I think this is what most don't understand. I am the type of pirate that does it for convenience. There is no other method of accessing movies that is as convenient as piracy, and I don't see anything coming in the near future that can come even close to allowing me to easily watch movies in multiple places in my home or on the road. With a downloaded.mkv, I can watch any movie I have on any TV in my home or on any computer in the world at the press of a button. I would love to see a viable legal alternative to my current setup, but it will never exist due to the luddites in charge of the movie companies.
I really, really, really hate the itunes interface in general but the online version of the store for the ipod touch is actually a good thing. The only two shows I watch on the pod are olbermann and maddow and the feeds are almost automatic. They only post the last aired episode but with a click I can download them to the pod. No fees, possibly one commercial, very sweet. I assume the for-pay stuff like Daily Show and Colbert would be just as slick but they're usually charging too much for this. Movie rentals are $4 and many movies are listed for "purchase" at DVD prices. I'm sorry, if you're not giving me physical media then why should I pay physical media prices? If DVD kiosks in the supermarket rent movies for $1, why should the electronic version that's even cheaper cost as much as renting from blockbuster?
The tech is already here to make buying more convenient than piracy. The issue is that they're charging too much and doing too many dickish things.
I actually like the idea of being able to vote with my dollars. Direct measurement of consumption is far more accurate than Neilsen's. Treat a season like shareware, Doom I'm thinking. The first third is free. You pay for access to the second third. If it's a good show, you'll want to pay. But make the price reasonable. I see DVD's of full seasons going for $20 some places. Keep the price down low enough so that it's an impulse purchase and we'll do it. Just look at the app store. Dollar apps? shit, that's cheaper than an appetizer. Yeah, I'll try it. If it sucks, no big deal. Price it at $10, now I'm skeptical and likely won't give it a spin.
I think the problem with Clippy was that he was ten years too early. If the little fellow was around today he wouldn't get nearly as much abuse. People are more used to the wizard idea now, and to being guided through tasks.
Back then the average user was (I suspect) more technically knowledgeable - the PC as appliance wasn't entrenched. So everybody felt a little insulted when Clippy stuck his nose in their work.
They're still not getting this stuff right. Last week I had to help someone from another department with a mail merge. Office 2007, oh joy. Now there's the usual problems with the wizard not seeing the data source from excel because it doesn't like characters used to name the worksheet or it wants/doesn't want to see a named range, that kind of thing. But the problem here is that the addresses wouldn't line up right in Word. The problem was that Word wanted the address in an invisible text box and it defaulted the address block outside of that box. So I had to go manually cut the address block, then click around on the screen until I highlighted the box, thus revealing it, and paste the block in. I can't even begin to fault my coworker for being stumped on this one. It's the kind of problem she shouldn't be encountering.
I'll go back to the car analogy. Early cars were fussy and demanding. You either had to be a mechanic who enjoyed twiddling with them or hire a mechanic to twiddle it for you. Cars these days have gotten far more reliable. You take it in for maintenance when you're told to and the car won't suffer unexpected failures, they just frickin' work. You don't need to know about timing belts and spark plugs and carburetors vs fuel injection. You just have to have some common sense. Don't drive your car in loose sand. Don't drive through flooded streets. Don't take corners too sharply. People will still make these mistakes but it's not the fault of the car or the engineers.
Software hasn't reached that point yet, not universally. Certainly there have been many improvements across the board. But there are still areas that are, frankly, embarrassing. Microsoft deserves a good portion of the blame simply because they are so huge and influential but they aren't alone.
Bullshit technology is defined as tech that appears to be doing something useful but you end up wasting more time with it than you'd ever save.
BOB is bullshit technology. Voice recognition for the longest time has been bullshit. It's rapidly becoming more useful. Blackberries and the like for business needs can be useful but often becomes bullshit technology when people use them ineffectively.
I won't take his apology seriously until he takes it seriously. The Japanese have a ceremony that helps to convey complete sincerity. I suggest he uses it.
The big problem with Google is privacy. Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do? I'd pay a subscription for such a thing. Maybe most people wouldn't, but I would. Search is such a big market that 5% of it is still huge. Maybe 5% of the people in the US would pay for private searching.
