This whole "just don't buy it" thing is getting ridiculous...Don't dare try to influence any of the actions of a corporation
I'm pretty sure that not buying a product is a strong and clear signal to a corporation that their product sucks. If the corporation is smart, it will listen to the signal and try something else.
See, the thing is, this reasoning doesn't work for the same reason that invading Iraq was both wrong and a stupid idea, yet Americans re-elected Bush anyway.
I mean... if, say, the stupidest 30% of people in the world all buy Apple products exclusively, then Apple will still be well rich enough to dictate standards etc for the rest of us, especially given that the rest of us are unlikely to all buy the same thing as one another to set up a powerful competitior. So Apple can quite happily ignore the "message" I send because for every person like me 10 techno-phobe idiots will buy their products based on an ad with bright primary colours and sexy people dancing to catchy music.
PLUS let's not forget that if I choose not to buy Apple's stuff they STILL affect my life because (a) they lobby my government and influence the laws that bind me and (b) their sheeple stampede causes other companies to emulate them instead of innovating. So I think proactive anti-Apple intervention going well beyond "not buying their products" is quite acceptable, frankly.
My bad. I was wrong. The whole thing looked CG to me. For instance, images like this. There were also some close-ups of his eye and face in the avatar chamber that seemed just seemed to give off a 'Final Fantasy' feel. Combined with Cameron's statements, I jumped to a conclusion.
I assume that Cameron did as much as he could to blend the CG stuff with the live action, so it wouldn't surprise me if some deliberate attempt was made to make the live stuff ever so slightly less real looking to make it match up.
I would be awesome if they could do that stuff with computers, but they just aren't quite there yet...
It is time to move on from this old container format and also move away from older DivX and XviD (MPEG-4 ASP) formats onto the newer H.264 / MPEG-4 (x264) video encoding formats.
Great! I look forward to you visiting my house to upgrade all of my hardware which supports DivX but not h264.
It's really nice of you to go to so much effort to help us all "move on".
You're out of date. Win7 supports DivX, XviD, h264, AAC, and a number of other formats right out of the box. I've used WMP (on a clean install) to play.mov files that were recorded by a digital camera and encoded as "QuickTime movies" in some MPEG 4 variant.
Perhaps the Handbrake folks just decided that the time to drop support for a format is when Microsoft includes support for it out of the box?
Great, good for them. Meanwhile just thinking through my various devices at home I have... 4 that will play DivX/XviD but will not play h264.
I wonder how many other people who aren't iDrones have devices that don't support it? E.g. DVD players, media streaming devices, non-Apple PMPs, mobile phones...
Seems like a pretty silly way to go. Kill off support for the majority of people who choose not to use Apple products.
Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features.
And they still looked animated to me. Apart from one or two extreme close up shots, which admittedly looked amazing, a great deal of the time the Navi still had that odd, plastic, overly smooth look that is a telltale sign that CGI is in effect.
I seriously question the sanity of anyone who claims they couldn't pick which bits of Avatar were rendered.
The real breakthrough was the 3D, which was phenomenal.
Man, for all the geeks on slashdot, nobody really understands what they saw.
In case you missed it, *all* the actors you saw on screen were CG'ed from motion capture. They captured the muscle movements of the actors and used that as the basis for CG. All those wrinkles on Weaver's human character? CG. They didn't have to put them there. They could make her appear as a 20-year-old, or as a man.
Ummmmmm... no.
Not quite sure if you're joking/trolling, but assuming you're not then, no, you are wrong. The human actors were real humans being filmed optically, not computer generated.
Cameron is banging on about how the avatar version of Weaver was made to look younger than the real actress. And also blue, and a huge alien cat thing. So I'm not convinced he can pull of everything he claims.
As mediocre as the movie was, I couldn't help but smile when Arnold shows up as a fresh T-800, looking like he just stepped off the set of the original film. Granted while there are only brief shots of his face - the rest of the scenes using typical hide-a-stunt-double camera angles - it was still a really cool scene in my opinion.
See, I thought this looked really fake and obviously rendered. I reckon if you put a gun to their heads and made people choose which was real on pain of death between that and some old footage of real Arnie (with both appropriately degraded to look the same quality wise etc) I think 99% would still pick it.
I refuse to believe that there is a whole continent-sized country with two and only two political parties.
Well, believe it or not, that's how it works in Australia, both practically and politically.
We have a compulsory, preferential voting system here. This means that in most cases, you actually have to vote for one of the two major parties.
The way this works is as follows: say there are three candidates, Labor, Liberal and Green. Every voter must put them in order, 1, 2, 3. Then all of the 1s are tallied up. The candidate with the least 1s gets eliminated (say, the Greens candidate). Then all of the votes for that candidate are re-allocated according to which of the remaining two candidates got voted 2. In this way, in a typical Australian electorate, 100% of the votes will ultimately be divided between the two major parties.
