While hardly a brilliant piece of work, I don't mind that "Happy Birthday to You" was granted a copyright. They're lyrics and lyrics can be copyrighted. I personally think copyright on lyrics is a good idea.
The problem isn't that the song was copyrighted. The problem is that the song is still under copyright. The lyrics were registered for copyright in 1935. Given the laws at the time, the copyright should have lasted 56 years, expiring in 1991. The sisters knew (or should have known) this when they registered the song. Instead, copyright has been retroactively extended several times. Now the copyright is 95 years. There is no way of interpreting that as anything but a shameless handout to the copyright holders.
When you bought a Blizzard game, you just got permission to play it in a way Blizzard condones.
Oddly enough, when I bought my last Blizzard game, I got a physical thing. It was a cardboard box, it contained a small book and a CD with data on it. Around the same time I purchased some music (another CD with data on it) and a novel. I got all of these home and dropped them on my kitchen table while I emptied my pockets. At that point in time I owned, by any reasonable sense of the work, that copy of the game, that copy of the music, and that copy of the novel.
Later I listened to the music and read the book. I didn't need any license to do either. I was free use them in ways the original publisher probably wouldn't have liked. I ripped the music to MP3 and stuffed the CD in my binder of CDs I store. After reading the book I loaned it to a friend. When he returned it, I sold it to a used book store. I managed all of this without any licenses or anything else.
Yet when I tried to play the game, I was confronted with what claimed to be a legal notice. Suddenly CD with data wasn't my property in some strange way. I wasn't free to use it as I wished. Indeed, apparently my purchase several hours earlier wasn't really a purchase (despite the fact that I was handed a product in exchange for money).
You should be offended that computer software publishers (and not console software publishers) have managed to create some magical new right for themselves that other copyright-based industries don't have. It's a shameful handout. There is some legal precedent for software EULA's, but it's hardly ironclad. EULA remain a debatable subject both morally and legally.
Think about the opposite, where you'd be allowed to benefit from the contract (i.e. use the software) but not incur the responsibilities (i.e. the limitations). How could such an asymmetry be reasonable, much less desireable?
Yes, imagine such an insane world were you might walk into your local Best Buy, pick up a CD full of music, a PS2 videogame, a movie, and a copy of Windows for Dummies, pay for them, take them home, then use them as you like without having to agree to some contract.
Oh, wait, I guess I can do that today and the world hasn't ended.
If a company wants to sell me software under contract, feel free to do so. Businesses do so all the time. You sign the contract, you pay for the license, then you get the actual software. But if I walk into a store and buy a music CD, a book, a PS2 video game, and a PC video game, I would suggest that I own those particular items and am free to use them as I wish. But you're claiming that I get home, open my purchases, and I can read the book without an agreement, I can play the music without an agreement, I can use the software on the PS2 without an agreement, but I need to agree to some new thing for my PC video game, that's just insane.
You people who are so against Blizzard here need to ask yourselves what the situation would be if users were free to disregard the EULA. It would mean that either (a) the software content producers would have to accept anything you did with it or (b) there would have to be LEGISLATIVE limitations on your use that applied to all software content. I'm positive you don't want (b), and I don't think you'd reasonably want (a) either since it's entirely inhibitive of content creation. If you cannot control perfectly reproducable content (i.e. software) and thus cannot profit from your work, a significant number of people will be dissuaded from producing.
Now if only there was some sort of law that could stop people from maing copies. Perhaps by granting a monopoly right to copy to the original author/publisher. Perhaps we should call it copyright. That seems like a good idea to me.
Thet LEGISLATIVE limitation you seem so worried about already exists. It works fine for books, music, console video games, movies, television programs, plays, maps, essays, articles, magazines, paintings, photographs, and more. Perhaps most importantly, it covers computer software.
You are right about one thing, the legal ignorance here is disturbing. Perhaps you're seeing your reflection in your monitor?
It's not reasonable to suggest that bnetd being legal would in any way threaten Blizzard's copyright. It should be legal to write software to speak any over the wire protocol I want. If I want replace a proprietary server with my own that I wrote, that should be legal. If it's legal for SAMBA, why isn't it legal for bnetd?
The Engligh to German to English looks just like a depressingly large number of instant messages and email messages I receive. So I guess it is good enough.
So what _does_ (CW) mean?
on
PAX05 Writeup
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If they're always being asked what (CW) means, why not fill the rest of us in?
