For those who have it, The Fawlty Towers box set has a great interview with John Cleese. It is a great interview and some of the points he makes are very relevant to Star Wars.
When questioned why he never made another series after the second, or whether he would do a movie or a reunion episode, he categorically says "no". Not because he doesnt want to, but that he knows that individuals romanticise movies and tv shows, and in their own mind make them to be better than they ever really were.
We all remember the great parts of the OT, but all too easily skip over the bad parts that we have chosen to forget about, or discard when we watch them again.
The reality is, that in our childhood minds the OT have a special place. And that will never be matched by any subsequent episode in the Star Wars universe. We all hold it so fondly in our minds that, regardless of how bad it actually was, we still love it anyway.
The REAL test is to put someone who has never seen any of the 5 movies and gauge their reaction. You will be surprised to find that (of the people i know) the OT is considered cheesy, melodramatic and (in the case of ROTJ particularly) are just kids films.
We made them great in our minds... the Prequels could never live up to that.
People still play all the old games that provided so much of a challenge way back in the 80's. The fact that we like to keep challenging ourselves with these old games is BAD news for publishers.
Why?
Because a publisher wants you to buy the game, finish it within 3 months and then be buying a new game or (even better) the expansion pack. A publisher doesnt really care if you are challenged or not. They attempt to strike the perfect balance between "value for money" and "quick to complete". It works the same as Poker machines. You want people to shell out their money as quickly as possible, whilst still feeling like they are getting reasonable value for money.
A game which you play for 12 months before you complete is good value for you, but not for the publisher.
They dont have the mental capacity or they dont know what the hell a MUD is?
Way back when i started university (1995), everyone knew what a MUD was. But just like Kings Quest's text based interface was replaced with a GUI, so Text-based MUDS got replaced by graphical versions. (I still think the Original KQ was far superior to the later GUI versions btw)
It's not that kids don't have the brain capacity, its just that kids go to their local mall and spend their money on the 'latest and greatest' game. Just like they'd rather watch a movie then read the book. It's about instant gratification. More reward for less effort. It's more of a reflection on society as a whole, and not so much the kids that are being brought up in it.
Even i stopped playing MUD's, after spending years writing them. There's really only so much you can do before you start reinventing the wheel.
Well i dont know about in the US, but in Australia, a percentage of a cover band's income is paid to APRA in the form of royalties.
The flip side is that if you are a band who has their song "covered" you are paid a cheque from APRA for those royalties.
Yeah... what he said!
Funny how its only ACTUAL artists who seem to understand the value of performance and recording.
Doesn't stop all these open source junkies saying how bad you are for wanting to make a buck for being creative... but hey, you guys are happy for the pirates to make money, while the artist goes hungry.
Sure... if everyone gets everything for free from everybody, life would be great.... but unfortunately life just isnt that nice.
Yes, let's abandon the thought of "product" and "property", and lets go down the "service" path.
Person (A) performs a basic service that 99% of the population know how to do.
Person (B) performs a complex service which only 1% of the population know how to do, but for which there is equal demand.
Which is more likely to be paid more for his services? Given the laws of supply and demand, person (B) would obviously charge more for his services. What makes person (B) more valuable? Him as a person? Or the knowledge/information which allows him to provide his service?
Even your model places value in information and knowledge.
But let's say person (B) is ultra nice and lets the world know his knowledge for free, as you suggest. As his knowledge becomes increasingly known, the value of his service decreases.
Information and service are inextricably linked. A service that can be provided by anyone has no value. A service that can be provided by few has a high value.
The difference is the information. The information, and not the service is what holds the value.
That is such an erroneous argument. Your analogy is as flawed as Linus' prostitute analogy. There is no parrallel to argument at all.
If someone leaves your service for a better service, then of course that is tough luck.
Your restaurant has many values, but the one value that is relevant to this argument you have omitted entirely. That being creativity, thought and inspiration.
If he stole your business plan, your recipes, your wine list, your interior design and THEN opened a restaurant using those things.... well the argument ceases to make sense, because it is not at all relevant to this discussion.
Wouldn't it suck, as a professor at Oxford, if my research project lost its funding because someone from Cambridge stole my idea, and then beat me to the solution. Tough luck i guess... i didnt need a job anyway.
An analogy is great as long as it doesnt have holes in it. Unfortunately, Linus' prostitue analogy DOES have holes in it (excuse the pun).
The prostitue may well be providing a service, but it is not a service that she invented or created or otherwise used some creative process to develop. So yes, she does not have the right to earn money from that service.
