But it *hasn't* yet. That's the point. The article was completely factually incorrect when it said the FBI had gained new powers. There's still time to contact your Congresspeople on the issue, and there's still the possibility that changes can be made.
By the way, on a slightly off-topic note, CNN Headline News reported today that a recent Gallup Poll found that while about 92% of the Republican Party is white, and 81% of the Republican Party is both white and Christian, it turns out that the Democratic Party is not too far from that demographic either: 74% of the Democratic Party is white, and 57% of the Democratic Party is white and Christian. (The story didn't report on the religious persuasion of blacks, who make up 19% of the Democratic party, but anecdotally, a lot of blacks are Christians as well.)
In other news, Slashdot article submitters have no clue how the U.S. Congress works:
The FBI has gained new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval, as well as the ability to designate subpoenas as secret and punish disclosure of their existence with up to one year in prison.
No, the FBI hasn't gained jack crap, yet. Senate committees may play a large role in the development of bills, but a bill has to get past the entirety of both the House and the Senate, and then get signed by the President, before it becomes a law.
Watch some Schoolhouse Rock or something, people. Or maybe pay attention in middle school.
Molyneux and Friends come up with some interesting game ideas on a regular basis. I liked the concepts behind Black and White, and thought it was a marvelous-looking game, but after you played it for maybe ten or fifteen hours, you started to realize that there were serious problems in terms of execution (competition against the computer was repetitive and boring, and training your creature was often confusing) (not counting the bugs).
It's sort of like the concept of the MMORTS. SOE worked on that concept for a couple years with Sovereign, but cancelled the project when it became clear that while you could come up with an interesting concept, you couldn't execute it properly without creating significant problems for some segment of the playerbase (generally, that you had to pick between hardcore gamers and casual gamers, if you planned to have persistence in the game).
I wish Molyneux the best of luck. He's a thinker, and there aren't enough thinkers these days in an industry that just keeps cranking out FPSes, fighting games, and GTA. Unfortunately, he's also very proud of what he thinks of, to the point of blindness of his games' flaws, and that means I probably won't be buying another Lionhead game before I get the chance to read several reviews of it and peruse some message boards about it.
Google has consistently trumped Wall Street estimates by a significant percentage, and the projected growth takes that into account. Google is making actual, real money. This isn't the vaporcash of the dot-com bubble, where companies would have an IPO and then blow all the cash on a giant fountain for their lobby.
The significant earnings growth (estimated based on Google's dominance of browser search combined with estimates on actual search advertising pricing) indicates the reason why Google commands such a high P/E. The forward P/E is currently about 42, compared to Yahoo's 50, but Yahoo isn't experiencing nearly the growth that Google has, so one would expect Google's P/E to increase (hence the significant run-up in price over the past month).
I hardly think you could describe most geeks, comic book authors, and/or comic book readers as people who dislike women. Sure, some of us might not be very adept at talking to or relating to women, but I'm guessing that most of us would do just about anything for the women in our lives. That doesn't mean our comic book characters have to wear a body-concealing environment suit anytime they go out to fight crime. Why can't we appreciate the female form physically, just as much as we admire the tenacity, intelligence, and strength of character of our superheroines?
This will only happen if Blizzard forces people in China off the US servers. There's no money to be made farming gold to sell to other people in China, and the sweatshop bosses in North America are well aware of that.
On the other hand, forcing the Chinese to play on the Chinese servers ruins the gold farming sweatshops, because the margins would be too low hiring North American gold farmers to do all the grunt work. The sweatshop bosses would just drop it and go back to spamming or identity phishing or whatever they did before WoW.
I'm normally happy to play the game along with anybody in the world who wants to play, but the benefits in terms of shutting down the gold farming sweatshops is great enough that forcing the separation based upon geography is probably a good idea. Besides, most people in China who actually want to *play* the game are probably going to prefer the localized version anyway, so it's not like it'd inconvenience that many people.
For example, I doubt many people here know who actually wrote the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone knows it, everyone sings it at a birthday party, and yet it's still under copyright.
if the NPCs gave chase to you DEPENDING on where, when, how and who/which NPC saw you.