Did Lawrence Lessig personally insult Orlowski? Did the Creative Commons run over Orlowski's dog? Because I can't think of any rational reason for Orlowski's bitterness toward the Creative Commons. I like the Register, I like it's aggressive, cynical point of view. And some people are promising that the Creative Commons is The Ultimate Answer that will Heal the Sick. They deserve some mocking. But to generalize a few overly enthusiatic supportors into a general statement about Creative Commons is stupid. Worse, he makes up entirely straw man arguments, like CC supports are just looking for a thin excuse to make infringing copys of copyrighted works. Congrats on missing the point; you might as well accuse Stallman of starting the Free Software Foundation because he wants an excuse to make copies of Microsoft Office. Maybe the supporters do want things to be Free, but so what? They've chosen to do so honestly, by making their own work free to varying extents.
Orlowski's coverage normally doesn't bother me, but when he gets on the Creative Commons he steps into la-la land. Feh.
In his response, he claimed that the article in question was written by somebody else and that he didn't know what to make of it. I pointed out that my message was a standard angry letter to the editor on a story he wrote and that he should take it as such. His response was further disconnected, apparently having no idea what was being discussed and asking how he could help me.
Perhaps some inner hatred of the Creative Commons has driven Orlowski off the deep end?
All Creative Commons is, as far as I can see, is a lawyer who was nice enough to draft up some stock boilerplate for you, free of charge. That was nice of him.
Just like the nice lawyer who drafted up the GPL and the LGPL. Shame that faded away without an impact on the software world.
Suggesting that Creative Commons is just some boilerplate licenses is an oversimplification. The Creative Commons is the implementation of a belief that things should be more free than they are, just like the GPL.
"MS Office has NO drawing capabilities worth speaking of"
MS Office ships with a servicable (but not great) vector drawing program: PowerPoint. It's a bit of a kludge to use it for non-presentational purposes, but I've seen it frequently used as a poor-man's Adobe Illustrator.
The only thing that is keeping the new 2.0 version of Impress from matching PowerPoint is the lack of slide backgrounds and clip art that really are essential to making a good presentation.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
I can promise you that if you're expecting a cool background and some clip art to push your presentation into "good" territory, you're doomed. An eloquent speaker presenting interesting information can present a great talk with minimal or no slides. But if you're not a good speaker (you can learn) or the information you're presenting isn't interesting (depressingly common for business talks), no amount of clip arts, backgrounds, or even animations will rescue you from giving a crappy presentation. Indeed, that's Tufte's point when he rails against PowerPoint: people have the confused idea that PowerPoint is the key to a good talk. They emphasis is entirely on the wrong part of the presentation development process and the result is a seemingly endless stream of bad presentations. Gah.
I believe Galaxy Quest was specifically spoofing generic science fiction conventions, not Gen Con or gaming conventions. Geek conventions for comic books, science fiction, or other areas of geekery long predate Gen Con.
You're pining for a Gen Con that never quite existed and placing the blame
on events that didn't quite happen.
TSR killed off the gift certificate prizes. TSR did it because TSR was in
deep debt after about a decade of gross mismanagement by a woman who hated
gaming. It was an expense to be saved. TSR was in such back shape that if
WotC hadn't bought them out, TSR, D&D, and Gen Con all were doomed. You can
thank WotC for Gen Con surviving at all.
The death of the gift certificate prizes was good for the industry as a
whole. Yes, you could redeem them with anyone in the exhibit hall. Did you
know that TSR/Gen Con only reimbursed an exhibitor for a fraction of the value
of the gift certificate? (From memory, it was 70% of face value). TSR was
giving away other company's money. It drove exhibitors away from Gen Con,
especially smaller publishers with very tight margins.
Finally, so you didn't get a gift certificate. So what? Do you really need
gift certificates to enjoy yourself? Myself, I'm thankful that Gen Con
survived and that event ticket prices have been pretty stable.
Your other primary complaint seems to be that the RPG events are dominated
by big organizations. Which organizations are you thinking of? The RPGA?
That's about it. After that, perhaps the D&D Open or NASCRAG, but both of
those are long standing traditions at Gen Con. Indeed, I suspect that the Open
and the NASCRAG (Fez/Zef) events predate you attendance at the convention.
As for the specific reason that often the GM is running the game with little
notice, it's often because an event is so popular that the group is scrambling
to find someone to run the game. Back the in early 90s I ran events for the
RGPA and was frequently asked if I could squeeze another game in. The RPGA
hated turning people away (even people with generic tickets). Perhaps a bad
idea (because you get GMs who haven't read the module in advance), but not one
bourne out of malice.
