Sorry, but democracy didn't start with womens' suffrage. (Furthermore, your assertion that a country of 100 people immediately becomes a democracy as soon as the 51st person gets the right to vote seems rather silly.) You can trace the roots of democracy back thousands of years, of course, but the fact remains that the first system of government to belong to that family of modern liberal democracies was founded here, in the mid- to late 1700's.
In the small world in which we live today, is any country not guilty of associating with at least one government you don't approve of? I don't like our association with Saudi Arabia. I don't like our war in Iraq. I don't really like much of anything we've done this century. But most Americans aren't directly responsible for that, and most of us would never have supported the invasion of Iraq in the first place had we not been flat-out lied to by Bush.
The OP made a rude generalization about Americans (i.e. the people, not the country). As such, I don't think his background is outside of the scope of the argument, and (aside from that Happy Meal comment, which you have to admit was kind of funny), I don't think I stepped outside of the boundaries of acceptable discourse. I wasn't defending the actions of the Bush administration at all.
And unless you're wearing clothes made in your local village, eating only locally-grown food and working for a small, local business with no connections outside your country, you're also complicit in a lot of this. Does your government have trade relations with the United States? Why haven't you done something to stop them? You're responsible for what they do, after all.
I agree with you. I hate the Bush administration. I voted; I donated money to Kerry, and I write letters to my legislative representatives. I don't know how so many people could be stupid enough to vote Republican two years ago, either. I'm just sick of being stereotyped because of it. There are tens of millions of conscientious Americans just like me who did all we could. It's not easy to compete with Jesus and an electoral system that favors rural states.
I'm quite familiar with my country's history, TYVM. Chances are you live in a country whose system of government is based on the one we first implemented. I'd also imagine you're enjoying not living under a Kaiser or a Fuhrer, something for which the United States is largely responsible.
Despite some ugly blemishes in our history, the U.S. has given a lot to the world. (Then again, name a country with as long a history that doesn't have something to be embarrassed about.) The current regime is a complete embarrassment, yes, but I didn't vote for them, and I'm getting really sick of hearing about how evil, fat, lazy and apathetic I am simply because of where I live.
The OP said something that I found offensive about Americans, while quite clearly trumpeting his association with China. I felt obligated to point out the hypocrisy there. That's where the China connection came from.
It takes a big man to call someone a bigot in an anonymous/. post. At least I have the stones to attach my name to my words, even when it's quite obvious that they'll offend some people.
And what, exactly, in my original post makes me a bigot? Is any of what I said untrue? More to the point, did I make any generalizations about Chinese people, or anyone else for that matter?
I'm totally ashamed of my government's actions. I can't think of a single good idea that's come out of Washington in the past five years. I'm a registered Democrat; I vote in every election, and I donate money to politicians in every election cycle. Short of armed revolt, I don't see what more I can do.
But hearing things like "the world spits on America" makes my blood boil. I love my country, and I'm proud of (most of) its history. Blaming all Americans for the poor decisions our government makes is no different than blaming all Muslims for the activities of al-Qaeda.
Karma Kablooiieee!
My thoughts exactly when I made my first post on this article.
Why the emphasis on "your own citizens"? Surely summary execution is bad regardless of whether the victims are citizens of the country in which it takes place or not? Are you saying you would have no problem with the US government rounding up foreigners and shooting them dead, as long as it leaves its citizens alone? Boy, what an admirable sentiment.
That's ridiculous. My aim was to point out the hypocracy in the OP's statement. And, frankly, yes, while you won't find a sane person anywhere would would condone murder in any form, you have to admit that there's something even more unsettling about doing it to the very people that you're supposed to be protecting.
It is? The country that's supposedly founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, is "supposed" to have class-based equality? I thought the American dream was that everyone had an equal opportunity to succeed based on their own talent and hard work. Giving greater opportunities to the children of the rich, while condemning the children of the poor to substandard education and bad jobs, is not what America is "supposed" to stand for.
