The summary says "Apparently [Microsoft] believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight'". But here's what the article actually says:
"In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight. Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address."
If the alternative to Microsoft FUD is Anti-Microsoft FUD, I'm not sure we're much better off.
That might be true, I haven't actually looked at the current draft. The point however is that we are *already* banning games. We have mandatory age ratings and even stricter bans (no advertisement, no public sales). All the child protection is *already* in place. So any change isn't adding any child protection at all
Again, the impression I get from the article is that the new draft is less restrictive than the current law, no? It says "The Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK) of the countries had unanimously decided on a production and distribution ban for violent computer games for the first time in the end of May. The responsible Federal Ministry of Family Affairs is presently working on a less drastic draft [...]"
advertising has a *very* broad definition, aka. every mentioning of the game in a positive context. So they not only ban the game, but also ban any talk about it in public gaming press.
In that case I'd say the problems with german legislation (and semantics) are a lot deeper than just an issue with videogames. A critique of a product, written by someone who does not stand to gain directly from the sale of that product, is simply not "advertising" by any sane definition of the term.
I don't think I've ever seen schoolgirls in CS, but I admit a lot of players behave that way.:)
But I have seen the effects of CS addiction on some kids, so that is one game that I definitely think parents should be required to "approve". If they have to be the ones to buy the game, then at least they can't say they "didn't know" and that's "it's not their responsibility".
Anyway, the Heise article states that the current draft of the law will only forbid advertising and selling to children. Is that not true? Does it say anything about banning the sale or development of the games completely?
As to "violence dominated", unless it's clearly defined, I guess it will depend on the criteria of the BPjM. Personally, I interpret it as games where killing (or torturing, etc.) people is the primary objective. And if they apply it that way, I have nothing against banning direct sales to children, or advertising targeted at children.
But, like I said on the other post, Germany does have a history of very silly videogame "modifications" (like the green blood in Doom, as if that makes any difference). I wonder if Pac-Man counts as "violence dominated", since you keep eating ghosts and being eaten by them. No, wait, that's "extreme sexual content".
Do you have any examples of games rated as "glorifying violence" by the PBjM?
What the article says is that "The IMK had decided on a production and distribution ban for violent computer games [...but...] the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs is presently working on a less drastic draft of the law which would make "violence glorifying" and "violence dominated" games indexed by the BPjM, meaning these could no longer be advertised and sold to youths".
In other words, only "violence dominated" and "violence glorifying" games (which I take to mean things like GTA, deathmatch games, etc.) would be banned from sale to minors and advertising, and there wouldn't be any problem with developing them or selling them to adults.
Is the article incorrect?
P.S. - I don't think there's any question about the sanity of most politicians; they're very clearly insane.
I see you know a lot more about psychological studies than the American Psychological Association (and the universities and institutes that have conducted long-term studies in this area). Have you considered writing to them, offering your services (either as a test subject or self-proclaimed expert)?
Unless of course (as I think it's safe to assume), by "non-bogus" you mean "a study that agrees with your opinion".
But look at it on the bright side, even if the study confirms all the other ones, you'll get to kill virtual people all day long without mommy and daddy finding out!
So you equate "targeting explosive ads at children" with "throwing dynamite at a kid" ? In that case, maybe you should compare it with "beating kids to death with a stack of Doom 3 CD-ROMs".
It's perfectly possible for kids to handle explosives (or guns, alcohol, etc.) correctly. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to advertise and sell those things directly to them.
As to your claim that "exposing kids to violent games does not harm them", good job posting all those supporting links.
Study after study has demonstrated that violent games make children and teenagers less sensitive to violence (not necessarily more agressive, assuming they're stable to begin with, but less likely to intervene in situations where others are victims of violence, and more likely to consider violence as an appropriate solution to problems). It has also been shown that more agressive people are naturally drawn towards violent games, which means the games can be used as an early warning sign - if the parents know their children are playing those games (which is the whole point of a law banning direct sales to children).
On top of that, the time that kids spend playing Doom 3 (for example) is time they do not spend doing other, more intellectually stimulating activities (which can include playing other videogames, coding, reading, playing sports, plotting world domination, etc.). In my personal experience, people who play FPS games obsessively and exclusively tend not to be very smart. Maybe they play FPS games because the other games are too complex for them, or maybe it's the other way around. More liklely, it's a self-reinforcing loop.
While I wouldn't have any problem with my kids playing FarCry, I definitely want to know that they're playing it, and I do not want marketing departments and retailers conspiring to undermine my parental responsibility just so they can increase their profits (at my cost, no less). I don't have any problem with kids being "exposed" to violence, but I do have a problem with companies trying to shove it down their throats.
How does requiring parents to know which games their children play "resctrict the way they can raise their children"? Unless your definition of "raise" means "let them do anything they want and not even be informed about it".
If anything, forcing parents to act as intermediaries between their children and commercial corporations will force them (and, eventually, the corporations) to act more responsibly.