Microsoft doesn't have a problem with google abusing privacy. Their only complaint is that they want to be the ones doing it, not google! Ask me how I feel in a year or two but for now I still trust Microsoft a whole lot less than Google.
Browsing is also mobile browsing nowadays. Microsoft has not the capability any more to impose technologies (Silverlight etc.) on users any more. If 50% of the devices dont support your webpage and never will, you can not ignore any mor anybody who can not install some plugin. Morover IE is also loosing foothold on the desktop. So what was a move to hinder a competitor seriously (Why should i embed SVG on webpage if IE can not view it?) is slowly becoming a disadvantage. If Firefox and google chrome get the image of "just working fine" when compared to the IE and IE gets the image of causing problems, then they can stop making IE9.
The mobile space really is exploding. Smart phones were fairly useless for the longest time but the tech has really matured. They're very useful machines. And with the prevalence of non-Windows netbooks, there's more and more pressure for true interoperability.
Buy the standard version of the game for $49.99. But wait, the gold edition is shipping the same day! Get this exclusive handsome corinthian leather bullshit gold edition for $59.99. It includes those two skins and another special character.
I'm more than happy to pay for games but there's no fucking way I'm paying for this shit.
So instead of American jobs being outsourced to one dirt-poor foreign country they'll be outsourced to another. Total significance to the American worker and the American customer -- nothing.
I think HDD will continue to stay enough ahead of SSD in raw capacity that it will stay relevant for a long time. When SSD is affordable at 200 GB then HDD will already be affordable at 2 TB, etc.
It will be a long, protracted death. I anticipate seeing HDD for mass storage for another decade bare minimum. SSD will be for the stuff that has to be fast, HDD will be for the stuff that can be slower but SSD is too expensive for. (someone look this up in ten years and laugh at me.)
Will they start actively trying to sabotage Chinese web efforts? I don't mean by just giving unfiltered results. Will they try to do a Radio Free Europe, only make it actually useful? It wouldn't be the first time a western corporation declared war on China but would they really go so far?
Personally, I don't see why something like Phalanx wouldn't be the right system to use against really fast missiles. The energy released when a DU bullet hits a missile coming in at mach 2.8 (or mach 5.2 for Brahmos II) must be absolutely enormous. Sure, you'll get crap all over the deck, but that's not the end of the world.
Because of the engagement envelope. It's very, very tiny. Against a supersonic target it would be a second or two at most. Scoring a critical hit against a cruise missile doesn't do much good if you do so only a hundred feet out. In the Falklands War, the Brits almost lost a ship to a dud Exocet. The warhead didn't go off but just the impact and burning fuel was almost enough to sink the ship. Just how bad could this be? I don't think we've ever conducted live fire tests. We really should.
Your primary defense against incoming cruise missiles is blowing them up before they're launched, be it ground or air-based. Failing that, your next best bet is knocking them down at range with your SAMs. A CWIS system is only meant to be the last line of defense.
missing something here
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
We already have web TV. Video on Demand has been talked about for years and years and tech skeptics have always scoffed about it being a decade out for decades. Well, we have it now. The internet has the carrying capacity. Netflix is doing it for a profit. And the part that really has me excited, small-time people are making money at it without giant corporate backing. Someone wants to be on national television, they're going to have to kiss the ass of a major corporation. There's barriers to entry like the massive cost of building a television network. The internet turns all that on its head.
1. Create the tech that makes internet broadcasting technically feasible. Done. 2. Create the business model that makes internet broadcasting financially feasible. Work still needs done but it's happening. Partially done. 3. Profit
What we've seen so far is the creation of net-based versions of the cheapie mainstream shows. Porn is cheap to produce and there were a lot of amateur and low-rent outfits out there even before the net happened. They were the first ones to make it big on the net. We're seeing computer tech shows, talk shows and the like with various podcasts. They give away the content for free and make their money on sponsorship deals. While a lot of work goes into them, they're still not as expensive to produce as a network television comedy or drama. We've seen a few attempts at net-based sitcoms but they died.
