This has little to do with Manhunt, and has far more to do with...main-stream portrayal of video games.
No matter how thin you slice it...
The New York Times reviews video games. TIME magazine reviews video games. Both have had nothing but good things to say about Bioshock and Halo.
When scandal erupts around a video game, it is almost certain to be a Rockstar product. Race. Sex. Violence. It doesn't matter. Rockstar will push all the red buttons.
'Rather than just pushing buttons, the player actually wields a knife, an ax, a glass shard -- to stab an opponent.' Ummm, no. Don't know who writes the copy over there at that ratings powerhouse, but that's just plain wrong...unless CBS has discovered some new feature -- we're currently unaware of the Wiimote's ability to shape-shift into any of those items described allowing a player to "stab an opponent."
Let's be honest here.
The player uses the Wii controller to physically mime the slashing - the gutting - of his victims. To which the game responds with the appropriate animations and rewards.
Rockstar's PR made the player's emotional engagement with his on-screen character a selling point.
If this isn't a murder simulation, I should like to know what is.
I am reminded uncomfortably of the inability of anyone in the Bush Administration to say that the water torture is torture.
The gamer, it seems, is no less willing to resort to any evasion, any contrivance, to avoid saying that this is out of bounds - - whatever this may be.
Perhaps the use of the Wii controller to mime a rape?
The coward denies the truths which are self-evident to others. A refusal to set limits isn't maturity, it is the very definition of arrested adolescence.
We know, and believe me, you will be the first against the wall when The Revolution comes.
The geek is first against the wall when the Revolution becomes the Terror.
He is the ideologue whose agricultural reforms end in famine, the architect whose grandiose stage sets for the new regime threaten to bankrupt the state.
He is the damned nuisance who frays tempers as he insists on drawing the new Assembly into yet another interminable debate over calendar reform.
This would be list for the most expensive retail boxes of both.
I have at least three options as a home user for a legit, discounted, price on Office 2007. The cheapest is through my employer: about $35 for the media with shipping and handling.
Local adult education programs in Office start at a subdized $5 per course.
No age restrictions. No income restrictions.
Your ticket out of welfare, your chance for a job past retirement, if you have need of one.
Wired published two unusual stories describing how consumers might link together a variety of third-party services to emulate Facebook, and ultimately calling on the open-source software community to build alternatives to the service. Inspired in part by Wired, I've posted some ideas describing what would be needed for an open source architecture for social networking.
Once communities begin to evolve around services like AIM they become very deeply entrenched. There are 47 million reasons to chose Facebook over its FOSS alternative.
Centralization may distress the Geek, but it makes it relatively easy to monitor abuse, set parental controls, license media content and so on.
I don't mean to sound like Scrooge, but it pisses me off when an elementary school kid shows up at school without a coat in the dead of winter because his parents "can't afford one," but they sure can afford to pay the cable bill every month./rant
Show me the kid and show me the cable bill. Then and only then will I mod you up to +4. Ronald Reagan was the past master of the welfare anecdote. What became real to him didn't need any better proof.
Sadly enough, not in a country with rent control, food stamps, and Medicaid. In a few years we'll probably have "Cable-Aid", helping the poor unfortunate souls with their entertainment budget straight from your pocket and mine
It's shameful that the elderly and disabled shouldn't have to pay full price for the entertainment the Geek sucks down for free from the P2P nets.
Why anyone with low income would waste it on cable (not to mention the time wasted watching it) is beyond me>
Elderly and disabled.
"Don't get out much anywhere."
But any adult over thirty is going to find the pickings mighty slim at Blockbuster or the suburban multiplex. You don't feel that your time has been wasted when you come across a series like Deadwood or The Sopranos.
Sports fans.
Tickets are priced out of reach. Transportation is priced out of reach. The Hispanic may want to see some soccer action. The Canadian, hockey.
There are only nine in New York State. Only three north of New York City. MacDirectory You'll find them all in the $$$ Galleria $$$ malls. So much for the image of a Mac for the masses.
just because someone buys a box with Vista installed, doesn't mean that Vista stays installed. How many eventually choose to upgrade back to Windows XP?
Realistically, almost no one.
Vista sales have been strongest at the high end.
When Walmart sells a dual core HP media laptop with an ATSC digital tuner, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB HDD and HD-DVD optical drive, integrated WiFi and WiMax, Webcam and NVIDIA DX10 mobile video, it ships with Vista Premium or Ultimate.
For a quick, cheap, performance boost, just plug in a stick of ReadyBoost Flash.