I'm strongly opposed to any law that bans or criminalises access to any kind of information, but the issue here is that companies are actively marketing (potentially harmful) products to children simply because that increases their profits. And when a company has millions in marketing funds and easy access to the media, 24 hours a day, things get a bit skewed against the parents, no matter how "responsible" they are.
Do you also think that it's "ridiculous" that kids can't buy whisky or cigarettes, in most countries?
In every country, "some politicians" will propose very stupid things. But this is what the Heise article says:
"The responsible Federal Ministry of Family Affairs is presently working on a less drastic draft of a law for the protection of children and youth. Instead of only the previous "violence glorifying" games, also the "violence dominated" games should be indexed by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPjM) in the future. These may then no longer be advertised and sold to youths."
If this is what the law does (limit advertising and sale of violent games), I have absolutely no problem with it, and in fact think it could be a good thing. There is far too much advertising targeted at children, nowadays, and the gaming industry has been losing originality and repeating the brainless FPS formula ad nauseum.
Cigarettes can't be advertised in most places but just about every coffeshop throughout Europe sells them. Porn can't be advertised, either, but the porn industry makes more money than Hollywood. So what was your point...?
And I believe the keyword in your first sentence is "centered". Is it too much to ask that games have a plot and some gameplay beyond pressing the trigger and killing anything that moves?
Germany has some really stupid "anti-violence" laws (which led to silly things such as changing the colour of blood from red to green in Doom), but IMO limiting the advertising and sale of "violence-centered" games to children is a good idea (let's see if they don't screw it up in the final draft of the law). Not only does it force the parents to take responsibility for their kids' education, but it also puts some pressure on developers to come up with more original, more constructive and more challenging forms of gameplay.
gt; Actually, the parent's wouldn't be allowed to let their kids play such games.
Can you please post a link to the part of the law that says that?
gt; the law prohibits advertisments so no TV spots,
TV spots would probably be allowed after a certain time of day, as happens with ads for alcoholic drinks, for example. The current draft of the law does not forbid advertising; it forbids advertising targetted at minors. I don't remeber any TV spots for FarCry, anyway, so even if they couldn't run TV spots at all, that would make very little difference.
> no posters,
Nothing prevents them from making posters as long as those aren't ads for the game.
gt; no standup figures, no games convention booth
They're free to have a games convention booth, as long as they limit access only to people over the legal limit (ex. 16 years of age). This is already true for games with explicit sexual content. And, inside that booth (or any other space limited to adults), they can even have all the ads and stand-up figures they want.
and no copies on retailers shelfes.
Of course they can have copies on retailers' shelves, just as restaurants are free to have whisky bottles and cigarette packs on their shelves. They simply cannot sell those products directly to minors.
This might harm them, don't you think?
Yes, I think it will (not much, though - there are still game review magazines and the internet, which is how most people learn about new games), but I don't feel the least bit sorry for them. I feel that advertising targeted at children is harmful (to the children and, indirectly, to their parents).
This might also force game developers to be a bit more original with their future games and come up with something that's isn't just a repetition of the same "shoot everything that moves" formula. I don't mind if my kids want to play violent games, but am concerned with advertisers brainswashing them into buying and playing dumb, repetitive games, when they could instead be playing something that stimulates their intellectual abilities (regardless of whether it's violent or not).
I guess it will boil down to the details in the final draft and on how the law is applied. If it's used to limit access to every game that shows a drop of blood, that's obviously stupid, but I don't think that limiting the marketing of games that revolve exclusively around violence is a bad thing. First-person shooters have become the junk food of the games industry, and I don't want marketing departments trying to get my kids "hooked".
> Here's a better way to accomplish the desired result- make it > illegal for children to possess/play such games and have > consequences for parents who fail their children in this regard.
While you're at it, why not prosecute parents that fail to indoctrinate their children with the state-approved worldview or religion? Surely they are "failing their children" by letting them see or think about something the Beloved Leader doesn't approve. Yes, let's turn parenting into the KGB.
If my kids want to play Doom, and if I think they're mature enough to play Doom, it's none of the government's fucking business. But since I can't (and have no desire to) control what my kids see 24/7, I expect sane limits on what can be advertised and sold directly to them. That is what this law does; it prevents marketing departments from undermining parenting, by forcing children to buy violent games through their parents.
Your notions of parenting and capitalism (not to mention freedom) must be seriously screwed up if you think that it should be legal to advertise and sell a certain product to children, but then it should be illegal for them to own it, with consequences for the rest of their family.
Did you bother to RTFA? This law simply forbids companies from advertising the games directly at kids ("stalking" them, to use your analogy) and shops from selling the games directly to kids (picture your own analogy). See the similarity?
Companies are still free to develop the games and kids are still free to ask their parents to buy the game for them.
Unless you give up your job and homeschool your kids, it's kind of hard to know (let alone control) what they're doing 24/7. And I'm not sure that's desirable, either.
I'm sure you wouldn't like to see explosives manufacturers (for example) targeting your 8-year-old kids. Buy a stick of dynamite, throw it at your friends, it'll be a blast! (add footage of cartoon character covered in soot, but still in one piece, and then everbody laughs).
