People who bitch about their children getting access to things which they should have prevented them getting access to (internet porn, bad tv, inappropriate videogames, guns, drugs) should immediately have their children taken away from them. They are unfit parents. If they want the government to be a giant nanny, they should cede all parental control to the government.
It's really not *that* hard to control a kid's access to media, it just takes a modicum of discipline on the part of the parent. (Speaking from experience as a parent with reasonably high standards about what constitutes acceptable viewing material.)
Re:Why is it now difficult to own games?
on
R.I.P Ultima Online ?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I recall Brian Moriarty speaking at a conference about Mpath (an early subscription online gaming service). He said that something like 30% of their payments were by mail via money order. His point was that as professionals, most game creators (and marketing people at EA) can't even conceive of the daily lives of some of their customer base, for whom having and using a credit card is a big deal.
That's legit. Don't want spam, don't try and get something for nothing. Don't click the monkey, put the lobster in the pot, etc. WTF do you think will happen when you send some random company your email address?
How long were your takes? Anything longer than a minute or two of you staring at the camera tends to be super-dull to watch. Even newscasts change the camera angle every minute or so, although you may not pay that much attention to it.
Curious: Are you from America? Typically, Americans are all about pluck and doing it yourself, while I tend to find that non-Americans are much more receptive to your attitude -- if you don't have access to a teleprompter, you don't need access to a teleprompter.
Which is all well and good if you want and expect people to stay in their places; for me I'll take creativity and social mobility.
I wonder if they consider campus dorm rooms as households. I certainly didn't have a phone in my dorm, but I guess that was 10+ years ago. Kids today probably have TVs and mini-computers in their rooms.
Despite PARCs perceived failures (like not capitalizing commercially on the GUI), its creation of the laser printer more than made the entire endeavor profitable for Xerox. I suggest reading Dealers of Lightning for a great history of Xerox PARC.
It does matter a lot to people; for the stats as much as anything else. Back in the mid-1990s there were a ton of football games. Some had the players license (like Joe Montana Sports Talk Football for Geneses, where Joe Montana could toss a pass to Jerry Rice, but they both played for just plain "San Francisco") and others had the teams licensed (where you could toss it to #80 of the 49ers, but never know who that was).
Then EA got the players license AND the NFL license, spending a butt-load to do it, and suddenly they saw that they had way better sales. So it does matter.
Actually, only MLB has an exemption to the anti-trust laws. The NFL does not. In fact, the USFL won an anti-trust suit against the NFL, although the damages awarded were small ($1, increased by statute to $3). You can read more, fan-written details here .
Hey, I went to that town! Fortine, MT. On the map. Not anywhere else. Nice country though.
Back on topic, You can't copyright a list -- you can't copyright the phone book, or just a list of words, but you can copyright the descriptions of what the words mean.
As for the Webster's trademark, it became dilluted and a few differnt publishers now use it.
I am not a Japan-o-phile, I don't have stacks of anime or dream of dating a Japanese girl -- I am practically a red state knuckle dragger when it comes to culture. But your comment strikes me as about as xenophobic and uninformed as they come.
Here's an excercise: Go to Japan. Go to a bar. Watch the people. Wow, what do you know! They pretty much act like everyone else! The guys there with their work mates look bored and forced, just like here. The people with their friends look like they're having fun. The single people look like they're desperately trying to look totally uninterested in members of the opposite sex.
To make a gross generalization -- but no grosser than yours! -- I think Americans can come on too strong and seem boorish to Japanese people, but if you're half-way polite to people, they're super cool. I made much better friends with locals in Japan than in Germany, that's for sure.
I gotta call bullshit on the personal interaction thing. I was in Japan and I saw people there talking *all the time!* You couldn't even understand what they were saying, they were talking so fast (and in such a weird language)...
Seriously, though, Japanese people are not any more introverted than Americans. If anything, they have to be more outgoing. There is a lot more rigid adherence to very structured, unspoken, rules of protocol and personal interaction, but all you have to do is spend a week kicking it in Tokyo and you'll quickly realize there're fewer major difference between our cultures than you would have thought.
Hot Dog on a Stick doesn't even hire guys, so 99.999% of/. readers are SOL. However, with HDOAS, you kind of want the ladies working there exclusively, especially when they make the lemonade...
Actually, upon closely RTFA, they *bought* the Think trademarks -- "ThinkPad" is now theirs. But they can use "IBM" on them for five years before they have to start calling them something else. I'd bet $500 easy that the name of the company becomes "Think" or "ThinkPad" or some derivitive name w/i the five years.
Yep. I may try to convince management to speed up my next laptop purchase, but other than that, if the ThinkPad tanks (which I suspect it will), I'll bit the bullet and learn to use a track-pad on a PowerBook.
This is totally true. If you write well, people pay way more attention to your written words, and give them more weight, even if your arguments or ideas are pretty stupid.
You could have the best idea in the world, but if you WRITE IT IN ALL CAPS AND SOMEHOW ADD 1s TO YOU'RE EXCLAMATION POINTZ NO 1 WILL LISTEN!!!1!!!
Most people get basic sentence structure right. Where I see a horrid batch of grammar crimes in in suffixes and word agreements, especially for some reason in California (maybe because the high rate of immigration here means there are a lot of new or first generation English speakers).
Signs like "Fish & Chip, $5" or "All player must register before going on ice" are so common here, it kind of makes me sick.
