Be warned - with this bill going to conference to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions, there's a good chance that someone will try to slip in the Broadcast Flag there.
Well, in my book, DRM is anti-consumer unless it has the flexibility to be read in Linux, preferably with OSS, and I'm pretty sure that's not what Bill had in mind.
System Shock 2 really was a great game because of the atmosphere (so were Thief I and II, for that matter). The level designers did a superb job at doing what TFA mentioned above - using the level design to indicate that "you should probably go in there next," while at the same time giving you the feeling of "like hell I'm going in there!!"
I've read that the biggest reason there are no friendly characters to interact with was due to technical limitations, and the use of recorded logs throughout the game was their workaround, but honestly, it's comes off as a stroke of thematic genius. A great deal of the atmosphere of SS2 was that all these horrible things had happened on board the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, and those horrible things could happen to you as well as you open that door or round the next corner. But we're so used to seeing visual cues in horror movies and other games that using audio cues instead - horrifying, visceral sounds of people meeting their demise, dashing any hopes you had that you'd be able to catch up with them - proves to be superbly effective.
I'm really looking forward to Bioshock, because I trust the team at Irrational to be able to re-evoke the same emotional response that they did with System Shock 2.
It's tough to make a blanket statement about all open source clones, but since developers and publishers rely very heavily on intellectual property rights, any infringement or dilution of those rights can be detrimental to companies, games, and consumers. In the case of Civilization, Take Two Interactive now owns all rights to the game series and fortunately, the franchise is still a mainstay at Firaxis...so we feel pretty protective of the IP.
Apparently, Take Two also owns all rights to the Sid Meier's Personal Opinion franchise.
Still, the rest of the interview was very interesting.
Specifically, the white house co-ordinator said "if he goes off script".
What, you think it's unreasonable for the President to prepare ahead of time the questions he wanted to ask? What's wrong with that? Interviewers write down questions ahead of their interviews all the time.
And many of the soldiers in the interview later said that they also wanted to be prepared, since they were nervous as all hell about talking to the President on (inter)national television, so they wrote down ahead of time many of the things they were going to say.
There's simply no evidence that either the President or the soldiers were giving dishonest answers to any of the questions, or that the answers they were giving differed in any way from their own opinions, and that's what's important here, not whether the people involved wanted to be prepared so that things would run smoothly.
That's funny, the OP says "geekster writes," and then goes on to quote TFA verbatim, but I could have sworn that TFA was written by someone at The Independent named "Geneviève Roberts".
TFA says that the analyst works for UBS Securities. He's a stock analyst, same as any other, who produces analysis that his employer sells as a product. The point is that the analysis is used by investors to help them decide where to put their money.
In this case, the analysis is probably really good news for investors in the companies supplying the parts for the 360, since it indicates that at least some of them are working to capacity, and it's still pretty good news for MSFT (though the part about them taking a loss on each unit makes that a little screwy - hopefully the slow supply will help them gauge software sales so that they can make better decisions on future supply).
Yes, the atrocities of WWII were horrendous. Yes, you want to make sure nobody can ever perpetrate such atrocities again. The monuments that remind Europe and the rest of the world about what happened there during the war are important and vital to making sure history doesn't repeat itself.
But when will it be time to stop sheltering people from the swastika and the Third Reich? Why is it necessary to forbid people from buying Nazi memorabilia? Why is it necessary to ban a game that frames the Nazi regime as being evil, just because it features the swastika (and features it as a target for your anger, no less)? If Europe had truly come to terms with what the Nazis did, these laws would no longer be necessary. As it stands, Europe is still obsessing over it, and can't get a grip on the fact that it really is history now.
There are items that cannot be sold on the US Market either.
Not for speech reasons. Such items can't be sold because they are physically dangerous, easy to dupe people with (real estate, stocks, loans), or because there are special taxes levied on their sale. And even in most of those cases, you can get a license to sell those things.
Phony interview? So sez the Dems. Even the LA Times can't come up with a sentence to incriminate the administration without making a fairly grandiose assumption on context. Note the brackets around "question" in this article, when "answer" or even "topic" would have been more accurate:
Also note that the article indicates that the soldiers didn't ask the questions - they answered them. The "coaching" was so that the soldiers knew which other soldier was best suited to answer particular questions. The soldiers would then know whom to hand the microphone to next, based on the question that was asked. They weren't told how to answer.
Nevertheless, the Democrats and Jon Stewart spout kneejerk nonsense as to what was going on, and all the Bush haters out there take it as gospel truth.
France and Germany have every right to try and get UN resolution to forbid Nazi stuff from the internet.