There is simply no point in pretending that a realistically configured Vista system is not going to look good to someone who has been out of the market for three or four years.
Microsoft is not directly mentioning Vista demand while they brag about how much money they made last quarter, because sales fell
Microsoft has had a lot to say about Vista and the market has been listening.
Gobsmacked. That's what the Brits call it when something jaw-dropping happens and you can't think of anything to say. Microsoft's blockbuster quarterly results kind of fall into that territory for me. The cash river keeps on flowing
Someone out there - or 88 million someones - bought a copy of Vista, 28 million of them in the last two months. This brought $4.14 billion in revenue in the quarter, making the Vista doom mongers look a tad silly. Sales of high-end Vista SKUs were the most popular.Vista helps Microsoft's quarterly profits rise 23 per cent"
Microsoft's chief financial officer said the company "outperformed expectations pretty much across the board." But it was led by robust performance of the company's PC software products. Sales in the Windows group rose 25 percent to more than $4.14 billion, while its Office division reported a 20 percent increase in sales to $4.11 billion....Growth was highest, he added, in international and consumer markets.... Microsoft also sold a higher mix of its premium-priced versions of Windows and Office than a year earlier. And Mr. Liddell said the company's anti-piracy efforts were particularly successful, increasing desktop software sales by as much as 5 percent from a year earlier.Microsoft Earnings Send Stock Soaring
The company reported "robust demand" for Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Server, and SQL server. The combined revenue of Microsoft's client, business, and server and tools divisions grew by more than 20%. Revenue in the company's video game division soared by 91%, driven primarily by the success of the launch of Halo 3.
Microsoft said Vista sales have been increasing since the release of the Windows operating system to consumers in January. "Customer demand for Windows Vista this quarter continued to build with double-digit growth in multi-year agreements by businesses and with the vast majority of consumers purchasing premium editions," said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft.
A strong global PC market helped sales of Windows Vista and Office 2007 considerably. PC shipments worldwide grew by 15.5% in the third quarter, according to IDC. Much of the growth occurred outside the United States, where PC shipments increased by only 4.7%.
Chris Liddell, CFO for Microsoft, said sales growth was strongest in the international markets, such as Brazil, China and Russia. The fact that Windows sales grew faster than the PC market was an indication that customers were upgrading their PCs to Vista, and also buying the premium edition. Three quarters of Microsoft's customers bought the more expensive version.Microsoft Earnings Boosted By Windows Vista, Office, Halo
The more expensive versions of Vista and a new Office 2007 package also are spurring a larger than usual number of customers to renew three-year licensing agreements, according to Bellini, Institutional Investor magazine's top-rated software analyst. Microsoft earnigns expected to rise
This is why I use OGG and ODF when I shares books/music etc. with people, I made a conscious decision to promote these standards.
"Pissing into the wind" is the phrase that comes to mind here.
Winamp as a free mp3 player for Windows has been around for ten years.
However awkward the Acrobat Reader can be, it at least preserves the look and feel of the original, with its distinctive fonts, layout, design and illustration.
The day you sell the Eee PC without a preloaded distro
The day a retailer tries to sell a laptop without an OEM system install is the day they go bankrupt.
The Geek can play Roulette with distros that may or may not support his hardware out-of-the box. The rest of us can't afford to gamble hundreds of dollars on the chance that we can probably get this thing to work.
The day the hardware manufacturer ignores Microsoft [Q1 revenues up 25%] is the day they go bankrupt.
as an American I reach my answer by asking, "What would the Founding Fathers say?"
I know in this case, they'd be completely against censorship of any form.
Freedom of Speech to the Founders meant "unconstrained" political debate among responsible adults --- but they could be prickly about the libels and slanders of their opposition.
It goes without saying that women and blacks were not invited to the party.
In those times, Freedom of Speech did not mean that Boston had to provide a stage for the sexual farces that entertained audiences in France.
ISPs, fiber owners have built the lines with PUBLIC funding, on PUBLIC property. they DO NOT own the lines.
I hear this mantra repeated again and again on Slashdot.
Public investment in telecommunications in the U.S. has - historically - been negligible.
When the moon and stars have been properly aligned you just might you get funding from Congress for a demonstration project like the first Atlantic cable or an Appalachian Co-Op during the New Deal.
But, with these modest qualifications, it's fair to say that the privately financed American telco has always owned and built the lines. Western Union had a transcontinental telegraph service up and running in 1861.
anyone calling himself HangingChad should know that no significant policy changes in telecommunications - or anything else, for that matter - are going to come out of Congress until after next year's Presidential elections.