However, surely you cant honestly believe that if you were to write a song to your pet dog "ralph" (with the intention of selling a couple of CD's around town) but The Eagles recorded it on their latest comeback album and made millions while you didnt sell a single CD, that you wouldnt be pissed off??
Wouldn't you demand compensation for them STEALING your idea?
Now a prositute had better come up with something DAMN impressive for her to hold a similar claim.
It's a completely irrelevant analogy.
For starters, whatever you did to fix the computer, you were most likely trained to do, and therefore hold no copyright claim in the first place. Secondly, unless IT support has become a creative endeavour recently, they arent stealing or duplicating your creative work.
If however, what if YOU wrote a piece of code which fixed the problem, and they took a copy of that piece of code and distributed that code around the world? It's no longer about whether they will pay you to come fix it next time... it's no about the fact that NO ONE will pay you to come fix that problem EVER AGAIN. You're means of surival have been taken from you, because somone STOLE your idea.
I can see where you are coming from, and I agree to a certain extent, and the way you put it certainly has merit.
Let's imagine that I am a musician who holds a concert, and for some reason people come see me and pay their hard-earned to see me and i make $$$. That's great, that seems to work. Let's imagine that i don't create any CD's because i believe i should just be paid for the work i've done, as you suggest.
However, one of my audience members did make a recording, and three weeks later he is performing my music down the road, and now people dont come and see me they go to see him... cos well.. he has a better voice.
By your logic, its just a bit of bad luck. Music isnt property, he's not somehow magically stealing it. I am entitled to payment for my labour only, and therefore him copying me is fine, because now he is doing the labour. Problem is, every time i write a new song this other guy performs it, and i eventually go broke and give up. Do my ideas have no value at all? Is it only the performance of those ideas that have value? You say that music isn't something you can steal, and yet i've had my means of survival taken from me. I would indeed be in a miserable state.
You're right. Someone cant steal music and make it disappear, but by replicating that work you are STILL depriving the original artist of income, regardless of whether the artist had originally recorded the music for profit or not. Copyright isnt about protecting property, it is about protecting the rights of someone to earn income from their artistic work.
Yeah, except that these people know they've broken the law. They know if they go to court they will lose. They are the ones who have broken the law. So that is why they settle, or why they attempt to counter-sue.
I'm not saying that is the truth with all of these cases. But I am quite sure it is the case in the majority of instances.
(let's ignore the fact that most people who own a computer/internet have at some stage pirated something!)
Music (or software) Piracy is not about stealing some sort of physical property, and never has been. If I "steal" a song via Kazaa, the RIAA isn't short one copy. However, by copying or distributing copyrighted works you are, in effect, depriving the original author of that work income (lets just pretend the artist usually gets the money).
It's not about whether you would or wouldn't have purchased a copy if it were cheaper or easier either. The fact is that you have taken something for free, which the owner has asked payment for. Just as a service isn't property, but you are still required to pay for your phone, your cable, your Doctor etc.
The law does not see music as property, just as it doesnt see a service as property, it is somewhere in between. The flaw isn't in the way the RIAA treats music, the flaw is in those who somehow feel right in taking something which they should rightly be required to pay for. It costs a lot of money to produce and promote an album, and those who pay for that are entitled to due payment for you using it.
If you are SERIOUS about supporting artists, and SERIOUS about screwing the RIAA. Go out and support your local unsigned artists by turning up to their gigs and buying their CD's, but dont take something you aren't entitled to just because you think music shouldn't be owned by anyone.
Rainbow Six 3, Counter Strike and every other FPS i've played you cant hear your opponent. So even if you do get spammed by a 12 year old, you arent going to hear him gloat. The down side is that when you get your revenge, he wont hear you either. This leaves you and your team mates to work more effectively, set traps, respond to rushing and work as a team.
PLUS, it is real easy to mute any morons that start singing in the lobby before the game.
From MS' point of view you've had your "new" account for nearly 3 months now. That's 1/4 of the duration of the billing period. For all they know you've been playing the hell out of xbox live in the last 3 months.
ALthough i feel sorry for your situation, there certainly isnt a clause in their contract that says "XBox Live, buy 12 months get 3 months free".
At the end of the day you've had access to their service for 3 months, and although i'd support the refund pro-rata, you can't possibly justify being refunded for the time you've already had access (whether you used it or not is hardly their fault).
I was a Beta tester for the game, and the concept DID work. Basically you were on a mission to solve the riddle of what happened to a long forgetten civilisation. The puzzles were cool, and the grpahics and everything were great.
Basically you had to interact with others to find new places and things to do. It felt alot like Second Life or There, but looked a lot nicer than both of them.
