Re:It's one of those persistent myths
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Why Myths Persist
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Bush's and Clinton's speeches were virtually identical. The only instance of an administration official even relating Iraq and 9/11 happened well after the war had been approved and had begun, I believe it was Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld related Iraq and 9/11 days after it happened when he suggested we should attack Iraq instead of Afghanistan. As far as public statements, they never explicitly said Saddam caused 9/11, they only mentioned the two things constantly within the same sentence. Dick Cheney went so far as to actually imply a causal relationship, saying Mohammad Atta had met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just months prior to 9/11. And he even started by saying "I'm not saying that Saddam was involved in plotting 9/11 for certain, but..." What's this article about? How even negating a myth can cause it to be reinforced? Well how about just not saying it's specifically true, just here's a bunch of statements that suggest so?
Strange how if they never said it, so many people believed it. Of course the whole point was to create the connection in people's minds, but to do it in such a way that they couldn't technically be accused of lying.
P.S. I don't care that Clinton used some of the same justifications for his make-Congress-happy-take-attention-from-my-problem s bullshit. He's a lying bastard too. At least he managed get us stuck in a war.
The truth is, Hussein had an obligation to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs. He did possess them before, and by the terms of the ceasefire for Desert Storm, he had to prove to weapons inspectors that they had been neutralized. He failed to do this. For more than a decade. That alone was proper justification for the invasion.
Don't use the weapon inspectors as justification for the invasion when the weapon inspectors' opinion was ignored. The statements made by the admin, particularly Rumsfeld when he said that not only did Iraq have weapons as a certainty, we also "know where they are". No, they didn't. And according to the inspectors, Saddam's weapons program was disabled.
The idea that we attacked Iraq for complicity in 9/11 didn't show up until well after the war had begun, after US troops failed to discover any significant caches of NCB arms. Those that opposed the administration found it to be an effective strawman.
Oh, right, it was a strawman invention of Bush's opponents. And those clever bastards somehow forced Dick Cheney to keep repeating it!
No, the "Iraq is part of the war on terror -- remember 9/11" justification is what the administration started to push harder after the "Iraq has WMDs!" justification fell through. It was part of it all along, it was just second fiddle to the WMD claims which were what were truly effective in gaining support from the populace.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected.
Enjoy. Try searching for "specific allegation" to get to the part where he can't exactly say Iraq caused 9/11, he just has "credible" intelligence that might imply it.
The US had beaten the North Vietnamese on the battlefield in every single major engagement when they were deployed. Even after the bulk of US ground forces left and all that was left was advisors and air support. The '72 NVA offensive failed. It was only after the US stopped funding the puppet South Vietnamese regime in '75 that they collapsed.
Following your much appreciated defense of U.S. military capability*, I have to point out an important lesson that is relavent today: We may have won every battle of Vietnam, but we still lost the war. Because in a guerilla war, winning battles in the field is not as important. Being able to crush the enemy when they dare to stand and fight is meaningless when the survivors, the smart ones, will just fade in the face of the attack and blend back into the population. The same holds true in Iraq, which is why invading Falluja was both a cakewalk and a fool's errand. Our forces far outmatch the insurgents, and that hardly matters for victory. It's very frustrating for those who want military solutions for everything, who think the problem with Vietnam is that we didn't spend enough blood and treasure, but it's a lesson we'll have to learn.
* I liked the part where the OP said the U.S. only attacks when it has overwhelming force. Duh, because that's a good strategy for winning! The primary strength of our armed forces is logistics, the ability to move our forces to where they are needed, and to keep them supplied, and to take ground piece by piece by dropping shit-tons of firepower on it. It's how the North won the Civil War against superior Southern generals, it's how we kept the march across France going, and it's what our last Secretary of Defense decided to throw out the window because he thought he knew better.
What difference does it make? Who cares if it's litteraly disguised? I don't think the vets do, and I only included the word because the post I replied to did. I think they're more upset because it's a recruitment vehicle period.
No, you're not deranged. After my first couple marathon sessions of GTA, I found myself sizing up cars I passed as potential escape vehicles. Their speed, handling, and durability in the face of gunfire. And... that's about as far as it got as far as real action. You didn't turn around, did you? You didn't forget that reality wasn't GTA, and you couldn't just pull a u-ey in the middle of the road, right?
It's one thing to let a game affect your emotional state. It's another to actually let it guide your actions. To forget the boundary between reality and fantasy to the point where you act on it is derangement. Or, when the point of the fantasy is to prepare you for reality, it's training. This is what they do with soldiers in the army, and to a lesser extent it's what they're doing with America's Army. It's not intended to be literal training for combat, but it is designed to put the idea in your head that real training for real-life combat is a good and exciting career move. In other words it's about as real as all advertising, but realism isn't as important as giving you the impression that the fantasy somehow represents reality. Tell me when does GTA try to convince you that a real life of stealing cars and running from the police would be awesome? It doesn't, and thus only the truly deranged go beyond merely thinking about how cool it would be to actually be a car-jacking thug. Whereas if America's Army does its job you'd be signing up to try to re-create the game in real life.
Not that this is necessarily going to happen. I somehow doubt that it's really that effective of a recruiting tool. But the connection is there, a real undeniable connection, between the game and reality, and that's why this isn't the same as GTA.
You'll have to help me out here. I'm not trying to be a smart ass - but here is how you start: "It's not about intent" and here is part of the next to last sentence: "specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention" and I know I'm just grabbing a little piece - but this just confuses me.
It will help greatly if you start dealing in complete sentences. My first sentence: "It's not about intent, it's about the connection between in-game actions and real-world actions." The next to last sentence: "I'm saying that doesn't follow, because there is a huge difference between AA and GTA, specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention for players to want to translate the in-game actions into real-life actions."
The important thing is the connection between the game and real life. This connection can be unintended, or it can be intended, but its existence is what matters. In the case of AA the connection is undeniable because that connection is the intent of the game, but what matters as far as conditioning occurs is that the connection is there.
If a bowling ball falls on your head from thirty feet up, it doesn't matter whether it rolled off something or was dropped. The physics and the result on your cranium are indpendent of the two cases. Intent could explain why the bowling ball fell on your head, but changes nothing regarding the effecsts.
Detail does matter. Not every detail - the import details. To learn to hit a target, the target doesn't need to have a lot of detail. But there is no substitute for firing a real weapon. This game does not provide a significant level of detail in any aspect and so (and I think here we will just have to agree to disagree) I think that it is much like gta and most any other video game that involves some form of simulated violence. No pc or console provides an experience that is going to reinforce these behaviors in a meaningful way.
Detail does not matter. It does not matter in firing practice where only rough outlines of humans are used with the target dead center in a human (no extra points for head shots or heart shots). It does not matter in AA. Because in both cases the behavior that is being reinforced is the willingness to see humans as the enemy who should be killed, to think of them as targets not people, and the U.S. Army as the executor of justice. The goal of AA is not to create recruits who don't need to be taught how to fire a gun, it's to create willing recruits. The connection between the game and reality is ample for that.
