Nah. I looked at it. It looks legit. Considering that last year I thought the gMail announcement was an April Fool's joke....bastards are out to get me:)
Who cares if it's ethical? Seriously. That's not the standard most people go by, to be honest.
People buy used CDs all the time, even though that's not ethical. It's accepted practice. Yet downloading samples of music to see if you like it, so you can then go out and buy new music is illegal, yet way more ethical.
About 110 comments in and not one person really has a good concept of what morality really is. I'm currently writing a book about the subject, so I have a good idea what I'm talking about.
Real morality, is how what you do affects other people. Simple as that. (And that is modified by your intentions.)
Game design, like all art, is a VERY amoral activity. Amoral isn't necessarly a bad thing. It just means that it's fairly neutral. Because what you do on screen doesn't really affect other people, it's not intended to. The intention of GTA isn't for you to go out and kill people, for example. It simply is.
There is pieces of art that ARE intended to have such an affect on people. Usually this takes the form of overtly racist propaganda. This is the sort of thing you can judge on a moral basis, but to say that game designers have a moral responsibility?
No, they don't. It's nice when games have a good moral message, of course. But to be frank, in today's day and age, being morally neutral puts you ahead of the pack.
Would be more like 20 bucks for access to ALL the world's content. Lexis-Nexis, academic journals, and other subscription only services. Access to all of 'em.
Geeez. Talk about a neophyte reaction to it. The reality is, the HHGTG universe is constantly in a state of flux. Between the radio series and the books, there are vast differences.
A movie that played the book "straight", would be the REAL bastardization.
The biggest problem that Nintendo has it this. In order to compete on Nintendo's system, you have to beat Nintendo itself. And that's hard. You have to beat Metriod Prime 1 and 2, you have to beat Smash Brothers, you have to beat Wind Waker, and so on. It's hard. So either you do a multi-platform series, just to make it a must-play, a big title.
But what the Gamecube is lacking is the big 3rd-party exclusives. But the ones that are there..well..they tend to be either big or small. Big games, like Resident Evil 4, or little games like Ikaragua seem to get the best return.
Actually, I think you're right. Locally, local movie/rental shops are about to drop the X-Box from their shelves. And local sales of X-Box games are fairly..well..slow.
But X-Boxes themselves still go fast. Why? They're cool. But you might only have 2 or 3 games for it..Halo maybe Halo 2 and a Madden game. And that's about it.
And the profit comes from game sales. From what I can tell, Nintendo is making more money than Microsoft. So I doubt Nintendo is going to go the way of Sega. As well, there's a lot of people who are happy with their little cube...
EULAs will come to a head when a spyware removal company is sued by a spyware maker for interfering with the EULA that allowed the spyware maker to put on the spyware in the first place, and said that the user was NOT allowed to remove it.
The EULAs are already in there, it's just a matter of time before one of these companies gets the moxie to take them to court...
It's "It just works" campaign attracts people, but when people realize that it doesn't "just work", it requires study and practice, and yes, you might have to fix it from time to time...
It frustrates people, and it makes people feel like morons. Which they're not, just inexperienced.
Zephyr said that she assumed the money was to buy message...
Which is kind of weird because the message predated any money. That's what you're missing. What..you expected him to completly stop talking about the primary campaign? I mean geez...DailyKos was primary CENTRAL during the Democratic primary campaign.
In other words, if there was no payment, would there have been any different content? Nope. There wouldn't have been.
It's not about getting the news. DailyKos isn't a news site either. It's an opinion/analyasis/hashing things over site.
I understand what you're saying. That money for you would be an issue, and you wouldn't be able to maintain your objective opinion. And that's fine.
Actually, what PA does..I barely even look at the webcomics, is that it's a great op-ed for the gaming world. A fantastic one actually. And yeah, it's biased. But do I feel as though money comes into it? Not at all.
And it's the same with Kos and crew.
But, if you don't believe that. Fine. That's up to you. But as long as they make the connections known, frankly, who cares?
Here's the story. Not in an exactly, but roughtly chronological order.
Kos and Jerome run MyDD. Endorses and is are VERY avid supporters of Dean.
Dean's campaign hires MyDD to do various technical consulting of various types.
Jerome, who starts to blog for Dean stops his own site. Everybody pretty much goes over to Kos' site, and Kos lets it well known that he does consulting for Dean. Nobody in the community (and DailyKos is a political version of Slashdot. It's a community site) cares.
Skip ahead a year and a half.
Zephyr Teachout (lead blogger for the old Dean campaign) is upset that the ethical people are taking all the money and bribe taking out of political blogging and writes a slash piece in the WSJ accusing Kos and Jerome of not being corrupt ENOUGH.