Likewise, some people think that certain kinds of games (or certain kinds of movies, powertools, guns, junk food, industrial chemicals, cigarettes, liquor, etc.) should not be advertised or sold directly to children. It's a crazy notion, I know...
Your talk about "banning videogames" suggests that you don't know what this law says, and didn't even bother to RTFA (in fact, it looks like you didn't even read the fucking summary, let alone the fucking article). The law doesn't "ban" any games and doesn't even forbid children from playing those games. All it says is that the games can't be advertised or sold directly to children. If your kids want to play it, they can simply ask you to buy it for them.
So you see, this law is exactly what you were asking for: it "outlaws ignorant parents" by making sure they are informed, and forces them to make a conscious decision.
What Crytek is doing here is called "getting free publicity". Their "threat to leave the country" is nonsensical, for two reasons:
1. The place where the game is developed makes no difference; the law applies to all games marketed and sold in Germany. They could move to Mars and that wouldn't make any difference.
2. All this law does is force kids to buy the games through their parents. Is Crytek's target market "kids who buy and play games without telling their parents"? Even if it is (which I find hard to believe), there's still #1.
Not quite. Contrary to what some rethorically challenged people like to state, you can prove a negative. You can prove that a certain entity doesn't exist by proving that it has contradicting characteristics. In this universe, there are certain well-established limits to physics and biology. I don't think it's at all clear that leprechauns "could" exist. For example, if they have those tiny heads, do they have enough brain cells to make them behave the way stories claim they behave?
You can't prove that Santa Claus doesn't exist (in fact, if you work in retail or marketing, you know he's very real), but you can prove that a sledge pulled by reindeer couldn't reach the speeds and accelerations required to visit every home on Earth during that one night. So you have to either accept that Santa doesn't exist or change your definition of "Santa Claus" to something slightly different (or very different), that at least could (even if you can't prove that it does).
The trouble with "god" is that there is no universally accepted definition. So, until you define what "god" is, indeed you cannot prove it doesn't exist. "Proof" of something that is undefined is logically meanigless. For some definitions of "god", its existence can be proven in purely logical terms, but what do we gain by that?
You can take any simple system and add layers of useless, self-cancelling complexity to it, so it would be trivial to "weave god into reality". The real question is: are gods necessary to make sense of the universe? And the answer to that seems to be a pretty resounding "no". In fact, if anything, attributing phenomena to supernatural, unknowable entities is a way to limit our understanding of the universe. Ockham's razor and all that.
To quote Lewis Carroll, "Don't be in such a hurry to believe next time - I'll tell you why - If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn't believe it, and rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn't recover its right shape for nearly two days."
And then there's the separate (but often associated) issue of religion, which is responsible for more irrationality, obscurantism, death and self-righteous cruelty than just about any other part of human culture.
It's not just Dreamweaver; Photoshop CS3 does the same. Not only that, but it installs the service with the name "##Id_String1.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762 ##", so it's not exactly easy to spot.
Here is a page with instructions about how to remove it (read the full thread; the first post has an error):
Well, Origin had the honesty to classify those games as "Interactive Movies". And they made some of the best RPGs ever (Ultima VII is probably the peak of the RPG genre).
Anyway, the problem with Oblivion aren't the cutscenes (which are weak but thankfully few). The problem with Oblivion is they tried to make a "RPG" for 10 year old players with consoles. The result is a bit like trying to make an "intellectual" version of Mortal Kombat or a "realistic" version of Super Mario. It's just the wrong kind of approach. Oblivion would be a much better game if they did away with the pseudo-RPG elements (and the hideous, generally uninspired, buggy-as-hell "quests") and focused on the combat aspects. Oblivion is actually quite fun as a hack'n'slash game. It's just not a good (believable, immersive, consistent) RPG or "world simulator".
I agree with some of the posters above, though, the "Thieves' Guild" sub-plot is by far the best part of the game. It's almost as if it was designed by someone with vision, and actually playtested (something that I find impossible to believe about the rest of the game).
It still suffers from the hand-holding, just-follow-the-arrow, auto-balancing-enemies approach, though, and it still has some incredible bugs. For example, whenever you talk to a thief you have a conversation topic called "The Gray Fox", and they all tell you exactly the same thing, word for word... including the Gray Fox himself. Maybe he's just one of those people who like to talk about themselves in the 3rd person, but still, it's kind of confusing to see him doubt his own existence...
True, you can choose the alternative style of play which consists of following the green arrow and clicking where you're told by the pop-up messages. In fact, I hear that for TES V they've decided to take the concept further, and the game will play itself without any human intervention.
Well, with all due respect for Feynman, who was a very smart and funny guy, he sometimes sacrificed intellectual honesty for a good story, and was a bit full of himself (as he easily admitted).
If you're working as a biologist and routinely have to refer to specific muscles, it's not very practical to take 15 minutes off every day to "look up" the names of those muscles. I doubt Feynman had to "look up" Planck's or Boltzmann's constants or Avogadro's number every time he needed to use them. That is why the biology students knew the names of the muscles; because they used those tools frequently, not because it took them 4 years to "memorise them".