Economically speaking, yes, America is supposed to be stratified. That's what happens in a capitalist economy. China, meanwhile, is just as stratified, but still operating under the auspices of being a Communist society in which everyone is absolutely economically equal. I didn't say America was perfect, nor did I say that I was happy with the direction in which my country is headed.
Wait, you're saying that because the Chinese have no right to freedom of speech in their own country, they should be denied it in America too?
I don't see how you could come to that conclusion based on what I said. Obviously, people have the right to say whatever they want, just as I have the right to label your speech as foolish or hypocritical. I wasn't saying that the OP didn't have a legal right to say whatever he wanted; merely that I think it was an illogical and hypocritical thing to say.
Oh, I totally agree with you. I despise Bush et. al. (and yes, I voted in 2004), and I think we'll look at the word "terrorism" in forty years in the same quaint, cringing way we look at mentions of "communism" from the 60's. Regardless, I love my country and its history, and I'm getting really tired of having to answer, as an American, for the actions of my government. It's understandable, I suppose, but hearing it from someone who seems so eager to embrace Chinese culture strikes me as a bit hypocritical.
For the record, the whole world spits on China, too.
America may be a mess, but it's not like China is a shining example of how to run a country. Your country sucks just as much as mine, and probably more so.
At least I can say America is a mess without worrying about a knock on my door from the thought police. America may be poorly mistreating those captured on the war on terror, but at least we don't have "strike hard" campaigns where our own citizens are sentenced to death in stadiums and executed minutes later. And there may be much class inequality in America, but from what I understand, it's the same in China (and everywhere else). At least our system is supposed to work that way. We may have sided with some real bastards in the Middle East in the early 1980's, but China's the one blocking action against everyone's favorite nascent nuclear theocracy in the UN Security Council.
America has been at the forefront of innovation for centuries, while China is poised to become an economic superpower simply by virtue of its huge numbers of people, importing Western ingenuity and cranking out cheap imitations. But I guess someone has to make our Happy Meal toys.:)
So seriously, shut the fuck up, Chinese guy. You have no right to talk.
I think you're probably right about most of that, but the 360 is substantially bigger and heavier than a PS2, and also requires an external power supply the size of a brick.
Not that the 360 isn't an impressive piece of engineering, but it's much more comparable in size and mass to the original XBox.
If PS2 Linux is any indication, you'll get access to a good deal of the system's functionality; six of the seven core libraries were opened up (well, given out, anyway), with low-level I/O being the exception, for a number of reasons. (Region-free DVD players and modified game images that boot from Linux are two possibilities that spring to mind.)
The problem is that Sony doesn't own any complex, reusable 3D or physics engines, at least to the best of my knowledge. That's why platforms like Havok and Renderware are so successful; you either license middleware or roll your own.
The real problem with the PS2 Linux distro was that you couldn't play anything you wrote on any other machine, not to mention that whatever you'd write had to be sitting on top of the Linux kernel the whole time. I don't know all that much about PS2 programming, but when you have 32 MB of shared memory to work with, I'm guessing that running a robust OS in the background is, um, sub-optimal.
So yeah, Sony is crazy and paranoid (as are, more importantly, third-party publishers), and yeah, you probably won't be able to write games for anyone other than yourself and other PS3 Linux users.
On the other hand, it's an opportunity to play with what looks like a really interesting system architecture, so that's always nice.
The iPod is a different story. It's small, sleek and elegant, and I'd venture that it appeals to a Japanese sensibility that values those things. The XBox, on the other hand (and the 360, which is also selling poorly), is bulky, heavy and noisy, and very distinctly American. The software library a lot to do with it as well, but Microsoft has secured a number of exclusives in Japan (such as all of Team Ninja's output), and it hasn't seemed to matter at all.
I wouldn't call it xenophobia so much as nationalism--if there were a native Japanese equivalent to the iPod that performed just as well, I think Apple would have sold very few iPods in Japan.
I think it's third in Europe and Australia, as well, and the only thing keeping it out of dead last in Japan is the disdain that they have for American electronics.
Sony holds the crown all over the world, and they do so by such a large margin that (handhelds notwithstanding) you can't really look at it as anything but defeat for both Nintendo and Microsoft.