What Kos and Jerome did is basically equivilent to what Gabe and Tycho do over at PA, getting paid for various side projects, a lot of whom they endorse/give good reviews/whatever. Is there any problem with that?
My experience is that India, being an outsourced based economy, at least in the high-tech sector, is more concerned with efficency than quality. Once demand for quality starts to go up, their sector is going to largly collapse.
It's news. It got leaked from the company somehow, in any case, any news sites have every right to report what they learn. If it hurts their business? Maybe they need tighter internal information controls?
The stock market is for the most part, a fairly modern invention. However, instead of opposing capitalist and socialist, I like to compare capitalist and labourist. Do you value wealth or work?
As a moral choice, I value work. America, as a society, values wealth, which is the cause of its moral decay.
It's quite easy. You just don't upload the files until the day of. Some people might be able to watch it an hour or two early, but to be blunt, that's not a terrible loss. Advertisers? You'd just match the advertising for the TV media with the Internet media.
And it doesn't have to be DRMd. People can already use a TV tuner card to rip, remove commercials and resend it out. Another source is going to do nothing to this ability. What it WILL do, is that it will make the authorized broadcasts with commercials, come in a higher quality, and easier to obtain. Which will for the most part put the P2P nets out of that material. Now, you'll still see P2P trading, mostly of fan-subs of anime and any show that the network is stubborn upon, but of those shows, the revenue for the networks will actually go up.
I'm thinking a BitTorrent type client. You log on, and you can sort by shows by network and independents (who would have access to this as well, can sell their own ad time). Choose the ones to download and it would start downloading. It would be watermarked, so if any of the files with commercials went onto P2P networks, they could track it, and the advertisers could now how many people have watched their advertising. (What..and saving the networks bandwidth costs is a bad thing?), but the files would be instantly transferrable to any OS, and the whole new market of handheld media players.
In this way, the networks, for a minimum of cost, would actually nip TV trading in the bud, actually competing so aggressivly to render it moot. The only potential problem is for DVD sales, but if you have it in a higher quality, and add in lots of extras, DVD sets will sell to the most avid fans, which is what most do now anyway. There are very few that are priced for mass consumption.
There's a demand for anything retro, to be honest. Especially when we're dealing with things that you can't obtain anymore at all.
How to reduce demand for emulators and Roms? You can't. Best to make some pocket change from it. Either release EVERYTHING old at a reasonable price, (maybe like an I-tunes model? 99 cents for a NES rom, 1.25 for a SNES rom, a flexible price for a MAME rom?), or don't even bother and just public domain it all, if it wouldn't be profitable.
And before anyone suggests that I can check e-bay or a local game store and pick up used carts, I believe that in the big ethics scale of things, e-bay and used carts are lower on the ethics scale than just downloading it. (The best being ordering a shrinkwrapped copy directly from the producer/online, I.E Steam)
One of the big problems, is for too long people have limited their voices to the ballot box.
That's just not good enough. You're not going to trick/fool enough people to change their minds in order to have anything come even close to a majority. You actually have to change hearts and minds. And that involves a lot of work, and a lot of..well..to be honest, disappointment.
The other big problem that well..in particular the Nader people have is that they tend to miss the forest for the trees. The problem with the media isn't consolodation (althouth that doesn't help), but it's actually the journalistic culture that teaches that "accuracy" is all about giving both sides of the issue equal focus. Without any concern for any sort of accuracy or anything like that.
Nader in particular actually used that in 2000 to his advantage, in order to present the race as being no difference between the two major candidates...an obvious LIE to anybody actually follows these things, but it allowed Bush to have success in presenting the election as in strictly personality/culture issues.
Finally, the big problem with American democracy is that for such a long time, there was no real cultural opposition to the Republicans. The Democrats were basically motivated by their own special interest groups. Nader's rationale for running, in fact is NOT to change that. It's to MAINTAIN that. He makes a lot of meony from those groups, and he doesn't want to kill his cash cow.
Until a rival group decides to kill/enslave those 4000 people because while the innocents have been building houses and passing out food, a smaller group has been building an army.
The real problem, of course, is not in the politics of it. If it was, it would be easy. Just elect the right people and the problem is fixed. But no, these are real cultural and social issues that really need to be taken care of, and it's going to take time, effort and a whole lot of work.
The further problem, at least in America, has to do with the whole idea of patriotism, and what it means to be a patriot. Conservative types have had a LOT of success of changing the definition of patriotism to a very childish one, where you love your country for what it is. The problem with that, is that it makes change virtually impossible. Because you want America to change? You must hate it!