In San Antonio, TX I was pulled over for doing 76 in a 75 zone.
Assuming that this is not a typo, I am tempted to call BS on this for several reasons.
Until the repeal of the 55/65 national speed limit, all freeways in the San Antonio area were 55 mph or less, and I-35 was 55 mph all the way to north of New Braunfels. Most freeways inside of Loop 410 have now gone to 60 mph. Outside of 410, speed limits are generally 65 on the Northside and 70 on the Southside. Speed limits jump up to 70 outside of Loop 1604 on the Northside. Loop 410 is 60 mph north of US 90, and 70 mph to the south. Loop 1604 is generally 70 mph on its freeway segments with some 65 and 55 stretches in Live Oak and Universal City. San Antonio Area Freeway System
This is Texas. Even a freeway can have a fan site.
If this ends up being a valid way to argue against getting a speeding ticket
There are two big problems with this case:
1 Malone's parents had the GPS system installed in order to track the whereabouts and speed of their son, whom they readily admit has a lead foot. In fact, he has already been grounded for having gone over 70 MPH after the GPS was installed.
2 The debate is likely to come down to how often the GPS device calculated and reported ground speed. Petaluma police lieutenant John Edwards told the AP that since GPS is satellite-based, there's a delay involved, and that Malone may have sped up and slowed down in the window between measurements, which could be as long as 60 seconds.My GPS Proves Your Radar Gun Is Wrong
I don't know Petaluma but I do know roads which have been posted at 45 for damn good reasons.
If it was censored no one would have ever seen the video, in turn the kid would have never had his story shown, and in turn no one would have ever cared about him getting punched. The problem with censoring "graphical" content is it promotes exactly what the supporters of the censoring tell you it's trying to avoid, apathy.
In the real world the bully lives for his chance to play before an audience. The Internet gives him a far bigger stage.
You sure about that? Fair use is one side, derivative works are another.
Yeah, I'm sure about it.
The copyright holder owns the rights to derivative works.
The music wasn't being "quoted" for classroom instruction or critical review. The video was given unrestricted distribution through the commercial service which is YouTube.
Prince didn't demand damages, he simply asked for a take down of the video, and that is well within bounds.
The video is cute --- but an American court is not going to gut copyright law by accepting the argument that mixing a copyrighted music track into your home video makes an unlicensed distribution legal.
These issues have been litigated in the U.S. since the founding of ASCAP in 1914.
The simplest solution for amateur productions is and always has been for the profit-making host to negotiate a license with the rights holders and pay the contracted or statutory fees.
Mom Stephanie Lenz was first afraid they'd come after her -- then she got angry. She got YouTube to put the video back up, she's enlisted the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she's filed a civil lawsuit
which she is likely to lose even more certainly than Jammie Thomas lost her case.
the copyright owner isn't going to know or care if you privately distribute a home video to a handful of friends and family members. but post the video to a site accessible to tens of millions and there is going be trouble.
this stretches the meaning of fair use beyond anything a judge is likely to find credible. there is a very real risk that fair use will be much more stringently defined if the EFF takes cases like these into court and loses.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter how thin you slice it...
The New York Times reviews video games. TIME magazine reviews video games. Both have had nothing but good things to say about Bioshock and Halo.
When scandal erupts around a video game, it is almost certain to be a Rockstar product. Race. Sex. Violence. It doesn't matter. Rockstar will push all the red buttons.
Presentation is the art of persuasion.
It is not a line of code.
The salesman doesn't need to know HTML. He needs to know to reach his target audience.
The thing I despise most is how games like Manhunt 2 define "adult."
Let's be honest here.
The player uses the Wii controller to physically mime the slashing - the gutting - of his victims. To which the game responds with the appropriate animations and rewards.
Rockstar's PR made the player's emotional engagement with his on-screen character a selling point.
If this isn't a murder simulation, I should like to know what is.
I am reminded uncomfortably of the inability of anyone in the Bush Administration to say that the water torture is torture.
The gamer, it seems, is no less willing to resort to any evasion, any contrivance, to avoid saying that this is out of bounds - - whatever this may be.
Perhaps the use of the Wii controller to mime a rape?
The coward denies the truths which are self-evident to others. A refusal to set limits isn't maturity, it is the very definition of arrested adolescence.
To most users, Google remains a search engine and nothing more.
Damon Runyon ["Guys and Dolls"] once wrote that life was 7-to-5 against.
The video game is structured so that the average player can win without falling back on the most obvious cheats.