Even if there are so many big organization run games, again, so what? WotC
did not put up any new barriers to running a game at a convention. Signing up
to run a game is just as easy today as it was 15 years ago. Perhaps the number of group-run game has increased more quickly, but given the growth of Gen Con that may be the only way to scale up. Perhaps they're popular like McDonald's you get a certain level of consistency; never great, but never awful. Indeed, during the RPGA's hayday of the early 90s the events were generally quite solid and well run. Conversely, while some of the best games I've ever played have been independent (like Todd Furler's games), some of the worst games I've ever played have been independent (Gen Con is not the place to try GMing for the first time).
Ultimately, if you don't like group-run games, don't play them. I had a
great Gen Con, playing only independent games. They're there. The existance
of the group-run games doesn't force you to play them.
It's not that people believe people magically become mature at 18, 19, 21, graduation, or whatever. It's that people recognize that there isn't a great measuring stick, but age makes a servicable measuring stick. Checking an ID to see if someone is 21 is practical. Determining if the person trying to get into the bar is mature enough to handle alcohol is nearly impossible. Age related limits are certainly flawed, but it's the best we've got for general purpose use.
That said, in the case of the X-Box and online play in general the solution should be trust networks. Not simple lists of friends or blacklists, but something that allows complex transient trust. "I trust Jeff. I trust Jeff so much that I'll trust anyone he trusts. I trust Mike, and I trust Mike's friends, but Mike's friends often have bad judgement so I won't trust Mike's friend's friends. Finally, I trust Joe, but Joe has terrible judgement in friends, so I won't trust Joe's friends." Add in a blacklist for good measure and you should be able to quickly build up a network of trustworthy fellow players.
The parents have to do a lot of things. Maybe the other people involved could, *gasp*, make their jobs a bit easier! Some fault does lie with them, but not all of it...
So to make their lives easier, you're suggesting that some products that you have decided are inappropriate (like Manhunt) be removed from shelves, despite the fact that some adults want the game and are mature enough to handle it? To make parent's lives easier you want to increase government meddling in free speech issues? To make parents lives easier, you want the pimple-faced counter monkey at the local game store to act as a nanny for their adult customers?
Yes, parenting is a hard job. You should damn well know that before you try to raise children. Expecting everyone else to change to make your job easier seems awfully selfish. If you can't handle the responsibility do the rest of the world a favor and don't have kids.
If you demand that the authors whose writings you read, the painters whose painting you view, the playwrites whose plays you watch all meet your personal standards, well, you'er not going to have much left to read, view, or watch. Perhaps Card does believe something you believe to be morally reprehensible. This doesn't change the quality of his books.
Now, I'm not asking you to love the man. Yes, it will linger in your mind and perhaps taint your ability to appreciate the books. And it's fair game to expose his beliefs. But engaging in a simple smear campaign ("Orson Scott Card is a worthless asshole") is not appropriate. I find it hard to believe that a popular writer could be "worthless." An asshole perhaps, but the world is full of them.
Ultimately you seem to be missing a key element of Card's beliefs: that they're his beliefs. Big shock: he wrote an article for Mormons about why Mormons should remain true to their beliefs. You may disagree with those beliefs (I certainly do), but simply bashing it as "anti-gay backwards bullshit" is hardly going to change anyones mind. Indeed, I found his statements among the more rational of the anti-gay arguments. As he points out, the Mormons are asking gays of no more than they ask their non-married straight members: no sex. Given that basis, one could try to seek some sort of middle ground. If the focus is on protecting the family, perhaps he could be convinced into supporting gay marriage. With gay marriage a homosexual could have a much more traditional, stable family; exactly as Card seems to be seeking.
That's your entire argument. It's a crappy argument. Branding sex offenders with a scarlet letter doesn't do much to protect people and does a lot of harm to society as a whole.
* Your next door neighbor may be a serial rapist who hasn't been caught yet. Do you want to live next to him? Obviously not. But you might be and you have no way of knowing. Being aware of known criminals can help, but you still need to be wary of the unknown criminals.
* Your next door neighbor is a released rapist. What are you going to do about it? Move? Not everyone can afford to; apparently safety is limited to people who can afford to move. Also, kiss those property values goodbye; your investment in a house might be destroyed because a convicted sex offender moved in down the street.