That's the big problem.
Fortunately, there's a growing number of patriots who are actually getting active in making change, with a more mature love of their country (We love it, so lets make it even better!). Maybe it's too late. Maybe we've let too much ground slip to the single-issue interest groups..let them do all the work..ignore the larger cultural issues.
The second part of it, is the idea that younger people are stupid and inexperienced, so therefore #1. Shouldn't vote and #2. Older people know what's good for them, so they should just shut up. You're seeing this is the media word war between Penn and Stone/Parker. The thing is...it doesn't really matter WHO young people vote for. But the idea is, by getting younger people out en masse to vote..period..it gets more of their issues out. It no longer becomes a government by the baby boomers and for the baby boomers. It has to become something more...substantive and long-reaching.
The third part, in my mind, is the economic problems of an economy based on fraud. The current investor economy for the overwhelming most part, is based upon a big ponzi scheme, where the actual invested in companies are paying very little back to the investors, and the money that's actually being made is coming from OTHER investors. The problem with that, is that it basically kills the insurance industry as their business model is made up in a large part in investments, forcing them to raise prices to keep with the..well..immature investor expectation of forever rising profits as far as the eye can see....
It's a system that's built for instability. And that needs to be fixed.
Err..take that a step back, but a step further at the same time.
Considering how much they're charging for the hardware at this poing, they have to have the costs of screens at a low level at this point. So basically, why make people spend all the money for a DS? If the hardware can handle it, theoretically one system could pump out the screens for 8? systems, at least to a quality that would be good enough for an LCD screen. Then put on top of that having that screen be touch sensitve, as well, you can bring output to the TV.
Think about this. Goldeneye/random FPS. Each person with their own view of the screen. On the TV, you can have a cinimatic view of the going ons, security cameras, kill cams score list, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. I looked at it. It looks legit. Considering that last year I thought the gMail announcement was an April Fool's joke....bastards are out to get me:)
Who cares if it's ethical? Seriously. That's not the standard most people go by, to be honest.
People buy used CDs all the time, even though that's not ethical. It's accepted practice. Yet downloading samples of music to see if you like it, so you can then go out and buy new music is illegal, yet way more ethical.
About 110 comments in and not one person really has a good concept of what morality really is. I'm currently writing a book about the subject, so I have a good idea what I'm talking about.
Real morality, is how what you do affects other people. Simple as that. (And that is modified by your intentions.)
Game design, like all art, is a VERY amoral activity. Amoral isn't necessarly a bad thing. It just means that it's fairly neutral. Because what you do on screen doesn't really affect other people, it's not intended to. The intention of GTA isn't for you to go out and kill people, for example. It simply is.
There is pieces of art that ARE intended to have such an affect on people. Usually this takes the form of overtly racist propaganda. This is the sort of thing you can judge on a moral basis, but to say that game designers have a moral responsibility?
No, they don't. It's nice when games have a good moral message, of course. But to be frank, in today's day and age, being morally neutral puts you ahead of the pack.
Later on in the thread they admit it's a fake.
Way to go Editor.
Yeah, it's expensive as hell.
So?
I can dream, can't I? And yeah. Westlaw is better. But it's what came to mind.
Would be more like 20 bucks for access to ALL the world's content. Lexis-Nexis, academic journals, and other subscription only services. Access to all of 'em.
Would be nice. I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.
Geeez. Talk about a neophyte reaction to it. The reality is, the HHGTG universe is constantly in a state of flux. Between the radio series and the books, there are vast differences.
A movie that played the book "straight", would be the REAL bastardization.
The biggest problem that Nintendo has it this. In order to compete on Nintendo's system, you have to beat Nintendo itself. And that's hard. You have to beat Metriod Prime 1 and 2, you have to beat Smash Brothers, you have to beat Wind Waker, and so on. It's hard. So either you do a multi-platform series, just to make it a must-play, a big title.
But what the Gamecube is lacking is the big 3rd-party exclusives. But the ones that are there..well..they tend to be either big or small. Big games, like Resident Evil 4, or little games like Ikaragua seem to get the best return.
X-Box is on life support..
Actually, I think you're right. Locally, local movie/rental shops are about to drop the X-Box from their shelves. And local sales of X-Box games are fairly..well..slow.
But X-Boxes themselves still go fast. Why? They're cool. But you might only have 2 or 3 games for it..Halo maybe Halo 2 and a Madden game. And that's about it.