The biology curriculum is full of useless "legacy" crap, but so is every other one.
I'm over 50 but I knew my home street address and phone # when I was a kid.
So do I, and so does everyone I know. Do you honestly think 15 or 25 year olds (the ones more likely to have cell phones or PDAs) don't know their own addresses, these days? Get lost a lot, do they? Not only do they know those, they also know their (often multiple) e-mail addresses, chat room nicknames, web page addresses, and so on. And the same goes for their friends'.
I knew all of my sibling's and parent's birth dates.
Again, so does everyone I know. But can you honestly say that, when you were a kid, you knew your aunts' and uncles' birth dates as well as you now know your nieces' and nephews'? Did you know your grandparents' birth dates as well as you know your grandchildren's?
People over 50 are more likely to remember birthdays of "close relatives" than people under 30? Maybe that's because people over 50 have had 20 extra years in which to memorise those birthdays. And maybe it's also because those "people over 50" actually saw many of their "close relatives" being born (children, grandchildren, nephews), unlike the people under 30 (whose "relatives" are more likely to be grandparents, uncles, cousins etc.).
People have trouble remembering their own phone number? Could that have something to do with the fact that it's not a number they call very often, if at all?
The notion that having a cellphone or a PDA somehow influenced the basic abilities of the human brain, reversing in 20 years what took 200 thousand to build, is even more ridiculous. Maybe people just aren't bothering to memorise 100 different things because they know that, by memorising 3 things, they'll easily be able to retrieve all the other ones. And that leaves enough mental addressing space for 97 new things, that the "people over 50" (or without PDAs, or whatever) were never able to learn in the first place (let alone remember).
Here's a thought: if, as this article claims, modern electronic devices are "dumbing down brain power", why don't we forbid scientists from using them? I wonder if the people making this study memorised all the results, or if their "brain power" is so "dumbed down" that they had to write them down on a piece of paper or even (gasp!) an electronic spreadsheet or database.
The article concludes: "Only 55 per cent of men could remember their wedding anniversary, compared to 90 per cent of women."
If we take their previous conclusions as valid, that can ony mean one thing: men use cell phones almost twice as much as women.
And I'll probably write a couple more, the first of which will be about HDR (high dynamic range) digital imaging. The problem with DMNet is they pay the same for a 3-paragraph article about "how to make your photos sharper in Photoshop" and a 20,000-word article about "how to build a working time machine and fix global warming", so I obviously don't have a big incentive (apart from "educating the masses") to take time off my normal job(s) to write for them.
I've also written a few guides & tips for my DVD site:
BTW, despite a couple of thousand hits a day and a pretty decent search ranking for the relevant terms, the site has what financial experts call "negative profits". Turns out that educating the masses isn't very good business (even BBC Prime has replaced its "Learning Zone" documentaries with soap operas). On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I'm going to heaven... oh, wait, I'm agnostic. Damn.:-P
I'll probably write a couple of chapters (and do most graphics) for a book about photography that might get published within a year (depends on the main writer), but that'll be in Portuguese, and I doubt it'll ever get translated into English.
As to that JPEG 2000 plug-in, there are pretty big differences in implementation, yes. I don't know j2k, so I really can't say how it ranks. I've been using Luratech's plug-in on the grounds that it was the only one available when I got it.:-) Their browser plug-in is pretty bad, but the compressor seems to be quite good. In this comparison it ranked as the best (for Photoshop), only slightly behind ACDSee's built-in implementation:
Until all browsers (and some digital cameras) come with JPEG 2000 support, I don't see it taking off. Part of the problem lies with the JPEG 2000 specification itself, which is vague about some things, and lacking some basic features (like EXIF, to store camera data). Microsoft's WMP / HDPhoto format is pretty civilized (support for HDR, etc.), but it has somewhat lower quality than JPEG 2000 (it's optimized for speed), and the actual compression and decompression has to be done through Microsoft's APIs. Maybe if they improve it an open-source it (yeah, right), it'll get support from browser and camera makers.
If it's wrapped in a common container (ex., AVI, Quicktime) and if downloading and installing the codec is an option, then pretty much anything can be converted into anything (at least within the same container format), so the point becomes more or less irrelevant. I thought you meant "will play anywhere right 'out of the box' ", that's why I mentioned MPEG-1.
It's rarely necessary to have faster-than-realtime transcoding, so "how long does it take" is usually less relevant than "can it be done dynamically, during streaming / recording / etc.?".
Of course, I work in post-production so I tend to look at things from a slightly different POV (having a "master" archive - determined by the original production format - and creating "distribution" copies when needed). But I'm pretty sure that most people don't need to transfer 1 million hours of video into their iPod on a daily basis.;^)
Slashdot Mirror
The summary says "Apparently [Microsoft] believe an almost 90% drop in networking performance is 'slight'". But here's what the article actually says:
"In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight. Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address."
If the alternative to Microsoft FUD is Anti-Microsoft FUD, I'm not sure we're much better off.