Yeah, how dare someone go into something without having any moral qualms, but after reflecting on the reality of the situation come to decide that they cannot support it! That's like... changing your mind based on experience! No, wait, that sounds rational and good... I mean, that's flip-flopping!
He quit the job, what more do you want? For every one of him there are two dozen people who take the job and never feel any moral qualms at all. I hate it when people dismiss someone else's experience just because that person didn't already know everything that they supposedly learned from the experience. If it weren't for this attitude that forming a new opinion is the same as admitting that you were wrong in the first place and that this is unacceptable, then maybe GWB wouldn't have been given a second term by all the people who refused to admit Iraq was a bad idea.
Well, as a Bush supporter, I see it as the opposite. Democrats, or more accurately, the left wing, have convinced their followers that opposing America is somehow patriotic.
And since what they're actually opposing are the policies of the President, you have proven that Bush supporters have been convinced that opposing George Bush is the same as opposing America, and that supporting George Bush is supporting America.
Just like every time in the last six years somebody has said "support our troops!" what they actually meant is "stop questioning George Bush!"
Here's a hint: George W. Bush is not America. If I'm against how Bush's policies because they are ruining America, it's because I'm for America. If I'm against how Bush is wasting our soldiers' lives, it's because I'm deeply concerned about our troops.
Oh, and I think the fact that AA is a recruiting tool disguised as a game is part of their complaint.
I don't think intent impacts the outcome. That's why I think the Army is wasting their money on this. From everything I've read - I've never played the game - the degree of accurate detail is low. I don't see how it could be any other way due to the limitations of the platform if nothing else.
It's not about intent, it's about the connection between in-game actions and real-world actions. Conditioning occurs between a person's actions and the consequences. Without any connection to reality, video game consequences can only condition video game actions. It is when the video game consequences is paralleled with real world consequences that real-world actions are affected. A soldier is told that their training simulations represent the same things they will be doing in real life -- killing people. A crazy person believes that GTA is like real life. One is intentional, one not, but the point is that in both cases the person sees a connection between their video-game actions and real-life actions and thus psychological conditioning can occur. The Army knows this and uses this to train soldiers to be able to kill people.
The degree of detail doesn't really matter -- when the army switched from square targets to torso-shaped targets there certainly wasn't any detail at all, just a flat green board in a bathroom-door caricature of a man. Yet despite the fact that the only realistic part of this exercise -- the actual firing of the rifle -- was the same, training with torso-shaped targets resulted in a greater portion of soldiers firing on live human targets when the time came. Because due to the explicit connection between the cardboard torso and their goal of firing on real people, they were able to condition themselves to do so.
I don't think AA is all that successful as a recruitment tool, but I really don't know what metrics they use and what kind of return they expected. I'm just addressing your original point -- that saying AA could affect people means that GTA could too. I'm saying that doesn't follow, because there is a huge difference between AA and GTA, specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention for players to want to translate the in-game actions into real-life actions. There is a connection to reality in AA that simply doesn't exist in any other game.
I also don't really think (in the absence of convincing evidence) that video games generally lead to violent behavior. I do think, though, that a game put out by the Army that touts its realism can shape the ideas of what combat is like in impressionable minds, so I definitely have an ethical problem with them using it as part of a recruiting effort with people who are just coming into adulthood.
Yeah, to me the difference between America's Army and all these games that supposedly corrupt our youth is that there is an actual connection between the in-game violence and real-life violence. The makers of the game, the U.S. Army, want to recruit you to join them and shoot people in real life, and America's Army is part of their advertising. Rockstar has never suggested that people go out and do what GTA portrays in real-life, but the U.S. Army is saying not just that they want you to do what the game portrays, they're willing to pay you to do it too.
I don't really think it's all that bad; I can't call it "unethical" any more than their usual rosy sales pitch to underprivileged youths is. I'm just saying I see a difference between it and all the games morons are trying to ban, and the difference isn't to AA's benefit.
Well, to briefly restate a position I've written here before -- I don't believe that video games affect the conceptually related real-life behavior, unless that person is mentally equating the game with the real-life behavior. In the case of someone who becomes violent playing GTA, that mental equation is a result of mental instability and derangement, which is basically a requirement for equating stealing cars and shooting cops in GTA with doing so in real life. If you can't separate reality from fantasy, then yes I do believe a game could affect your real life behavior, but that's the fault of whatever caused the mental deficiency in the first place, not the game.
By the same token, sometimes we create such a connection on purpose. The difference between a military-style video game and a military training simulator isn't so much accuracy and detail. The difference is that when practicing on a training simulator you are deliberately, explicitly, and with the support of your superiors trying to equate the simulated action with its real-life counterpart. I think it's worth noting that even when conflating games with real life in order to train someone to kill is the explicit goal, still a large portion of soldiers find that when push comes to shove and they're faced with the actual chance to shoot someone that they are unable to pull the trigger. Yet that portion is much smaller than before we started training soldiers to be comfortable shooting a person, starting back when we replaced normal firing range targets with person-shaped ones.
Now what about America's Army? While it isn't an explicit combat trainer, it is a game called "America's Army" put out by the U.S. Army itself. It's not just any video game, it's official advertising for the Army, their P.R. for what being in the Army is like and what kind of exciting things you'll be able to do. Look at how in the game no matter which team you are on, your side is always the U.S. Army and the other side is the evil terrorists.
What I'm saying is that AA has an implicit reality claim intended to create a connection between the game and reality. It is implicitly a brochure for what you can experience in the Army, going to foreign lands and shooting the "bad guys" for the sake of your country. The Army wants you to form a connection between the game and the real-life choice of joining the Army.
It certainly isn't the same as explicit military training simulators, and I doubt any peacenik nerd playing AA for fun is going to rush out to join the military, or much less so run out and buy a gun to start shooting people. I'm just saying that there is a definite connection between the game and reality that doesn't exist in other games and thus causes more of an effect on people. BF1942 is in no way ever presented as showing how you could be a WWII soldier. GTA has no connection to real-life crime outside of the minds of the deranged. Yet if the next sandbox/crime game were to be produced by the mafia for purposes of recruitment, then I do think you would see a much stronger connection between the game and real-life crime.
Long story short: unlike other games, America's Army is designed to make you think about the real-life Army while playing the game, because otherwise there wouldn't be any reason for it to exist.
Total bull. My 2002 Prius gets around 47 mpg real-world. The same year non-hybrid car (the Toyota Echo - same chassis, conventional motor) gets significantly less mileage.