Functionality most likely implemented through a huge set of IF-THEN statements.
That's to some degree all that AI is, whether it's an expert system or an Eliza-style conversational program. You really don't get away from if-then until you start talking about computational intelligence, like neural networks, Dijkstra-style pathfinding, and the like.
So just sit, be patient and wait for the signals my son.
Revelation 6:12 And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; 13 And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. 14 And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. 15 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; 16 And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: 17 For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? 18 Oh, and Debian Etch was released.
Sounds like you are one of those people who thinks unions are bad, anti-free market creations.
In nearly every case in today's United States, yes, unions only serve as a middleman which leeches money from both the worker and the employer. This occurs because after a union succeeds in insulating the worker from predatory employment practices, it then continues to exist in full force because it is run by career union officers whose entire income is derived from the success of the union. The union *should* scale back its efforts to match up with the actions of the employer, but instead it tries to inflate wages so that it can inflate dues and litigation rewards as well as to satisfy the worker who then votes to keep the union's officers in power (i.e., drawing a paycheck).
In a labor market where the union can dominate and the final product has no external competition (such as screen acting or voice acting), this works great for the worker, since they can get their increased wages, and that cost gets passed along to the consumer of the product. But in low-margin industries, the inflated wages, while temporarily giving the worker a wage bonus, ultimately put the union-controlled business at a competitive disadvantage once wage inflation caused by the unions grips the entire economy. (See the U.S. steel industry.)
My problem in this particular case is with AFTRA/SAG claiming that the workers being abused are the voice actors. This simply isn't the case. If AFTRA and SAG operated on principle, then instead of trying to shake down the game developers for cash for the voice actors, they would realize that the programmers, artists, and others working 60+ hours a week for months on end are the ones who need union protection, not necessarily to increase their wages, but to prevent the employers from pushing their workers to such extremes.
Presumably, if you had a court date set, you could file to get copies of all the evidence the city plans on using against you as part of discovery (though this may differ by jurisdiction). If they then present evidence that wasn't given to you as part of the discovery process, you can move for dismissal.
Probably part of the problem is that unions tend to develop into their own beast, taking from the average worker without returning a whole lot. When working conditions are unfair to the worker, then yes, there's a need for the union, but once the union has solved the problem, it doesn't scale itself back to allow itself to serve the needs of the workers and nothing more. That's because invariably you end up with career officers in the unions (union execs whose sole source of income is union dues and lawsuit settlements), and they have negative motivation at that point to do what's best for the worker.
Funny, that's exactly what most actors do. They don't call it being a "struggling actor" for nothing.
Then what's the problem? They can still make their living wage doing grunt work for 30 to 60 hours a week, just like the rest of us. Why should the games industry be forced to subsidize voice actors just because video/computer game voiceover opportunities are scarce?
In fact, if there's a glut of voice actors compared to the jobs available, then they should be getting paid less, not more. The union is not only artificially propping up wages to levels far beyond what the supply and demand dictate, but now they're trying to inflate them even more to cater to the name-brand actors who are now invading the space and putting struggling actors out of work.
you really don't understand how hollywood works do you?
There is acting beyond Hollywood. If a person is truly dedicated to the art, they will pack up and go to where the work is, for meager pay, living out of their car as they drive from audition to audition if necessary, until they find work.
You evidently didn't listen to the interview. His point is that people like Jim Carrey, Vin Diesel, and Elijah Wood *are* really poor voice actors, only hired for their name recognition.
Not every brand-name screen actor does crappy work at voice acting, mind you - Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy were cited by West in the interview as having real talent. But by and large, quality work isn't the concern when Hollywood hires voice actors, and that trend seems to be infecting the game community as well.
Ever play System Shock 2 or the Thief series? Fantastic voice acting (mostly) in those games, and none of those people did voice acting as a career. In fact, many of them were just people on the development team.