So let's say I really, really don't want to vote for one of Labor or the Liberal party. Well, that's a shame for me, because at the end of the day I have to rank one of them last and one of them second last, and because of preferential voting the one I put second last will get my full vote after all of the other parties have been eliminated.
On top of this, voting is compulsory. Even if a decent sized chunk of highly motivated people go out and vote for the Greens, the fact that all of the sheep will also be herded out of their pen to vote whether they like it or not means that the major parties inevitably get a very large default vote. Stick a non-political person in a voting booth and tell them they have to vote and chances are they go with what they know, which is either the government or the main opposition party. Compare with the USA where something like 40-50% of people don't vote, IIRC.
Add to this that most Australian cities have one or sometimes two newspapers, and that we get serious political coverage on only one TV channel which many intellectually lazy Aussies wouldn't watch because it's the boring government channel. All of our newspapers are actually owned by either Murdoch (in which case they are sympathetic to the Liberal Party) or Fairfax (in which case they are sympathetic to the Labor Party on the whole).
Politically, Labor and Liberal hate each other but not as much as they hate the minor parties. So they spend a lot of time either discrediting or outmaneuvering any small party they see as a threat. For example, they both demonize the Greens as a bunch of environmental crazies who all want to take heaps of drugs and have orgies in the forest. A few years ago there was a far right party with a bit of clout ("One Nation") which the government promptly dealt with by subsuming most of its policy positions on key issues. That party is all but dead now.
Nothing is free and if you use their services, your privacy, at least in part, is the cost. If the price is too high, go somewhere else.
Which would be a more reasonable position if that trade off was made MUCH more explicit and obvious to people using the service. Most people I know who use GMail have not got a clue about Google's data retention practices, for example.
This is like a steer asking, "how can I keep getting this free food and board without being taken to the slaughter house later?"
Unfortunately when the steer emails aunty Daisy, who lives in a paddock in another country, and she writes back, she also gets taken to the slaughter house later.
This is my biggest issue with Google: I can control my own use of their services, but I can't control the drones around me who have all flocked to GMail as rapidly as they can. Even my alma mater has started using Google docs/apps/whatever and GMail to replace its old email system.
I would imagine that this would be incredibly useful to those with muscle wasting diseases.
A hundred star trek, gorilla and body builder jokes before someone points out what seems like the most significant implication. For people with muscular and myotonic dystrophy this could mean the difference between an very unpleasant and premature death and living to a normal age.
Another example: the Wikipedia page on Singapore describes its political system thus:
Singapore is a parliamentary democracy with a Westminster system of unicameral parliamentary government representing different constituencies.
What is mentioned only obliquely, however, is the fact that Singapore is totally undemocratic because any meaningful opposition party or politician is ruthlessly crushed using oppressive defamation laws and stacked courts to bankrupt them. It is a "democracy" in name only.
Wikipedia simply says that it is "criticised by some" in relation to democratic rights. I tried to add more detail to this to reflect reality, which is that there are substantial and well recognised problems with Singaporean "democracy", and was brutally and instantly edited into oblivion.
Apparently actual, objective, provable facts which are slightly offensive to some are now called "opinions" and are not relevant or informative.
I resolved this exact problem by carefully selecting an LCD that does 1:1 pixel mapping. This means that if you feed it a 640x480 image, it will display 640x480 pixels in the middle of the screen and leave the rest blank. Ok, not ideal - you now have a fairly tiny image. On the plus side it looks exactly as it should.
But then you use a software scaler to multiply your image resolution by a whole number factor which results in a resolution which is still smaller than your screen resolution. In my case, the screen is 1920x1200, so I can multiply 640 x 480 exactly twice to get to 1280 x 960 and still have it fit within the screen. With lower resolution inputs you can sometimes multiply by a factor of 3 or 4.
End result: no, you don't get to use all 1920x1200 pixels of your kick arse modern 16:10 LCD - but that's never going to happen for really old games. But you DO get a nice sharp, big, scaled version of your game. And if you cast your mind back to the heady days of 14" CRT monitors you will realise that the image you are looking at is, if anything, bigger than it used to be. Play for 5 minutes and you forget that there is any black space around the edges of the screen, too.
The other big advantage of 1:1 pixel mapping is that if you buy, say, Modern Warfare 2 and find that your graphic card isn't quite up to it, you can drop it down from 1920x1200 to (say) 1600x1200 and 'buy back' a bit of image size to improve performance. Again, play for 5 minutes and you forget those edges of the screen are even there. Because it's an LCD and not a plasma or CRT, burn in isn't as much of a problem so this is all around quite a nice solution.
I suggest you check out BenQ 24" (or bigger) LCDs - cheap, well made, very fast, and some do 1:1 pixel mapping.
Complaining about Apple will not hurt them, but withholding your funds from them sure as hell will.
Well, if the 40 people in the world who realize that they can install an os that didn't come on their computer and think that OS X is worth installing withhold their funds then...
apple probably won't notice.
but if all 40 of them come here and complain, then apple will...
still probably not notice.