Is that true? I knew the early model Prius were smaller, but they still looked a lot bigger than the Echo -- which is the car I drive. I get about 35-40 mpg, btw, but it's mostly highway driving to/from work. Which isn't noticeably better than my last car, an '87 Toyota Tercel. Though unlike with the Echo, in the Tercel I had to downshift to second to go up even moderate hills.:P
Which, depending on what is actually to the left (cliff, fuel depot, power station) could mean that not only do we have lying cars, we have homicidal cars. Thus bringing to pass yet another prediction of a well-known futurist.
Ah, trying to make equivalent the portable market and the console market, even though the two are not similar and never have been.
Just answering your question. The fact that hardware power has not and has never been a dominant factor in console success is true in both the portable and home console market. In that way they are very similar. The history is very clear on this.
So in other words, the N64 wasn't really all that much better than the PSX? The idea that CD storage wasn't important is total bull, BTW.
In terms of "horespower", as in "ability to draw pretty pictures", then no the N64 was way more powerful than the PSX. And sorry, but most games didn't use the CD's capacity. Because most companies back then couldn't afford massive amounts of FMV. For those that did, clearly the N64 suffered. Yet for those that didn't, the PSX didn't die merely because it was "obsolete". Because nobody cared if the games were fun.
As opposed to either being stuck with an obsolete console for years or having to migrate to a new one every couple of years with all of the hassle that entails?
So "able to squeeze maximal performance from" means "obsolete" now, meaning the PS3 will never become obsolete since nobody will ever figure out how to keep all the SPEs busy, just like Sony said. Once again, this is a plus from a developers point of view. And based on the ongoing sales of the PS2, I think it's clear people care about "obsolete" a lot less than you.
And the Wii's strengths are towards gimmickry, not towards the magnificent games we've been seeing on the other systems like Bioshock and Oblivion, neither of which would really be difficult to port to the Wii if it had the required power.
I didn't know magnificent games required a certain power level unachievable before this generation. I guess Halo 1 was ass then. Of course it would have sucked less without being hindered by terrible controls. Good thing being able to aim in an FPS is just a gimmick, just like those PC users and their mouse gimmick.
Seriously, you sound like the DS detractors in its first year (which, since your first post made it seem you aren't aware, I'll let you know was light on quality 3rd party support and heavy with "gimmicky" mini-games). Competitors called the analog stick a gimmick too when Nintendo introduced it to consoles. Until they universally adopted it.
Because those go against the things that the market wants. The fact that a lot of Wiis are being bought doesn't mean anything if the games aren't being bought with them, if the Wiis are just being bought out of impulse and hype.
The market disagrees with you. The game development studios disagree with you. You want to know what happens with a console selling based solely on hype? Look at the the hysteria at the PS3 launch compared to it's performance this year. That's what hype with no substance gets you. People buy Wiis because they play them at a friend's house and find it to be fun.
Really you just don't like the Wii, and that's fine, but stop pretending that your opinion actually represents things game developers see as a downside, especially when they're saying the opposite.
PSP is PS2-level hardware while DS is N64-level hardware. Speaking of N64, it was vastly more powerful than the PSX (see Waverace vs Jet Moto if you don't remember), though the PSX had the advantage of CD storage which was important for some games but not most. Mostly the ones that used lots of FMV. Gameboy vs every pre-PSP portable is a perfect example.
Pretend power is important all you want. History says otherwise. Game developers understand this.
I don't remember ever seeing a console succeed whose full potential could be realized so quickly. Less than a year into the Wii's lifespan, we already hear speculation from developers that they're approaching the limits of what the Wii can do
And I don't remember ever hearing anyone say that having it take 5+ years to figure out how to get the promised performance out of a console is a good thing. The Wii is the same architecture as the GC just with ~2-3x the frequency. It's hardly surprising that it takes developers less time to figure out how to max its potential than the PS3 given 5 years of experience with the GC, and judging from their comments they prefer it this way.
And how do you explain all the games for the PS3 and 360 which have no planned ports for the Wii, even after the third parties are supposed to have "gotten it"?
Well pretty much like you said the Wii encourages non-traditional game play. Half-assed ports with waggle controls added are what the companies are putting out now. Having "gotten it" they are not planning on continuing, instead they will be developing titles that play to the Wii's strengths. This is what you would expect.
You haven't actually said how any of these things are negatives for game developers... they just seem like things you aren't impressed with. Game developers are impressed by market share numbers. Game developers have openly supported the Wii and said they made a mistake not supporting it and are changing course in order to do so. Why you think that means the opposite of what it seems to, that 3rd parties won't be supporting the Wii, I don't know.
3rd party relations means business relations, as in not treating 3rd parties like shit (as they did in the N64 generation), and instead encouraging them with development support and other assistance to publish games for the system (as they did insufficiently in the GC generation). Nintendo made it clear they understood their errors.
Just like more and more 3rd party game developers are making it clear they understand their own error in underestimating the Wii. Having more consoles out there than any other, with ongoing sales stronger than any other, is a strong positive to third parties. When's the last time you heard a company publicly say "Yes, we fucked up when we didn't strongly support this console from the beginning, we're trying to fix that ASAP"? Nobody said that about the N64 or GC, that's for certain. So whether you can see it or not, things are very different now.
You're also completely wrong about the Wii being weak being a strong negative to 3rd parties. It isn't. They don't care. Proof: Basically every console matchup you could mention. N64 vs PSX, Xbox vs PS2, PSP vs DS, NES vs Master System. In each case the largest library and the largest player base was on the weaker system, in some cases vastly weaker. The last time the most powerful console "won" was the SNES vs Genesis generation. The game developers only care about power if the players care about power, and so far no indication that the Wii's lack of power has hurt sales.
The N64 and GC were disasters for Nintendo's 3rd party support, and it had very little do with the popularity of Nintendo's 1st party titles. 3rd parties were extremely active and successful on the SNES and NES; N just did a great job of ostracizing them in the N64 generation and an inadequate job of luring them back in the GC generation. Based on appearances N has fixed the problem with 3rd party relations, and now looks to have fixed the other problem of not having enough units out there to be attractive vs the other consoles as in the GC generation.
Things change. "Waggle" may not be why they change, but "3rd parties don't sell on Nintendo" is not set in stone.
Hehe, according to the actual game developers instead of trolls, the reason there's so much shovelware coming out for the Wii is because they were all caught with their pants down, buying into the Sony hype and writing off the Wii. They are, however, smartening up and trying to change directions as fast as they can. That takes time, however, and in the meantime crapware cash-ins are what they've got to offer. It sucks, but it's how the game is played. Look at the majority of the PS2 library: utter shit designed to cash in on the most popular console. But also with plenty of gems designed to cash in on the most popular console as well.
Pretend Wii Sports and Elebits don't have unique gameplay all you want. The market has spoken, and the publishers are listening. The "Nobody would bet on Nintendo" rhetoric is about six months too late. It's now the "nobody would bet against Sony!" folks who are kicking themselves.