If the Taliban has a bomb factory (legit target) in a mosque/hospital/kitten orphanage (illegal target) it becomes a legit target, and for good reason. A AAA cannon mounted on the Eiffel Tower would be a legit target.
When did this change, after we abandoned the Geneva Conventions? I know we still operated under them in Vietnam when a tactic used by the NVA was to locate SAM sites in the courtyards of hospitals.
I don't think the question here is whether it is permissible to attack military enemies, so much as whether it is permissible to engage in the assassination of specific individuals, to say nothing of the accuracy of the intelligence that leads to such assassination missions and the extensive collateral damage that may end up creating more enemies than it destroys. We are, after all, talking about an intelligence community whose failures over the last fifty years would be comical if the consequences weren't so grave.
Plus it's the extra-judicial killing of American citizens. Currently, our laws support judicial killing but the whole process is open to public scrutiny. Cops are allowed to use lethal force but every action is subject to review and criminal prosecution if the cop acted illegally. While there have been some awful exceptions, generally speaking, representatives of the government can't just kill you for no good reason and get away with it. And our legal system is based on the idea that it's better to let ten guilty men go free rather than send one innocent man to jail. It's meant to error on the side of caution.
If we were to declare a special case for citizens who are criminals beyond the means of law enforcement to capture, who it might only be possible to kill from afar, whose continued existence threatens the lives of American citizens, the judgement call on killing them should not be held by the same people who do the killing. There should be a chance for public review and accountability. And if we're going to kill them, we'd damn well better not take out a dozen bystanders while we're at it.
The failure of the "let's just trust our leaders" model is what spurred us to form a republic in the first place. To have it come up again in the context of the two biggest military disasters of our nation's history suggests that someone isn't paying attention to the reality on the ground, and it's not the ACLU.
Bunch of pussies shooting a $30000.00 bullet far away at some people, without accountability. No warriors, only point and click. Now you can be fat and not even be able to walk to kill. The civilian victims should start suing the government(s) responsible. They are wronged and this should clearly be illegal. I am very pro democracy and without accountability you are not in a real democracy. More like a republic led by pseudo dictators. I call them dictators because they say "national security" then they dictate what will happen, no debate, no constitution, no UN, no Geneva convention just... dictation.
There's the school of thought that says if you find yourself in a fair fight, you're doing something wrong. Of course, the person who gets to choose whether or not to fight and has a chance to prepare for that fight is likely the aggressor performing the ambush.
The sin of our current policy isn't so much that our drone and bomber pilots are safe from retaliation while killing the enemy, it's that we're doing such a lazy job of finding out who the target is. We'd string our cops up by their nipples if they started firebombing crack houses at random just because they claimed to have good intelligence that there was a crime going on inside and yet there doesn't seem to be the same sense of outrage when a car full of civilians gets blown up because we misidentified it as being driven by Baddie al Badguy.
There's the separate argument of whether or not our military would be less prone to misbehavior if they were more vulnerable to retaliation. Even if that were incontrovertibly true, I'd have problems with sending our guys into a fight with a t-shirt and a baseball bat.
They get to charge more per ticket for delivering the exact same product. What's not to love? (if you're a studio.)
I'd pay for 3D for a movie that's supposed to be all amazing all the time like Avatar. But even for an enjoyable movie like Dark Knight, which scenes really require 3D? It's better in 2D on a digital screen.
And let's not even get started on the whole liemax thing where we're told it's an imax theater but it's really just a barely adapted standard theater charging imax prices.
What bothers me is the possibility that content is cut from the game specifically to sell, rather than being developed in addition to the game. It's important to bear in mind though that extra content can still be developed before the game is totally finished, programmers don't create most of the game content.
Feeling cheated is kind of subjective. The whole thing with the new Starcraft games sounds like a cheat. It's not just Starcraft 2 but a trilogy of games, one game per race rather than one game with three races and three campaigns. And each game will go for $50 or $60. That feels like a cheat. It's supposed to be three full games worth of material but it doesn't feel right.