First of all, a truly revolutionary control system would track your entire body. Secondly, it would likely require some kind of visual interface that makes you feel like you're there. Either that, or playing a game will be like a dream. You're convinced you're actually in the game world even though you're stationary.
That's like saying that the introduction of airplanes wasn't revolutionary because they can't fly to Mars. I don't think calling Wii's control system "revolutionary" is a stretch, even if it isn't a Holodeck or anything.
Another problem is that gaming is generally a sedentary experience. Not many people are going to be able to stand there waving their arms around for several hours straight. When using a keyboard and mouse we're supposed to keep our wrists in a neutral position, and here we have a device that requires we use our wrists in repetitive motions. Your range of motion is fairly limited, which means your entire arm has to move, which increases exhaustion. Hold a remote control in the air and you'll get a good sense of what's involved.
Excercise is a great thing; anything that encourages kids to work out is good. People are too sedentary. But keep in mind, most people who game for hours on end aren't necessarily looking to move around much. But it also get's a point where you might as well just go out and play sports for real if you need to move that much.
I've also wondered how long a person would be able to play for at a time. I don't think it's going to be that much of an issue, and if peoples' physical limitations keep them from playing for more than a few hours straight, well, that's probably healthy.
On the other hand, while providing a better control scheme it will still lose every to the precision and speed of a mouse in many genres.
Are you so sure about that? We don't know much about the accuracy of the device itself, but I'd imagine that the Wii controller could be more responsive than a mouse. There's no technological reason that its precision should be less than that of a mouse. Furthermore, I'd imagine that the human brain incurs some computational cost when attempting to project movement on a 2D plane into a 3D space. I could honestly see Wii actually being better for twitch games.
It's easy for me to make sweeping, optimistic predictions when nothing has been announced yet. But I don't see any reason to focus on the system's limitations until we actually see what it can do.
It's a tricky issue. Her "official" name was in Japanese katakana, of course, and would be transliterated as Earisu (Ay-ah-ree-su). Japanese is, phonetically speaking, pretty restrictive--you can only make about a hundred differenct sounds. There are a lot of different English spellings and even pronunciations (just off the top of my head, "air lease" would work, among other weird examples) that would result in the same Japanese spelling.
However, the developers of most Japanese RPG's name their characters in Roman letters as well. The concept sketch that was handed to the 3D modellers back when FF7 was just a gleam in Hironobu Sakaguchi's eye was labelled "Aerith." Whether that means more to you than her name in the version of the game that you actually played is entirely a matter of perspective. Personally, I'd say that "Aerith" is the correct spelling.
I also think this is a pretty dumb argument to be having, so take that for what it's worth.:)
Cowboy Bebop was pretty much the only Japanese-to-English video dub that I have ever found even remotely acceptable. A vast majority of games are butchered as well.
Most anime and video game dubs suffer from at least one of three problems:
Bad casting and hammy acting. There are a lot of crappy voice actors out there, and they apparently keep getting hired. Some of them annunciate like they're in a third grade Thanksgiving pageant. And some of them just have annoying voices. (I'd say that 75% of the female roles in most dubs meet that last criterion.)
Lousy script translations. Even the best actor can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. (See Natalie Portman and Ewan MacGregor in Star Wars.)
Lip sync problems. Japanese and English are very different from one another. A thought that may take one word to express in Japanese may take a full sentence in English, and vice-versa. (Almost anything can be contextually implied in Japanese; a verb by itself can be a perfectly valid sentence.) Footage is almost never redone to accomodate the translation, so you end up with a creepy disconnect between what you see and what you hear. Sometimes attempts are made to sync the speech to the visuals, but this generally makes matters even worse. A classic example of this is Yuna in Final Fantasy X. ("I... trail off... every few words... and sound... like that kid in the wheelchair... from Malcolm in... the Middle.")
Subtitles are a much better option. They preserve more of the original experience (always a good thing), and even if the actors on the Japanese track are overacting and reading from the cheesiest script in the world, you'll never be able to tell.:)
I play pool now and again. It is unfair that I can't compete with people who play it for several hours every day? Should the pockets be made 12" across to level the playing field?
