The reason the law was originally written to exempt charities etc. had a lot to do with previous court decisions that said non-commercial speech was more protected than commercial speech. It's not as simple as just following the constitution--court precedents are just damned inconsistent right now, and its likely that if the law were changed to get this court to like it, another court will call it unconstitutional because it restricts non-commercial entities. What needs to happen is the Supreme Court needs to rule on this to clarify the inconsistencies--unfortunately this is exactly the sort of hornet's nest the Supremes love to refuse to rule on and leave everyone hanging--see the Second Amendment for more examples of that.
The difference is not between good and bad advertisng, but between push and pull advertising.
Push advertising, people offering goods and services pushing or broadcasting information unto hapless and unwilling customers, is generally inefficient and wasteful, and will continue to be more so as societies information overload increases.
Pull advertising, in which the customer uses the internet or the phonebook or some other tool to solicit only the information they need from merchants, is the useful kind. E-mail advertising of any sort, even of the opt-in variety, strikes me as push advertising. While perhaps not immoral, it at the very least plays on the naivete and immaturity of users (because there's not really a good reason to ask businesses to send email about their products into your inbox--if you want to buy something, it's much more logical for you to go to their website, rather then have them go to your email.) All email marketing, opt-out, opt-in, whatever, is anti-utilitarian, and slightly shady.
Heh, do you know the kind of things Plato said? Plato, like perhaps all great philosophers, is judged to be great by the originality of his ideas and arguments rather than how well such arguments correspond to either today's thinking or reality. Unless you think that everything is made of earth, air, fire, and water, or that slavery and fascism are good.
Not that I'm arguing with the point your making, (I might not go so far as Bad journalism, though), but Plato struct me as a really humorous example, since he spent an awful lot of time saying things we now judge to be false.
Um, this is probably easier to read split into paragraphs. Preview before submit should be my mantra...
Reading what you post here and other people on rationality leads me to the conclusion that the idea of rationality as conceived by theorists is less of a useful assumption and more of vague catch-all used to confuse anyone who questions the assumptions. The rationality you describe could be possesed by anything. This rock does nothing, it just sits there. Thus the rock must be choosing to do nothing from its beliefs or preferences. This robot chooses to follow my instructions. It must be choosing to follow my instructions from its beliefs or preferences.
There is no action I can take that will earn me that adjective irrational, as it would be impossible to prove that I was not acting according to my beliefs or preferences. But if rationality has no falsifiability, it has no predictive power, and is therefore a completely meaningless as either an assumption or an assertion--it is like assuming that an tautology is true.
Thus, then an economist assumes that people are rational, they're really saying "Well, gee, I can't be held responsible for anything these people do, you'll have to ask a sociologist or psychologist why my theory is incorrect."
And, when a game theorist tries to guess what the ideal rational person would do to make a particular abstract choice, the word rational in that context would be closer to the common definition than your apparently definition. Otherwise, how could it make sense to talk about the ideally rational choice at all?
Unfortunately, (for your argument) any attempt to restore meaning to rationality (by making it possible for something to be irrational) opens the door to Slashdot-style arguing about what the rational choice is. Assuming you aren't reading Slashdot disingenously, when you read something saying "choosing X is the rational choice because you get benefit Y", you should read it as "if you believe benefit Y is something worth pursuing, X is the rational choice."
Reading what you post here and other people on rationality leads me to the conclusion that the idea of rationality as conceived by theorists is less of a useful assumption and more of vague catch-all used to confuse anyone who questions the assumptions. The rationality you describe could be possesed by anything. This rock does nothing, it just sits there. Thus the rock must be choosing to do nothing from its beliefs or preferences. This robot chooses to follow my instructions. It must be choosing to follow my instructions from its beliefs or preferences.
There is no action I can take that will earn me that adjective irrational, as it would be impossible to prove that I was not acting according to my beliefs or preferences. But if rationality has no falsifiability, it has no predictive power, and is therefore a completely meaningless as either an assumption or an assertion--it is like assuming that an tautology is true.
Thus, then an economist assumes that people are rational, they're really saying "Well, gee, I can't be held responsible for anything these people do, you'll have to ask a sociologist or psychologist why my theory is incorrect."
And, when a game theorist tries to guess what the ideal rational person would do to make a particular abstract choice, the word rational in that context would be closer to the common definition than your apparently definition. Otherwise, how could it make sense to talk about the ideally rational choice at all?
