tax is owed by a business to the government. You're not involved at all. However, to make prices seem lower businesses advertise a lower price that doesn't include the percentage they will eventually owe to the government. While common, this is hardly required. Indeed businesses like vendor carts often simply advertise the full price and don't charge extra for the sales tax (it helps keep the math simple). They still need to pay up to the city, county, and state. The business isn't getting a cut of the sales tax. They're just labelling the percentage of the real price of the product that will eventually be handed to the government. If they want a bigger "cut" they simply increase their prices (and the sales tax that goes to the government goes up proportionally). If anyone is getting a "cut", it's the government getting a cut of the business's revenue.
Incorrect. There are special "Audio CD-Rs" that do include the fee. If you own a dedicated audio CD recording device (something designed to sit in your stereo cabinet, not a computer), they're built to require these Audio CD-Rs for exactly this reason. however, the plain old cheap CD-R you buy to stick into your computer aren't charged this fee. The reality is that almost no one purchased these special CDs; most people burning audio CDs are just buying the non-compensated data CDs and burning them on their computer.
Hell, I just saw a Cirque du Soliel show in Vegas and spent $125 for two hours of entertainment. So clearly entertainment should be priced at $60 an hour. So clearly HL2:E1 should have been about $240 and the original HL2 is worth more than $600. My copy of Freakonomics, which I got for $18 and took me about 3 hours to read is grossly underpriced; why wasn't I charged ten-fold more?
Perhaps on the other hand, why are video games so expensive? Why does anyone buy them at all? Instead of dropping $50 on the newest video game (about 15 hours of entertainment), you could buy 6 paperback novels (about 24 hours)!
Different forms of entertainment isn't directly exchangible. You need to compare games to games. Market forces have set games at roughly $50 for 15 hours of play. That's what other games roughly charge. The competition for HL2:E1 isn't a few movies: it's Far Cry Preditor.
(And keep in mind that for both examples you gave, there are cheaper and quite popular options. I rent far more movies (about $3/movie; watched by 2 people) than I see in theatres. I purchase far more books in paperback than hardcover. I even sometimes use the library or borrow books from friends.)
Throwing your hands up in the air and declaring that because you cannot be sure it's all garbage is foolishness. Know the limitations of your tools, accept the error, and take what you can get.
At 50 games for a console, all apparently paid for at full price (which you see fond of), you have an insane amount of disposable income, and money doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, 20 games remains a respectable personal library. Many people will pay less than full price, buying some used, getting some as gifts, getting some from friends who are tired of the game. Those 20 games will be spread out over 2 or so years, so a game purchased 2 years after the purchase of the console is effectively much cheaper because that $50 was sitting in a bank account earning a few percent interest instead of having been spent on a more expensive system. Finally, you're assuming that most Wii games are going to run $50. Given Nintendo's goals (to make the Wii mass-market in far beyond any other game console ever), this seem unlikely.
Ultimately, Sony is asking for $500 right now. (Well, when it ships) For many people this means saving up to purchase a PS3 ($500 for the low end) and a single game ($50). For that same amount of saving, someone can purchase a Wii (Let's use the pessimistic $250 estimate), a second controller so they can play with a friend (say $50), and five games (using your pessimistic $50 estimate = $250). They can swap games for controllers, so if they'd rather be able to support a four player game immediately, that still leaves them with two games. Or, if saving up $550 in a single shot is a bit much, they can buy the console and a single game ($300), then purchase more games as they save enough to purchase them.
Putting it in other terms, with the money a college student saves buying a Wii instead of a PS3 he can buy a pretty good 27" SDTV to play it on. Assuming he already has a television, he can buy a $40 DVD player and assuming he pays the ridiculous $40 per disc, 5 movies to watch on it. Or even more realistically, he can have himself 50 pints of beer at the local overpriced college bar.
Price matters. To claim that it doesn't means you're lucky enough to have no real money concerns, or you've been drinking Sony's kool-aid.