Just as Syria has every right to try to get a UN resolution to forbid Israeli/Jewish stuff on the Internet? The point is that with the Internet under UN control, the right to censorship is available at the foundational level. It shouldn't be that way. If Syria wants to filter out all traffic to Israeli web sites at their borders, they can feel free to do so. If China wants to block information about Falun Gong from their country, let them go right ahead. But when that control extends to a global level through a mechanism such as DNS, where censorship can't be bypassed without creating technological problems, we have a serious problem. The US hasn't been abusing its position in this regard, something that is even less certain if control were to pass elsewhere.
Wikipedia indicates that the US Department of Commerce has objected to the.xxx domain, but doesn't say that their objection is binding:
It also indicates that the situation regarding the legality of online gambling in the US is somewhat more complicated than you suggest (and in any event, there's still an abundance of online gambling available on the Internet:
As for pr0n, yes, the feds frequently try to crack down on pornography, but just as often, the right to free speech is upheld on appeal by judges who value the First Amendment over dubious claims regarding pornography. However, the US is not trying to leverage DNS in its crackdown.
As many others here have said, censorship is a huge reason why other countries want UN control over DNS. With it in US control, that isn't a problem, because freedom of speech is at the very heart of the way the country works. Yes, the UN includes a statement of freedom of expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but even after 57 years, the document is still just a non-binding "feel-good" resolution.
Consider first that France demanded that eBay remove auctions of historical WWII Nazi items from their site.
Consider next that Germany outlawed Wolfenstein 3D because it contained various symbols of the WWII Nazi regime, despite the game hardly being sympathetic to the Nazis.
If there's a country that stands for defending freedom of speech, it sure isn't either of them. Perish the day when we can't even register domain names like "naziscansuckmyballs.com" because Europe is too afraid to deal with the realities of its own history.
The same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to aluminum, and proposed the name aluminium.
All this pointless bickering because of a troll who posted as an Anonymous Coward... in 1812. I guess he must have gotten modded up.
The claim of selling time rather than items is intended to be protection (however feeble) against lawsuits. Most MMOG companies explicitly state in their EULA/TOS that they can terminate an account at any time for any reason, so the "selling time" claim isn't meant to protect against account deletion.
Thus far, smaller scale operations have gotten around this by claiming that they're just selling their time,
Many such operations have claimed that, yes. But so far, they haven't been challenged in court, so it hasn't yet been determined whether or not they're actually getting around anything.
I suspect, however, that most judges have the good sense to understand the concept of, "If it quacks like a duck...." Just because they say they're selling their time doesn't change the fact that the people running such operations receive money, and in exchange, their customers receive in-game gold or items.
Like Florida, for example? Yeah, if somebody breaks into your house, you can shoot them. They don't even have to be armed. It also doesn't have to be dark.
How does this work into Monsanto suing farmers who grow crops next door to a farm that uses Monsanto GM crops, after the crops on the two farms cross-pollinate and the farmer replants harvested seeds from his own farm? The only thing that's being transferred is some of the genes from the GM plants in their natural environment (i.e., in vivo), and that's not even under the farmer's control.
In the "About..." help dialog, have the developers put "Devised and developed by {insert names}" to ensure that the foolishness of their bosses' attempts at running away with the credit is forever emblazoned on every machine in the entire company that uses the software.
The question is, though, can you buy Season 1 of Lost on iTMS for $35 now, and then when the DVD comes out, pay the remaining $4 to upgrade to the higher-resolution surround-sound physical DVDs with extra content (commentary on four tracks, deleted scenes, numerous behind-the-scenes snippets)? Could I pay $10, or $15 to upgrade? No, I have to spend another $39 on the DVD release if I want to see any of that stuff.
This is less-than-TV-quality programming, and it should be priced as such. How much money does ABC make per head per episode? That's the guideline they should be using on pricing. Their price point should be closer to $1 an episode a la carte, depending on its popularity on TV, or, going by the per-season discount iTMS shows, about $0.75 per episode if bought by the season.
That's $18 for a season of Lost, which is a reasonable expense even for those people who want to pick it up on DVD when it comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
The ones that said, "I'm sorry," as they beat the hell out of you with a pipe, were particularly unnerving.
Be warned - with this bill going to conference to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions, there's a good chance that someone will try to slip in the Broadcast Flag there.
Well, in my book, DRM is anti-consumer unless it has the flexibility to be read in Linux, preferably with OSS, and I'm pretty sure that's not what Bill had in mind.