Funny, but it does add up.
I know of at least three people of my personal aquaintance (me plus a couple of others) who actively (a) avoid all Apple products and services and (b) discourage our friends and relatives from acquiring any Apple products or services.
For each of us this is motivated by a combination of: Apple's pricing; Apple's horrible approach to Windows software and, specifically, the existence of Quicktime for Windows in its present form; Apple's reliance on image and 'coolness'; Apple's horrendous and irritating TV ads; and Apple's horrible approach to DRM.
You'd be surprised how influential a tech person saying to a non-tech person "oh god, don't buy X, it's an over-hyped piece of junk made by a company who will screw you when you least expect it" can be. Or just, "you do realise that Apple reserves the right to pull the plug on anything you buy for your iphone if they decide it doesn't meet their random standards". Or "you can get a similarly specced Windows laptop from a reputable company for much less money". And now, thank Christ, "Windows 7 is actually pretty good".
Personally I have talked a couple of people out of buying Apple products (ipods, iphones and in one case a laptop) so right there word of mouth has cost them a couple of thousand $. If my two friends have done the same that's $5-6k just in my little circle... how much is it worldwide? Maybe not that much yet, but if they keep up their recent form it'll grow.
Piss off enough people and it DOES matter. Look at MS, they finally have a good product again and it's going to take everything they've got to overcome the giant mountain of hatred they have conditioned into tech people worldwide.
Well, then let me express my disgust at a couple of books that are full of murder, rape, and genocide: the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. Please join me in expressing my disgust for them.
Wow, are you assuming that anyone who criticises this game is a religious nut?
I'm quite happy to join you in condemning those books as reprehensible, and, incidentally, an excellent example of how art/literature can and does inspire hatred and violence.
Grosse Pointe Blank: comedy, killing is not in a realistic context, movie makes clear that most normal people find this behavious reprehensible.
Assassins: haven't seen so can't comment
Reservoir Dogs: depicts killing by criminals; killing is portrayed as horrible; character who enjoys torture is portrayed in extremely negative light; "good" guy is torn by his actions and the conflict between his sense of honour and his preference for NOT killing.
Pulp Fiction: depicts killing by criminals; the reasons/justifications for each killing are generally explored; film is openly presented in a highly stylised manner which plainly suggests the unreality of the events to the viewer.
Most other movies about "murderous psychopaths" involve serious consequences for the perpetrator, who is almost invariably the bad guy. An interesting exception would be Ripley's Game.
what do we do if large numbers of people do buy the game and grow up thinking this type of thing is 'just how the world works'?
People aren't a blank slate waiting for the media to tell them how reality works. Thousands of years of evolution have left the vast majority of us with an innate moral sense that largely precludes killing except in very unusual circumstances. The few psychopaths who decide that killing is OK because they saw it in a video game have things wrong with them that simply keeping them away from video games won't fix.
I know people aren't a blank slate, and I don't believe that anyone is going to go and kill anyone else because of a computer game. But what does concern me is that if things like this are a part of our culture, then people become desensitised to it in real life. For example, I can imagine that there might be less concern or opposition to military actions overseas which involved the killing of civilians if various aspects of our popular culture conveyed this activity as a cultural norm. No one game or movie or TV show or talk radio host will be responsible for that, but I think it is appropriate, and healthy, that when a game or similar does portray this it is noted that such activities are reprehensible.
As for 'thousands of years of evolution', that's a long bow. I'm fairly confident that if we ran out of food tomorrow you'd find our good ol' killing instincts are as strong as they ever were.
PS Thanks for quoting me in such a way as to make me look like an hysterical "think of the children" type rather than someone asking a hypothetical question.
Seriously, what the fuck? Are you telling me, than you've never read, enjoyed, or engaged in ANY kind of fictional endeavor, game, novel, comic book the involved a crime, or something tasteless or horrible? Are you telling me that by playing monopoly, I will become more likely to want to financially destroy people? Are you saying that because I read Frankenstein I will want to 'play God' as it were?
No, that's not what I said so I won't respond to this point.
People playing video games KNOW they are playing video games. They voluntarily purchase the game, or they voluntarily take up the controller at their friends house. They have not been conned, or duped. They are not under any kind of direct emotional manipulation to fool them otherwise.
Where did I say anyone was FORCING anyone else to play anything? I was merely observing that to condemn something like this brings out the knee-jerk "free" speech brigade, of which you appear to be a flag bearer, who demand speech which is not only free from legal consequences but free from criticism or condemnation. I KNOW that they KNOW they are playing video games. In a few years time, I will still find it disturbing if a human being can sit there with a virtual but totally convincing image of another human being who is at their mercy and choose to kill that virtual human. That is my opinion, and I don't think that my expression of it or others' distaste at the notion of this part of this game in any sense impinges on anyone's freedom of speech.