This, I think, is really the crux of your argument:
Encouraging efficient production isn't the core of the free market; it's an expected side effect. (The core is personal greed.) But I'll yield what I think if your core idea: most economists would say that a free market is good because it encourages efficient production. Efficient production is a generally good thing. It leads to overall growth: better lifestyles for people as a whole. All great stuff. But at what cost? The participants in a free market have incentive to thwart that very market: to create barriers to entry, to form monopolies, to make serious costs externalities, and actively harm their very customers so long as it increases the bottom line. Sure, maybe you place your faith in market and purchase a medication that is supposed to make you healthier. Oops, turned out it killed you. The market will self correct as it becomes clear that the medication is too dangerous to use, but you (or perhaps someone you loved) is still dead. Perhaps after much research you pick a well respected financial advisor to handle your retirement money. The guy has years of experience. Oops, he's decided it's time to retire and has fled the country with your retirement. The market will adjust, but you're still poor despite having tried to save. Perhaps you worked at a company for your entire life and retired with a good pension. Oops, the company enters bankruptcy and uses the opportunity to drastically cut the pension you've been promised. The market has already adjusted (only a fool trusts a pension program these days), but those people who relied on it before the rules changed are still poor.
As the market self adjusts, people's lives are destroyed. And the market simply cannot adjust quickly enough to cope with the occasionally otherwise honest person who decides to make a money grab and flee.
A free market is only viable economic system we have. It's like cockroaches: you can try and crush it, but it always survives (See: any black market anywhere in the world). But the free market has no morality, no innate "good". The free market, given the existance and behavior of human beings, is more like a force of nature. Some people would argue that the number of people whose lives are destroyed is relatively small; and a price we must pay for efficiency. They would claim that it's more important to have a more free market, to have more efficiency. I think many more (myself included, obviously) would argue that the destruction of a significant minority of people's live is too high of a price to pay, that we should sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for providing various safety nets for people. We'll live best if we accept the free market as a reality, take reasonable individual steps to protect ourselves from the occasional storms (I think everyone will agree with that), and collectively work to set up failsafes when the storm of the century shows up (and that's where the pure libertarians and myself diverge).
Of course, this assumes the customer realizes he's been hurt. Or perhaps knowingly hurting a small percentage of your customers is acceptable because it's more cost effective. Or perhaps you've just taken over a business with a good reputation and are perfectly happy to destroy the business in a year or so, harming many customers in process, in exchange for a short term increase in profit. Or you've got a monopoly through some means and can generally treat your customers like crap because they don't have other viable options.
The market may self-correct, but it doesn't do so instantaneously. During the churn as the market adjusts, innocent people get hurt. A tobacco company willfully suppresses information on the danger of their products. A con artist convinces people to invest in his new company, then skips the country with the money. An automotive manufacturer ships a car with a deadly flaw because it's cheaper to pay off the occasional lawsuit that will result instead of fixing the flaw. A construction firm building a house runs massively late because once construction is underway it's extremely difficult to change companies. A software company ships deeply buggy software because its users are trapped by incompatible file formats, bad standards, or license agreements. If you wait long enough the market will correct, but in the meanwhile people get hurt. And when the market corrects, it's just time for the next dishonest businessman to step to the plate of greed.
Bad example. Are you really familiar with the details of case or just the strawman version popular among those in favor of tort reform? McDonald's sold the woman a beverage that, by their own admission is "not fit for consumption" when handed it to a customer. They sold their coffee far hotter than just about anyone else. They had been repeatedly warned about their coffee and serious burns had happened before. This wasn't a woman dangerously mixing drinking coffee and driving; she was a passenger in the vehicle in question. The woman originally contacted McDonald's and only asked for McDonald's to cover her medical expenses. Only when McDonald's refuse did she turn to a lawsuit. Even then she asked for a relatively small amount of money (on the order of $200,000; a reasonable amount considering she had many thousands of dollars of medical bills and now a lawyer's bills). The rest of the judgement was punitive damages assigned by the jury when they learned that how negligent McDonald's was. This wasn't someone greedily trying to get free money. This was a 79-year-old woman trying to cope with sudden large medical bills because McDonald's had sold her a dangerously hot beverage.
A good summary of the facts of the case.
That's not going to go well. You'll call up your ISP and complain; they'll quite honestly say, "We're not blocking you; they're blocking you. You'll have to take it up with them." As a potential customer of First Bank of Example, it's going to look really bad if I try to visit their web site and get a "we refuse to serve you because you use EvilOnline." Why, EvilOnline works for everything else I do, so it must be FBoE's fault!
Doesn't have the right? In what strange way? Sure, we can't regulate an ISP in France, but we're talking about regulating businesses doing business in the US. You want to do business in the US, you have to play by US rules. Telecommunications companies live under piles of regulations.
The government is not the only group we need to be wary of. Participants in a free market have every incentive to break the free market and make it less free. Imperfect and delayed information, barriers to entry, and natural monopolies mean that the real free market isn't quite a wonderfully self-regulating as theory would suggest.