* Well, I suppose you could somehow figure out how to keep the released rapist from moving into your neighorhood. If only some neighborhoods are able to do this we've created two tiers: do you live in a rich enough/politically powerful enough neighborhood tbe safer? Those neighborhoods who don't have the money or power, well, sucks to be them. If you block him from living anywhere, well, what's the rapist supposed to do? Like it or not, he has to live somewhere.
* Congrats, you've somehow convinced our hypothetical rapist to live elsewhere. Of course, this doesn't mean he won't enter your neighborhood or otherwise get access to your kids.
* Your next door neighbor might be an released felon convicted of some other horrible crime. Assault. Robbery at gunpoint. In some cases, murder. You won't learn about those criminals. They don't need to register. Just the sex offenders. Sexual assault is a terrible, terrible crime. But it's hardly the only crime worth worrying about.
Like it or not, most criminals are eventually released. We have to deal with that. If they're not rehabilitied we need to fix our prison and parole system. If they cannot be rahabilitated we need to fix our sentencing to ensure they're imprisoned for life without parole. Putting some of them on a life-long list is an ineffective fix.
If you think Megan's Law is actually a useful protection, I pity you and your family.
The solution is simple. Pass an amendment giving the President a line-item veto.
Sweet Mother, no!
In a country this size we need the ability to pass compromises. I'll support your expansion of some powers for the FBI if the bill also contains additional limitations on the FBI. Ultimately it's one of the tools that tries to keep democracy from turning into mob rule. A line item veto would toss those compromises out the window; giving too much power to one man. The current veto is a crude tool intentionally; its use is discouraged. A present is encouraged to limit vetos to Important Issues. The presidental veto is supposed to be a check on serious abuse by the legislative branch, not an opportunity to act like a nanny. A line item veto would encourage meddling in many, many more bills and damage the ability of the legislature to reach compromises. Without compromises, our legislature will become even more fractured. Riders and amendments are all too frequently abused; but more careful changes are necessary. A line item veto tries to solve the problem by handing too much power to another branch.
(Here in Wisconsin our Governor's line item veto is frequently and regrettably abused to distort the intentions of legislature.)
Graham has written some insightful and well thought out stuff, but this is just sloppy:
This is, strictly speaking, terrorism: harming innnocent people as a way to pressure some central authority into doing what you want.
I find it amazing that blacklists which mail servers must opt-in to use are somehow terrorism. Are you suggesting that these innocent people have some fundamental right to contact my mail server and send mail? They certainly don't; it's my mail server. I can use any methods I like to filter out mail, including chosing to rely on one of the IP blacklists. This can only be terrorism if random people have some sort of human right to send mail to my machine. I hardly think that's a right.
Come to think of it, apparently organizing against tangentally related people to stop another problem is terrorism? By that strange standard you could call advertiser boycotts terrorism: you're trying to influence some media outlet by negatively influencing advertisers on that outlet. They often have the same claim of innocence ("I didn't know that they would run that article! I just buy bulk advertising rates.")
(Now there are problems with blacklists, perhaps most significantly that many ISPs use them without informing their subscribers or allowing them to opt out. Blacklisting unaware users who happen to share a machine with a spammer's website is definately a complex question.)
And one of the mistakes management makes is hiring people who can't or won't estimate correctly.
It often cuts the other way: management rejects the realistic estimates as "padded", or imply that the person is being lazy. They demand that the programmer revise the estimate downward. When the overly aggressive estimate is missed they don't stop and realize, "What, he said it would take 10 days, I demanded he reduce it to 5 days, and it took 8 days. Maybe I should trust his estimates." Instead the manager get angry that the programmer missed the deadline the programmer "agreed" to. Depressingly common.
So the publisher admits that he pulled the article not because it was ethical, but because he was being DOSed. So they first lack the ethics to realize that publishing someone's home address and the address of their elderly mother is wrong, then bend over when attacked. That's shameful. This publisher has shown that he fundamentally does not get it. I strongly support his first amendment right to publish that article, but he's still a sleazebag. I'll be avoiding the entire SysCon family of magazines as I can't trust them to do good journalism.
The gaming industry has a higher gross than the movie industry in the USA...
Only if you distort then numbers in some strange ways. Ron Gilbert disects the claim quite well. In short: The US video game industry is estimated at $10B. That includes console systems, the movie industry sales wouldn't include DVD players. DVD sales and rentals were about $16B, already topping the game industry. In both cases we're talking about rentals and sales of products (and the game industry gets a boost from sales of consoles and peripherals). Add in video tapes at about $6B and the box office at $9B and the movie industry becomes very dominant at about $31B to $10B.