That might be true, I haven't actually looked at the current draft. The point however is that we are *already* banning games. We have mandatory age ratings and even stricter bans (no advertisement, no public sales). All the child protection is *already* in place. So any change isn't adding any child protection at all
Again, the impression I get from the article is that the new draft is less restrictive than the current law, no? It says "The Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK) of the countries had unanimously decided on a production and distribution ban for violent computer games for the first time in the end of May. The responsible Federal Ministry of Family Affairs is presently working on a less drastic draft [...]"
advertising has a *very* broad definition, aka. every mentioning of the game in a positive context. So they not only ban the game, but also ban any talk about it in public gaming press.
In that case I'd say the problems with german legislation (and semantics) are a lot deeper than just an issue with videogames. A critique of a product, written by someone who does not stand to gain directly from the sale of that product, is simply not "advertising" by any sane definition of the term.
I don't think I've ever seen schoolgirls in CS, but I admit a lot of players behave that way. :)
But I have seen the effects of CS addiction on some kids, so that is one game that I definitely think parents should be required to "approve". If they have to be the ones to buy the game, then at least they can't say they "didn't know" and that's "it's not their responsibility".
Anyway, the Heise article states that the current draft of the law will only forbid advertising and selling to children. Is that not true? Does it say anything about banning the sale or development of the games completely?
As to "violence dominated", unless it's clearly defined, I guess it will depend on the criteria of the BPjM. Personally, I interpret it as games where killing (or torturing, etc.) people is the primary objective. And if they apply it that way, I have nothing against banning direct sales to children, or advertising targeted at children.
But, like I said on the other post, Germany does have a history of very silly videogame "modifications" (like the green blood in Doom, as if that makes any difference). I wonder if Pac-Man counts as "violence dominated", since you keep eating ghosts and being eaten by them. No, wait, that's "extreme sexual content".
Do you have any examples of games rated as "glorifying violence" by the PBjM?
What the article says is that "The IMK had decided on a production and distribution ban for violent computer games [...but...] the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs is presently working on a less drastic draft of the law which would make "violence glorifying" and "violence dominated" games indexed by the BPjM, meaning these could no longer be advertised and sold to youths".
In other words, only "violence dominated" and "violence glorifying" games (which I take to mean things like GTA, deathmatch games, etc.) would be banned from sale to minors and advertising, and there wouldn't be any problem with developing them or selling them to adults.
Is the article incorrect?
P.S. - I don't think there's any question about the sanity of most politicians; they're very clearly insane.
I see you know a lot more about psychological studies than the American Psychological Association (and the universities and institutes that have conducted long-term studies in this area). Have you considered writing to them, offering your services (either as a test subject or self-proclaimed expert)?
Unless of course (as I think it's safe to assume), by "non-bogus" you mean "a study that agrees with your opinion".
But look at it on the bright side, even if the study confirms all the other ones, you'll get to kill virtual people all day long without mommy and daddy finding out!
So you equate "targeting explosive ads at children" with "throwing dynamite at a kid" ? In that case, maybe you should compare it with "beating kids to death with a stack of Doom 3 CD-ROMs".
It's perfectly possible for kids to handle explosives (or guns, alcohol, etc.) correctly. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to advertise and sell those things directly to them.
As to your claim that "exposing kids to violent games does not harm them", good job posting all those supporting links.
Study after study has demonstrated that violent games make children and teenagers less sensitive to violence (not necessarily more agressive, assuming they're stable to begin with, but less likely to intervene in situations where others are victims of violence, and more likely to consider violence as an appropriate solution to problems). It has also been shown that more agressive people are naturally drawn towards violent games, which means the games can be used as an early warning sign - if the parents know their children are playing those games (which is the whole point of a law banning direct sales to children).
Here:
http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8449
etc.
On top of that, the time that kids spend playing Doom 3 (for example) is time they do not spend doing other, more intellectually stimulating activities (which can include playing other videogames, coding, reading, playing sports, plotting world domination, etc.). In my personal experience, people who play FPS games obsessively and exclusively tend not to be very smart. Maybe they play FPS games because the other games are too complex for them, or maybe it's the other way around. More liklely, it's a self-reinforcing loop.
While I wouldn't have any problem with my kids playing FarCry, I definitely want to know that they're playing it, and I do not want marketing departments and retailers conspiring to undermine my parental responsibility just so they can increase their profits (at my cost, no less). I don't have any problem with kids being "exposed" to violence, but I do have a problem with companies trying to shove it down their throats.
How does requiring parents to know which games their children play "resctrict the way they can raise their children"? Unless your definition of "raise" means "let them do anything they want and not even be informed about it".
If anything, forcing parents to act as intermediaries between their children and commercial corporations will force them (and, eventually, the corporations) to act more responsibly.
I'm strongly opposed to any law that bans or criminalises access to any kind of information, but the issue here is that companies are actively marketing (potentially harmful) products to children simply because that increases their profits. And when a company has millions in marketing funds and easy access to the media, 24 hours a day, things get a bit skewed against the parents, no matter how "responsible" they are.
Do you also think that it's "ridiculous" that kids can't buy whisky or cigarettes, in most countries?