If you are so cognitively and emotionally weak that you cannot separate from reality behavior in a fictional setting, the content of that setting is far from the problem.
If people didn't engage emotionally with the actions they carry out in games, why would they contain elements plainly designed to provoke an emotional response? Put differently, if there is such a separation, why not have the player kill anonymous non-civilians in this game, or aliens, or robots? Because people emotionally respond to realism, and terrorists killing civilians in an airport is pretty realistic and believable. Would you be concerned about a kid that constantly drew pictures of themself hurting others? Or an adult who spent their whole time watching the most sadistic and violent porn possible? Apparently not, because they 'know it's not real'. Note once again that 'concerned' does not equal 'should be legally banned'.
Furthermore, if you think video games somehow apply to the crowded theater caveat of free speech, you are without a doubt, a complete fucking moron.
I don't know what the fuck you're fucking talking about, so apparently I am indeed a fucking moron. I do gather that you are assuming that everyone on this site in American, which would probably put you in the same category. Hail, fellow fucking moron.
Anybody who whines more loudly about a game that involves killing civilians than they do about any of the real wars that involve really killing civilians goes on my bad list.
I take your point, but whereas "real wars" are (hopefully) at the most extreme end of the spectrum in terms of their justification/necessity, fucking video games are entertainment. It says one thing about a society which accepts some civilian deaths in what is perceived to be a just and necessary war (and I note that once that perception drops away wars tend to become pretty fucking unpopular) but it says something entirely different about a society which creates and participates in a simulation of the same for fun.
Life is controversial, people do horrible things to each other, and sometimes part of games and movies is depicting those horrible things.
Agreed. But would you watch a movie which featured soldiers killing civilians with no consequences and then going on to have an exciting adventure killing other people?
Part of serious art is exploring the moral dimensions of the subject matter. I will have sympathy for this kind of stuff in games when the game also features the horrible psychological after-effects of perpetrating these crimes, and then later the legal consequences when justice catches up with the perpetrators. Eventually the player's character should either die in prison or alone and suffering from terrible mental illness.
Somehow I think after the 'civilian killing' in this game, the player will go on to have a series of exciting firefights in a variety of cool environments against a variety of tough opponents. Art? Maybe only in the Paul Verhoven sense.
...of hordes of./ readers taking time out from flaming one another and bitching about the poor quality of editor control on the site and the dubious submissions which make it through to the front page to sanctimoniously celebrate the death of "old" media.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal? Do they even have the resources? Would they have survived the commercial and political pressure resulting from pursuing the story (the Post nearly didn't)?
Newspapers have failed to adapt, but they do have a number of useful features which IMHO the web has so far failed to replicate, such as strong editorial structures, proper investigative journalism (not just "in today's blog blog, we blog about a blog about something which someone wrong somewhere else"), accountability (once it's printed, it's printed), a selection of content which does not automatically conform to every pre-defined interest and prejudice of the reader, and a delivery method which involves passivity from the recipient rather than requiring the recipient to go out and proactively seek the information they want.
Does all of this mean they deserve to prosper in their current form? No. But I am scared if the Drudge Report is what is going to replace the Washington Post. On one level the issues facing newspapers seem to me to be facing society more generally: how do we manage our apparent addiction to short, semi-meaningless factoids now that we have a series of electronic systems for delivering them faster and more meaninglessly than ever before?
So your thesis is that everything fictional is acceptable, not only from a legal perspective but also such that it may not be criticised or the subject of moral or ethical censure?
I don't think you understand free speech. Free speech doesn't mean "free from all consequences", it means "free from legal consequences". If you say something which disgusts me, it is not inconsistent with "free" speech for me to express my disgust and encourage others to do the same (in fact, it is consistent with my corresponding right to free speech).
People saying that this footage disgusts them is not only legitimate, it's healthy and (IMHO) reassuring.
Furthermore, you seem to suggest that the player has no level of investment or involvement in the events that occur inside modern games, which is patently wrong.
The key is not to suppress free expression, but instead simply vote with your dollar or euro (don't buy the game).
Out of interest, what do we do if large numbers of people do buy the game and grow up thinking this type of thing is 'just how the world works'? Is that a good trade off for 'free expression'? How do we counter it given that it's unlikely that a message like 'killing civilians is really, really wrong' is going to be the foundation of a popular FPS action game any time soon.
I guess what I mean is, how does your 'free expression' principle work when the choice is not so clear cut - most people will buy this because it looks like a fun and entertaining game with kewl graphics etc, not because it does or does not contain particular themes or depict particular events.
I know it's heresy on/. but Windows 7 is actually quite good. Seriously.
Indeed. Having used the RC for a few months, for the first time in many years I am considering actually paying money to Microsoft for a product (albeit via parallel importation given that their pricing in Australia is just offensively disproportionate to their pricing elsewhere... seriously, wtf?).