The difference is that in pool (and every meatspace game I can think of), an experienced player's advantage comes from his, um, experience. Pool doesn't innately reward you for playing a lot--it's your ability to learn from your past successes and mistakes that makes you a better player. The rules are the same for both players--the laws of physics don't become more forgiving for someone who's played more.
You can't deny that WoW is very raid-centric, and that you'll do far better with a modicum of skill and a tier 2 epic set than you will with amazing reflexes, strategic brilliance and a Shadowcraft set.
Honestly, this philosophy probably appeals to more people than the truly level playing field of most games. In most games of skill, a small minority of players wins almost all the time. (In baseball, for example, you'll see many of the same names at the top of the home run list year after year.) Some people are just more skilled than others, and there's really not that much that anyone can do about it. (I could practice golf for twelve hours every day for the next ten years, and I still probably couldn't compete with Tiger Woods.) But no one likes to lose, and unhappy people don't keep their subscriptions active. And so WoW has become a candy-coated world in which skill isn't really a factor, everything comes easily with the right amount of effort, and anyone can be successful if they spend enough time playing.
There's nothing wrong with that. Judging by the sales numbers, a lot of people like that kind of thing. But it is a radical departure from almost everything that came before it, and I think people tend to ignore that. The bottom line, of course, is that if you don't like it, you should quit whining and play something else.
Pre-endgame WoW is a deep, amazing game. But once you get into raiding, it degenerates into a boring, repetitive timesink. There's nothing new left to see, and nothing left to do but try to get the most purple items, and then act like a jackass to everyone who has fewer than you. It's not like you have anything better to do while you're waiting for those two hour queues to pop.
This inequality completely ruins PvP, since everyone who's put in the hundreds of hours clearing Blackwing Lair is at a huge mechanical advantage. If that's your thing, then by all means, have fun. I just don't see the appeal in competing on such an uneven playing field.
If you RTFA, this case isn't about whether it's legal to use a disk wiping utility on data you own. What the guy did was clearly immoral, and would probably have been illegal if the information was on paper, too.
I don't think this is the kind of thing that should be handled under a hacking statute, but it's not like creative prosecutions are anything new.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, we're not all drooling morons, and most of us are quite aware that bombs kill people on both sides, thank you very much.
Sorry, but democracy didn't start with womens' suffrage. (Furthermore, your assertion that a country of 100 people immediately becomes a democracy as soon as the 51st person gets the right to vote seems rather silly.) You can trace the roots of democracy back thousands of years, of course, but the fact remains that the first system of government to belong to that family of modern liberal democracies was founded here, in the mid- to late 1700's.
In the small world in which we live today, is any country not guilty of associating with at least one government you don't approve of? I don't like our association with Saudi Arabia. I don't like our war in Iraq. I don't really like much of anything we've done this century. But most Americans aren't directly responsible for that, and most of us would never have supported the invasion of Iraq in the first place had we not been flat-out lied to by Bush.
The OP made a rude generalization about Americans (i.e. the people, not the country). As such, I don't think his background is outside of the scope of the argument, and (aside from that Happy Meal comment, which you have to admit was kind of funny), I don't think I stepped outside of the boundaries of acceptable discourse. I wasn't defending the actions of the Bush administration at all.
And unless you're wearing clothes made in your local village, eating only locally-grown food and working for a small, local business with no connections outside your country, you're also complicit in a lot of this. Does your government have trade relations with the United States? Why haven't you done something to stop them? You're responsible for what they do, after all.
I agree with you. I hate the Bush administration. I voted; I donated money to Kerry, and I write letters to my legislative representatives. I don't know how so many people could be stupid enough to vote Republican two years ago, either. I'm just sick of being stereotyped because of it. There are tens of millions of conscientious Americans just like me who did all we could. It's not easy to compete with Jesus and an electoral system that favors rural states.
Look at the OP's name and website, then get back to me.
I'm quite familiar with my country's history, TYVM. Chances are you live in a country whose system of government is based on the one we first implemented. I'd also imagine you're enjoying not living under a Kaiser or a Fuhrer, something for which the United States is largely responsible.