The geek is first against the wall when the Revolution becomes the Terror.
He is the ideologue whose agricultural reforms end in famine, the architect whose grandiose stage sets for the new regime threaten to bankrupt the state.
He is the damned nuisance who frays tempers as he insists on drawing the new Assembly into yet another interminable debate over calendar reform.
This would be list for the most expensive retail boxes of both.
I have at least three options as a home user for a legit, discounted, price on Office 2007. The cheapest is through my employer: about $35 for the media with shipping and handling.
Local adult education programs in Office start at a subdized $5 per course.
No age restrictions. No income restrictions.
Your ticket out of welfare, your chance for a job past retirement, if you have need of one.
Once communities begin to evolve around services like AIM they become very deeply entrenched. There are 47 million reasons to chose Facebook over its FOSS alternative.
Centralization may distress the Geek, but it makes it relatively easy to monitor abuse, set parental controls, license media content and so on.
I don't mean to sound like Scrooge, but it pisses me off when an elementary school kid shows up at school without a coat in the dead of winter because his parents "can't afford one," but they sure can afford to pay the cable bill every month. /rant
Show me the kid and show me the cable bill. Then and only then will I mod you up to +4. Ronald Reagan was the past master of the welfare anecdote. What became real to him didn't need any better proof.
It's shameful that the elderly and disabled shouldn't have to pay full price for the entertainment the Geek sucks down for free from the P2P nets.
Elderly and disabled.
"Don't get out much anywhere."
But any adult over thirty is going to find the pickings mighty slim at Blockbuster or the suburban multiplex. You don't feel that your time has been wasted when you come across a series like Deadwood or The Sopranos.
Sports fans.
Tickets are priced out of reach. Transportation is priced out of reach. The Hispanic may want to see some soccer action. The Canadian, hockey.
Apple stores are hard to find.
There are only nine in New York State. Only three north of New York City. MacDirectory You'll find them all in the $$$ Galleria $$$ malls. So much for the image of a Mac for the masses.
Realistically, almost no one.
Vista sales have been strongest at the high end.
When Walmart sells a dual core HP media laptop with an ATSC digital tuner, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB HDD and HD-DVD optical drive, integrated WiFi and WiMax, Webcam and NVIDIA DX10 mobile video, it ships with Vista Premium or Ultimate.
For a quick, cheap, performance boost, just plug in a stick of ReadyBoost Flash.
There is simply no point in pretending that a realistically configured Vista system is not going to look good to someone who has been out of the market for three or four years.
Microsoft has had a lot to say about Vista and the market has been listening.
Gobsmacked. That's what the Brits call it when something jaw-dropping happens and you can't think of anything to say. Microsoft's blockbuster quarterly results kind of fall into that territory for me. The cash river keeps on flowing
Someone out there - or 88 million someones - bought a copy of Vista, 28 million of them in the last two months. This brought $4.14 billion in revenue in the quarter, making the Vista doom mongers look a tad silly. Sales of high-end Vista SKUs were the most popular. Vista helps Microsoft's quarterly profits rise 23 per cent"
Microsoft's chief financial officer said the company "outperformed expectations pretty much across the board." But it was led by robust performance of the company's PC software products. Sales in the Windows group rose 25 percent to more than $4.14 billion, while its Office division reported a 20 percent increase in sales to $4.11 billion. ...Growth was highest, he added, in international and consumer markets. ... Microsoft also sold a higher mix of its premium-priced versions of Windows and Office than a year earlier. And Mr. Liddell said the company's anti-piracy efforts were particularly successful, increasing desktop software sales by as much as 5 percent from a year earlier. Microsoft Earnings Send Stock Soaring
The company reported "robust demand" for Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Server, and SQL server. The combined revenue of Microsoft's client, business, and server and tools divisions grew by more than 20%. Revenue in the company's video game division soared by 91%, driven primarily by the success of the launch of Halo 3.
Microsoft said Vista sales have been increasing since the release of the Windows operating system to consumers in January. "Customer demand for Windows Vista this quarter continued to build with double-digit growth in multi-year agreements by businesses and with the vast majority of consumers purchasing premium editions," said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft.
A strong global PC market helped sales of Windows Vista and Office 2007 considerably. PC shipments worldwide grew by 15.5% in the third quarter, according to IDC. Much of the growth occurred outside the United States, where PC shipments increased by only 4.7%.