I thnk it suffered from a real lack of exposure, and while i dont think it was ever commercially viable as a "pay to play" i think it did add an interesting new dimension to the Myst series...and i am sad that it didnt survive.
Having said that.... i got pretty bored with it, as the online component didnt have THAT much to offer me to keep me logging back in.
I think people are confusing difficulty with intelligence. Use a game like Dead or Alive or Tekken as an example. Increasing the difficulty adaptively would involve the AI hitting faster or using more advanced moves the better you got. That is not adaptive AI, that is adaptive difficulty.
Adaptive AI in this case would be more like that if you only use a certain set of attacks the AI learns what you are likely to do and defends appropriately. Just like a real person would. These would be the end of using set-patterns of attack against a stupid AI. Its not just to make things harder, but to make them more realistic. No more "left jab, right kick, knee, knee, knee, rinse and repeat"
Or in a game like Age of Empires, if your strategy is to always use cavalry to rush the opposition, the AI would learn and create Pikemen to counter your repeated attacks. Having AI which adapts to your moves forces the player to continually revise their strategy... not neccesarily make it more difficult, but forcing the player to ALSO become adaptive instead of using a tried and true method to beat the AI.
Sure 3gig is fine for surfing the web. But I happen to be a big gamer, and have been in several Beta Programs for AC2, Eve-online, Chrome, SWG and a few others. SWG was a 2gig download!!! There goes my cap for the next month!!
So, it appears that you suggest that the intended audience for particular article is those that fully understand the content of it?
That's a bit of a paradox. If everyone only read things about that which they already knew, then no one would be doing much learning. The fact that someone shows interest in a topic or article is enough to suggest that the person is justified in wanting to know more about it... even if they don't understand the fundamentals.
Mysticgoat expressed interest in learning more on this topic so that he could possibly understand the article more fully, and all you manage to do is express how far above the rest of us you are.
In future, if you aren't going to assist in someones quest for furthering their own knowledge, dont be so pathetic as to degrade them for trying.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who have it, The Fawlty Towers box set has a great interview with John Cleese. It is a great interview and some of the points he makes are very relevant to Star Wars.
When questioned why he never made another series after the second, or whether he would do a movie or a reunion episode, he categorically says "no". Not because he doesnt want to, but that he knows that individuals romanticise movies and tv shows, and in their own mind make them to be better than they ever really were.
We all remember the great parts of the OT, but all too easily skip over the bad parts that we have chosen to forget about, or discard when we watch them again.
The reality is, that in our childhood minds the OT have a special place. And that will never be matched by any subsequent episode in the Star Wars universe. We all hold it so fondly in our minds that, regardless of how bad it actually was, we still love it anyway.
The REAL test is to put someone who has never seen any of the 5 movies and gauge their reaction. You will be surprised to find that (of the people i know) the OT is considered cheesy, melodramatic and (in the case of ROTJ particularly) are just kids films.
We made them great in our minds... the Prequels could never live up to that.
Cool, there is a "Shop or Compare Prices" link at the end of the article!
'We couldn't find any product matches on Shopping.com for "the Bugatti Veyron"'
Damn!
People still play all the old games that provided so much of a challenge way back in the 80's. The fact that we like to keep challenging ourselves with these old games is BAD news for publishers.
Why?
Because a publisher wants you to buy the game, finish it within 3 months and then be buying a new game or (even better) the expansion pack. A publisher doesnt really care if you are challenged or not. They attempt to strike the perfect balance between "value for money" and "quick to complete". It works the same as Poker machines. You want people to shell out their money as quickly as possible, whilst still feeling like they are getting reasonable value for money.
A game which you play for 12 months before you complete is good value for you, but not for the publisher.
They dont have the mental capacity or they dont know what the hell a MUD is? Way back when i started university (1995), everyone knew what a MUD was. But just like Kings Quest's text based interface was replaced with a GUI, so Text-based MUDS got replaced by graphical versions. (I still think the Original KQ was far superior to the later GUI versions btw) It's not that kids don't have the brain capacity, its just that kids go to their local mall and spend their money on the 'latest and greatest' game. Just like they'd rather watch a movie then read the book. It's about instant gratification. More reward for less effort. It's more of a reflection on society as a whole, and not so much the kids that are being brought up in it. Even i stopped playing MUD's, after spending years writing them. There's really only so much you can do before you start reinventing the wheel.
Well i dont know about in the US, but in Australia, a percentage of a cover band's income is paid to APRA in the form of royalties. The flip side is that if you are a band who has their song "covered" you are paid a cheque from APRA for those royalties.