Indignant? I find the continued delusions of the trolls hilarious.:)
Umm... don't the second two statements there pretty much put the first one to rest as inaccurate? The DLL has its own memory space. A mapping to that address space is created within the "virtual address space" of the app. The DLL's code is not duplicated into each app (unlike a statically-linked library), merely mapped so that it kinda looks like it's statically linked. But it's not, really. It's separate, but easy access is granted to it, bypassing the normal restrictions on app-to-app memory use.
No, because mapping the DLL within the virtual address space of the app means by definition that they are the same address space. The DLL is is the same address space as the app. Don't let the word "virtual" fool you, it doesn't mean some things are part of the app's address space and others are only "virtually" so; it only means there's a translation between the app's notion of "address" and an actual location in physical memory which only the OS is supposed to know about. Everything that composes the app, whether dynamically linked or not, is mapped into its virtual address space because otherwise it is inaccessible.
Not copying the DLL code is for efficiency reasons, nothing more. As soon as a copy becomes necessary -- as in one app using the DLL needs to make a store to memory that should not be visible to other apps using the DLL -- then it is copied and is no longer shared. But "shared" does not mean "not part of the app". It means "also part of other apps". so this in the end makes no difference.
You could do the same kind of sharing with statically linked code, but they usually don't have the necessary symbol information. That's a technical limitation, again done for efficiency's sake not because dynamic and static linking are fundamentally different.
And it is really linking. It's exactly the same as linking. The end result is intended to be exactly the same as static linking. It doesn't "kinda look", it exactly looks. The app cannot distinguish. E.g. your un-linked object code would look like this:
push arg1 push arg2 call $strlen
Where $strlen is a placeholder for the function declared in stdio.h. Note that at this point the compiler has no idea at all if strlen() is going to be statically or dynamically linked, nor does it matter.
If you use static linking, ld looks at the object files specified on the command line and when it finds strlen in a symbol table, it replaces $strlen with the address of the function. If you use dynamic linking, then the dynamic linker looks at the.so's referenced by the binary, loads the dll if necessary, and replaces $strlen with the address of the function. The end result is exactly the same, the exact same sequence of instructions, and the exact same mapping of the object code into the app's virtual address space. The only difference is when it happens -- run time or compile time -- and this is by design.
So, the end result of either is: code for the function mapped into an app's virtual address space, with the exact same call interface. DLLs give advantages to linking, by allowing fewer copies to reside in memory, but are very much linking and make no difference with regard to derivative works.
Well the only reason Sony discounted the 60GB version was to clear the stock, I doubt the 80GB one will drop in price soon. There's certainly no reason to do so until the 60GB ones are no longer available at retail (which TFS says they are). Since $500 is the "discount" price for soon-to-be-obsolete versions, I highly doubt they want to lose that distinction from the 80GB version.
They may drop the price if sales of the 80GB version are as slow or slower than when the 60GB version was $600 -- it's possible especially if a lot of fence-sitters are buying the cheaper 60GB. Expect Sony to sit around for a few months coming up with insane reasons why sales are slowing until one of them accidentally becomes sober and notices the correlation between reduced price and increased sales.
The holiday will of course obscure this effect for a while, too. I do not an expect a price drop on the 80GB model this year.
DLL's aren't a gray area. DLL's are dynamically linked libraries. They're also shared libraries. That means that they have to stand on their own in the OS (they "plug-in" to a loader framework, then stay resident until their memory space is needed for something else). Any app can use any DLL present on the system, and when compiling, this requires only a few hooks to be placed in the code (hooks into the loader framework, not the DLL, thus no GPL violation).
But those hooks into the loader framework are turned into hooks into the DLL by the dynamic linker. As opposed to when hooks into the linker framework are truned into hooks into a non-dynamic library by the static linker. There is very little difference other than the format of the symbol table. The end result when the application is executed is a single program comprised both of application code and library code together. Once the loader is done with its work, there is no distinguishable difference from the application's point of view between a statically linked and dynamically linked library -- the ABI is identical, the way arguments are pushed on the stack, etc. The result is a work that is derived from both application and library, irrespective of whether it's dynamic or static linking.
DLLs are a matter of convenience and efficiency, it isn't a matter of being a fundamentally different beast than static linking, because it isn't as pains are taken to prevent it from being so.
This means that DLL's are basically a separate app from the app that calls them. They have their own memory space, even (because they're shared and can outlive any app that uses them). Thus, GPL is not violated and does not foist itself upon the main app. The libraries likely underwent changes to make them valid DLL's, and those changes would certainly be covered by the GPL. But the main app is not. Period. It's quite cut-and-dried.
That's not true. If the DLL was in a different memory space, it would be prohibitively difficult for an application to use the DLL, as it would require operating system support to get data from one to the other. A DLL must by necessity be mapped into the application's virtual address space so that data structures and function arguments on the stack can easily be passed back and forth. The DLL is shared by mapping it into several application's address space (which the OS can do with non-DLL memory too, on the request of applications). The sharing is only for efficiency with read-only code; if the DLL contains any state then that memory will be copied whenever it is first written, and from that point on that (copy of) part of the DLL will exist exclusively within the application's memory space.
For example take the standard C library function strlen(). You sure as heck wouldn't want to have strlen() is a separate address space that required OS intervention to access just to count non-zero bytes at a given location. It gets mapped into your application at the points it is referenced, and the only difference is that it's at run time instead of link time, and the code for strlen() is not duplicated in memory for every app that needs it. Those differences are not the difference between a derivative work and not a derivative work.
This is why glibc, and pretty much everything on Linux that is intended to be used as a library, is licensed under the LPGL instead of the GPL. Because it is cut and dry, just in the opposite way: "Dynamic" doesn't mean anything with regards to derivative works, "linking" does.
It's easy to make a superficial comparison with other countries - particularly European - who have higher population densities. I'd like to see a study in which the figures for broadband access were weighted for density.
New York City has crap for broadband compared to Europe.
I'm finding this so improbable I'm having difficulty believing anyone would raise this. HD games, written for the PC, have been out for over a decade, and now nearly 10Gb is being seen as something unbearably low capacity?
I think the situation is different for console games, as they duplicate data so that the slow seek times of optical media aren't as big a problem. PS3 games can be installed to its hard drive, which ironically means the Bluray may not be as necessary, but it may mean that xbox 360 games are constrained and/or the programmers have to work harder to keep loading performance acceptable.
No, genius, it's pointing out that you are not an island, and what happens to other people affects you in significant ways, so you can still be completely self-absorbed and still be concerned with this issue because it does affect you. In this case by affecting the efficiency of distributing and thus the cost of your food.
I'm sorry to hear that. That sucks. Yet at the same time it's an obvious reason why your opinion wouldn't be typical... I understand even less why you don't understand the Wii's popularity.
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Bush's and Clinton's speeches were virtually identical. The only instance of an administration official even relating Iraq and 9/11 happened well after the war had been approved and had begun, I believe it was Rumsfeld.
m s bullshit. He's a lying bastard too. At least he managed get us stuck in a war.