System Shock 2 really was a great game because of the atmosphere (so were Thief I and II, for that matter). The level designers did a superb job at doing what TFA mentioned above - using the level design to indicate that "you should probably go in there next," while at the same time giving you the feeling of "like hell I'm going in there!!"
I've read that the biggest reason there are no friendly characters to interact with was due to technical limitations, and the use of recorded logs throughout the game was their workaround, but honestly, it's comes off as a stroke of thematic genius. A great deal of the atmosphere of SS2 was that all these horrible things had happened on board the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, and those horrible things could happen to you as well as you open that door or round the next corner. But we're so used to seeing visual cues in horror movies and other games that using audio cues instead - horrifying, visceral sounds of people meeting their demise, dashing any hopes you had that you'd be able to catch up with them - proves to be superbly effective.
I'm really looking forward to Bioshock, because I trust the team at Irrational to be able to re-evoke the same emotional response that they did with System Shock 2.
It's tough to make a blanket statement about all open source clones, but since developers and publishers rely very heavily on intellectual property rights, any infringement or dilution of those rights can be detrimental to companies, games, and consumers. In the case of Civilization, Take Two Interactive now owns all rights to the game series and fortunately, the franchise is still a mainstay at Firaxis...so we feel pretty protective of the IP.
Apparently, Take Two also owns all rights to the Sid Meier's Personal Opinion franchise.
Still, the rest of the interview was very interesting.
It's a face? I never looked at it that close, because my parents told me it would hurt my eyes.
Yep, sure is.
Specifically, the white house co-ordinator said "if he goes off script".
What, you think it's unreasonable for the President to prepare ahead of time the questions he wanted to ask? What's wrong with that? Interviewers write down questions ahead of their interviews all the time.
And many of the soldiers in the interview later said that they also wanted to be prepared, since they were nervous as all hell about talking to the President on (inter)national television, so they wrote down ahead of time many of the things they were going to say.
There's simply no evidence that either the President or the soldiers were giving dishonest answers to any of the questions, or that the answers they were giving differed in any way from their own opinions, and that's what's important here, not whether the people involved wanted to be prepared so that things would run smoothly.
That's funny, the OP says "geekster writes," and then goes on to quote TFA verbatim, but I could have sworn that TFA was written by someone at The Independent named "Geneviève Roberts".
TFA says that the analyst works for UBS Securities. He's a stock analyst, same as any other, who produces analysis that his employer sells as a product. The point is that the analysis is used by investors to help them decide where to put their money.
In this case, the analysis is probably really good news for investors in the companies supplying the parts for the 360, since it indicates that at least some of them are working to capacity, and it's still pretty good news for MSFT (though the part about them taking a loss on each unit makes that a little screwy - hopefully the slow supply will help them gauge software sales so that they can make better decisions on future supply).
Yes, the atrocities of WWII were horrendous. Yes, you want to make sure nobody can ever perpetrate such atrocities again. The monuments that remind Europe and the rest of the world about what happened there during the war are important and vital to making sure history doesn't repeat itself.
But when will it be time to stop sheltering people from the swastika and the Third Reich? Why is it necessary to forbid people from buying Nazi memorabilia? Why is it necessary to ban a game that frames the Nazi regime as being evil, just because it features the swastika (and features it as a target for your anger, no less)? If Europe had truly come to terms with what the Nazis did, these laws would no longer be necessary. As it stands, Europe is still obsessing over it, and can't get a grip on the fact that it really is history now.
There are items that cannot be sold on the US Market either.
Not for speech reasons. Such items can't be sold because they are physically dangerous, easy to dupe people with (real estate, stocks, loans), or because there are special taxes levied on their sale. And even in most of those cases, you can get a license to sell those things.
Phony interview? So sez the Dems. Even the LA Times can't come up with a sentence to incriminate the administration without making a fairly grandiose assumption on context. Note the brackets around "question" in this article, when "answer" or even "topic" would have been more accurate:
f g-bush14oct14,0,7903715.story?coll=la-home-headlin es
4 866.php
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-
Also note that the article indicates that the soldiers didn't ask the questions - they answered them. The "coaching" was so that the soldiers knew which other soldier was best suited to answer particular questions. The soldiers would then know whom to hand the microphone to next, based on the question that was asked. They weren't told how to answer.
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-117
Nevertheless, the Democrats and Jon Stewart spout kneejerk nonsense as to what was going on, and all the Bush haters out there take it as gospel truth.
The fact that it was self censorship is irrelevant, the result for the citizen is the same.
So every time a movie director decides, "No, that scene didn't work. Cut it," the movie-consuming public suffers?