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This whole "just don't buy it" thing is getting ridiculous...Don't dare try to influence any of the actions of a corporation
I'm pretty sure that not buying a product is a strong and clear signal to a corporation that their product sucks. If the corporation is smart, it will listen to the signal and try something else.
See, the thing is, this reasoning doesn't work for the same reason that invading Iraq was both wrong and a stupid idea, yet Americans re-elected Bush anyway.
I mean... if, say, the stupidest 30% of people in the world all buy Apple products exclusively, then Apple will still be well rich enough to dictate standards etc for the rest of us, especially given that the rest of us are unlikely to all buy the same thing as one another to set up a powerful competitior. So Apple can quite happily ignore the "message" I send because for every person like me 10 techno-phobe idiots will buy their products based on an ad with bright primary colours and sexy people dancing to catchy music.
PLUS let's not forget that if I choose not to buy Apple's stuff they STILL affect my life because (a) they lobby my government and influence the laws that bind me and (b) their sheeple stampede causes other companies to emulate them instead of innovating. So I think proactive anti-Apple intervention going well beyond "not buying their products" is quite acceptable, frankly.
My bad. I was wrong. The whole thing looked CG to me. For instance, images like this. There were also some close-ups of his eye and face in the avatar chamber that seemed just seemed to give off a 'Final Fantasy' feel. Combined with Cameron's statements, I jumped to a conclusion.
I assume that Cameron did as much as he could to blend the CG stuff with the live action, so it wouldn't surprise me if some deliberate attempt was made to make the live stuff ever so slightly less real looking to make it match up.
I would be awesome if they could do that stuff with computers, but they just aren't quite there yet...
It is time to move on from this old container format and also move away from older DivX and XviD (MPEG-4 ASP) formats onto the newer H.264 / MPEG-4 (x264) video encoding formats.
Great! I look forward to you visiting my house to upgrade all of my hardware which supports DivX but not h264.
It's really nice of you to go to so much effort to help us all "move on".
You're out of date. Win7 supports DivX, XviD, h264, AAC, and a number of other formats right out of the box. I've used WMP (on a clean install) to play .mov files that were recorded by a digital camera and encoded as "QuickTime movies" in some MPEG 4 variant.
Perhaps the Handbrake folks just decided that the time to drop support for a format is when Microsoft includes support for it out of the box?
Great, good for them. Meanwhile just thinking through my various devices at home I have... 4 that will play DivX/XviD but will not play h264.
I wonder how many other people who aren't iDrones have devices that don't support it? E.g. DVD players, media streaming devices, non-Apple PMPs, mobile phones...
Seems like a pretty silly way to go. Kill off support for the majority of people who choose not to use Apple products.
Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features.
And they still looked animated to me. Apart from one or two extreme close up shots, which admittedly looked amazing, a great deal of the time the Navi still had that odd, plastic, overly smooth look that is a telltale sign that CGI is in effect.
I seriously question the sanity of anyone who claims they couldn't pick which bits of Avatar were rendered.
The real breakthrough was the 3D, which was phenomenal.
Man, for all the geeks on slashdot, nobody really understands what they saw.
In case you missed it, *all* the actors you saw on screen were CG'ed from motion capture. They captured the muscle movements of the actors and used that as the basis for CG. All those wrinkles on Weaver's human character? CG. They didn't have to put them there. They could make her appear as a 20-year-old, or as a man.
Ummmmmm... no.
Not quite sure if you're joking/trolling, but assuming you're not then, no, you are wrong. The human actors were real humans being filmed optically, not computer generated.
Cameron is banging on about how the avatar version of Weaver was made to look younger than the real actress. And also blue, and a huge alien cat thing. So I'm not convinced he can pull of everything he claims.
*SPOILER*
As mediocre as the movie was, I couldn't help but smile when Arnold shows up as a fresh T-800, looking like he just stepped off the set of the original film. Granted while there are only brief shots of his face - the rest of the scenes using typical hide-a-stunt-double camera angles - it was still a really cool scene in my opinion.
See, I thought this looked really fake and obviously rendered. I reckon if you put a gun to their heads and made people choose which was real on pain of death between that and some old footage of real Arnie (with both appropriately degraded to look the same quality wise etc) I think 99% would still pick it.
I refuse to believe that there is a whole continent-sized country with two and only two political parties.
Well, believe it or not, that's how it works in Australia, both practically and politically.
We have a compulsory, preferential voting system here. This means that in most cases, you actually have to vote for one of the two major parties.
The way this works is as follows: say there are three candidates, Labor, Liberal and Green. Every voter must put them in order, 1, 2, 3. Then all of the 1s are tallied up. The candidate with the least 1s gets eliminated (say, the Greens candidate). Then all of the votes for that candidate are re-allocated according to which of the remaining two candidates got voted 2. In this way, in a typical Australian electorate, 100% of the votes will ultimately be divided between the two major parties.