Rumsfeld related Iraq and 9/11 days after it happened when he suggested we should attack Iraq instead of Afghanistan. As far as public statements, they never explicitly said Saddam caused 9/11, they only mentioned the two things constantly within the same sentence. Dick Cheney went so far as to actually imply a causal relationship, saying Mohammad Atta had met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just months prior to 9/11. And he even started by saying "I'm not saying that Saddam was involved in plotting 9/11 for certain, but..." What's this article about? How even negating a myth can cause it to be reinforced? Well how about just not saying it's specifically true, just here's a bunch of statements that suggest so?
Strange how if they never said it, so many people believed it. Of course the whole point was to create the connection in people's minds, but to do it in such a way that they couldn't technically be accused of lying.
P.S. I don't care that Clinton used some of the same justifications for his make-Congress-happy-take-attention-from-my-proble
The truth is, Hussein had an obligation to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs. He did possess them before, and by the terms of the ceasefire for Desert Storm, he had to prove to weapons inspectors that they had been neutralized. He failed to do this. For more than a decade. That alone was proper justification for the invasion.
Don't use the weapon inspectors as justification for the invasion when the weapon inspectors' opinion was ignored. The statements made by the admin, particularly Rumsfeld when he said that not only did Iraq have weapons as a certainty, we also "know where they are". No, they didn't. And according to the inspectors, Saddam's weapons program was disabled.
The idea that we attacked Iraq for complicity in 9/11 didn't show up until well after the war had begun, after US troops failed to discover any significant caches of NCB arms. Those that opposed the administration found it to be an effective strawman.
Oh, right, it was a strawman invention of Bush's opponents. And those clever bastards somehow forced Dick Cheney to keep repeating it!
No, the "Iraq is part of the war on terror -- remember 9/11" justification is what the administration started to push harder after the "Iraq has WMDs!" justification fell through. It was part of it all along, it was just second fiddle to the WMD claims which were what were truly effective in gaining support from the populace.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected.
Enjoy. Try searching for "specific allegation" to get to the part where he can't exactly say Iraq caused 9/11, he just has "credible" intelligence that might imply it.
The US had beaten the North Vietnamese on the battlefield in every single major engagement when they were deployed. Even after the bulk of US ground forces left and all that was left was advisors and air support. The '72 NVA offensive failed. It was only after the US stopped funding the puppet South Vietnamese regime in '75 that they collapsed.
Following your much appreciated defense of U.S. military capability*, I have to point out an important lesson that is relavent today: We may have won every battle of Vietnam, but we still lost the war. Because in a guerilla war, winning battles in the field is not as important. Being able to crush the enemy when they dare to stand and fight is meaningless when the survivors, the smart ones, will just fade in the face of the attack and blend back into the population. The same holds true in Iraq, which is why invading Falluja was both a cakewalk and a fool's errand. Our forces far outmatch the insurgents, and that hardly matters for victory. It's very frustrating for those who want military solutions for everything, who think the problem with Vietnam is that we didn't spend enough blood and treasure, but it's a lesson we'll have to learn.
* I liked the part where the OP said the U.S. only attacks when it has overwhelming force. Duh, because that's a good strategy for winning! The primary strength of our armed forces is logistics, the ability to move our forces to where they are needed, and to keep them supplied, and to take ground piece by piece by dropping shit-tons of firepower on it. It's how the North won the Civil War against superior Southern generals, it's how we kept the march across France going, and it's what our last Secretary of Defense decided to throw out the window because he thought he knew better.
What difference does it make? Who cares if it's litteraly disguised? I don't think the vets do, and I only included the word because the post I replied to did. I think they're more upset because it's a recruitment vehicle period.
No, you're not deranged. After my first couple marathon sessions of GTA, I found myself sizing up cars I passed as potential escape vehicles. Their speed, handling, and durability in the face of gunfire. And... that's about as far as it got as far as real action. You didn't turn around, did you? You didn't forget that reality wasn't GTA, and you couldn't just pull a u-ey in the middle of the road, right?
It's one thing to let a game affect your emotional state. It's another to actually let it guide your actions. To forget the boundary between reality and fantasy to the point where you act on it is derangement. Or, when the point of the fantasy is to prepare you for reality, it's training. This is what they do with soldiers in the army, and to a lesser extent it's what they're doing with America's Army. It's not intended to be literal training for combat, but it is designed to put the idea in your head that real training for real-life combat is a good and exciting career move. In other words it's about as real as all advertising, but realism isn't as important as giving you the impression that the fantasy somehow represents reality. Tell me when does GTA try to convince you that a real life of stealing cars and running from the police would be awesome? It doesn't, and thus only the truly deranged go beyond merely thinking about how cool it would be to actually be a car-jacking thug. Whereas if America's Army does its job you'd be signing up to try to re-create the game in real life.
Not that this is necessarily going to happen. I somehow doubt that it's really that effective of a recruiting tool. But the connection is there, a real undeniable connection, between the game and reality, and that's why this isn't the same as GTA.
You'll have to help me out here. I'm not trying to be a smart ass - but here is how you start: "It's not about intent" and here is part of the next to last sentence: "specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention" and I know I'm just grabbing a little piece - but this just confuses me.
It will help greatly if you start dealing in complete sentences. My first sentence: "It's not about intent, it's about the connection between in-game actions and real-world actions." The next to last sentence: "I'm saying that doesn't follow, because there is a huge difference between AA and GTA, specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention for players to want to translate the in-game actions into real-life actions."
The important thing is the connection between the game and real life. This connection can be unintended, or it can be intended, but its existence is what matters. In the case of AA the connection is undeniable because that connection is the intent of the game, but what matters as far as conditioning occurs is that the connection is there.
If a bowling ball falls on your head from thirty feet up, it doesn't matter whether it rolled off something or was dropped. The physics and the result on your cranium are indpendent of the two cases. Intent could explain why the bowling ball fell on your head, but changes nothing regarding the effecsts.
Detail does matter. Not every detail - the import details. To learn to hit a target, the target doesn't need to have a lot of detail. But there is no substitute for firing a real weapon. This game does not provide a significant level of detail in any aspect and so (and I think here we will just have to agree to disagree) I think that it is much like gta and most any other video game that involves some form of simulated violence. No pc or console provides an experience that is going to reinforce these behaviors in a meaningful way.
Detail does not matter. It does not matter in firing practice where only rough outlines of humans are used with the target dead center in a human (no extra points for head shots or heart shots). It does not matter in AA. Because in both cases the behavior that is being reinforced is the willingness to see humans as the enemy who should be killed, to think of them as targets not people, and the U.S. Army as the executor of justice. The goal of AA is not to create recruits who don't need to be taught how to fire a gun, it's to create willing recruits. The connection between the game and reality is ample for that.