Yeah... what he said! Funny how its only ACTUAL artists who seem to understand the value of performance and recording. Doesn't stop all these open source junkies saying how bad you are for wanting to make a buck for being creative... but hey, you guys are happy for the pirates to make money, while the artist goes hungry. Sure... if everyone gets everything for free from everybody, life would be great.... but unfortunately life just isnt that nice.
Yes, let's abandon the thought of "product" and "property", and lets go down the "service" path.
Person (A) performs a basic service that 99% of the population know how to do.
Person (B) performs a complex service which only 1% of the population know how to do, but for which there is equal demand.
Which is more likely to be paid more for his services? Given the laws of supply and demand, person (B) would obviously charge more for his services. What makes person (B) more valuable? Him as a person? Or the knowledge/information which allows him to provide his service?
Even your model places value in information and knowledge.
But let's say person (B) is ultra nice and lets the world know his knowledge for free, as you suggest. As his knowledge becomes increasingly known, the value of his service decreases.
Information and service are inextricably linked. A service that can be provided by anyone has no value. A service that can be provided by few has a high value.
The difference is the information. The information, and not the service is what holds the value.
That is such an erroneous argument. Your analogy is as flawed as Linus' prostitute analogy. There is no parrallel to argument at all.
If someone leaves your service for a better service, then of course that is tough luck.
Your restaurant has many values, but the one value that is relevant to this argument you have omitted entirely. That being creativity, thought and inspiration.
If he stole your business plan, your recipes, your wine list, your interior design and THEN opened a restaurant using those things.... well the argument ceases to make sense, because it is not at all relevant to this discussion.
Wouldn't it suck, as a professor at Oxford, if my research project lost its funding because someone from Cambridge stole my idea, and then beat me to the solution. Tough luck i guess... i didnt need a job anyway.
An analogy is great as long as it doesnt have holes in it. Unfortunately, Linus' prostitue analogy DOES have holes in it (excuse the pun). The prostitue may well be providing a service, but it is not a service that she invented or created or otherwise used some creative process to develop. So yes, she does not have the right to earn money from that service. However, surely you cant honestly believe that if you were to write a song to your pet dog "ralph" (with the intention of selling a couple of CD's around town) but The Eagles recorded it on their latest comeback album and made millions while you didnt sell a single CD, that you wouldnt be pissed off?? Wouldn't you demand compensation for them STEALING your idea? Now a prositute had better come up with something DAMN impressive for her to hold a similar claim.
It's a completely irrelevant analogy. For starters, whatever you did to fix the computer, you were most likely trained to do, and therefore hold no copyright claim in the first place. Secondly, unless IT support has become a creative endeavour recently, they arent stealing or duplicating your creative work. If however, what if YOU wrote a piece of code which fixed the problem, and they took a copy of that piece of code and distributed that code around the world? It's no longer about whether they will pay you to come fix it next time... it's no about the fact that NO ONE will pay you to come fix that problem EVER AGAIN. You're means of surival have been taken from you, because somone STOLE your idea.
I can see where you are coming from, and I agree to a certain extent, and the way you put it certainly has merit.
Let's imagine that I am a musician who holds a concert, and for some reason people come see me and pay their hard-earned to see me and i make $$$. That's great, that seems to work. Let's imagine that i don't create any CD's because i believe i should just be paid for the work i've done, as you suggest.
However, one of my audience members did make a recording, and three weeks later he is performing my music down the road, and now people dont come and see me they go to see him... cos well.. he has a better voice.
By your logic, its just a bit of bad luck. Music isnt property, he's not somehow magically stealing it. I am entitled to payment for my labour only, and therefore him copying me is fine, because now he is doing the labour. Problem is, every time i write a new song this other guy performs it, and i eventually go broke and give up. Do my ideas have no value at all? Is it only the performance of those ideas that have value? You say that music isn't something you can steal, and yet i've had my means of survival taken from me. I would indeed be in a miserable state.
You're right. Someone cant steal music and make it disappear, but by replicating that work you are STILL depriving the original artist of income, regardless of whether the artist had originally recorded the music for profit or not. Copyright isnt about protecting property, it is about protecting the rights of someone to earn income from their artistic work.
Yeah, except that these people know they've broken the law. They know if they go to court they will lose. They are the ones who have broken the law. So that is why they settle, or why they attempt to counter-sue.
I'm not saying that is the truth with all of these cases. But I am quite sure it is the case in the majority of instances.
(let's ignore the fact that most people who own a computer/internet have at some stage pirated something!)