So let's say I really, really don't want to vote for one of Labor or the Liberal party. Well, that's a shame for me, because at the end of the day I have to rank one of them last and one of them second last, and because of preferential voting the one I put second last will get my full vote after all of the other parties have been eliminated.
On top of this, voting is compulsory. Even if a decent sized chunk of highly motivated people go out and vote for the Greens, the fact that all of the sheep will also be herded out of their pen to vote whether they like it or not means that the major parties inevitably get a very large default vote. Stick a non-political person in a voting booth and tell them they have to vote and chances are they go with what they know, which is either the government or the main opposition party. Compare with the USA where something like 40-50% of people don't vote, IIRC.
Add to this that most Australian cities have one or sometimes two newspapers, and that we get serious political coverage on only one TV channel which many intellectually lazy Aussies wouldn't watch because it's the boring government channel. All of our newspapers are actually owned by either Murdoch (in which case they are sympathetic to the Liberal Party) or Fairfax (in which case they are sympathetic to the Labor Party on the whole).
Politically, Labor and Liberal hate each other but not as much as they hate the minor parties. So they spend a lot of time either discrediting or outmaneuvering any small party they see as a threat. For example, they both demonize the Greens as a bunch of environmental crazies who all want to take heaps of drugs and have orgies in the forest. A few years ago there was a far right party with a bit of clout ("One Nation") which the government promptly dealt with by subsuming most of its policy positions on key issues. That party is all but dead now.
Nothing is free and if you use their services, your privacy, at least in part, is the cost. If the price is too high, go somewhere else.
Which would be a more reasonable position if that trade off was made MUCH more explicit and obvious to people using the service. Most people I know who use GMail have not got a clue about Google's data retention practices, for example.
This is like a steer asking, "how can I keep getting this free food and board without being taken to the slaughter house later?"
Unfortunately when the steer emails aunty Daisy, who lives in a paddock in another country, and she writes back, she also gets taken to the slaughter house later.
This is my biggest issue with Google: I can control my own use of their services, but I can't control the drones around me who have all flocked to GMail as rapidly as they can. Even my alma mater has started using Google docs/apps/whatever and GMail to replace its old email system.
I would imagine that this would be incredibly useful to those with muscle wasting diseases.
A hundred star trek, gorilla and body builder jokes before someone points out what seems like the most significant implication. For people with muscular and myotonic dystrophy this could mean the difference between an very unpleasant and premature death and living to a normal age.
Another example: the Wikipedia page on Singapore describes its political system thus:
What is mentioned only obliquely, however, is the fact that Singapore is totally undemocratic because any meaningful opposition party or politician is ruthlessly crushed using oppressive defamation laws and stacked courts to bankrupt them. It is a "democracy" in name only.
Wikipedia simply says that it is "criticised by some" in relation to democratic rights. I tried to add more detail to this to reflect reality, which is that there are substantial and well recognised problems with Singaporean "democracy", and was brutally and instantly edited into oblivion.
Apparently actual, objective, provable facts which are slightly offensive to some are now called "opinions" and are not relevant or informative.
Agreed, this thread is full of illiterate fools.
I resolved this exact problem by carefully selecting an LCD that does 1:1 pixel mapping. This means that if you feed it a 640x480 image, it will display 640x480 pixels in the middle of the screen and leave the rest blank. Ok, not ideal - you now have a fairly tiny image. On the plus side it looks exactly as it should.
But then you use a software scaler to multiply your image resolution by a whole number factor which results in a resolution which is still smaller than your screen resolution. In my case, the screen is 1920x1200, so I can multiply 640 x 480 exactly twice to get to 1280 x 960 and still have it fit within the screen. With lower resolution inputs you can sometimes multiply by a factor of 3 or 4.
End result: no, you don't get to use all 1920x1200 pixels of your kick arse modern 16:10 LCD - but that's never going to happen for really old games. But you DO get a nice sharp, big, scaled version of your game. And if you cast your mind back to the heady days of 14" CRT monitors you will realise that the image you are looking at is, if anything, bigger than it used to be. Play for 5 minutes and you forget that there is any black space around the edges of the screen, too.
The other big advantage of 1:1 pixel mapping is that if you buy, say, Modern Warfare 2 and find that your graphic card isn't quite up to it, you can drop it down from 1920x1200 to (say) 1600x1200 and 'buy back' a bit of image size to improve performance. Again, play for 5 minutes and you forget those edges of the screen are even there. Because it's an LCD and not a plasma or CRT, burn in isn't as much of a problem so this is all around quite a nice solution.
I suggest you check out BenQ 24" (or bigger) LCDs - cheap, well made, very fast, and some do 1:1 pixel mapping.
Well, if the 40 people in the world who realize that they can install an os that didn't come on their computer and think that OS X is worth installing withhold their funds then...
apple probably won't notice.
but if all 40 of them come here and complain, then apple will...
still probably not notice.
Funny, but it does add up.