Yeah, how dare someone go into something without having any moral qualms, but after reflecting on the reality of the situation come to decide that they cannot support it! That's like... changing your mind based on experience! No, wait, that sounds rational and good... I mean, that's flip-flopping!
He quit the job, what more do you want? For every one of him there are two dozen people who take the job and never feel any moral qualms at all. I hate it when people dismiss someone else's experience just because that person didn't already know everything that they supposedly learned from the experience. If it weren't for this attitude that forming a new opinion is the same as admitting that you were wrong in the first place and that this is unacceptable, then maybe GWB wouldn't have been given a second term by all the people who refused to admit Iraq was a bad idea.
Well, as a Bush supporter, I see it as the opposite. Democrats, or more accurately, the left wing, have convinced their followers that opposing America is somehow patriotic.
And since what they're actually opposing are the policies of the President, you have proven that Bush supporters have been convinced that opposing George Bush is the same as opposing America, and that supporting George Bush is supporting America.
Just like every time in the last six years somebody has said "support our troops!" what they actually meant is "stop questioning George Bush!"
Here's a hint: George W. Bush is not America. If I'm against how Bush's policies because they are ruining America, it's because I'm for America. If I'm against how Bush is wasting our soldiers' lives, it's because I'm deeply concerned about our troops.
Oh, and I think the fact that AA is a recruiting tool disguised as a game is part of their complaint.
I don't think intent impacts the outcome. That's why I think the Army is wasting their money on this. From everything I've read - I've never played the game - the degree of accurate detail is low. I don't see how it could be any other way due to the limitations of the platform if nothing else.
It's not about intent, it's about the connection between in-game actions and real-world actions. Conditioning occurs between a person's actions and the consequences. Without any connection to reality, video game consequences can only condition video game actions. It is when the video game consequences is paralleled with real world consequences that real-world actions are affected. A soldier is told that their training simulations represent the same things they will be doing in real life -- killing people. A crazy person believes that GTA is like real life. One is intentional, one not, but the point is that in both cases the person sees a connection between their video-game actions and real-life actions and thus psychological conditioning can occur. The Army knows this and uses this to train soldiers to be able to kill people.
The degree of detail doesn't really matter -- when the army switched from square targets to torso-shaped targets there certainly wasn't any detail at all, just a flat green board in a bathroom-door caricature of a man. Yet despite the fact that the only realistic part of this exercise -- the actual firing of the rifle -- was the same, training with torso-shaped targets resulted in a greater portion of soldiers firing on live human targets when the time came. Because due to the explicit connection between the cardboard torso and their goal of firing on real people, they were able to condition themselves to do so.
I don't think AA is all that successful as a recruitment tool, but I really don't know what metrics they use and what kind of return they expected. I'm just addressing your original point -- that saying AA could affect people means that GTA could too. I'm saying that doesn't follow, because there is a huge difference between AA and GTA, specifically the explicit and government-sanctioned intention for players to want to translate the in-game actions into real-life actions. There is a connection to reality in AA that simply doesn't exist in any other game.
I also don't really think (in the absence of convincing evidence) that video games generally lead to violent behavior. I do think, though, that a game put out by the Army that touts its realism can shape the ideas of what combat is like in impressionable minds, so I definitely have an ethical problem with them using it as part of a recruiting effort with people who are just coming into adulthood.
Yeah, to me the difference between America's Army and all these games that supposedly corrupt our youth is that there is an actual connection between the in-game violence and real-life violence. The makers of the game, the U.S. Army, want to recruit you to join them and shoot people in real life, and America's Army is part of their advertising. Rockstar has never suggested that people go out and do what GTA portrays in real-life, but the U.S. Army is saying not just that they want you to do what the game portrays, they're willing to pay you to do it too.
I don't really think it's all that bad; I can't call it "unethical" any more than their usual rosy sales pitch to underprivileged youths is. I'm just saying I see a difference between it and all the games morons are trying to ban, and the difference isn't to AA's benefit.
Well, to briefly restate a position I've written here before -- I don't believe that video games affect the conceptually related real-life behavior, unless that person is mentally equating the game with the real-life behavior. In the case of someone who becomes violent playing GTA, that mental equation is a result of mental instability and derangement, which is basically a requirement for equating stealing cars and shooting cops in GTA with doing so in real life. If you can't separate reality from fantasy, then yes I do believe a game could affect your real life behavior, but that's the fault of whatever caused the mental deficiency in the first place, not the game.
By the same token, sometimes we create such a connection on purpose. The difference between a military-style video game and a military training simulator isn't so much accuracy and detail. The difference is that when practicing on a training simulator you are deliberately, explicitly, and with the support of your superiors trying to equate the simulated action with its real-life counterpart. I think it's worth noting that even when conflating games with real life in order to train someone to kill is the explicit goal, still a large portion of soldiers find that when push comes to shove and they're faced with the actual chance to shoot someone that they are unable to pull the trigger. Yet that portion is much smaller than before we started training soldiers to be comfortable shooting a person, starting back when we replaced normal firing range targets with person-shaped ones.
Now what about America's Army? While it isn't an explicit combat trainer, it is a game called "America's Army" put out by the U.S. Army itself. It's not just any video game, it's official advertising for the Army, their P.R. for what being in the Army is like and what kind of exciting things you'll be able to do. Look at how in the game no matter which team you are on, your side is always the U.S. Army and the other side is the evil terrorists.
What I'm saying is that AA has an implicit reality claim intended to create a connection between the game and reality. It is implicitly a brochure for what you can experience in the Army, going to foreign lands and shooting the "bad guys" for the sake of your country. The Army wants you to form a connection between the game and the real-life choice of joining the Army.
It certainly isn't the same as explicit military training simulators, and I doubt any peacenik nerd playing AA for fun is going to rush out to join the military, or much less so run out and buy a gun to start shooting people. I'm just saying that there is a definite connection between the game and reality that doesn't exist in other games and thus causes more of an effect on people. BF1942 is in no way ever presented as showing how you could be a WWII soldier. GTA has no connection to real-life crime outside of the minds of the deranged. Yet if the next sandbox/crime game were to be produced by the mafia for purposes of recruitment, then I do think you would see a much stronger connection between the game and real-life crime.
Long story short: unlike other games, America's Army is designed to make you think about the real-life Army while playing the game, because otherwise there wouldn't be any reason for it to exist.
Dude, you guys were beat by Ghandi. GHANDI!
Try saying that to his face and maybe you'll understand what the Brits already knew -- he's one bad mother you don't want to mess with!
Total bull. My 2002 Prius gets around 47 mpg real-world. The same year non-hybrid car (the Toyota Echo - same chassis, conventional motor) gets significantly less mileage.