Despite some ugly blemishes in our history, the U.S. has given a lot to the world. (Then again, name a country with as long a history that doesn't have something to be embarrassed about.) The current regime is a complete embarrassment, yes, but I didn't vote for them, and I'm getting really sick of hearing about how evil, fat, lazy and apathetic I am simply because of where I live.
The OP said something that I found offensive about Americans, while quite clearly trumpeting his association with China. I felt obligated to point out the hypocrisy there. That's where the China connection came from.
It takes a big man to call someone a bigot in an anonymous /. post. At least I have the stones to attach my name to my words, even when it's quite obvious that they'll offend some people.
And what, exactly, in my original post makes me a bigot? Is any of what I said untrue? More to the point, did I make any generalizations about Chinese people, or anyone else for that matter?
I'm totally ashamed of my government's actions. I can't think of a single good idea that's come out of Washington in the past five years. I'm a registered Democrat; I vote in every election, and I donate money to politicians in every election cycle. Short of armed revolt, I don't see what more I can do.
But hearing things like "the world spits on America" makes my blood boil. I love my country, and I'm proud of (most of) its history. Blaming all Americans for the poor decisions our government makes is no different than blaming all Muslims for the activities of al-Qaeda.
Karma Kablooiieee!
My thoughts exactly when I made my first post on this article.
Why the emphasis on "your own citizens"? Surely summary execution is bad regardless of whether the victims are citizens of the country in which it takes place or not? Are you saying you would have no problem with the US government rounding up foreigners and shooting them dead, as long as it leaves its citizens alone? Boy, what an admirable sentiment.
That's ridiculous. My aim was to point out the hypocracy in the OP's statement. And, frankly, yes, while you won't find a sane person anywhere would would condone murder in any form, you have to admit that there's something even more unsettling about doing it to the very people that you're supposed to be protecting.
It is? The country that's supposedly founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, is "supposed" to have class-based equality? I thought the American dream was that everyone had an equal opportunity to succeed based on their own talent and hard work. Giving greater opportunities to the children of the rich, while condemning the children of the poor to substandard education and bad jobs, is not what America is "supposed" to stand for.
Economically speaking, yes, America is supposed to be stratified. That's what happens in a capitalist economy. China, meanwhile, is just as stratified, but still operating under the auspices of being a Communist society in which everyone is absolutely economically equal. I didn't say America was perfect, nor did I say that I was happy with the direction in which my country is headed.
Wait, you're saying that because the Chinese have no right to freedom of speech in their own country, they should be denied it in America too?
I don't see how you could come to that conclusion based on what I said. Obviously, people have the right to say whatever they want, just as I have the right to label your speech as foolish or hypocritical. I wasn't saying that the OP didn't have a legal right to say whatever he wanted; merely that I think it was an illogical and hypocritical thing to say.
Given your Chinese username, domain name (TLD notwithstanding) and text on your website, you can see where the confusion occurred.
Oh, I totally agree with you. I despise Bush et. al. (and yes, I voted in 2004), and I think we'll look at the word "terrorism" in forty years in the same quaint, cringing way we look at mentions of "communism" from the 60's. Regardless, I love my country and its history, and I'm getting really tired of having to answer, as an American, for the actions of my government. It's understandable, I suppose, but hearing it from someone who seems so eager to embrace Chinese culture strikes me as a bit hypocritical.
For the record, the whole world spits on China, too.
America may be a mess, but it's not like China is a shining example of how to run a country. Your country sucks just as much as mine, and probably more so.
At least I can say America is a mess without worrying about a knock on my door from the thought police. America may be poorly mistreating those captured on the war on terror, but at least we don't have "strike hard" campaigns where our own citizens are sentenced to death in stadiums and executed minutes later. And there may be much class inequality in America, but from what I understand, it's the same in China (and everywhere else). At least our system is supposed to work that way. We may have sided with some real bastards in the Middle East in the early 1980's, but China's the one blocking action against everyone's favorite nascent nuclear theocracy in the UN Security Council.