I know of at least three people of my personal aquaintance (me plus a couple of others) who actively (a) avoid all Apple products and services and (b) discourage our friends and relatives from acquiring any Apple products or services.
For each of us this is motivated by a combination of: Apple's pricing; Apple's horrible approach to Windows software and, specifically, the existence of Quicktime for Windows in its present form; Apple's reliance on image and 'coolness'; Apple's horrendous and irritating TV ads; and Apple's horrible approach to DRM.
You'd be surprised how influential a tech person saying to a non-tech person "oh god, don't buy X, it's an over-hyped piece of junk made by a company who will screw you when you least expect it" can be. Or just, "you do realise that Apple reserves the right to pull the plug on anything you buy for your iphone if they decide it doesn't meet their random standards". Or "you can get a similarly specced Windows laptop from a reputable company for much less money". And now, thank Christ, "Windows 7 is actually pretty good".
Personally I have talked a couple of people out of buying Apple products (ipods, iphones and in one case a laptop) so right there word of mouth has cost them a couple of thousand $. If my two friends have done the same that's $5-6k just in my little circle... how much is it worldwide? Maybe not that much yet, but if they keep up their recent form it'll grow.
Piss off enough people and it DOES matter. Look at MS, they finally have a good product again and it's going to take everything they've got to overcome the giant mountain of hatred they have conditioned into tech people worldwide.
Well, then let me express my disgust at a couple of books that are full of murder, rape, and genocide: the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. Please join me in expressing my disgust for them.
Wow, are you assuming that anyone who criticises this game is a religious nut?
I'm quite happy to join you in condemning those books as reprehensible, and, incidentally, an excellent example of how art/literature can and does inspire hatred and violence.
Grosse Pointe Blank: comedy, killing is not in a realistic context, movie makes clear that most normal people find this behavious reprehensible.
Assassins: haven't seen so can't comment
Reservoir Dogs: depicts killing by criminals; killing is portrayed as horrible; character who enjoys torture is portrayed in extremely negative light; "good" guy is torn by his actions and the conflict between his sense of honour and his preference for NOT killing.
Pulp Fiction: depicts killing by criminals; the reasons/justifications for each killing are generally explored; film is openly presented in a highly stylised manner which plainly suggests the unreality of the events to the viewer.
Most other movies about "murderous psychopaths" involve serious consequences for the perpetrator, who is almost invariably the bad guy. An interesting exception would be Ripley's Game.
what do we do if large numbers of people do buy the game and grow up thinking this type of thing is 'just how the world works'?
People aren't a blank slate waiting for the media to tell them how reality works. Thousands of years of evolution have left the vast majority of us with an innate moral sense that largely precludes killing except in very unusual circumstances. The few psychopaths who decide that killing is OK because they saw it in a video game have things wrong with them that simply keeping them away from video games won't fix.
I know people aren't a blank slate, and I don't believe that anyone is going to go and kill anyone else because of a computer game. But what does concern me is that if things like this are a part of our culture, then people become desensitised to it in real life. For example, I can imagine that there might be less concern or opposition to military actions overseas which involved the killing of civilians if various aspects of our popular culture conveyed this activity as a cultural norm. No one game or movie or TV show or talk radio host will be responsible for that, but I think it is appropriate, and healthy, that when a game or similar does portray this it is noted that such activities are reprehensible.
As for 'thousands of years of evolution', that's a long bow. I'm fairly confident that if we ran out of food tomorrow you'd find our good ol' killing instincts are as strong as they ever were.
PS Thanks for quoting me in such a way as to make me look like an hysterical "think of the children" type rather than someone asking a hypothetical question.
Seriously, what the fuck? Are you telling me, than you've never read, enjoyed, or engaged in ANY kind of fictional endeavor, game, novel, comic book the involved a crime, or something tasteless or horrible? Are you telling me that by playing monopoly, I will become more likely to want to financially destroy people? Are you saying that because I read Frankenstein I will want to 'play God' as it were?
No, that's not what I said so I won't respond to this point.
People playing video games KNOW they are playing video games. They voluntarily purchase the game, or they voluntarily take up the controller at their friends house. They have not been conned, or duped. They are not under any kind of direct emotional manipulation to fool them otherwise.
Where did I say anyone was FORCING anyone else to play anything? I was merely observing that to condemn something like this brings out the knee-jerk "free" speech brigade, of which you appear to be a flag bearer, who demand speech which is not only free from legal consequences but free from criticism or condemnation. I KNOW that they KNOW they are playing video games. In a few years time, I will still find it disturbing if a human being can sit there with a virtual but totally convincing image of another human being who is at their mercy and choose to kill that virtual human. That is my opinion, and I don't think that my expression of it or others' distaste at the notion of this part of this game in any sense impinges on anyone's freedom of speech.
If you are so cognitively and emotionally weak that you cannot separate from reality behavior in a fictional setting, the content of that setting is far from the problem.