That said, the video game industry is clearly in the same ballpark as the movie industry and continues to grow. Games are a very large market and may come to challenge the movie industry, but not this year and certainly not for the immediate future. Besides, so what if games aren't as big. It's till a $10B a year industry in the US alone! That's still amazingly big. Anyone who doesn't respect the games industry because it's not as big as the movie industry is a fool.
Actually, as a general case you are. Don't tell secrets to someone you don't trust. Or at least get a contract where they agree to not reveal them (which moves this into Trade Secret and Contract law). Ratting out secrets is a key part of good investigative journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
While hardly a brilliant piece of work, I don't mind that "Happy Birthday to You" was granted a copyright. They're lyrics and lyrics can be copyrighted. I personally think copyright on lyrics is a good idea.
The problem isn't that the song was copyrighted. The problem is that the song is still under copyright. The lyrics were registered for copyright in 1935. Given the laws at the time, the copyright should have lasted 56 years, expiring in 1991. The sisters knew (or should have known) this when they registered the song. Instead, copyright has been retroactively extended several times. Now the copyright is 95 years. There is no way of interpreting that as anything but a shameless handout to the copyright holders.
Oddly enough, when I bought my last Blizzard game, I got a physical thing. It was a cardboard box, it contained a small book and a CD with data on it. Around the same time I purchased some music (another CD with data on it) and a novel. I got all of these home and dropped them on my kitchen table while I emptied my pockets. At that point in time I owned, by any reasonable sense of the work, that copy of the game, that copy of the music, and that copy of the novel.
Later I listened to the music and read the book. I didn't need any license to do either. I was free use them in ways the original publisher probably wouldn't have liked. I ripped the music to MP3 and stuffed the CD in my binder of CDs I store. After reading the book I loaned it to a friend. When he returned it, I sold it to a used book store. I managed all of this without any licenses or anything else.
Yet when I tried to play the game, I was confronted with what claimed to be a legal notice. Suddenly CD with data wasn't my property in some strange way. I wasn't free to use it as I wished. Indeed, apparently my purchase several hours earlier wasn't really a purchase (despite the fact that I was handed a product in exchange for money).
You should be offended that computer software publishers (and not console software publishers) have managed to create some magical new right for themselves that other copyright-based industries don't have. It's a shameful handout. There is some legal precedent for software EULA's, but it's hardly ironclad. EULA remain a debatable subject both morally and legally.
Yes, imagine such an insane world were you might walk into your local Best Buy, pick up a CD full of music, a PS2 videogame, a movie, and a copy of Windows for Dummies, pay for them, take them home, then use them as you like without having to agree to some contract.
Oh, wait, I guess I can do that today and the world hasn't ended.
If a company wants to sell me software under contract, feel free to do so. Businesses do so all the time. You sign the contract, you pay for the license, then you get the actual software. But if I walk into a store and buy a music CD, a book, a PS2 video game, and a PC video game, I would suggest that I own those particular items and am free to use them as I wish. But you're claiming that I get home, open my purchases, and I can read the book without an agreement, I can play the music without an agreement, I can use the software on the PS2 without an agreement, but I need to agree to some new thing for my PC video game, that's just insane.
Now if only there was some sort of law that could stop people from maing copies. Perhaps by granting a monopoly right to copy to the original author/publisher. Perhaps we should call it copyright. That seems like a good idea to me.
Thet LEGISLATIVE limitation you seem so worried about already exists. It works fine for books, music, console video games, movies, television programs, plays, maps, essays, articles, magazines, paintings, photographs, and more. Perhaps most importantly, it covers computer software.
You are right about one thing, the legal ignorance here is disturbing. Perhaps you're seeing your reflection in your monitor?
It's not reasonable to suggest that bnetd being legal would in any way threaten Blizzard's copyright. It should be legal to write software to speak any over the wire protocol I want. If I want replace a proprietary server with my own that I wrote, that should be legal. If it's legal for SAMBA, why isn't it legal for bnetd?
The Engligh to German to English looks just like a depressingly large number of instant messages and email messages I receive. So I guess it is good enough.
If they're always being asked what (CW) means, why not fill the rest of us in?