Music (or software) Piracy is not about stealing some sort of physical property, and never has been. If I "steal" a song via Kazaa, the RIAA isn't short one copy. However, by copying or distributing copyrighted works you are, in effect, depriving the original author of that work income (lets just pretend the artist usually gets the money).
It's not about whether you would or wouldn't have purchased a copy if it were cheaper or easier either. The fact is that you have taken something for free, which the owner has asked payment for. Just as a service isn't property, but you are still required to pay for your phone, your cable, your Doctor etc.
The law does not see music as property, just as it doesnt see a service as property, it is somewhere in between. The flaw isn't in the way the RIAA treats music, the flaw is in those who somehow feel right in taking something which they should rightly be required to pay for. It costs a lot of money to produce and promote an album, and those who pay for that are entitled to due payment for you using it.
If you are SERIOUS about supporting artists, and SERIOUS about screwing the RIAA. Go out and support your local unsigned artists by turning up to their gigs and buying their CD's, but dont take something you aren't entitled to just because you think music shouldn't be owned by anyone.
Rainbow Six 3, Counter Strike and every other FPS i've played you cant hear your opponent. So even if you do get spammed by a 12 year old, you arent going to hear him gloat. The down side is that when you get your revenge, he wont hear you either. This leaves you and your team mates to work more effectively, set traps, respond to rushing and work as a team. PLUS, it is real easy to mute any morons that start singing in the lobby before the game.
Generally speaking, the angle of the dangle is proportional to the sag of the bag, providing the throb of the knob remains constant.
From MS' point of view you've had your "new" account for nearly 3 months now. That's 1/4 of the duration of the billing period. For all they know you've been playing the hell out of xbox live in the last 3 months.
ALthough i feel sorry for your situation, there certainly isnt a clause in their contract that says "XBox Live, buy 12 months get 3 months free".
At the end of the day you've had access to their service for 3 months, and although i'd support the refund pro-rata, you can't possibly justify being refunded for the time you've already had access (whether you used it or not is hardly their fault).
I was a Beta tester for the game, and the concept DID work. Basically you were on a mission to solve the riddle of what happened to a long forgetten civilisation. The puzzles were cool, and the grpahics and everything were great. Basically you had to interact with others to find new places and things to do. It felt alot like Second Life or There, but looked a lot nicer than both of them. I thnk it suffered from a real lack of exposure, and while i dont think it was ever commercially viable as a "pay to play" i think it did add an interesting new dimension to the Myst series...and i am sad that it didnt survive. Having said that.... i got pretty bored with it, as the online component didnt have THAT much to offer me to keep me logging back in.
It does say "+5 Interesting"... not "+5 Yeah, he's right"
mmmmm.... xbox live... Kick MS all you like, but i havent come across a cheat yet.
I think people are confusing difficulty with intelligence. Use a game like Dead or Alive or Tekken as an example. Increasing the difficulty adaptively would involve the AI hitting faster or using more advanced moves the better you got. That is not adaptive AI, that is adaptive difficulty.
Adaptive AI in this case would be more like that if you only use a certain set of attacks the AI learns what you are likely to do and defends appropriately. Just like a real person would. These would be the end of using set-patterns of attack against a stupid AI. Its not just to make things harder, but to make them more realistic. No more "left jab, right kick, knee, knee, knee, rinse and repeat"
Or in a game like Age of Empires, if your strategy is to always use cavalry to rush the opposition, the AI would learn and create Pikemen to counter your repeated attacks. Having AI which adapts to your moves forces the player to continually revise their strategy... not neccesarily make it more difficult, but forcing the player to ALSO become adaptive instead of using a tried and true method to beat the AI.
Sure 3gig is fine for surfing the web. But I happen to be a big gamer, and have been in several Beta Programs for AC2, Eve-online, Chrome, SWG and a few others. SWG was a 2gig download!!! There goes my cap for the next month!!
So, it appears that you suggest that the intended audience for particular article is those that fully understand the content of it? That's a bit of a paradox. If everyone only read things about that which they already knew, then no one would be doing much learning. The fact that someone shows interest in a topic or article is enough to suggest that the person is justified in wanting to know more about it... even if they don't understand the fundamentals. Mysticgoat expressed interest in learning more on this topic so that he could possibly understand the article more fully, and all you manage to do is express how far above the rest of us you are. In future, if you aren't going to assist in someones quest for furthering their own knowledge, dont be so pathetic as to degrade them for trying.
Yes day arr, to be sure, to be sure. But, just you be watchin' out for da little people.
I had a friend once who did 1500 lines in one day... but he got a REALLY serious nose bleed