If people didn't engage emotionally with the actions they carry out in games, why would they contain elements plainly designed to provoke an emotional response? Put differently, if there is such a separation, why not have the player kill anonymous non-civilians in this game, or aliens, or robots? Because people emotionally respond to realism, and terrorists killing civilians in an airport is pretty realistic and believable. Would you be concerned about a kid that constantly drew pictures of themself hurting others? Or an adult who spent their whole time watching the most sadistic and violent porn possible? Apparently not, because they 'know it's not real'. Note once again that 'concerned' does not equal 'should be legally banned'.
Furthermore, if you think video games somehow apply to the crowded theater caveat of free speech, you are without a doubt, a complete fucking moron.
I don't know what the fuck you're fucking talking about, so apparently I am indeed a fucking moron. I do gather that you are assuming that everyone on this site in American, which would probably put you in the same category. Hail, fellow fucking moron.
If society gets used to ultra-violence and makes murder legal then, well, that's what the voters want so that's how it should be.
So I take it you have no criticisms of the Germans during the Third Reich, then?
Anybody who whines more loudly about a game that involves killing civilians than they do about any of the real wars that involve really killing civilians goes on my bad list.
I take your point, but whereas "real wars" are (hopefully) at the most extreme end of the spectrum in terms of their justification/necessity, fucking video games are entertainment. It says one thing about a society which accepts some civilian deaths in what is perceived to be a just and necessary war (and I note that once that perception drops away wars tend to become pretty fucking unpopular) but it says something entirely different about a society which creates and participates in a simulation of the same for fun.
Life is controversial, people do horrible things to each other, and sometimes part of games and movies is depicting those horrible things.
Agreed. But would you watch a movie which featured soldiers killing civilians with no consequences and then going on to have an exciting adventure killing other people?
Part of serious art is exploring the moral dimensions of the subject matter. I will have sympathy for this kind of stuff in games when the game also features the horrible psychological after-effects of perpetrating these crimes, and then later the legal consequences when justice catches up with the perpetrators. Eventually the player's character should either die in prison or alone and suffering from terrible mental illness.
Somehow I think after the 'civilian killing' in this game, the player will go on to have a series of exciting firefights in a variety of cool environments against a variety of tough opponents. Art? Maybe only in the Paul Verhoven sense.
...of hordes of ./ readers taking time out from flaming one another and bitching about the poor quality of editor control on the site and the dubious submissions which make it through to the front page to sanctimoniously celebrate the death of "old" media.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal? Do they even have the resources? Would they have survived the commercial and political pressure resulting from pursuing the story (the Post nearly didn't)?
Newspapers have failed to adapt, but they do have a number of useful features which IMHO the web has so far failed to replicate, such as strong editorial structures, proper investigative journalism (not just "in today's blog blog, we blog about a blog about something which someone wrong somewhere else"), accountability (once it's printed, it's printed), a selection of content which does not automatically conform to every pre-defined interest and prejudice of the reader, and a delivery method which involves passivity from the recipient rather than requiring the recipient to go out and proactively seek the information they want.
Does all of this mean they deserve to prosper in their current form? No. But I am scared if the Drudge Report is what is going to replace the Washington Post. On one level the issues facing newspapers seem to me to be facing society more generally: how do we manage our apparent addiction to short, semi-meaningless factoids now that we have a series of electronic systems for delivering them faster and more meaninglessly than ever before?
So your thesis is that everything fictional is acceptable, not only from a legal perspective but also such that it may not be criticised or the subject of moral or ethical censure?
I don't think you understand free speech. Free speech doesn't mean "free from all consequences", it means "free from legal consequences". If you say something which disgusts me, it is not inconsistent with "free" speech for me to express my disgust and encourage others to do the same (in fact, it is consistent with my corresponding right to free speech).
People saying that this footage disgusts them is not only legitimate, it's healthy and (IMHO) reassuring.
Furthermore, you seem to suggest that the player has no level of investment or involvement in the events that occur inside modern games, which is patently wrong.
The key is not to suppress free expression, but instead simply vote with your dollar or euro (don't buy the game).
Out of interest, what do we do if large numbers of people do buy the game and grow up thinking this type of thing is 'just how the world works'? Is that a good trade off for 'free expression'? How do we counter it given that it's unlikely that a message like 'killing civilians is really, really wrong' is going to be the foundation of a popular FPS action game any time soon.
I guess what I mean is, how does your 'free expression' principle work when the choice is not so clear cut - most people will buy this because it looks like a fun and entertaining game with kewl graphics etc, not because it does or does not contain particular themes or depict particular events.
I know it's heresy on /. but Windows 7 is actually quite good. Seriously.
Indeed. Having used the RC for a few months, for the first time in many years I am considering actually paying money to Microsoft for a product (albeit via parallel importation given that their pricing in Australia is just offensively disproportionate to their pricing elsewhere... seriously, wtf?).