Did Lawrence Lessig personally insult Orlowski? Did the Creative Commons run over Orlowski's dog? Because I can't think of any rational reason for Orlowski's bitterness toward the Creative Commons. I like the Register, I like it's aggressive, cynical point of view. And some people are promising that the Creative Commons is The Ultimate Answer that will Heal the Sick. They deserve some mocking. But to generalize a few overly enthusiatic supportors into a general statement about Creative Commons is stupid. Worse, he makes up entirely straw man arguments, like CC supports are just looking for a thin excuse to make infringing copys of copyrighted works. Congrats on missing the point; you might as well accuse Stallman of starting the Free Software Foundation because he wants an excuse to make copies of Microsoft Office. Maybe the supporters do want things to be Free, but so what? They've chosen to do so honestly, by making their own work free to varying extents. Orlowski's coverage normally doesn't bother me, but when he gets on the Creative Commons he steps into la-la land. Feh.
Orlowski seems to inhabit a world of his own.
One of Orlowski's earlier articles claimed that Gary Trudeau was specifically lampooning the Creative Commons in Doonesbury. I wrote the editors to point out that the comics in question were two years old, and that I found it highly unlikely that Gary Trudeau had even heard about a movement that was at the time only six months old. Unsurprisingly my mail was forwarded on to Orlowski. More surprising was the bizarre response I got from Orlowski.
In his response, he claimed that the article in question was written by somebody else and that he didn't know what to make of it. I pointed out that my message was a standard angry letter to the editor on a story he wrote and that he should take it as such. His response was further disconnected, apparently having no idea what was being discussed and asking how he could help me.
Perhaps some inner hatred of the Creative Commons has driven Orlowski off the deep end?
Just like the nice lawyer who drafted up the GPL and the LGPL. Shame that faded away without an impact on the software world.
Suggesting that Creative Commons is just some boilerplate licenses is an oversimplification. The Creative Commons is the implementation of a belief that things should be more free than they are, just like the GPL.
MS Office ships with a servicable (but not great) vector drawing program: PowerPoint. It's a bit of a kludge to use it for non-presentational purposes, but I've seen it frequently used as a poor-man's Adobe Illustrator.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
I can promise you that if you're expecting a cool background and some clip art to push your presentation into "good" territory, you're doomed. An eloquent speaker presenting interesting information can present a great talk with minimal or no slides. But if you're not a good speaker (you can learn) or the information you're presenting isn't interesting (depressingly common for business talks), no amount of clip arts, backgrounds, or even animations will rescue you from giving a crappy presentation. Indeed, that's Tufte's point when he rails against PowerPoint: people have the confused idea that PowerPoint is the key to a good talk. They emphasis is entirely on the wrong part of the presentation development process and the result is a seemingly endless stream of bad presentations. Gah.
I believe Galaxy Quest was specifically spoofing generic science fiction conventions, not Gen Con or gaming conventions. Geek conventions for comic books, science fiction, or other areas of geekery long predate Gen Con.
You're pining for a Gen Con that never quite existed and placing the blame on events that didn't quite happen.
TSR killed off the gift certificate prizes. TSR did it because TSR was in deep debt after about a decade of gross mismanagement by a woman who hated gaming. It was an expense to be saved. TSR was in such back shape that if WotC hadn't bought them out, TSR, D&D, and Gen Con all were doomed. You can thank WotC for Gen Con surviving at all.
The death of the gift certificate prizes was good for the industry as a whole. Yes, you could redeem them with anyone in the exhibit hall. Did you know that TSR/Gen Con only reimbursed an exhibitor for a fraction of the value of the gift certificate? (From memory, it was 70% of face value). TSR was giving away other company's money. It drove exhibitors away from Gen Con, especially smaller publishers with very tight margins.
Finally, so you didn't get a gift certificate. So what? Do you really need gift certificates to enjoy yourself? Myself, I'm thankful that Gen Con survived and that event ticket prices have been pretty stable.
Your other primary complaint seems to be that the RPG events are dominated by big organizations. Which organizations are you thinking of? The RPGA? That's about it. After that, perhaps the D&D Open or NASCRAG, but both of those are long standing traditions at Gen Con. Indeed, I suspect that the Open and the NASCRAG (Fez/Zef) events predate you attendance at the convention.
As for the specific reason that often the GM is running the game with little notice, it's often because an event is so popular that the group is scrambling to find someone to run the game. Back the in early 90s I ran events for the RGPA and was frequently asked if I could squeeze another game in. The RPGA hated turning people away (even people with generic tickets). Perhaps a bad idea (because you get GMs who haven't read the module in advance), but not one bourne out of malice.