Unfortunately, (for your argument) any attempt to restore meaning to rationality (by making it possible for something to be irrational) opens the door to Slashdot-style arguing about what the rational choice is. Assuming you aren't reading Slashdot disingenously, when you read something saying "choosing X is the rational choice because you get benefit Y", you should read it as "if you believe benefit Y is something worth pursuing, X is the rational choice."
Wow, I'm really surprised at how anti-gamer slashdot is today. Everyone's pointing a finger at piracy, but I think the article of this story (which you folks may or may not have read) broke that finger off really well--draconian return policies do absolutely nothing to stop piracy via p2p networks.
Everyone keeps saying to try out the demo, but if the demo works that's no guarantee the game works--especially since copy protective CD-checks are getting more draconian and obscure as well (obscure as in not working properly with all hardware). Unreal Tournament 2003 is an example that comes to mind--I played the demo, I bought the game, game does not work. It think a patch fixed the problem eventually--but it seems to me I should have been perfectly justified in returning the product immediately for a full refund (or store credit at least), open box or no open box.
Gamestop (which I guess is the same corporate empire as Software Etc.) used to have an insanely liberal return policy as late as last year--a salesman actually encouraged me to try a game and return it if I didn't like it the next day.
Yes, if 3d zelda had a camera like any other 3d game, it would totally have sucked. What would have been cool is a fixed perspective, overhead 3D--like the gamecube wario game, or the power stone games. It would have maintained the feel of the 2d zeldas but added a third dimension.
I played Wind Waker, and then I loaded the Legend of Zelda ROM in an emulator. There's no contest--the 2d zelda was way, way, the heck harder. It is NOT just camera management, because advancing on and defending against a single enemy become trivially easy. And there are way fewer instances of multiple enemies in the 3d ones than in the 2d ones--the reason for this is that z targeting is great for single enemies, but a player used to using z-targeting will be completely confused when trying to deal with more than one enemy. Even the Savage Labyrinth of Wind Waker didn't throw anything at the player like the original zelda would.
The owls were not complicated, but counter-intuitive. Most people, their first time around, don't expect loading the saved game to also DELETE the saved game (yes, the game warns you, but no one reads warnings in our information overloaded world.)
the original legend of zelda is how you describe, but that seems like the exception. Zelda 2 is more of an rpg, link to the past and link's awakening are fairly similar to the 3d zeldas in the amount of action they have.
I know I'm posting anonymous (not a regular slashdoter), but the part that made Ocarina of Time so damn good is that it was a nearly perfect translation of the Link to the Past gameplay into 3D.
There was one big problem in the translation: combat. Zelda was never particularly combat-centric--but z targetting in the 3d zeldas makes 95% percent of all the fighting completely easy--just push the attack button at the right time. Combat in the 3d zeldas is more of an emotional, graphics oriented experience rather than a challenge, gameplay oriented experience.
But I still loved Ocarina of Time anyway. I'm not sure if I accept the received view that its the best Zelda -- A Link to the Past is always closest to my heart. And then there's the original Zelda...nope, I just can't decide. They're all too awesome.
Majora's Mask time travel business was really annoying. What's the point of solving subquests and helping people if time keeps getting reset and the people remain unhelped? I've seen an awful lot of people who were confused about how owl-saving worked in that game and lost progress because of that annoying feature. Wind Waker's vast, empty oceans are simply unforgivable.
Competition for resources among life forms has been going on for billions of years now. It strikes me as silly for us puny humans to declare that the way of nature is "immature". Conflict is just an option rational organisms with different goals have been known to resort to.
The maturity that enables us to leave this rock will not be the end of conflict, nor the end of persons and organizations willing to use violent conflict, but rather the capacity for our species to deal with this conflict and stop it from reaching a species-destroying level. Probably the best way to increase that capacity would be to get our species on more than one planet--like vicious animals, we need to start putting ourselves into seperate cages.
open-ended online games where meaningful player interaction determines what will happen...where the story of the game is molded by the players and not the other way around....
In college dorms everywhere, Halo replaced Goldeneye as the 2:30am procrastination technique
Whoops, we forgot. Someone add Goldeneye to the overrated list, quick!
To us, this is nothing new. But to console gamers, Halo is *the* original multiplayer shooter, not Team Fortress, or Quake, or Counterstrike. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Well, I guess I'm not the only one who can't remember Goldeneye for more than two seconds. But seriously, if you're calling something the original multiplayer shooter, when in reality it's just the original CONSOLE multiplayer shooter, then by definition you are overrating it.