Ummm, it doesn't? That's the entire net neutrality point. Absent these safeguards companies like SBC have incentive to offer Google and Yahoo special deals: say, whoever pays us more gets 50% more traffic than your competitor. As long as they're careful, the slowdown will be relatively minor. Your average consumer is completely incapable of determining why Google is a bit slower than Yahoo; maybe Google is overloaded. Maybe your ISP is throttling you.
The claims that some sites will be totally blocked off are implausible; if Google stopped working an ISPs customers would be furious. But a slight throttling of a non-compliant site's bandwidth would work just fine.
This isn't about saving the consumer money. Broadband rates are pretty reasonable already. This is about a new source of revenue for ISPs. This is about figuring out how to charge twice for service. I pay my cable company for my broadband. Google pays for its network pipes. My cable company shouldn't be asking Google for more money.
This isn't hypothetical worrying. The CEO of SBC wants to charge both you and the content provider. The CTO of BellSouth wants the same thing. They're both essentially claiming that because I run a web site that their customers visit, I'm somehow "stealing" from them, completely ignoring that their customers already paid them so they can get access to my site.
No one (sane) is doing anti-aliasing on the CPU; they're doing it on the GPU. While the Wii's GPU may not be up to it (I really have no idea), you're talking about the CPU. If the Wii's GPU is roughly on par with the GPU in the 360 or PS3 then by only running in lower resolutions it will (potentially) have extra power available to spend on fancy AA.
Indeed, an argument could be made that if you want stunning graphics the GPU is much more important than the CPU. You just need the CPU to do some basic work to keep the GPU busy. (Of course if you want really good AI, physic simulations, and clever optimizations of the world geometry, the CPU is the boss.)
Yes, you can get an HDTV for $300. But for $300 (or, say $340), I can get a giant 32 inch television. This isn't carefully hunting for a sale; this walking into Best Buy or Circuit City with $340 (plus tax) and walking out with a big television. We're (mostly) Americans here. Bigger is better. I like having a big television. For 32 inches of HD I'm paying $700 or more. I've been promised cheap HDTVs for years now, but they keep failing to arrive. HD is nice, but given that most of my signals are SD (vast majority of cable channels, all of my DVDs, all of my current generation video game systems) it's not really worth doubling how much I spent on my television. My existing 30" television (5 years old, $300 off the shelf without a special sale at Best Buy) serves me well.
HDTV is coming. But it's going to be a slow, painful transition. Lots of SD televisions are going to linger on for a long, long time. When the mandatory cut over occurs there will be mostly ED televisions until HD prices fall much, much further. For most people HDTV still remains in the unclear future.
That's America. And in further American fashion, the laws that ensure companies can lay you off with zero notice are sometimes euphemistically called "Right to Work" laws.
Now the theory is that by making it easy to fire or lay people off, companies are more prone to take risks hiring people who may end up being unneeded or not good enough for the position. Thus, if the theory works, more jobs will exist. Indeed, I gather that companise in Europe (to generalize) tend to be more cautious about hiring people because it's so much more expensive to let them go.
We don't totally hose people; newly fired or laid off people can collect unemployment compensation for a short period (on the order of months). Unemployment is a fraction of your pre-unemployed pay. In most (all?) states businesses need to pay a portion of the compensation.
Theory aside, now that employees know they can be dismissed so easily and stories of it happening are quite common, employees are less connected to their employers. Businesses (as a general rule) have no commitment or dedication to their employees, so why should an employee have commitment or dedication to their employers? The result has been an increasingly mercenary job marketplace. Employees and employers are increasingly distrustly of each other. Those people lucky enough to be be in demand have incentive to constantly shop around for a new job. Those people who aren't in demand have incentive to generally do the lowest quality and quantity of work necessary to stay employed. Perhaps this is more efficient in a way that will make some economists happy.
Assuming by "the way they made the game," you mean "as cheaply as possible," true enough. By rerecording the tracks they only need to pay the cover artists a flat fee and the songwriter a percentage. (Indeed, you don't even need their permission to cover the song if you're willing to pay the rates set by the copyright office. Assuming they didn't negotiate better terms, each copy of Guitar Hero sold included $2.73 for the compulsory rights.)
If they used the original tracks or got the original artist to re-record it, most of those artists would have wanted a percentage. It's the same reason that Karaoke Revolution uses covers. This also explains why the bonus songs in Guitar Hero are performed by the original artists: they're all much less famous bands who were willing to accept the free publicity in exchange for their music. For a relatively unknown band that's probably a good call. A group like Rush has no incentive short of being well paid (and perhaps a genuine love of the game); they're not going to get significantly new fans from the game.