In every country, "some politicians" will propose very stupid things. But this is what the Heise article says:
"The responsible Federal Ministry of Family Affairs is presently working on a less drastic draft of a law for the protection of children and youth. Instead of only the previous "violence glorifying" games, also the "violence dominated" games should be indexed by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPjM) in the future. These may then no longer be advertised and sold to youths."
If this is what the law does (limit advertising and sale of violent games), I have absolutely no problem with it, and in fact think it could be a good thing. There is far too much advertising targeted at children, nowadays, and the gaming industry has been losing originality and repeating the brainless FPS formula ad nauseum.
Cigarettes can't be advertised in most places but just about every coffeshop throughout Europe sells them. Porn can't be advertised, either, but the porn industry makes more money than Hollywood. So what was your point...?
And I believe the keyword in your first sentence is "centered". Is it too much to ask that games have a plot and some gameplay beyond pressing the trigger and killing anything that moves?
Germany has some really stupid "anti-violence" laws (which led to silly things such as changing the colour of blood from red to green in Doom), but IMO limiting the advertising and sale of "violence-centered" games to children is a good idea (let's see if they don't screw it up in the final draft of the law). Not only does it force the parents to take responsibility for their kids' education, but it also puts some pressure on developers to come up with more original, more constructive and more challenging forms of gameplay.
gt; Actually, the parent's wouldn't be allowed to let their kids play such games.
Can you please post a link to the part of the law that says that?
gt; the law prohibits advertisments so no TV spots,
TV spots would probably be allowed after a certain time of day, as happens with ads for alcoholic drinks, for example. The current draft of the law does not forbid advertising; it forbids advertising targetted at minors. I don't remeber any TV spots for FarCry, anyway, so even if they couldn't run TV spots at all, that would make very little difference.
> no posters,
Nothing prevents them from making posters as long as those aren't ads for the game.
gt; no standup figures, no games convention booth
They're free to have a games convention booth, as long as they limit access only to people over the legal limit (ex. 16 years of age). This is already true for games with explicit sexual content. And, inside that booth (or any other space limited to adults), they can even have all the ads and stand-up figures they want.
and no copies on retailers shelfes.
Of course they can have copies on retailers' shelves, just as restaurants are free to have whisky bottles and cigarette packs on their shelves. They simply cannot sell those products directly to minors.
This might harm them, don't you think?
Yes, I think it will (not much, though - there are still game review magazines and the internet, which is how most people learn about new games), but I don't feel the least bit sorry for them. I feel that advertising targeted at children is harmful (to the children and, indirectly, to their parents).
This might also force game developers to be a bit more original with their future games and come up with something that's isn't just a repetition of the same "shoot everything that moves" formula. I don't mind if my kids want to play violent games, but am concerned with advertisers brainswashing them into buying and playing dumb, repetitive games, when they could instead be playing something that stimulates their intellectual abilities (regardless of whether it's violent or not).
I guess it will boil down to the details in the final draft and on how the law is applied. If it's used to limit access to every game that shows a drop of blood, that's obviously stupid, but I don't think that limiting the marketing of games that revolve exclusively around violence is a bad thing. First-person shooters have become the junk food of the games industry, and I don't want marketing departments trying to get my kids "hooked".
> Here's a better way to accomplish the desired result- make it
> illegal for children to possess/play such games and have
> consequences for parents who fail their children in this regard.
While you're at it, why not prosecute parents that fail to indoctrinate their children with the state-approved worldview or religion? Surely they are "failing their children" by letting them see or think about something the Beloved Leader doesn't approve. Yes, let's turn parenting into the KGB.
If my kids want to play Doom, and if I think they're mature enough to play Doom, it's none of the government's fucking business. But since I can't (and have no desire to) control what my kids see 24/7, I expect sane limits on what can be advertised and sold directly to them. That is what this law does; it prevents marketing departments from undermining parenting, by forcing children to buy violent games through their parents.
Your notions of parenting and capitalism (not to mention freedom) must be seriously screwed up if you think that it should be legal to advertise and sell a certain product to children, but then it should be illegal for them to own it, with consequences for the rest of their family.
Did you bother to RTFA? This law simply forbids companies from advertising the games directly at kids ("stalking" them, to use your analogy) and shops from selling the games directly to kids (picture your own analogy). See the similarity?
Companies are still free to develop the games and kids are still free to ask their parents to buy the game for them.
Unless you give up your job and homeschool your kids, it's kind of hard to know (let alone control) what they're doing 24/7. And I'm not sure that's desirable, either.
I'm sure you wouldn't like to see explosives manufacturers (for example) targeting your 8-year-old kids. Buy a stick of dynamite, throw it at your friends, it'll be a blast! (add footage of cartoon character covered in soot, but still in one piece, and then everbody laughs).
Likewise, some people think that certain kinds of games (or certain kinds of movies, powertools, guns, junk food, industrial chemicals, cigarettes, liquor, etc.) should not be advertised or sold directly to children. It's a crazy notion, I know...