I'd agree with you about Myst and The Sims, but I've gotta draw the line at Halo. It oughta be up there with Black and White. It might be the best Xbox game, but outside that one console it's not significant at all.
Steve Jobs doesn't want you to theme your Aqua eye candy--which kinda defeats the purpose, IMHO.
Not to mention that Mac OS X doesn't let you exploit the most important benefit of vector graphics--resolution independence.
You must not have much experience with Cable internet if you would say something like this.;) This issue isn't the original poster needs help running linux or configuring linux to use the network or something the user can do something about at all or something that requires the support staff to know linux.
If he was calling a cable company, chances are the stupid cable modem was broken (because those stupid little boxes they reuse for every customer almost always are) and getting tech support to send another one is like pulling teeth. Most of the time they can actually tell it's broken from their end by checking the signals BUT THEY STILL REFUSE TO CHECK THIS SIGNAL BECAUSE THEY'RE SADISTIC BASTARDS.
For God's sake, Comcast--just push the "test customer's modem button" FIRST and THEN I'll understand why you make me go through this Sisyphusian reboot dance a thousand time.
So, is it okay to pirate HP:ATSS or HP:ATPS if you're a starving single mother?
I'd basically agree with your post (although maybe you should ask authors about whether book publishers are any less tyranical than RIAA, MPAA). However, if book publishers started enouraging the same attack on my free speech and privacy, on the internet itself, as the double A's do, then it's open season on them, too.
It would be phenomenally stupid for bookpublishers to do so--there's always going to be a huge chunk of the population that buys paper books, such that the only way to stop them from buying paper books is to treat them like criminals.
No, you have to consider both sides of the equation sure there aren't yet many DeCSS users, but on the other side there are even fewer gigantic media corporations benefiting from CSS.
Regardless, utilitarianism is less appropriate for in the first amendment DeCSS issue than it would be for spectrum allocation issues, which are supposed to be based on utilitarianism anyway.
Wait, if they can already get it at archive.org, why should they try to get it from you?
To be honest, I'm not concerned about violating copywrights because most of the time if I were planning to buy the product in question, I would have already paid the money to do so. Because downloading things is such an unpredictable pain, I only steal things I wasn't planning to buy anyway--thus no loss in sales.
Of course, since I now refuse to download OR buy RIAA content, THAT might be a loss in sales.
The very beautiful Klonoa 2 for PS2 did this. (I'm told Klonoa 1 for PS1 also did, but I've never played it). The mediocre Duke Nukem: Manhatten Project on the PC did this as well. Lots of people talk about using Direct3D for 2D stuff--getting free hardware transparency and linear transformations as a bonus.
It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.
On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the law was originally written to exempt charities etc. had a lot to do with previous court decisions that said non-commercial speech was more protected than commercial speech. It's not as simple as just following the constitution--court precedents are just damned inconsistent right now, and its likely that if the law were changed to get this court to like it, another court will call it unconstitutional because it restricts non-commercial entities. What needs to happen is the Supreme Court needs to rule on this to clarify the inconsistencies--unfortunately this is exactly the sort of hornet's nest the Supremes love to refuse to rule on and leave everyone hanging--see the Second Amendment for more examples of that.
The difference is not between good and bad advertisng, but between push and pull advertising. Push advertising, people offering goods and services pushing or broadcasting information unto hapless and unwilling customers, is generally inefficient and wasteful, and will continue to be more so as societies information overload increases. Pull advertising, in which the customer uses the internet or the phonebook or some other tool to solicit only the information they need from merchants, is the useful kind. E-mail advertising of any sort, even of the opt-in variety, strikes me as push advertising. While perhaps not immoral, it at the very least plays on the naivete and immaturity of users (because there's not really a good reason to ask businesses to send email about their products into your inbox--if you want to buy something, it's much more logical for you to go to their website, rather then have them go to your email.) All email marketing, opt-out, opt-in, whatever, is anti-utilitarian, and slightly shady.
Not that I'm arguing with the point your making, (I might not go so far as Bad journalism, though), but Plato struct me as a really humorous example, since he spent an awful lot of time saying things we now judge to be false.
Um, this is probably easier to read split into paragraphs. Preview before submit should be my mantra...