Unless by "we" you mean "me and my multiple personalities", you're being a bit bold to speak for the entire games.slashdot.org audience. Indeed, Zonk's posting these things as he's dashing from talk to talk. He's trying to post timely content because of an endless stream of complaints that Slashdot is constantly getting scooped by other sites. Many Slashdot readers are very vocally saying that they prefer the "jotted down thoughts and abysmal sentence fragments" of say, digg, and want Slashdot to be more timely. They may be wrong, but it's hardly Zonk making this decision totally divorced from what his readers want.
Did any of the Slashdot editors and writers go to journalism school? If you're looking for some sort of credential that the writers are good enough to bother spending your time reading, you're at the wrong web site. Come of to think of it, I doubt you'll find any site or magazine that focuses on covering the game industry (as games.slashdot.org does) that is entirely or even mostly j-school graduates.
Your might also consider how you phrase your feedback. "Do you get paid for this shit? Can you give us more than this half-assed effort next time?" is not a good way to provide feedback. It makes the recipient more likely to brush you off as a troll. I suggest something like, "This was rushed and low quality. It harms Slashdot's reputation as a polished news organization when drafts are posted as final articles. I'd really prefer more polished articles, even if it means waiting longer to get them." Obviously that's just a hypothetical example, as no one who has read Slashdot for more than a day or two would confuse it with a "polished news organization."
Indeed, by adding more rules and systems, you can drive away more casual players because they have no chance of understanding what is going on and making reasonable decisions.
"This armor makes my armor 3 better (15% chance to avoid damage), but will make my ability to sneak around 2 worse (10% worse)." That's a trade off most people can appreciate.
"Wearing the right shoulder guard on this armor gives me an 18.32% bonus against attacks aimed at my shoulder, but enemies familiar with that piece of armor can target thier attacks in a way that reduces it to 7.20%. Against those enemies who do mostly downward attacks, the armor actually glances blows into my neck, increasing the likelyhood of a neck hit by 3.12%. Fortunately those blows are weakened by the deflection and do 42.33% less damage. The armor reduces my shoulder motion by 5.01%, which will harm my ability to accurately aim bows by 23.43%, and crossbows by 7.52%." That's not fun for anyone but stat mongers.
If you're going to propose more complex simulations, you have to explain why that more complex simulation translates into fun.
Long boat rides? Big experience point penalties? Bah! You kids these days! Back in the good old days if you made a mistake, your character was deleted, often costing 40 or more hours of play! The better games would reformat your hard drive! In the cream of the crop the game's administrator would fly to your city, drive to your house, and personally kick you in the balls every time your character was seriously injured. Sure, some whiny crybabies didn't like it, but our games were meaningful! By making the lows really low, it meant the highs were all the higher! Sure, it drove off anyone who didn't have months of time to play, replay, and re-replay sections of content when a character died, but those were wimps who didn't deserve to play games. If you can't afford to play for 40 to 60 hours a week, well, you have no right to playing a video game! If you're not playing the game the way I think you should, well, clearly you're playing it wrong!
Bogus comparisons. Magazine and book publishers don't specifically add things to their products to make them harder to copy. They don't charge me for the "privlege" of blocking me from the information I've purchased. I'm not owed an easy way to get the data. I'm saying that media companies want to make it extremely difficult, effectively impossible for the average person to engage in some types of fair use. That will spell the effective end of fair use. Instead of the digital age becoming an era when people have increasing freedom to engage in commentary on other works, we'll be restricting people further. That's a step backward for humanity. For the potential (but not certain) benefit of additional income to companies, we're trading social progress as a whole. That bullshit.
You're completely missing the point. Sure, Zonk could have added a "fun" score. And Black would have gotten a low score being Zonk determined that it wasn't fun. He's reviewing a game, of course he's going to seek out the fun. However instead of handwaving, "Hey, it's fun!" or "This isn't fun!" a review has to explain why. Zonk took eight paragraphs to explain his position. He summarized gameplay and had positive things to say about parts of the experience. But for him it didn't come together and he concluded that it wasn't fun. We know that he didn't find it fun. If he's good reviewer, we can conclude that much of his readership will agree. No reviewer is so good as to be able to saw a game is fun or not-fun such that that rating will apply for all of their readers. If you're looking for a particular sort of game, you should be able to read a well written review, positive or negative, and see the parts that matter to you. You're not looking for a well written review, you're looking for a reviewer whose idea of fun matches yours.