Lord of the Rings was shot like one big movie and released in installments. It didn't feel like such a cheat since the second one was in no way complete when the first hit theaters, likewise for the third when the second was released. And when released on DVD we knew the schedule in advance, movie versions first with expanded editions later. The whole set was expensive but well worth the money. But technically this is no different from Starcraft 2. Feels different, though.
It seems like the only way to handle this for games is to just get the game of the year or collected edition a year or three after release when all the DLC is shipped on CD. God knows nobody has enough hard drive space on the consoles to keep all the DLC handy.
It gives customer the impression that they're being nickel-and-dimed to death. Maybe if the main game were cheap ($20 or so) they could get away with a $5 multiplayer addon, but at normal videogame prices that stuff's not going to fly.
Games seemed to have longer shelf lives back in the day. The add-ons to the first two Wing Commander games really felt right. More content, more gameplay, not that much more money. It was honest. The GTAIV add-ons are like getting new games added to the original. That's honest. But I hate paying for stuff that should already be there, that was already developed beforehand.
We're going to keep seeing more of this nickel and dime crap. I never play sports games so the EA thing of putting in a new roster and rereleasing the same sports game the following year didn't affect me. But DLC means we're going to keep seeing more and more of this crap.
One thing that shouldn't surprise me anymore but keeps surprising me is that it seems like the more money you pay for software, the more half-assed it is. You get an off-the-shelf product like Quickbooks, it's impressive. You look at stuff that's industry-specific, specialized software that doesn't have a lot of competition, it costs thousands and feels primitive in comparison. It must be the lack of competition means there's no real reason to improve the product beyond what it already does.
I'm sure there are some exceptions to my experience, naturally. But these niche applications generally seem to be very expensive and primitive.
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This isn't "Clippy 2.0".
No, it's worse. Clippy's been weaponized.
wouldn't ID4-2 be ID2?
No. The first one is ID4. Second ID5. Third ID6. You know what this means? There's going to be three prequels. FUCK!!!!
The 1st Matrix movie was good. I don't see the analogy.
Just imagine if the second two ID4 movies are good. Alanis Morissette might write a song about it.
I think this is what most don't understand. I am the type of pirate that does it for convenience. There is no other method of accessing movies that is as convenient as piracy, and I don't see anything coming in the near future that can come even close to allowing me to easily watch movies in multiple places in my home or on the road. With a downloaded .mkv, I can watch any movie I have on any TV in my home or on any computer in the world at the press of a button. I would love to see a viable legal alternative to my current setup, but it will never exist due to the luddites in charge of the movie companies.
I really, really, really hate the itunes interface in general but the online version of the store for the ipod touch is actually a good thing. The only two shows I watch on the pod are olbermann and maddow and the feeds are almost automatic. They only post the last aired episode but with a click I can download them to the pod. No fees, possibly one commercial, very sweet. I assume the for-pay stuff like Daily Show and Colbert would be just as slick but they're usually charging too much for this. Movie rentals are $4 and many movies are listed for "purchase" at DVD prices. I'm sorry, if you're not giving me physical media then why should I pay physical media prices? If DVD kiosks in the supermarket rent movies for $1, why should the electronic version that's even cheaper cost as much as renting from blockbuster?
The tech is already here to make buying more convenient than piracy. The issue is that they're charging too much and doing too many dickish things.
I actually like the idea of being able to vote with my dollars. Direct measurement of consumption is far more accurate than Neilsen's. Treat a season like shareware, Doom I'm thinking. The first third is free. You pay for access to the second third. If it's a good show, you'll want to pay. But make the price reasonable. I see DVD's of full seasons going for $20 some places. Keep the price down low enough so that it's an impulse purchase and we'll do it. Just look at the app store. Dollar apps? shit, that's cheaper than an appetizer. Yeah, I'll try it. If it sucks, no big deal. Price it at $10, now I'm skeptical and likely won't give it a spin.
I think the problem with Clippy was that he was ten years too early. If the little fellow was around today he wouldn't get nearly as much abuse. People are more used to the wizard idea now, and to being guided through tasks.