Ever watch recent anime titles (the ones on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim are the best example here)? Dubs have gone from superbly crappy (as they were in the late 80s and early 90s) to, quite simply, superb. None of these new, talented people are brand-name actors that would be recognized outside the cartoon voice-over community (and sometimes, they have to use stage names to take non-union jobs), but they also do great work in video/computer games.
Everybody making the high-up money decisions seems to think that having a star-studded GTA-esque voice cast is important. But people have been doing talented voice-over work for years. It's only now that the brand-name actors are moving in on their turf that AFTRA/SAG wants to get involved, and not to protect the talented voice actors who are heard-yet-unheard-of.
However, there are NOT 10 Jim Careys. There are NOT 10 Vin Diesels. There are NOT 10 Elijah Woods. THEY can not be replaced, except by really poor voice actors.
"Yeah -- $275 an hour would be a huge amount if actors did that kind of work several times a week," said [Wil] Wheaton, "but the average, working-class actor is lucky to get four of those jobs a year."
Dude, if you're unsatisfied with getting $2200 a year for doing eight hours of voice-over work in a year, maybe you need another job. Take some other acting gigs, drive a truck for UPS, learn a trade. Hell, flip burgers if you're that hard up for cash.
Or, better yet, learn to program, learn to work on sound effects, learn to do 3-D art, learn to do game level design. Then get a real 60-hour-a-week job in the games industry and see how the other half lives. Maybe then you'll realize you should be asking the programmers, artists, etc. to go on strike.
Slashdot Mirror
But it *hasn't* yet. That's the point. The article was completely factually incorrect when it said the FBI had gained new powers. There's still time to contact your Congresspeople on the issue, and there's still the possibility that changes can be made.
By the way, on a slightly off-topic note, CNN Headline News reported today that a recent Gallup Poll found that while about 92% of the Republican Party is white, and 81% of the Republican Party is both white and Christian, it turns out that the Democratic Party is not too far from that demographic either: 74% of the Democratic Party is white, and 57% of the Democratic Party is white and Christian. (The story didn't report on the religious persuasion of blacks, who make up 19% of the Democratic party, but anecdotally, a lot of blacks are Christians as well.)
In other news, Slashdot article submitters have no clue how the U.S. Congress works:
The FBI has gained new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval, as well as the ability to designate subpoenas as secret and punish disclosure of their existence with up to one year in prison.
No, the FBI hasn't gained jack crap, yet . Senate committees may play a large role in the development of bills, but a bill has to get past the entirety of both the House and the Senate, and then get signed by the President, before it becomes a law.
Watch some Schoolhouse Rock or something, people. Or maybe pay attention in middle school.
I thought that was Alex Trebek.
There is a need to protect your email password because even email has a legal standing as a form of communication.
Which is odd, since you don't need a password to send an e-mail.
Molyneux and Friends come up with some interesting game ideas on a regular basis. I liked the concepts behind Black and White, and thought it was a marvelous-looking game, but after you played it for maybe ten or fifteen hours, you started to realize that there were serious problems in terms of execution (competition against the computer was repetitive and boring, and training your creature was often confusing) (not counting the bugs).
It's sort of like the concept of the MMORTS. SOE worked on that concept for a couple years with Sovereign, but cancelled the project when it became clear that while you could come up with an interesting concept, you couldn't execute it properly without creating significant problems for some segment of the playerbase (generally, that you had to pick between hardcore gamers and casual gamers, if you planned to have persistence in the game).
I wish Molyneux the best of luck. He's a thinker, and there aren't enough thinkers these days in an industry that just keeps cranking out FPSes, fighting games, and GTA. Unfortunately, he's also very proud of what he thinks of, to the point of blindness of his games' flaws, and that means I probably won't be buying another Lionhead game before I get the chance to read several reviews of it and peruse some message boards about it.
The irony of this story is that by the time it was posted to Slashdot, it was no longer actually true.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWX
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG
Google has consistently trumped Wall Street estimates by a significant percentage, and the projected growth takes that into account. Google is making actual, real money. This isn't the vaporcash of the dot-com bubble, where companies would have an IPO and then blow all the cash on a giant fountain for their lobby.