America has been at the forefront of innovation for centuries, while China is poised to become an economic superpower simply by virtue of its huge numbers of people, importing Western ingenuity and cranking out cheap imitations. But I guess someone has to make our Happy Meal toys. :)
So seriously, shut the fuck up, Chinese guy. You have no right to talk.
I think you're probably right about most of that, but the 360 is substantially bigger and heavier than a PS2, and also requires an external power supply the size of a brick.
Not that the 360 isn't an impressive piece of engineering, but it's much more comparable in size and mass to the original XBox.
So now it's gonna ship even later than never?
If PS2 Linux is any indication, you'll get access to a good deal of the system's functionality; six of the seven core libraries were opened up (well, given out, anyway), with low-level I/O being the exception, for a number of reasons. (Region-free DVD players and modified game images that boot from Linux are two possibilities that spring to mind.)
The problem is that Sony doesn't own any complex, reusable 3D or physics engines, at least to the best of my knowledge. That's why platforms like Havok and Renderware are so successful; you either license middleware or roll your own.
The real problem with the PS2 Linux distro was that you couldn't play anything you wrote on any other machine, not to mention that whatever you'd write had to be sitting on top of the Linux kernel the whole time. I don't know all that much about PS2 programming, but when you have 32 MB of shared memory to work with, I'm guessing that running a robust OS in the background is, um, sub-optimal.
So yeah, Sony is crazy and paranoid (as are, more importantly, third-party publishers), and yeah, you probably won't be able to write games for anyone other than yourself and other PS3 Linux users.
On the other hand, it's an opportunity to play with what looks like a really interesting system architecture, so that's always nice.
The iPod is a different story. It's small, sleek and elegant, and I'd venture that it appeals to a Japanese sensibility that values those things. The XBox, on the other hand (and the 360, which is also selling poorly), is bulky, heavy and noisy, and very distinctly American. The software library a lot to do with it as well, but Microsoft has secured a number of exclusives in Japan (such as all of Team Ninja's output), and it hasn't seemed to matter at all.
I wouldn't call it xenophobia so much as nationalism--if there were a native Japanese equivalent to the iPod that performed just as well, I think Apple would have sold very few iPods in Japan.
I think it's third in Europe and Australia, as well, and the only thing keeping it out of dead last in Japan is the disdain that they have for American electronics.
Sony holds the crown all over the world, and they do so by such a large margin that (handhelds notwithstanding) you can't really look at it as anything but defeat for both Nintendo and Microsoft.
First of all, a truly revolutionary control system would track your entire body. Secondly, it would likely require some kind of visual interface that makes you feel like you're there. Either that, or playing a game will be like a dream. You're convinced you're actually in the game world even though you're stationary.
That's like saying that the introduction of airplanes wasn't revolutionary because they can't fly to Mars. I don't think calling Wii's control system "revolutionary" is a stretch, even if it isn't a Holodeck or anything.
Another problem is that gaming is generally a sedentary experience. Not many people are going to be able to stand there waving their arms around for several hours straight. When using a keyboard and mouse we're supposed to keep our wrists in a neutral position, and here we have a device that requires we use our wrists in repetitive motions. Your range of motion is fairly limited, which means your entire arm has to move, which increases exhaustion. Hold a remote control in the air and you'll get a good sense of what's involved.
Excercise is a great thing; anything that encourages kids to work out is good. People are too sedentary. But keep in mind, most people who game for hours on end aren't necessarily looking to move around much. But it also get's a point where you might as well just go out and play sports for real if you need to move that much.
I've also wondered how long a person would be able to play for at a time. I don't think it's going to be that much of an issue, and if peoples' physical limitations keep them from playing for more than a few hours straight, well, that's probably healthy.
On the other hand, while providing a better control scheme it will still lose every to the precision and speed of a mouse in many genres.
Are you so sure about that? We don't know much about the accuracy of the device itself, but I'd imagine that the Wii controller could be more responsive than a mouse. There's no technological reason that its precision should be less than that of a mouse. Furthermore, I'd imagine that the human brain incurs some computational cost when attempting to project movement on a 2D plane into a 3D space. I could honestly see Wii actually being better for twitch games.