Back then the average user was (I suspect) more technically knowledgeable - the PC as appliance wasn't entrenched. So everybody felt a little insulted when Clippy stuck his nose in their work.
They're still not getting this stuff right. Last week I had to help someone from another department with a mail merge. Office 2007, oh joy. Now there's the usual problems with the wizard not seeing the data source from excel because it doesn't like characters used to name the worksheet or it wants/doesn't want to see a named range, that kind of thing. But the problem here is that the addresses wouldn't line up right in Word. The problem was that Word wanted the address in an invisible text box and it defaulted the address block outside of that box. So I had to go manually cut the address block, then click around on the screen until I highlighted the box, thus revealing it, and paste the block in. I can't even begin to fault my coworker for being stumped on this one. It's the kind of problem she shouldn't be encountering.
I'll go back to the car analogy. Early cars were fussy and demanding. You either had to be a mechanic who enjoyed twiddling with them or hire a mechanic to twiddle it for you. Cars these days have gotten far more reliable. You take it in for maintenance when you're told to and the car won't suffer unexpected failures, they just frickin' work. You don't need to know about timing belts and spark plugs and carburetors vs fuel injection. You just have to have some common sense. Don't drive your car in loose sand. Don't drive through flooded streets. Don't take corners too sharply. People will still make these mistakes but it's not the fault of the car or the engineers.
Software hasn't reached that point yet, not universally. Certainly there have been many improvements across the board. But there are still areas that are, frankly, embarrassing. Microsoft deserves a good portion of the blame simply because they are so huge and influential but they aren't alone.
Bullshit technology is defined as tech that appears to be doing something useful but you end up wasting more time with it than you'd ever save.
BOB is bullshit technology. Voice recognition for the longest time has been bullshit. It's rapidly becoming more useful. Blackberries and the like for business needs can be useful but often becomes bullshit technology when people use them ineffectively.
You ever sucked d**k for a cheeseburger?
No. But I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
I've been eating big macs for years and I ain't hooked yet.
I won't take his apology seriously until he takes it seriously. The Japanese have a ceremony that helps to convey complete sincerity. I suggest he uses it.
The big problem with Google is privacy. Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do? I'd pay a subscription for such a thing. Maybe most people wouldn't, but I would. Search is such a big market that 5% of it is still huge. Maybe 5% of the people in the US would pay for private searching.
Microsoft doesn't have a problem with google abusing privacy. Their only complaint is that they want to be the ones doing it, not google! Ask me how I feel in a year or two but for now I still trust Microsoft a whole lot less than Google.
Browsing is also mobile browsing nowadays. Microsoft has not the capability any more to impose technologies (Silverlight etc.) on users any more. If 50% of the devices dont support your webpage and never will, you can not ignore any mor anybody who can not install some plugin. Morover IE is also loosing foothold on the desktop. So what was a move to hinder a competitor seriously (Why should i embed SVG on webpage if IE can not view it?) is slowly becoming a disadvantage. If Firefox and google chrome get the image of "just working fine" when compared to the IE and IE gets the image of causing problems, then they can stop making IE9.
The mobile space really is exploding. Smart phones were fairly useless for the longest time but the tech has really matured. They're very useful machines. And with the prevalence of non-Windows netbooks, there's more and more pressure for true interoperability.
Buy the standard version of the game for $49.99. But wait, the gold edition is shipping the same day! Get this exclusive handsome corinthian leather bullshit gold edition for $59.99. It includes those two skins and another special character.
I'm more than happy to pay for games but there's no fucking way I'm paying for this shit.
So instead of American jobs being outsourced to one dirt-poor foreign country they'll be outsourced to another. Total significance to the American worker and the American customer -- nothing.
I think HDD will continue to stay enough ahead of SSD in raw capacity that it will stay relevant for a long time. When SSD is affordable at 200 GB then HDD will already be affordable at 2 TB, etc.
It will be a long, protracted death. I anticipate seeing HDD for mass storage for another decade bare minimum. SSD will be for the stuff that has to be fast, HDD will be for the stuff that can be slower but SSD is too expensive for. (someone look this up in ten years and laugh at me.)