Even if there are so many big organization run games, again, so what? WotC did not put up any new barriers to running a game at a convention. Signing up to run a game is just as easy today as it was 15 years ago. Perhaps the number of group-run game has increased more quickly, but given the growth of Gen Con that may be the only way to scale up. Perhaps they're popular like McDonald's you get a certain level of consistency; never great, but never awful. Indeed, during the RPGA's hayday of the early 90s the events were generally quite solid and well run. Conversely, while some of the best games I've ever played have been independent (like Todd Furler's games), some of the worst games I've ever played have been independent (Gen Con is not the place to try GMing for the first time).
Ultimately, if you don't like group-run games, don't play them. I had a great Gen Con, playing only independent games. They're there. The existance of the group-run games doesn't force you to play them.
That said, in the case of the X-Box and online play in general the solution should be trust networks. Not simple lists of friends or blacklists, but something that allows complex transient trust. "I trust Jeff. I trust Jeff so much that I'll trust anyone he trusts. I trust Mike, and I trust Mike's friends, but Mike's friends often have bad judgement so I won't trust Mike's friend's friends. Finally, I trust Joe, but Joe has terrible judgement in friends, so I won't trust Joe's friends." Add in a blacklist for good measure and you should be able to quickly build up a network of trustworthy fellow players.
So to make their lives easier, you're suggesting that some products that you have decided are inappropriate (like Manhunt) be removed from shelves, despite the fact that some adults want the game and are mature enough to handle it? To make parent's lives easier you want to increase government meddling in free speech issues? To make parents lives easier, you want the pimple-faced counter monkey at the local game store to act as a nanny for their adult customers?
Yes, parenting is a hard job. You should damn well know that before you try to raise children. Expecting everyone else to change to make your job easier seems awfully selfish. If you can't handle the responsibility do the rest of the world a favor and don't have kids.
If you demand that the authors whose writings you read, the painters whose painting you view, the playwrites whose plays you watch all meet your personal standards, well, you'er not going to have much left to read, view, or watch. Perhaps Card does believe something you believe to be morally reprehensible. This doesn't change the quality of his books.
Now, I'm not asking you to love the man. Yes, it will linger in your mind and perhaps taint your ability to appreciate the books. And it's fair game to expose his beliefs. But engaging in a simple smear campaign ("Orson Scott Card is a worthless asshole") is not appropriate. I find it hard to believe that a popular writer could be "worthless." An asshole perhaps, but the world is full of them.
Ultimately you seem to be missing a key element of Card's beliefs: that they're his beliefs. Big shock: he wrote an article for Mormons about why Mormons should remain true to their beliefs. You may disagree with those beliefs (I certainly do), but simply bashing it as "anti-gay backwards bullshit" is hardly going to change anyones mind. Indeed, I found his statements among the more rational of the anti-gay arguments. As he points out, the Mormons are asking gays of no more than they ask their non-married straight members: no sex. Given that basis, one could try to seek some sort of middle ground. If the focus is on protecting the family, perhaps he could be convinced into supporting gay marriage. With gay marriage a homosexual could have a much more traditional, stable family; exactly as Card seems to be seeking.
But what about the chillllllren?!?!?!
That's your entire argument. It's a crappy argument. Branding sex offenders with a scarlet letter doesn't do much to protect people and does a lot of harm to society as a whole.
* Your next door neighbor may be a serial rapist who hasn't been caught yet. Do you want to live next to him? Obviously not. But you might be and you have no way of knowing. Being aware of known criminals can help, but you still need to be wary of the unknown criminals.
* Your next door neighbor is a released rapist. What are you going to do about it? Move? Not everyone can afford to; apparently safety is limited to people who can afford to move. Also, kiss those property values goodbye; your investment in a house might be destroyed because a convicted sex offender moved in down the street.
* Well, I suppose you could somehow figure out how to keep the released rapist from moving into your neighorhood. If only some neighborhoods are able to do this we've created two tiers: do you live in a rich enough/politically powerful enough neighborhood tbe safer? Those neighborhoods who don't have the money or power, well, sucks to be them. If you block him from living anywhere, well, what's the rapist supposed to do? Like it or not, he has to live somewhere.
* Congrats, you've somehow convinced our hypothetical rapist to live elsewhere. Of course, this doesn't mean he won't enter your neighborhood or otherwise get access to your kids.