Reading what you post here and other people on rationality leads me to the conclusion that the idea of rationality as conceived by theorists is less of a useful assumption and more of vague catch-all used to confuse anyone who questions the assumptions. The rationality you describe could be possesed by anything. This rock does nothing, it just sits there. Thus the rock must be choosing to do nothing from its beliefs or preferences. This robot chooses to follow my instructions. It must be choosing to follow my instructions from its beliefs or preferences.
There is no action I can take that will earn me that adjective irrational, as it would be impossible to prove that I was not acting according to my beliefs or preferences. But if rationality has no falsifiability, it has no predictive power, and is therefore a completely meaningless as either an assumption or an assertion--it is like assuming that an tautology is true.
Thus, then an economist assumes that people are rational, they're really saying "Well, gee, I can't be held responsible for anything these people do, you'll have to ask a sociologist or psychologist why my theory is incorrect."
And, when a game theorist tries to guess what the ideal rational person would do to make a particular abstract choice, the word rational in that context would be closer to the common definition than your apparently definition. Otherwise, how could it make sense to talk about the ideally rational choice at all?
Unfortunately, (for your argument) any attempt to restore meaning to rationality (by making it possible for something to be irrational) opens the door to Slashdot-style arguing about what the rational choice is. Assuming you aren't reading Slashdot disingenously, when you read something saying "choosing X is the rational choice because you get benefit Y", you should read it as "if you believe benefit Y is something worth pursuing, X is the rational choice."
Reading what you post here and other people on rationality leads me to the conclusion that the idea of rationality as conceived by theorists is less of a useful assumption and more of vague catch-all used to confuse anyone who questions the assumptions. The rationality you describe could be possesed by anything. This rock does nothing, it just sits there. Thus the rock must be choosing to do nothing from its beliefs or preferences. This robot chooses to follow my instructions. It must be choosing to follow my instructions from its beliefs or preferences. There is no action I can take that will earn me that adjective irrational, as it would be impossible to prove that I was not acting according to my beliefs or preferences. But if rationality has no falsifiability, it has no predictive power, and is therefore a completely meaningless as either an assumption or an assertion--it is like assuming that an tautology is true. Thus, then an economist assumes that people are rational, they're really saying "Well, gee, I can't be held responsible for anything these people do, you'll have to ask a sociologist or psychologist why my theory is incorrect." And, when a game theorist tries to guess what the ideal rational person would do to make a particular abstract choice, the word rational in that context would be closer to the common definition than your apparently definition. Otherwise, how could it make sense to talk about the ideally rational choice at all? Unfortunately, (for your argument) any attempt to restore meaning to rationality (by making it possible for something to be irrational) opens the door to Slashdot-style arguing about what the rational choice is. Assuming you aren't reading Slashdot disingenously, when you read something saying "choosing X is the rational choice because you get benefit Y", you should read it as "if you believe benefit Y is something worth pursuing, X is the rational choice."
Everyone keeps saying to try out the demo, but if the demo works that's no guarantee the game works--especially since copy protective CD-checks are getting more draconian and obscure as well (obscure as in not working properly with all hardware). Unreal Tournament 2003 is an example that comes to mind--I played the demo, I bought the game, game does not work. It think a patch fixed the problem eventually--but it seems to me I should have been perfectly justified in returning the product immediately for a full refund (or store credit at least), open box or no open box.
Gamestop (which I guess is the same corporate empire as Software Etc.) used to have an insanely liberal return policy as late as last year--a salesman actually encouraged me to try a game and return it if I didn't like it the next day.
Yes, if 3d zelda had a camera like any other 3d game, it would totally have sucked. What would have been cool is a fixed perspective, overhead 3D--like the gamecube wario game, or the power stone games. It would have maintained the feel of the 2d zeldas but added a third dimension.
I played Wind Waker, and then I loaded the Legend of Zelda ROM in an emulator. There's no contest--the 2d zelda was way, way, the heck harder. It is NOT just camera management, because advancing on and defending against a single enemy become trivially easy. And there are way fewer instances of multiple enemies in the 3d ones than in the 2d ones--the reason for this is that z targeting is great for single enemies, but a player used to using z-targeting will be completely confused when trying to deal with more than one enemy. Even the Savage Labyrinth of Wind Waker didn't throw anything at the player like the original zelda would. The owls were not complicated, but counter-intuitive. Most people, their first time around, don't expect loading the saved game to also DELETE the saved game (yes, the game warns you, but no one reads warnings in our information overloaded world.)
the original legend of zelda is how you describe, but that seems like the exception. Zelda 2 is more of an rpg, link to the past and link's awakening are fairly similar to the 3d zeldas in the amount of action they have.