Chris Liddell, CFO for Microsoft, said sales growth was strongest in the international markets, such as Brazil, China and Russia. The fact that Windows sales grew faster than the PC market was an indication that customers were upgrading their PCs to Vista, and also buying the premium edition. Three quarters of Microsoft's customers bought the more expensive version. Microsoft Earnings Boosted By Windows Vista, Office, Halo
The more expensive versions of Vista and a new Office 2007 package also are spurring a larger than usual number of customers to renew three-year licensing agreements, according to Bellini, Institutional Investor magazine's top-rated software analyst. Microsoft earnigns expected to rise
"Pissing into the wind" is the phrase that comes to mind here.
Winamp as a free mp3 player for Windows has been around for ten years.
However awkward the Acrobat Reader can be, it at least preserves the look and feel of the original, with its distinctive fonts, layout, design and illustration.
The day a retailer tries to sell a laptop without an OEM system install is the day they go bankrupt.
The Geek can play Roulette with distros that may or may not support his hardware out-of-the box. The rest of us can't afford to gamble hundreds of dollars on the chance that we can probably get this thing to work.
The day the hardware manufacturer ignores Microsoft [Q1 revenues up 25%] is the day they go bankrupt.
I know in this case, they'd be completely against censorship of any form.
Freedom of Speech to the Founders meant "unconstrained" political debate among responsible adults --- but they could be prickly about the libels and slanders of their opposition.
It goes without saying that women and blacks were not invited to the party.
In those times, Freedom of Speech did not mean that Boston had to provide a stage for the sexual farces that entertained audiences in France.
I hear this mantra repeated again and again on Slashdot.
Public investment in telecommunications in the U.S. has - historically - been negligible.
When the moon and stars have been properly aligned you just might you get funding from Congress for a demonstration project like the first Atlantic cable or an Appalachian Co-Op during the New Deal.
But, with these modest qualifications, it's fair to say that the privately financed American telco has always owned and built the lines. Western Union had a transcontinental telegraph service up and running in 1861.
anyone calling himself HangingChad should know that no significant policy changes in telecommunications - or anything else, for that matter - are going to come out of Congress until after next year's Presidential elections.
Assuming that this is not a typo, I am tempted to call BS on this for several reasons.
Until the repeal of the 55/65 national speed limit, all freeways in the San Antonio area were 55 mph or less, and I-35 was 55 mph all the way to north of New Braunfels. Most freeways inside of Loop 410 have now gone to 60 mph. Outside of 410, speed limits are generally 65 on the Northside and 70 on the Southside. Speed limits jump up to 70 outside of Loop 1604 on the Northside. Loop 410 is 60 mph north of US 90, and 70 mph to the south. Loop 1604 is generally 70 mph on its freeway segments with some 65 and 55 stretches in Live Oak and Universal City. San Antonio Area Freeway System
This is Texas. Even a freeway can have a fan site.
There are two big problems with this case:
1 Malone's parents had the GPS system installed in order to track the whereabouts and speed of their son, whom they readily admit has a lead foot. In fact, he has already been grounded for having gone over 70 MPH after the GPS was installed.
2 The debate is likely to come down to how often the GPS device calculated and reported ground speed. Petaluma police lieutenant John Edwards told the AP that since GPS is satellite-based, there's a delay involved, and that Malone may have sped up and slowed down in the window between measurements, which could be as long as 60 seconds. My GPS Proves Your Radar Gun Is Wrong
I don't know Petaluma but I do know roads which have been posted at 45 for damn good reasons.
In the real world the bully lives for his chance to play before an audience. The Internet gives him a far bigger stage.
Yeah, I'm sure about it.
The copyright holder owns the rights to derivative works.
The music wasn't being "quoted" for classroom instruction or critical review. The video was given unrestricted distribution through the commercial service which is YouTube.
Prince didn't demand damages, he simply asked for a take down of the video, and that is well within bounds.
The video is cute --- but an American court is not going to gut copyright law by accepting the argument that mixing a copyrighted music track into your home video makes an unlicensed distribution legal.
These issues have been litigated in the U.S. since the founding of ASCAP in 1914.
The simplest solution for amateur productions is and always has been for the profit-making host to negotiate a license with the rights holders and pay the contracted or statutory fees.
which she is likely to lose even more certainly than Jammie Thomas lost her case.
the copyright owner isn't going to know or care if you privately distribute a home video to a handful of friends and family members. but post the video to a site accessible to tens of millions and there is going be trouble.
this stretches the meaning of fair use beyond anything a judge is likely to find credible. there is a very real risk that fair use will be much more stringently defined if the EFF takes cases like these into court and loses.