Your talk about "banning videogames" suggests that you don't know what this law says, and didn't even bother to RTFA (in fact, it looks like you didn't even read the fucking summary, let alone the fucking article). The law doesn't "ban" any games and doesn't even forbid children from playing those games. All it says is that the games can't be advertised or sold directly to children. If your kids want to play it, they can simply ask you to buy it for them.
So you see, this law is exactly what you were asking for: it "outlaws ignorant parents" by making sure they are informed, and forces them to make a conscious decision.
What Crytek is doing here is called "getting free publicity". Their "threat to leave the country" is nonsensical, for two reasons:
1. The place where the game is developed makes no difference; the law applies to all games marketed and sold in Germany. They could move to Mars and that wouldn't make any difference.
2. All this law does is force kids to buy the games through their parents. Is Crytek's target market "kids who buy and play games without telling their parents"? Even if it is (which I find hard to believe), there's still #1.
Not quite. Contrary to what some rethorically challenged people like to state, you can prove a negative. You can prove that a certain entity doesn't exist by proving that it has contradicting characteristics. In this universe, there are certain well-established limits to physics and biology. I don't think it's at all clear that leprechauns "could" exist. For example, if they have those tiny heads, do they have enough brain cells to make them behave the way stories claim they behave?
You can't prove that Santa Claus doesn't exist (in fact, if you work in retail or marketing, you know he's very real), but you can prove that a sledge pulled by reindeer couldn't reach the speeds and accelerations required to visit every home on Earth during that one night. So you have to either accept that Santa doesn't exist or change your definition of "Santa Claus" to something slightly different (or very different), that at least could (even if you can't prove that it does).
The trouble with "god" is that there is no universally accepted definition. So, until you define what "god" is, indeed you cannot prove it doesn't exist. "Proof" of something that is undefined is logically meanigless. For some definitions of "god", its existence can be proven in purely logical terms, but what do we gain by that?
You can take any simple system and add layers of useless, self-cancelling complexity to it, so it would be trivial to "weave god into reality". The real question is: are gods necessary to make sense of the universe? And the answer to that seems to be a pretty resounding "no". In fact, if anything, attributing phenomena to supernatural, unknowable entities is a way to limit our understanding of the universe. Ockham's razor and all that.
To quote Lewis Carroll, "Don't be in such a hurry to believe next time - I'll tell you why - If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn't believe it, and rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn't recover its right shape for nearly two days."
And then there's the separate (but often associated) issue of religion, which is responsible for more irrationality, obscurantism, death and self-righteous cruelty than just about any other part of human culture.
It's not just Dreamweaver; Photoshop CS3 does the same. Not only that, but it installs the service with the name "##Id_String1.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762 ##", so it's not exactly easy to spot.
p ic=4214
Here is a page with instructions about how to remove it (read the full thread; the first post has an error):
http://www.x64bit.net/site/board/index.php?showto
PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY... YOU NOW HAVE 15 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
Well, Origin had the honesty to classify those games as "Interactive Movies". And they made some of the best RPGs ever (Ultima VII is probably the peak of the RPG genre).
Anyway, the problem with Oblivion aren't the cutscenes (which are weak but thankfully few). The problem with Oblivion is they tried to make a "RPG" for 10 year old players with consoles. The result is a bit like trying to make an "intellectual" version of Mortal Kombat or a "realistic" version of Super Mario. It's just the wrong kind of approach. Oblivion would be a much better game if they did away with the pseudo-RPG elements (and the hideous, generally uninspired, buggy-as-hell "quests") and focused on the combat aspects. Oblivion is actually quite fun as a hack'n'slash game. It's just not a good (believable, immersive, consistent) RPG or "world simulator".
I agree with some of the posters above, though, the "Thieves' Guild" sub-plot is by far the best part of the game. It's almost as if it was designed by someone with vision, and actually playtested (something that I find impossible to believe about the rest of the game).
It still suffers from the hand-holding, just-follow-the-arrow, auto-balancing-enemies approach, though, and it still has some incredible bugs. For example, whenever you talk to a thief you have a conversation topic called "The Gray Fox", and they all tell you exactly the same thing, word for word... including the Gray Fox himself. Maybe he's just one of those people who like to talk about themselves in the 3rd person, but still, it's kind of confusing to see him doubt his own existence...
True, you can choose the alternative style of play which consists of following the green arrow and clicking where you're told by the pop-up messages. In fact, I hear that for TES V they've decided to take the concept further, and the game will play itself without any human intervention.
They already did that to TES. It's called "Oblivion".
Actually, I'm neither under 30 nor over 50. And I'm definitely not on your lawn.
Well, with all due respect for Feynman, who was a very smart and funny guy, he sometimes sacrificed intellectual honesty for a good story, and was a bit full of himself (as he easily admitted).
If you're working as a biologist and routinely have to refer to specific muscles, it's not very practical to take 15 minutes off every day to "look up" the names of those muscles. I doubt Feynman had to "look up" Planck's or Boltzmann's constants or Avogadro's number every time he needed to use them. That is why the biology students knew the names of the muscles; because they used those tools frequently, not because it took them 4 years to "memorise them".