The significant earnings growth (estimated based on Google's dominance of browser search combined with estimates on actual search advertising pricing) indicates the reason why Google commands such a high P/E. The forward P/E is currently about 42, compared to Yahoo's 50, but Yahoo isn't experiencing nearly the growth that Google has, so one would expect Google's P/E to increase (hence the significant run-up in price over the past month).
O Great Oracle Known As Google,
define:misogynist
"a misanthrope who dislikes women in particular"
I hardly think you could describe most geeks, comic book authors, and/or comic book readers as people who dislike women. Sure, some of us might not be very adept at talking to or relating to women, but I'm guessing that most of us would do just about anything for the women in our lives. That doesn't mean our comic book characters have to wear a body-concealing environment suit anytime they go out to fight crime. Why can't we appreciate the female form physically, just as much as we admire the tenacity, intelligence, and strength of character of our superheroines?
"Hey, Bill, check this out. The last six gold farmers we've banned have all been logged in from the same IP address at the same time."
"Is anybody else logging in from that IP?"
"No."
"...Then your mission is clear."
Pwned.
Why are we worried about the realism of the science in Star Wars when we're all still pissed off about the wholly fictional midichlorians?
From a TV show with real voice acting talent:
Sal: Welcomes aboard, scab.
Bender: Great to be here!
Sal: Come on. I'll introduces you to your scab co-workers you'll be scabbing with.
This will only happen if Blizzard forces people in China off the US servers. There's no money to be made farming gold to sell to other people in China, and the sweatshop bosses in North America are well aware of that.
On the other hand, forcing the Chinese to play on the Chinese servers ruins the gold farming sweatshops, because the margins would be too low hiring North American gold farmers to do all the grunt work. The sweatshop bosses would just drop it and go back to spamming or identity phishing or whatever they did before WoW.
I'm normally happy to play the game along with anybody in the world who wants to play, but the benefits in terms of shutting down the gold farming sweatshops is great enough that forcing the separation based upon geography is probably a good idea. Besides, most people in China who actually want to *play* the game are probably going to prefer the localized version anyway, so it's not like it'd inconvenience that many people.
For example, I doubt many people here know who actually wrote the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone knows it, everyone sings it at a birthday party, and yet it's still under copyright.
:P
God bless Time Warner.
if the NPCs gave chase to you DEPENDING on where, when, how and who/which NPC saw you.
Functionality most likely implemented through a huge set of IF-THEN statements.
That's to some degree all that AI is, whether it's an expert system or an Eliza-style conversational program. You really don't get away from if-then until you start talking about computational intelligence, like neural networks, Dijkstra-style pathfinding, and the like.
So just sit, be patient and wait for the signals my son.
Revelation 6:12 And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;
13 And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
14 And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
15 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;
16 And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
17 For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
18 Oh, and Debian Etch was released.
Oh... in that case, I suppose you could subpoena the camera company to give you the other frames.
Sounds like you are one of those people who thinks unions are bad, anti-free market creations.
In nearly every case in today's United States, yes, unions only serve as a middleman which leeches money from both the worker and the employer. This occurs because after a union succeeds in insulating the worker from predatory employment practices, it then continues to exist in full force because it is run by career union officers whose entire income is derived from the success of the union. The union *should* scale back its efforts to match up with the actions of the employer, but instead it tries to inflate wages so that it can inflate dues and litigation rewards as well as to satisfy the worker who then votes to keep the union's officers in power (i.e., drawing a paycheck).
In a labor market where the union can dominate and the final product has no external competition (such as screen acting or voice acting), this works great for the worker, since they can get their increased wages, and that cost gets passed along to the consumer of the product. But in low-margin industries, the inflated wages, while temporarily giving the worker a wage bonus, ultimately put the union-controlled business at a competitive disadvantage once wage inflation caused by the unions grips the entire economy. (See the U.S. steel industry.)
My problem in this particular case is with AFTRA/SAG claiming that the workers being abused are the voice actors. This simply isn't the case. If AFTRA and SAG operated on principle, then instead of trying to shake down the game developers for cash for the voice actors, they would realize that the programmers, artists, and others working 60+ hours a week for months on end are the ones who need union protection, not necessarily to increase their wages, but to prevent the employers from pushing their workers to such extremes.