* Your next door neighbor might be an released felon convicted of some other horrible crime. Assault. Robbery at gunpoint. In some cases, murder. You won't learn about those criminals. They don't need to register. Just the sex offenders. Sexual assault is a terrible, terrible crime. But it's hardly the only crime worth worrying about.
Like it or not, most criminals are eventually released. We have to deal with that. If they're not rehabilitied we need to fix our prison and parole system. If they cannot be rahabilitated we need to fix our sentencing to ensure they're imprisoned for life without parole. Putting some of them on a life-long list is an ineffective fix.
If you think Megan's Law is actually a useful protection, I pity you and your family.
In a country this size we need the ability to pass compromises. I'll support your expansion of some powers for the FBI if the bill also contains additional limitations on the FBI. Ultimately it's one of the tools that tries to keep democracy from turning into mob rule. A line item veto would toss those compromises out the window; giving too much power to one man. The current veto is a crude tool intentionally; its use is discouraged. A present is encouraged to limit vetos to Important Issues. The presidental veto is supposed to be a check on serious abuse by the legislative branch, not an opportunity to act like a nanny. A line item veto would encourage meddling in many, many more bills and damage the ability of the legislature to reach compromises. Without compromises, our legislature will become even more fractured. Riders and amendments are all too frequently abused; but more careful changes are necessary. A line item veto tries to solve the problem by handing too much power to another branch.
(Here in Wisconsin our Governor's line item veto is frequently and regrettably abused to distort the intentions of legislature.)
Graham has written some insightful and well thought out stuff, but this is just sloppy:
I find it amazing that blacklists which mail servers must opt-in to use are somehow terrorism. Are you suggesting that these innocent people have some fundamental right to contact my mail server and send mail? They certainly don't; it's my mail server. I can use any methods I like to filter out mail, including chosing to rely on one of the IP blacklists. This can only be terrorism if random people have some sort of human right to send mail to my machine. I hardly think that's a right.
Come to think of it, apparently organizing against tangentally related people to stop another problem is terrorism? By that strange standard you could call advertiser boycotts terrorism: you're trying to influence some media outlet by negatively influencing advertisers on that outlet. They often have the same claim of innocence ("I didn't know that they would run that article! I just buy bulk advertising rates.")
(Now there are problems with blacklists, perhaps most significantly that many ISPs use them without informing their subscribers or allowing them to opt out. Blacklisting unaware users who happen to share a machine with a spammer's website is definately a complex question.)
It often cuts the other way: management rejects the realistic estimates as "padded", or imply that the person is being lazy. They demand that the programmer revise the estimate downward. When the overly aggressive estimate is missed they don't stop and realize, "What, he said it would take 10 days, I demanded he reduce it to 5 days, and it took 8 days. Maybe I should trust his estimates." Instead the manager get angry that the programmer missed the deadline the programmer "agreed" to. Depressingly common.
So the publisher admits that he pulled the article not because it was ethical, but because he was being DOSed. So they first lack the ethics to realize that publishing someone's home address and the address of their elderly mother is wrong, then bend over when attacked. That's shameful. This publisher has shown that he fundamentally does not get it. I strongly support his first amendment right to publish that article, but he's still a sleazebag. I'll be avoiding the entire SysCon family of magazines as I can't trust them to do good journalism.
There are lots of 2d side-scrollers for the GBA. What's noteworthy about this one? Was the original especially noteworthy in some way?
Only if you distort then numbers in some strange ways. Ron Gilbert disects the claim quite well. In short: The US video game industry is estimated at $10B. That includes console systems, the movie industry sales wouldn't include DVD players. DVD sales and rentals were about $16B, already topping the game industry. In both cases we're talking about rentals and sales of products (and the game industry gets a boost from sales of consoles and peripherals). Add in video tapes at about $6B and the box office at $9B and the movie industry becomes very dominant at about $31B to $10B.
That said, the video game industry is clearly in the same ballpark as the movie industry and continues to grow. Games are a very large market and may come to challenge the movie industry, but not this year and certainly not for the immediate future. Besides, so what if games aren't as big. It's till a $10B a year industry in the US alone! That's still amazingly big. Anyone who doesn't respect the games industry because it's not as big as the movie industry is a fool.
Given that the Xbox 2 will almost certainly support overweight American gamers, isn't supporting heavy Japanese gamers a naturally side-effect?
Actually, as a general case you are. Don't tell secrets to someone you don't trust. Or at least get a contract where they agree to not reveal them (which moves this into Trade Secret and Contract law). Ratting out secrets is a key part of good investigative journalism.