It's easy for me to make sweeping, optimistic predictions when nothing has been announced yet. But I don't see any reason to focus on the system's limitations until we actually see what it can do.
Interesting reference, but unless we're printing U.S. currency on patents, I fail to see how it applies to this situation.
Dear Intel,
If I could pronounce the name of your product, I'd probably be more likely to buy it.
"VIIV" has got to be one of the stupidest names in the history of marketing.
That's the funniest thing I have ever seen. Are people making YTMND's of this yet?
It's a tricky issue. Her "official" name was in Japanese katakana, of course, and would be transliterated as Earisu (Ay-ah-ree-su). Japanese is, phonetically speaking, pretty restrictive--you can only make about a hundred differenct sounds. There are a lot of different English spellings and even pronunciations (just off the top of my head, "air lease" would work, among other weird examples) that would result in the same Japanese spelling.
However, the developers of most Japanese RPG's name their characters in Roman letters as well. The concept sketch that was handed to the 3D modellers back when FF7 was just a gleam in Hironobu Sakaguchi's eye was labelled "Aerith." Whether that means more to you than her name in the version of the game that you actually played is entirely a matter of perspective. Personally, I'd say that "Aerith" is the correct spelling.
I also think this is a pretty dumb argument to be having, so take that for what it's worth. :)
Cowboy Bebop was pretty much the only Japanese-to-English video dub that I have ever found even remotely acceptable. A vast majority of games are butchered as well.
Most anime and video game dubs suffer from at least one of three problems:
Subtitles are a much better option. They preserve more of the original experience (always a good thing), and even if the actors on the Japanese track are overacting and reading from the cheesiest script in the world, you'll never be able to tell. :)
I play pool now and again. It is unfair that I can't compete with people who play it for several hours every day? Should the pockets be made 12" across to level the playing field?
The difference is that in pool (and every meatspace game I can think of), an experienced player's advantage comes from his, um, experience. Pool doesn't innately reward you for playing a lot--it's your ability to learn from your past successes and mistakes that makes you a better player. The rules are the same for both players--the laws of physics don't become more forgiving for someone who's played more.
You can't deny that WoW is very raid-centric, and that you'll do far better with a modicum of skill and a tier 2 epic set than you will with amazing reflexes, strategic brilliance and a Shadowcraft set.
Honestly, this philosophy probably appeals to more people than the truly level playing field of most games. In most games of skill, a small minority of players wins almost all the time. (In baseball, for example, you'll see many of the same names at the top of the home run list year after year.) Some people are just more skilled than others, and there's really not that much that anyone can do about it. (I could practice golf for twelve hours every day for the next ten years, and I still probably couldn't compete with Tiger Woods.) But no one likes to lose, and unhappy people don't keep their subscriptions active. And so WoW has become a candy-coated world in which skill isn't really a factor, everything comes easily with the right amount of effort, and anyone can be successful if they spend enough time playing.
There's nothing wrong with that. Judging by the sales numbers, a lot of people like that kind of thing. But it is a radical departure from almost everything that came before it, and I think people tend to ignore that. The bottom line, of course, is that if you don't like it, you should quit whining and play something else.
Pre-endgame WoW is a deep, amazing game. But once you get into raiding, it degenerates into a boring, repetitive timesink. There's nothing new left to see, and nothing left to do but try to get the most purple items, and then act like a jackass to everyone who has fewer than you. It's not like you have anything better to do while you're waiting for those two hour queues to pop.
This inequality completely ruins PvP, since everyone who's put in the hundreds of hours clearing Blackwing Lair is at a huge mechanical advantage. If that's your thing, then by all means, have fun. I just don't see the appeal in competing on such an uneven playing field.
Only on Slashdot will you hear it implied that a product with 65% marketshare might be "dead."
If you RTFA, this case isn't about whether it's legal to use a disk wiping utility on data you own. What the guy did was clearly immoral, and would probably have been illegal if the information was on paper, too.
I don't think this is the kind of thing that should be handled under a hacking statute, but it's not like creative prosecutions are anything new.