The biology curriculum is full of useless "legacy" crap, but so is every other one.
I'm over 50 but I knew my home street address and phone # when I was a kid.
So do I, and so does everyone I know. Do you honestly think 15 or 25 year olds (the ones more likely to have cell phones or PDAs) don't know their own addresses, these days? Get lost a lot, do they? Not only do they know those, they also know their (often multiple) e-mail addresses, chat room nicknames, web page addresses, and so on. And the same goes for their friends'.
I knew all of my sibling's and parent's birth dates.
Again, so does everyone I know. But can you honestly say that, when you were a kid, you knew your aunts' and uncles' birth dates as well as you now know your nieces' and nephews'? Did you know your grandparents' birth dates as well as you know your grandchildren's?
Seriously, who funds this crap?
People over 50 are more likely to remember birthdays of "close relatives" than people under 30? Maybe that's because people over 50 have had 20 extra years in which to memorise those birthdays. And maybe it's also because those "people over 50" actually saw many of their "close relatives" being born (children, grandchildren, nephews), unlike the people under 30 (whose "relatives" are more likely to be grandparents, uncles, cousins etc.).
People have trouble remembering their own phone number? Could that have something to do with the fact that it's not a number they call very often, if at all?
The notion that having a cellphone or a PDA somehow influenced the basic abilities of the human brain, reversing in 20 years what took 200 thousand to build, is even more ridiculous. Maybe people just aren't bothering to memorise 100 different things because they know that, by memorising 3 things, they'll easily be able to retrieve all the other ones. And that leaves enough mental addressing space for 97 new things, that the "people over 50" (or without PDAs, or whatever) were never able to learn in the first place (let alone remember).
Here's a thought: if, as this article claims, modern electronic devices are "dumbing down brain power", why don't we forbid scientists from using them? I wonder if the people making this study memorised all the results, or if their "brain power" is so "dumbed down" that they had to write them down on a piece of paper or even (gasp!) an electronic spreadsheet or database.
The article concludes: "Only 55 per cent of men could remember their wedding anniversary, compared to 90 per cent of women."
If we take their previous conclusions as valid, that can ony mean one thing: men use cell phones almost twice as much as women.
Well, in English, for Digital Media Net, I've also written an article about the exciting subject of... alpha channels:
e s/viewarticle.jsp?id=135386
:-P
:-) Their browser plug-in is pretty bad, but the compressor seems to be quite good. In this comparison it ranked as the best (for Photoshop), only slightly behind ACDSee's built-in implementation:
p df/jpeg2000_codec_comparison_en.pdf
http://digitalproducer.digitalmedianet.com/articl
And I'll probably write a couple more, the first of which will be about HDR (high dynamic range) digital imaging. The problem with DMNet is they pay the same for a 3-paragraph article about "how to make your photos sharper in Photoshop" and a 20,000-word article about "how to build a working time machine and fix global warming", so I obviously don't have a big incentive (apart from "educating the masses") to take time off my normal job(s) to write for them.
I've also written a few guides & tips for my DVD site:
http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html
http://dvd-hq.info/FAQ.html
http://dvd-hq.info/forum
BTW, despite a couple of thousand hits a day and a pretty decent search ranking for the relevant terms, the site has what financial experts call "negative profits". Turns out that educating the masses isn't very good business (even BBC Prime has replaced its "Learning Zone" documentaries with soap operas). On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I'm going to heaven... oh, wait, I'm agnostic. Damn.
I'll probably write a couple of chapters (and do most graphics) for a book about photography that might get published within a year (depends on the main writer), but that'll be in Portuguese, and I doubt it'll ever get translated into English.
As to that JPEG 2000 plug-in, there are pretty big differences in implementation, yes. I don't know j2k, so I really can't say how it ranks. I've been using Luratech's plug-in on the grounds that it was the only one available when I got it.
http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/
Until all browsers (and some digital cameras) come with JPEG 2000 support, I don't see it taking off. Part of the problem lies with the JPEG 2000 specification itself, which is vague about some things, and lacking some basic features (like EXIF, to store camera data). Microsoft's WMP / HDPhoto format is pretty civilized (support for HDR, etc.), but it has somewhat lower quality than JPEG 2000 (it's optimized for speed), and the actual compression and decompression has to be done through Microsoft's APIs. Maybe if they improve it an open-source it (yeah, right), it'll get support from browser and camera makers.
If it's wrapped in a common container (ex., AVI, Quicktime) and if downloading and installing the codec is an option, then pretty much anything can be converted into anything (at least within the same container format), so the point becomes more or less irrelevant. I thought you meant "will play anywhere right 'out of the box' ", that's why I mentioned MPEG-1.
;^)
It's rarely necessary to have faster-than-realtime transcoding, so "how long does it take" is usually less relevant than "can it be done dynamically, during streaming / recording / etc.?".
Of course, I work in post-production so I tend to look at things from a slightly different POV (having a "master" archive - determined by the original production format - and creating "distribution" copies when needed). But I'm pretty sure that most people don't need to transfer 1 million hours of video into their iPod on a daily basis.