And the profit comes from game sales. From what I can tell, Nintendo is making more money than Microsoft. So I doubt Nintendo is going to go the way of Sega. As well, there's a lot of people who are happy with their little cube...
EULAs will come to a head when a spyware removal company is sued by a spyware maker for interfering with the EULA that allowed the spyware maker to put on the spyware in the first place, and said that the user was NOT allowed to remove it.
The EULAs are already in there, it's just a matter of time before one of these companies gets the moxie to take them to court...
And probably to the cleaners.
It's "It just works" campaign attracts people, but when people realize that it doesn't "just work", it requires study and practice, and yes, you might have to fix it from time to time...
It frustrates people, and it makes people feel like morons. Which they're not, just inexperienced.
Zephyr said that she assumed the money was to buy message...
Which is kind of weird because the message predated any money. That's what you're missing. What..you expected him to completly stop talking about the primary campaign? I mean geez...DailyKos was primary CENTRAL during the Democratic primary campaign.
In other words, if there was no payment, would there have been any different content? Nope. There wouldn't have been.
It's not about getting the news. DailyKos isn't a news site either. It's an opinion/analyasis/hashing things over site.
I understand what you're saying. That money for you would be an issue, and you wouldn't be able to maintain your objective opinion. And that's fine.
Actually, what PA does..I barely even look at the webcomics, is that it's a great op-ed for the gaming world. A fantastic one actually. And yeah, it's biased. But do I feel as though money comes into it? Not at all.
And it's the same with Kos and crew.
But, if you don't believe that. Fine. That's up to you. But as long as they make the connections known, frankly, who cares?
Here's the story. Not in an exactly, but roughtly chronological order.
Kos and Jerome run MyDD. Endorses and is are VERY avid supporters of Dean.
Dean's campaign hires MyDD to do various technical consulting of various types.
Jerome, who starts to blog for Dean stops his own site. Everybody pretty much goes over to Kos' site, and Kos lets it well known that he does consulting for Dean. Nobody in the community (and DailyKos is a political version of Slashdot. It's a community site) cares.
Skip ahead a year and a half.
Zephyr Teachout (lead blogger for the old Dean campaign) is upset that the ethical people are taking all the money and bribe taking out of political blogging and writes a slash piece in the WSJ accusing Kos and Jerome of not being corrupt ENOUGH.
What Kos and Jerome did is basically equivilent to what Gabe and Tycho do over at PA, getting paid for various side projects, a lot of whom they endorse/give good reviews/whatever. Is there any problem with that?
Of course not.
I seriously doubt there was any malicious intent, I mean come on, would Apple's plans be news to the tech world? I would think yes.
As for "coercing", that's what Apple says. Maybe that's true, but then again, maybe not.
Actually, I'm more comparing it to Canada/Europe.
My experience is that India, being an outsourced based economy, at least in the high-tech sector, is more concerned with efficency than quality. Once demand for quality starts to go up, their sector is going to largly collapse.
One word.
Tough.
It's news. It got leaked from the company somehow, in any case, any news sites have every right to report what they learn. If it hurts their business? Maybe they need tighter internal information controls?
But what problem is it of ours?
Absolutly none.
It depends on what you mean by capitalist...
The stock market is for the most part, a fairly modern invention. However, instead of opposing capitalist and socialist, I like to compare capitalist and labourist. Do you value wealth or work?
As a moral choice, I value work. America, as a society, values wealth, which is the cause of its moral decay.
You can..mostly do that without DRM, you know.
It's quite easy. You just don't upload the files until the day of. Some people might be able to watch it an hour or two early, but to be blunt, that's not a terrible loss. Advertisers? You'd just match the advertising for the TV media with the Internet media.
And it doesn't have to be DRMd. People can already use a TV tuner card to rip, remove commercials and resend it out. Another source is going to do nothing to this ability. What it WILL do, is that it will make the authorized broadcasts with commercials, come in a higher quality, and easier to obtain. Which will for the most part put the P2P nets out of that material. Now, you'll still see P2P trading, mostly of fan-subs of anime and any show that the network is stubborn upon, but of those shows, the revenue for the networks will actually go up.
I'm thinking a BitTorrent type client. You log on, and you can sort by shows by network and independents (who would have access to this as well, can sell their own ad time). Choose the ones to download and it would start downloading. It would be watermarked, so if any of the files with commercials went onto P2P networks, they could track it, and the advertisers could now how many people have watched their advertising. (What..and saving the networks bandwidth costs is a bad thing?), but the files would be instantly transferrable to any OS, and the whole new market of handheld media players.