He is promoting rules of how you should eat, a dietary law if you will. If he tells us how to run our sex lives and wears a funny hat, case closed.
Will they start actively trying to sabotage Chinese web efforts? I don't mean by just giving unfiltered results. Will they try to do a Radio Free Europe, only make it actually useful? It wouldn't be the first time a western corporation declared war on China but would they really go so far?
Personally, I don't see why something like Phalanx wouldn't be the right system to use against really fast missiles. The energy released when a DU bullet hits a missile coming in at mach 2.8 (or mach 5.2 for Brahmos II) must be absolutely enormous. Sure, you'll get crap all over the deck, but that's not the end of the world.
Because of the engagement envelope. It's very, very tiny. Against a supersonic target it would be a second or two at most. Scoring a critical hit against a cruise missile doesn't do much good if you do so only a hundred feet out. In the Falklands War, the Brits almost lost a ship to a dud Exocet. The warhead didn't go off but just the impact and burning fuel was almost enough to sink the ship. Just how bad could this be? I don't think we've ever conducted live fire tests. We really should.
Your primary defense against incoming cruise missiles is blowing them up before they're launched, be it ground or air-based. Failing that, your next best bet is knocking them down at range with your SAMs. A CWIS system is only meant to be the last line of defense.
We already have web TV. Video on Demand has been talked about for years and years and tech skeptics have always scoffed about it being a decade out for decades. Well, we have it now. The internet has the carrying capacity. Netflix is doing it for a profit. And the part that really has me excited, small-time people are making money at it without giant corporate backing. Someone wants to be on national television, they're going to have to kiss the ass of a major corporation. There's barriers to entry like the massive cost of building a television network. The internet turns all that on its head.
1. Create the tech that makes internet broadcasting technically feasible. Done.
2. Create the business model that makes internet broadcasting financially feasible. Work still needs done but it's happening. Partially done.
3. Profit
What we've seen so far is the creation of net-based versions of the cheapie mainstream shows. Porn is cheap to produce and there were a lot of amateur and low-rent outfits out there even before the net happened. They were the first ones to make it big on the net. We're seeing computer tech shows, talk shows and the like with various podcasts. They give away the content for free and make their money on sponsorship deals. While a lot of work goes into them, they're still not as expensive to produce as a network television comedy or drama. We've seen a few attempts at net-based sitcoms but they died.
If the Taliban has a bomb factory (legit target) in a mosque/hospital/kitten orphanage (illegal target) it becomes a legit target, and for good reason. A AAA cannon mounted on the Eiffel Tower would be a legit target.
When did this change, after we abandoned the Geneva Conventions? I know we still operated under them in Vietnam when a tactic used by the NVA was to locate SAM sites in the courtyards of hospitals.
I don't think the question here is whether it is permissible to attack military enemies, so much as whether it is permissible to engage in the assassination of specific individuals, to say nothing of the accuracy of the intelligence that leads to such assassination missions and the extensive collateral damage that may end up creating more enemies than it destroys. We are, after all, talking about an intelligence community whose failures over the last fifty years would be comical if the consequences weren't so grave.
Plus it's the extra-judicial killing of American citizens. Currently, our laws support judicial killing but the whole process is open to public scrutiny. Cops are allowed to use lethal force but every action is subject to review and criminal prosecution if the cop acted illegally. While there have been some awful exceptions, generally speaking, representatives of the government can't just kill you for no good reason and get away with it. And our legal system is based on the idea that it's better to let ten guilty men go free rather than send one innocent man to jail. It's meant to error on the side of caution.
If we were to declare a special case for citizens who are criminals beyond the means of law enforcement to capture, who it might only be possible to kill from afar, whose continued existence threatens the lives of American citizens, the judgement call on killing them should not be held by the same people who do the killing. There should be a chance for public review and accountability. And if we're going to kill them, we'd damn well better not take out a dozen bystanders while we're at it.
The failure of the "let's just trust our leaders" model is what spurred us to form a republic in the first place. To have it come up again in the context of the two biggest military disasters of our nation's history suggests that someone isn't paying attention to the reality on the ground, and it's not the ACLU.