Self-censorship is part of freedom of speech - the right not to say something is just as important as the right to say it.
France and Germany have every right to try and get UN resolution to forbid Nazi stuff from the internet.
.xxx domain, but doesn't say that their objection is binding:
Just as Syria has every right to try to get a UN resolution to forbid Israeli/Jewish stuff on the Internet? The point is that with the Internet under UN control, the right to censorship is available at the foundational level. It shouldn't be that way. If Syria wants to filter out all traffic to Israeli web sites at their borders, they can feel free to do so. If China wants to block information about Falun Gong from their country, let them go right ahead. But when that control extends to a global level through a mechanism such as DNS, where censorship can't be bypassed without creating technological problems, we have a serious problem. The US hasn't been abusing its position in this regard, something that is even less certain if control were to pass elsewhere.
Wikipedia indicates that the US Department of Commerce has objected to the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.xxx
It also indicates that the situation regarding the legality of online gambling in the US is somewhat more complicated than you suggest (and in any event, there's still an abundance of online gambling available on the Internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_gambling
As for pr0n, yes, the feds frequently try to crack down on pornography, but just as often, the right to free speech is upheld on appeal by judges who value the First Amendment over dubious claims regarding pornography. However, the US is not trying to leverage DNS in its crackdown.
As many others here have said, censorship is a huge reason why other countries want UN control over DNS. With it in US control, that isn't a problem, because freedom of speech is at the very heart of the way the country works. Yes, the UN includes a statement of freedom of expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but even after 57 years, the document is still just a non-binding "feel-good" resolution.
Consider first that France demanded that eBay remove auctions of historical WWII Nazi items from their site.
Consider next that Germany outlawed Wolfenstein 3D because it contained various symbols of the WWII Nazi regime, despite the game hardly being sympathetic to the Nazis.
If there's a country that stands for defending freedom of speech, it sure isn't either of them. Perish the day when we can't even register domain names like "naziscansuckmyballs.com" because Europe is too afraid to deal with the realities of its own history.
I especially liked this part:
The same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to aluminum, and proposed the name aluminium.
All this pointless bickering because of a troll who posted as an Anonymous Coward... in 1812. I guess he must have gotten modded up.
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cokebottle.html
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+chr onic+marijuana+use
The claim of selling time rather than items is intended to be protection (however feeble) against lawsuits. Most MMOG companies explicitly state in their EULA/TOS that they can terminate an account at any time for any reason, so the "selling time" claim isn't meant to protect against account deletion.
Thus far, smaller scale operations have gotten around this by claiming that they're just selling their time,
Many such operations have claimed that, yes. But so far, they haven't been challenged in court, so it hasn't yet been determined whether or not they're actually getting around anything.
I suspect, however, that most judges have the good sense to understand the concept of, "If it quacks like a duck...." Just because they say they're selling their time doesn't change the fact that the people running such operations receive money, and in exchange, their customers receive in-game gold or items.
Like Florida, for example? Yeah, if somebody breaks into your house, you can shoot them. They don't even have to be armed. It also doesn't have to be dark.
How does this work into Monsanto suing farmers who grow crops next door to a farm that uses Monsanto GM crops, after the crops on the two farms cross-pollinate and the farmer replants harvested seeds from his own farm? The only thing that's being transferred is some of the genes from the GM plants in their natural environment (i.e., in vivo), and that's not even under the farmer's control.
In the "About..." help dialog, have the developers put "Devised and developed by {insert names}" to ensure that the foolishness of their bosses' attempts at running away with the credit is forever emblazoned on every machine in the entire company that uses the software.
Make distribution costs sufficiently close to zero. Make unit cost close to zero. Independent producers will grow like weeds.
Given your description, I think you meant, "Independent producers will grow, like, weed."
The question is, though, can you buy Season 1 of Lost on iTMS for $35 now, and then when the DVD comes out, pay the remaining $4 to upgrade to the higher-resolution surround-sound physical DVDs with extra content (commentary on four tracks, deleted scenes, numerous behind-the-scenes snippets)? Could I pay $10, or $15 to upgrade? No, I have to spend another $39 on the DVD release if I want to see any of that stuff.
This is less-than-TV-quality programming, and it should be priced as such. How much money does ABC make per head per episode? That's the guideline they should be using on pricing. Their price point should be closer to $1 an episode a la carte, depending on its popularity on TV, or, going by the per-season discount iTMS shows, about $0.75 per episode if bought by the season.
That's $18 for a season of Lost, which is a reasonable expense even for those people who want to pick it up on DVD when it comes out.
And to think that, back in the day, people made friends by actually talking to other people.