:P
Is that true? I knew the early model Prius were smaller, but they still looked a lot bigger than the Echo -- which is the car I drive. I get about 35-40 mpg, btw, but it's mostly highway driving to/from work. Which isn't noticeably better than my last car, an '87 Toyota Tercel. Though unlike with the Echo, in the Tercel I had to downshift to second to go up even moderate hills.
"Turn left now"
But there is no left.
Which, depending on what is actually to the left (cliff, fuel depot, power station) could mean that not only do we have lying cars, we have homicidal cars. Thus bringing to pass yet another prediction of a well-known futurist.
Ah, trying to make equivalent the portable market and the console market, even though the two are not similar and never have been.
Just answering your question. The fact that hardware power has not and has never been a dominant factor in console success is true in both the portable and home console market. In that way they are very similar. The history is very clear on this.
So in other words, the N64 wasn't really all that much better than the PSX? The idea that CD storage wasn't important is total bull, BTW.
In terms of "horespower", as in "ability to draw pretty pictures", then no the N64 was way more powerful than the PSX. And sorry, but most games didn't use the CD's capacity. Because most companies back then couldn't afford massive amounts of FMV. For those that did, clearly the N64 suffered. Yet for those that didn't, the PSX didn't die merely because it was "obsolete". Because nobody cared if the games were fun.
As opposed to either being stuck with an obsolete console for years or having to migrate to a new one every couple of years with all of the hassle that entails?
So "able to squeeze maximal performance from" means "obsolete" now, meaning the PS3 will never become obsolete since nobody will ever figure out how to keep all the SPEs busy, just like Sony said. Once again, this is a plus from a developers point of view. And based on the ongoing sales of the PS2, I think it's clear people care about "obsolete" a lot less than you.
And the Wii's strengths are towards gimmickry, not towards the magnificent games we've been seeing on the other systems like Bioshock and Oblivion, neither of which would really be difficult to port to the Wii if it had the required power.
I didn't know magnificent games required a certain power level unachievable before this generation. I guess Halo 1 was ass then. Of course it would have sucked less without being hindered by terrible controls. Good thing being able to aim in an FPS is just a gimmick, just like those PC users and their mouse gimmick.
Seriously, you sound like the DS detractors in its first year (which, since your first post made it seem you aren't aware, I'll let you know was light on quality 3rd party support and heavy with "gimmicky" mini-games). Competitors called the analog stick a gimmick too when Nintendo introduced it to consoles. Until they universally adopted it.
Because those go against the things that the market wants. The fact that a lot of Wiis are being bought doesn't mean anything if the games aren't being bought with them, if the Wiis are just being bought out of impulse and hype.
The market disagrees with you. The game development studios disagree with you. You want to know what happens with a console selling based solely on hype? Look at the the hysteria at the PS3 launch compared to it's performance this year. That's what hype with no substance gets you. People buy Wiis because they play them at a friend's house and find it to be fun.
Really you just don't like the Wii, and that's fine, but stop pretending that your opinion actually represents things game developers see as a downside, especially when they're saying the opposite.
In what cases vastly weaker?
PSP is PS2-level hardware while DS is N64-level hardware. Speaking of N64, it was vastly more powerful than the PSX (see Waverace vs Jet Moto if you don't remember), though the PSX had the advantage of CD storage which was important for some games but not most. Mostly the ones that used lots of FMV. Gameboy vs every pre-PSP portable is a perfect example.
Pretend power is important all you want. History says otherwise. Game developers understand this.
I don't remember ever seeing a console succeed whose full potential could be realized so quickly. Less than a year into the Wii's lifespan, we already hear speculation from developers that they're approaching the limits of what the Wii can do
And I don't remember ever hearing anyone say that having it take 5+ years to figure out how to get the promised performance out of a console is a good thing. The Wii is the same architecture as the GC just with ~2-3x the frequency. It's hardly surprising that it takes developers less time to figure out how to max its potential than the PS3 given 5 years of experience with the GC, and judging from their comments they prefer it this way.
And how do you explain all the games for the PS3 and 360 which have no planned ports for the Wii, even after the third parties are supposed to have "gotten it"?
Well pretty much like you said the Wii encourages non-traditional game play. Half-assed ports with waggle controls added are what the companies are putting out now. Having "gotten it" they are not planning on continuing, instead they will be developing titles that play to the Wii's strengths. This is what you would expect.
You haven't actually said how any of these things are negatives for game developers... they just seem like things you aren't impressed with. Game developers are impressed by market share numbers. Game developers have openly supported the Wii and said they made a mistake not supporting it and are changing course in order to do so. Why you think that means the opposite of what it seems to, that 3rd parties won't be supporting the Wii, I don't know.
3rd party relations means business relations, as in not treating 3rd parties like shit (as they did in the N64 generation), and instead encouraging them with development support and other assistance to publish games for the system (as they did insufficiently in the GC generation). Nintendo made it clear they understood their errors.
Just like more and more 3rd party game developers are making it clear they understand their own error in underestimating the Wii. Having more consoles out there than any other, with ongoing sales stronger than any other, is a strong positive to third parties. When's the last time you heard a company publicly say "Yes, we fucked up when we didn't strongly support this console from the beginning, we're trying to fix that ASAP"? Nobody said that about the N64 or GC, that's for certain. So whether you can see it or not, things are very different now.
You're also completely wrong about the Wii being weak being a strong negative to 3rd parties. It isn't. They don't care. Proof: Basically every console matchup you could mention. N64 vs PSX, Xbox vs PS2, PSP vs DS, NES vs Master System. In each case the largest library and the largest player base was on the weaker system, in some cases vastly weaker. The last time the most powerful console "won" was the SNES vs Genesis generation. The game developers only care about power if the players care about power, and so far no indication that the Wii's lack of power has hurt sales.
The N64 and GC were disasters for Nintendo's 3rd party support, and it had very little do with the popularity of Nintendo's 1st party titles. 3rd parties were extremely active and successful on the SNES and NES; N just did a great job of ostracizing them in the N64 generation and an inadequate job of luring them back in the GC generation. Based on appearances N has fixed the problem with 3rd party relations, and now looks to have fixed the other problem of not having enough units out there to be attractive vs the other consoles as in the GC generation.
Things change. "Waggle" may not be why they change, but "3rd parties don't sell on Nintendo" is not set in stone.
Hehe, according to the actual game developers instead of trolls, the reason there's so much shovelware coming out for the Wii is because they were all caught with their pants down, buying into the Sony hype and writing off the Wii. They are, however, smartening up and trying to change directions as fast as they can. That takes time, however, and in the meantime crapware cash-ins are what they've got to offer. It sucks, but it's how the game is played. Look at the majority of the PS2 library: utter shit designed to cash in on the most popular console. But also with plenty of gems designed to cash in on the most popular console as well.
:)
Pretend Wii Sports and Elebits don't have unique gameplay all you want. The market has spoken, and the publishers are listening. The "Nobody would bet on Nintendo" rhetoric is about six months too late. It's now the "nobody would bet against Sony!" folks who are kicking themselves.