Yes, a thousand times yes.
Bunch of pussies shooting a $30000.00 bullet far away at some people, without accountability. No warriors, only point and click. Now you can be fat and not even be able to walk to kill. The civilian victims should start suing the government(s) responsible. They are wronged and this should clearly be illegal. I am very pro democracy and without accountability you are not in a real democracy. More like a republic led by pseudo dictators. I call them dictators because they say "national security" then they dictate what will happen, no debate, no constitution, no UN, no Geneva convention just... dictation.
There's the school of thought that says if you find yourself in a fair fight, you're doing something wrong. Of course, the person who gets to choose whether or not to fight and has a chance to prepare for that fight is likely the aggressor performing the ambush.
The sin of our current policy isn't so much that our drone and bomber pilots are safe from retaliation while killing the enemy, it's that we're doing such a lazy job of finding out who the target is. We'd string our cops up by their nipples if they started firebombing crack houses at random just because they claimed to have good intelligence that there was a crime going on inside and yet there doesn't seem to be the same sense of outrage when a car full of civilians gets blown up because we misidentified it as being driven by Baddie al Badguy.
There's the separate argument of whether or not our military would be less prone to misbehavior if they were more vulnerable to retaliation. Even if that were incontrovertibly true, I'd have problems with sending our guys into a fight with a t-shirt and a baseball bat.
They get to charge more per ticket for delivering the exact same product. What's not to love? (if you're a studio.)
I'd pay for 3D for a movie that's supposed to be all amazing all the time like Avatar. But even for an enjoyable movie like Dark Knight, which scenes really require 3D? It's better in 2D on a digital screen.
And let's not even get started on the whole liemax thing where we're told it's an imax theater but it's really just a barely adapted standard theater charging imax prices.
What bothers me is the possibility that content is cut from the game specifically to sell, rather than being developed in addition to the game. It's important to bear in mind though that extra content can still be developed before the game is totally finished, programmers don't create most of the game content.
Feeling cheated is kind of subjective. The whole thing with the new Starcraft games sounds like a cheat. It's not just Starcraft 2 but a trilogy of games, one game per race rather than one game with three races and three campaigns. And each game will go for $50 or $60. That feels like a cheat. It's supposed to be three full games worth of material but it doesn't feel right.
Lord of the Rings was shot like one big movie and released in installments. It didn't feel like such a cheat since the second one was in no way complete when the first hit theaters, likewise for the third when the second was released. And when released on DVD we knew the schedule in advance, movie versions first with expanded editions later. The whole set was expensive but well worth the money. But technically this is no different from Starcraft 2. Feels different, though.
It seems like the only way to handle this for games is to just get the game of the year or collected edition a year or three after release when all the DLC is shipped on CD. God knows nobody has enough hard drive space on the consoles to keep all the DLC handy.
It gives customer the impression that they're being nickel-and-dimed to death. Maybe if the main game were cheap ($20 or so) they could get away with a $5 multiplayer addon, but at normal videogame prices that stuff's not going to fly.
Games seemed to have longer shelf lives back in the day. The add-ons to the first two Wing Commander games really felt right. More content, more gameplay, not that much more money. It was honest. The GTAIV add-ons are like getting new games added to the original. That's honest. But I hate paying for stuff that should already be there, that was already developed beforehand.
We're going to keep seeing more of this nickel and dime crap. I never play sports games so the EA thing of putting in a new roster and rereleasing the same sports game the following year didn't affect me. But DLC means we're going to keep seeing more and more of this crap.
Film at 11.
One thing that shouldn't surprise me anymore but keeps surprising me is that it seems like the more money you pay for software, the more half-assed it is. You get an off-the-shelf product like Quickbooks, it's impressive. You look at stuff that's industry-specific, specialized software that doesn't have a lot of competition, it costs thousands and feels primitive in comparison. It must be the lack of competition means there's no real reason to improve the product beyond what it already does.
I'm sure there are some exceptions to my experience, naturally. But these niche applications generally seem to be very expensive and primitive.