There was one big problem in the translation: combat. Zelda was never particularly combat-centric--but z targetting in the 3d zeldas makes 95% percent of all the fighting completely easy--just push the attack button at the right time. Combat in the 3d zeldas is more of an emotional, graphics oriented experience rather than a challenge, gameplay oriented experience.
But I still loved Ocarina of Time anyway. I'm not sure if I accept the received view that its the best Zelda -- A Link to the Past is always closest to my heart. And then there's the original Zelda...nope, I just can't decide. They're all too awesome.
Majora's Mask time travel business was really annoying. What's the point of solving subquests and helping people if time keeps getting reset and the people remain unhelped? I've seen an awful lot of people who were confused about how owl-saving worked in that game and lost progress because of that annoying feature. Wind Waker's vast, empty oceans are simply unforgivable.
Behold! Consensus!
This is probably true, but surely the list of all games that were the best looking game when they came out is a fairly long list.
The maturity that enables us to leave this rock will not be the end of conflict, nor the end of persons and organizations willing to use violent conflict, but rather the capacity for our species to deal with this conflict and stop it from reaching a species-destroying level. Probably the best way to increase that capacity would be to get our species on more than one planet--like vicious animals, we need to start putting ourselves into seperate cages.
A Tale in the Desert comes to mind...
Whoops, we forgot. Someone add Goldeneye to the overrated list, quick!
To us, this is nothing new. But to console gamers, Halo is *the* original multiplayer shooter, not Team Fortress, or Quake, or Counterstrike. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Well, I guess I'm not the only one who can't remember Goldeneye for more than two seconds. But seriously, if you're calling something the original multiplayer shooter, when in reality it's just the original CONSOLE multiplayer shooter, then by definition you are overrating it.
I'd agree with you about Myst and The Sims, but I've gotta draw the line at Halo. It oughta be up there with Black and White. It might be the best Xbox game, but outside that one console it's not significant at all.
Is it worse the VII, the playstation one? Because holy crap, that one sucked.
Steve Jobs doesn't want you to theme your Aqua eye candy--which kinda defeats the purpose, IMHO. Not to mention that Mac OS X doesn't let you exploit the most important benefit of vector graphics--resolution independence.
Holy freaking crap! Did you just hold up "Internet Explorer" as an example of a GOOD product name? GASP!
If he was calling a cable company, chances are the stupid cable modem was broken (because those stupid little boxes they reuse for every customer almost always are) and getting tech support to send another one is like pulling teeth. Most of the time they can actually tell it's broken from their end by checking the signals BUT THEY STILL REFUSE TO CHECK THIS SIGNAL BECAUSE THEY'RE SADISTIC BASTARDS.
For God's sake, Comcast--just push the "test customer's modem button" FIRST and THEN I'll understand why you make me go through this Sisyphusian reboot dance a thousand time.
I'd basically agree with your post (although maybe you should ask authors about whether book publishers are any less tyranical than RIAA, MPAA). However, if book publishers started enouraging the same attack on my free speech and privacy, on the internet itself, as the double A's do, then it's open season on them, too.
It would be phenomenally stupid for bookpublishers to do so--there's always going to be a huge chunk of the population that buys paper books, such that the only way to stop them from buying paper books is to treat them like criminals.
Man, after I read that a month or so ago, I have not been able to play Rez (the American no-accessory version). It just somehow feels different.
I thought it would be perfectly legal to inferfere with WiFi bands, given their in the 2.4 ghz range for microwaves and such.
No, you have to consider both sides of the equation sure there aren't yet many DeCSS users, but on the other side there are even fewer gigantic media corporations benefiting from CSS. Regardless, utilitarianism is less appropriate for in the first amendment DeCSS issue than it would be for spectrum allocation issues, which are supposed to be based on utilitarianism anyway.
Wait, if they can already get it at archive.org, why should they try to get it from you? To be honest, I'm not concerned about violating copywrights because most of the time if I were planning to buy the product in question, I would have already paid the money to do so. Because downloading things is such an unpredictable pain, I only steal things I wasn't planning to buy anyway--thus no loss in sales. Of course, since I now refuse to download OR buy RIAA content, THAT might be a loss in sales.
It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.
On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.