Still, English has been moving since Old English from a tense and ending based grammar and towards a word order based grammar (think of how weird "yoda talk" seems, even when it isn't technically grammatically incorrect, and understand it just fine you can), so we may just be losing those agreements at the end of words, because the sentence structure dictates the meaning without them. It's still grating to me, but I bet none of the old fogeys in Shakespeare's time were down with the great vowel shift.
Given his variety of roles -- plumber (most games he's in), construction worker (the deeply underrated Wrecking Crew), general man-about-the-construction-site (Donkey Kong) -- maybe it would have been better to refer to him as a general contractor...
Slashdot Mirror
It's really not *that* hard to control a kid's access to media, it just takes a modicum of discipline on the part of the parent. (Speaking from experience as a parent with reasonably high standards about what constitutes acceptable viewing material.)
I recall Brian Moriarty speaking at a conference about Mpath (an early subscription online gaming service). He said that something like 30% of their payments were by mail via money order. His point was that as professionals, most game creators (and marketing people at EA) can't even conceive of the daily lives of some of their customer base, for whom having and using a credit card is a big deal.
That's legit. Don't want spam, don't try and get something for nothing. Don't click the monkey, put the lobster in the pot, etc. WTF do you think will happen when you send some random company your email address?
How long were your takes? Anything longer than a minute or two of you staring at the camera tends to be super-dull to watch. Even newscasts change the camera angle every minute or so, although you may not pay that much attention to it.
Which is all well and good if you want and expect people to stay in their places; for me I'll take creativity and social mobility.
I wonder if they consider campus dorm rooms as households. I certainly didn't have a phone in my dorm, but I guess that was 10+ years ago. Kids today probably have TVs and mini-computers in their rooms.
PC Load Letter = an HP invention. Duh.
Despite PARCs perceived failures (like not capitalizing commercially on the GUI), its creation of the laser printer more than made the entire endeavor profitable for Xerox. I suggest reading Dealers of Lightning for a great history of Xerox PARC.
Then EA got the players license AND the NFL license, spending a butt-load to do it, and suddenly they saw that they had way better sales. So it does matter.
Actually, only MLB has an exemption to the anti-trust laws. The NFL does not. In fact, the USFL won an anti-trust suit against the NFL, although the damages awarded were small ($1, increased by statute to $3). You can read more, fan-written details here .
Anyway this is more a videogame monopoly story than a strict sports story...
Back on topic, You can't copyright a list -- you can't copyright the phone book, or just a list of words, but you can copyright the descriptions of what the words mean.
As for the Webster's trademark, it became dilluted and a few differnt publishers now use it.
and barbers.
Here's an excercise: Go to Japan. Go to a bar. Watch the people. Wow, what do you know! They pretty much act like everyone else! The guys there with their work mates look bored and forced, just like here. The people with their friends look like they're having fun. The single people look like they're desperately trying to look totally uninterested in members of the opposite sex.
To make a gross generalization -- but no grosser than yours! -- I think Americans can come on too strong and seem boorish to Japanese people, but if you're half-way polite to people, they're super cool. I made much better friends with locals in Japan than in Germany, that's for sure.
If his site wasn't burned right now, you would see that he typically hires super hot assistants.
Seriously, though, Japanese people are not any more introverted than Americans. If anything, they have to be more outgoing. There is a lot more rigid adherence to very structured, unspoken, rules of protocol and personal interaction, but all you have to do is spend a week kicking it in Tokyo and you'll quickly realize there're fewer major difference between our cultures than you would have thought.
All these fuckwads who sell pirated games do is make it harder for legitimate hobbiests to open up their consoles.
Hot Dog on a Stick doesn't even hire guys, so 99.999% of /. readers are SOL. However, with HDOAS, you kind of want the ladies working there exclusively, especially when they make the lemonade...
A PowerBook with a track point and two buttons would bring me back into the Apple fold faster than you can say "Wozniak"... or even "Jobs"
Ironically, while they're known for totally shitty inkjets, they make really nice but expensive laser and color laser printers. Weird.
Actually, upon closely RTFA, they *bought* the Think trademarks -- "ThinkPad" is now theirs. But they can use "IBM" on them for five years before they have to start calling them something else. I'd bet $500 easy that the name of the company becomes "Think" or "ThinkPad" or some derivitive name w/i the five years.
Yep. I may try to convince management to speed up my next laptop purchase, but other than that, if the ThinkPad tanks (which I suspect it will), I'll bit the bullet and learn to use a track-pad on a PowerBook.
You could have the best idea in the world, but if you WRITE IT IN ALL CAPS AND SOMEHOW ADD 1s TO YOU'RE EXCLAMATION POINTZ NO 1 WILL LISTEN!!!1!!!
Signs like "Fish & Chip, $5" or "All player must register before going on ice" are so common here, it kind of makes me sick.
Still, English has been moving since Old English from a tense and ending based grammar and towards a word order based grammar (think of how weird "yoda talk" seems, even when it isn't technically grammatically incorrect, and understand it just fine you can), so we may just be losing those agreements at the end of words, because the sentence structure dictates the meaning without them. It's still grating to me, but I bet none of the old fogeys in Shakespeare's time were down with the great vowel shift.
Given his variety of roles -- plumber (most games he's in), construction worker (the deeply underrated Wrecking Crew), general man-about-the-construction-site (Donkey Kong) -- maybe it would have been better to refer to him as a general contractor...