Presumably, if you had a court date set, you could file to get copies of all the evidence the city plans on using against you as part of discovery (though this may differ by jurisdiction). If they then present evidence that wasn't given to you as part of the discovery process, you can move for dismissal.
{{Disclaimer:IANAL}}
Probably part of the problem is that unions tend to develop into their own beast, taking from the average worker without returning a whole lot. When working conditions are unfair to the worker, then yes, there's a need for the union, but once the union has solved the problem, it doesn't scale itself back to allow itself to serve the needs of the workers and nothing more. That's because invariably you end up with career officers in the unions (union execs whose sole source of income is union dues and lawsuit settlements), and they have negative motivation at that point to do what's best for the worker.
Funny, that's exactly what most actors do. They don't call it being a "struggling actor" for nothing.
Then what's the problem? They can still make their living wage doing grunt work for 30 to 60 hours a week, just like the rest of us. Why should the games industry be forced to subsidize voice actors just because video/computer game voiceover opportunities are scarce?
In fact, if there's a glut of voice actors compared to the jobs available, then they should be getting paid less, not more. The union is not only artificially propping up wages to levels far beyond what the supply and demand dictate, but now they're trying to inflate them even more to cater to the name-brand actors who are now invading the space and putting struggling actors out of work.
you really don't understand how hollywood works do you?
There is acting beyond Hollywood. If a person is truly dedicated to the art, they will pack up and go to where the work is, for meager pay, living out of their car as they drive from audition to audition if necessary, until they find work.
But is he a really poor voice actor?
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0921942/
You evidently didn't listen to the interview. His point is that people like Jim Carrey, Vin Diesel, and Elijah Wood *are* really poor voice actors, only hired for their name recognition.
Not every brand-name screen actor does crappy work at voice acting, mind you - Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy were cited by West in the interview as having real talent. But by and large, quality work isn't the concern when Hollywood hires voice actors, and that trend seems to be infecting the game community as well.
Ever play System Shock 2 or the Thief series? Fantastic voice acting (mostly) in those games, and none of those people did voice acting as a career. In fact, many of them were just people on the development team.
Ever watch recent anime titles (the ones on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim are the best example here)? Dubs have gone from superbly crappy (as they were in the late 80s and early 90s) to, quite simply, superb. None of these new, talented people are brand-name actors that would be recognized outside the cartoon voice-over community (and sometimes, they have to use stage names to take non-union jobs), but they also do great work in video/computer games.
Everybody making the high-up money decisions seems to think that having a star-studded GTA-esque voice cast is important. But people have been doing talented voice-over work for years. It's only now that the brand-name actors are moving in on their turf that AFTRA/SAG wants to get involved, and not to protect the talented voice actors who are heard-yet-unheard-of.
However, there are NOT 10 Jim Careys. There are NOT 10 Vin Diesels. There are NOT 10 Elijah Woods. THEY can not be replaced, except by really poor voice actors.
A real voice actor would like to take issue with your comment.
"Yeah -- $275 an hour would be a huge amount if actors did that kind of work several times a week," said [Wil] Wheaton, "but the average, working-class actor is lucky to get four of those jobs a year."
Dude, if you're unsatisfied with getting $2200 a year for doing eight hours of voice-over work in a year, maybe you need another job. Take some other acting gigs, drive a truck for UPS, learn a trade. Hell, flip burgers if you're that hard up for cash.
Or, better yet, learn to program, learn to work on sound effects, learn to do 3-D art, learn to do game level design. Then get a real 60-hour-a-week job in the games industry and see how the other half lives. Maybe then you'll realize you should be asking the programmers, artists, etc. to go on strike.
I believe that was one of the things that helped AMD with mindshare in the geek community.
And here I thought it was the whole "better performance at a lower price" thing.
Could such a scheme be foiled by running "untrusted" software within a "trusted" virtual machine that interfaces with the outside world?