In this way, the networks, for a minimum of cost, would actually nip TV trading in the bud, actually competing so aggressivly to render it moot. The only potential problem is for DVD sales, but if you have it in a higher quality, and add in lots of extras, DVD sets will sell to the most avid fans, which is what most do now anyway. There are very few that are priced for mass consumption.
There's a demand for anything retro, to be honest. Especially when we're dealing with things that you can't obtain anymore at all.
How to reduce demand for emulators and Roms? You can't. Best to make some pocket change from it. Either release EVERYTHING old at a reasonable price, (maybe like an I-tunes model? 99 cents for a NES rom, 1.25 for a SNES rom, a flexible price for a MAME rom?), or don't even bother and just public domain it all, if it wouldn't be profitable.
And before anyone suggests that I can check e-bay or a local game store and pick up used carts, I believe that in the big ethics scale of things, e-bay and used carts are lower on the ethics scale than just downloading it. (The best being ordering a shrinkwrapped copy directly from the producer/online, I.E Steam)
... ...
HENSHIN A BYE-BYE!!
Your voices CAN be heard.
One of the big problems, is for too long people have limited their voices to the ballot box.
That's just not good enough. You're not going to trick/fool enough people to change their minds in order to have anything come even close to a majority. You actually have to change hearts and minds. And that involves a lot of work, and a lot of..well..to be honest, disappointment.
The other big problem that well..in particular the Nader people have is that they tend to miss the forest for the trees. The problem with the media isn't consolodation (althouth that doesn't help), but it's actually the journalistic culture that teaches that "accuracy" is all about giving both sides of the issue equal focus. Without any concern for any sort of accuracy or anything like that.
Nader in particular actually used that in 2000 to his advantage, in order to present the race as being no difference between the two major candidates...an obvious LIE to anybody actually follows these things, but it allowed Bush to have success in presenting the election as in strictly personality/culture issues.
Finally, the big problem with American democracy is that for such a long time, there was no real cultural opposition to the Republicans. The Democrats were basically motivated by their own special interest groups. Nader's rationale for running, in fact is NOT to change that. It's to MAINTAIN that. He makes a lot of meony from those groups, and he doesn't want to kill his cash cow.
Until a rival group decides to kill/enslave those 4000 people because while the innocents have been building houses and passing out food, a smaller group has been building an army.
Or that would never happen?
Sorry. Yeah, it would.
The real problem, of course, is not in the politics of it. If it was, it would be easy. Just elect the right people and the problem is fixed. But no, these are real cultural and social issues that really need to be taken care of, and it's going to take time, effort and a whole lot of work.
The further problem, at least in America, has to do with the whole idea of patriotism, and what it means to be a patriot. Conservative types have had a LOT of success of changing the definition of patriotism to a very childish one, where you love your country for what it is. The problem with that, is that it makes change virtually impossible. Because you want America to change? You must hate it!
That's the big problem.
Fortunately, there's a growing number of patriots who are actually getting active in making change, with a more mature love of their country (We love it, so lets make it even better!). Maybe it's too late. Maybe we've let too much ground slip to the single-issue interest groups..let them do all the work..ignore the larger cultural issues.
The second part of it, is the idea that younger people are stupid and inexperienced, so therefore #1. Shouldn't vote and #2. Older people know what's good for them, so they should just shut up. You're seeing this is the media word war between Penn and Stone/Parker. The thing is...it doesn't really matter WHO young people vote for. But the idea is, by getting younger people out en masse to vote..period..it gets more of their issues out. It no longer becomes a government by the baby boomers and for the baby boomers. It has to become something more...substantive and long-reaching.
The third part, in my mind, is the economic problems of an economy based on fraud. The current investor economy for the overwhelming most part, is based upon a big ponzi scheme, where the actual invested in companies are paying very little back to the investors, and the money that's actually being made is coming from OTHER investors. The problem with that, is that it basically kills the insurance industry as their business model is made up in a large part in investments, forcing them to raise prices to keep with the..well..immature investor expectation of forever rising profits as far as the eye can see....
It's a system that's built for instability. And that needs to be fixed.
Err..take that a step back, but a step further at the same time.
Considering how much they're charging for the hardware at this poing, they have to have the costs of screens at a low level at this point. So basically, why make people spend all the money for a DS? If the hardware can handle it, theoretically one system could pump out the screens for 8? systems, at least to a quality that would be good enough for an LCD screen. Then put on top of that having that screen be touch sensitve, as well, you can bring output to the TV.
Think about this. Goldeneye/random FPS. Each person with their own view of the screen. On the TV, you can have a cinimatic view of the going ons, security cameras, kill cams score list, etc.
That would be a revolution.