Indignant? I find the continued delusions of the trolls hilarious.
Umm... don't the second two statements there pretty much put the first one to rest as inaccurate? The DLL has its own memory space. A mapping to that address space is created within the "virtual address space" of the app. The DLL's code is not duplicated into each app (unlike a statically-linked library), merely mapped so that it kinda looks like it's statically linked. But it's not, really. It's separate, but easy access is granted to it, bypassing the normal restrictions on app-to-app memory use.
.so's referenced by the binary, loads the dll if necessary, and replaces $strlen with the address of the function. The end result is exactly the same, the exact same sequence of instructions, and the exact same mapping of the object code into the app's virtual address space. The only difference is when it happens -- run time or compile time -- and this is by design.
No, because mapping the DLL within the virtual address space of the app means by definition that they are the same address space. The DLL is is the same address space as the app. Don't let the word "virtual" fool you, it doesn't mean some things are part of the app's address space and others are only "virtually" so; it only means there's a translation between the app's notion of "address" and an actual location in physical memory which only the OS is supposed to know about. Everything that composes the app, whether dynamically linked or not, is mapped into its virtual address space because otherwise it is inaccessible.
Not copying the DLL code is for efficiency reasons, nothing more. As soon as a copy becomes necessary -- as in one app using the DLL needs to make a store to memory that should not be visible to other apps using the DLL -- then it is copied and is no longer shared. But "shared" does not mean "not part of the app". It means "also part of other apps". so this in the end makes no difference.
You could do the same kind of sharing with statically linked code, but they usually don't have the necessary symbol information. That's a technical limitation, again done for efficiency's sake not because dynamic and static linking are fundamentally different.
And it is really linking. It's exactly the same as linking. The end result is intended to be exactly the same as static linking. It doesn't "kinda look", it exactly looks. The app cannot distinguish. E.g. your un-linked object code would look like this:
push arg1
push arg2
call $strlen
Where $strlen is a placeholder for the function declared in stdio.h. Note that at this point the compiler has no idea at all if strlen() is going to be statically or dynamically linked, nor does it matter.
If you use static linking, ld looks at the object files specified on the command line and when it finds strlen in a symbol table, it replaces $strlen with the address of the function. If you use dynamic linking, then the dynamic linker looks at the
So, the end result of either is: code for the function mapped into an app's virtual address space, with the exact same call interface. DLLs give advantages to linking, by allowing fewer copies to reside in memory, but are very much linking and make no difference with regard to derivative works.
Well the only reason Sony discounted the 60GB version was to clear the stock, I doubt the 80GB one will drop in price soon. There's certainly no reason to do so until the 60GB ones are no longer available at retail (which TFS says they are). Since $500 is the "discount" price for soon-to-be-obsolete versions, I highly doubt they want to lose that distinction from the 80GB version.
They may drop the price if sales of the 80GB version are as slow or slower than when the 60GB version was $600 -- it's possible especially if a lot of fence-sitters are buying the cheaper 60GB. Expect Sony to sit around for a few months coming up with insane reasons why sales are slowing until one of them accidentally becomes sober and notices the correlation between reduced price and increased sales.
The holiday will of course obscure this effect for a while, too. I do not an expect a price drop on the 80GB model this year.
DLL's aren't a gray area. DLL's are dynamically linked libraries. They're also shared libraries. That means that they have to stand on their own in the OS (they "plug-in" to a loader framework, then stay resident until their memory space is needed for something else). Any app can use any DLL present on the system, and when compiling, this requires only a few hooks to be placed in the code (hooks into the loader framework, not the DLL, thus no GPL violation).
But those hooks into the loader framework are turned into hooks into the DLL by the dynamic linker. As opposed to when hooks into the linker framework are truned into hooks into a non-dynamic library by the static linker. There is very little difference other than the format of the symbol table. The end result when the application is executed is a single program comprised both of application code and library code together. Once the loader is done with its work, there is no distinguishable difference from the application's point of view between a statically linked and dynamically linked library -- the ABI is identical, the way arguments are pushed on the stack, etc. The result is a work that is derived from both application and library, irrespective of whether it's dynamic or static linking.
DLLs are a matter of convenience and efficiency, it isn't a matter of being a fundamentally different beast than static linking, because it isn't as pains are taken to prevent it from being so.
This means that DLL's are basically a separate app from the app that calls them. They have their own memory space, even (because they're shared and can outlive any app that uses them). Thus, GPL is not violated and does not foist itself upon the main app. The libraries likely underwent changes to make them valid DLL's, and those changes would certainly be covered by the GPL. But the main app is not. Period. It's quite cut-and-dried.
That's not true. If the DLL was in a different memory space, it would be prohibitively difficult for an application to use the DLL, as it would require operating system support to get data from one to the other. A DLL must by necessity be mapped into the application's virtual address space so that data structures and function arguments on the stack can easily be passed back and forth. The DLL is shared by mapping it into several application's address space (which the OS can do with non-DLL memory too, on the request of applications). The sharing is only for efficiency with read-only code; if the DLL contains any state then that memory will be copied whenever it is first written, and from that point on that (copy of) part of the DLL will exist exclusively within the application's memory space.
For example take the standard C library function strlen(). You sure as heck wouldn't want to have strlen() is a separate address space that required OS intervention to access just to count non-zero bytes at a given location. It gets mapped into your application at the points it is referenced, and the only difference is that it's at run time instead of link time, and the code for strlen() is not duplicated in memory for every app that needs it. Those differences are not the difference between a derivative work and not a derivative work.
This is why glibc, and pretty much everything on Linux that is intended to be used as a library, is licensed under the LPGL instead of the GPL. Because it is cut and dry, just in the opposite way: "Dynamic" doesn't mean anything with regards to derivative works, "linking" does.
It's easy to make a superficial comparison with other countries - particularly European - who have higher population densities. I'd like to see a study in which the figures for broadband access were weighted for density.
New York City has crap for broadband compared to Europe.
Never mention the density argument again.
I'm finding this so improbable I'm having difficulty believing anyone would raise this. HD games, written for the PC, have been out for over a decade, and now nearly 10Gb is being seen as something unbearably low capacity?
I think the situation is different for console games, as they duplicate data so that the slow seek times of optical media aren't as big a problem. PS3 games can be installed to its hard drive, which ironically means the Bluray may not be as necessary, but it may mean that xbox 360 games are constrained and/or the programmers have to work harder to keep loading performance acceptable.
Is that a threat?
No, genius, it's pointing out that you are not an island, and what happens to other people affects you in significant ways, so you can still be completely self-absorbed and still be concerned with this issue because it does affect you. In this case by affecting the efficiency of distributing and thus the cost of your food.
I'm sorry to hear that. That sucks. Yet at the same time it's an obvious reason why your opinion wouldn't be typical... I understand even less why you don't understand the Wii's popularity.