Ultimately, the best thing that could happen to research publications is to separate the peer review process from the publishing process. This would facilitate "just-in-time" publishing while maintaining the credentials for a peer-accepted work. Then, other interested parties can download the paper and read it from their computers, or print it out to a hardcopy (as school libraries might do).
Yes, it takes the whole aspect of "profit" out of the equation, but this is science, not entertainment.
It's probably just cheaper to sit on a stockpile of phones they know they'll sell later anyway than to pay the cash to market the things themselves. But I agree with you, Motorola should suck it up and market their own damn products.
Whole categories of (at least in my game) often happening situations were completely untouched upon, or mentioned only in passing.
Mod parent up! This is exactly what we ran into when we played, and it drove us to extreme madness, especially after having been coddled by the extremely polished 3rd edition D&D before we picked up Shadowrun. Of course, WotC decided 3.0 D&D wasn't good enough, so they released a 3.5 that really does seem to address a lot of issues with 3.0 - our group has found ourselves using bits of the 3.5 rules more and more recently. FanPro has their work cut out for them in this case, though....
For a Sci-Fi look at how it would be read the Man-Machine Interface graphic novel by Masamune Shirow. It's almost enough to make me want to play SR again.
Probably more accessible to folks is the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex which also features a future where lots of people are cyberized in some way, and many of those people can wirelessly access the Net directly with their brains. It airs on the weekends on Cartoon Network, though they're already up to episode 19 or so.
I played Shadowrun back in the early 90s as well, and (as I mention in another post around here) a different group of friends and I picked it up for a little while. They already had changed the look of the Matrix from being a series of functional interconnected nodes that needed to be traversed to accomplish a goal into a single VR entity which the decker operated within. That change was almost certainly done to help prevent a decker's player from, as you say, needing to show up four hours early. It helped some, but I definitely think this next change will help much more if they do it right.
4. Jumping the Shark (Malcolm in the Middle, Will and Grace) 5. The thing everyone waited for happened (Cheers, Moonlighting, soon will happen to Lost and Desperate Hosuewives)
These are usually considered to be the same thing. In fact, at http://www.jumptheshark.com/, Character A and Character B Finally Having Sex After Six Seasons Of The Fans Wanting It To Happen is one of the biggest reasons a show jumps the shark.
I guess for that matter, changes in the cast can cause a show to jump the shark as well. Lots of people felt that Happy Days (the original shark-jumper) jumped the shark upon losing Richie Cunningham to the void.
Interesting that FanPro says they're revising Shadowrun to be "simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play". My RPG group tried Shadowrun (at my suggestion/insistence, as I'd played it back in my teen years), and it lasted less than a year because the game system was too cumbersome. There were so many things to remember that we spent more time flipping through the rules than we did playing the game. Each additional subgame system (Matrix, vehicles, magic) had its own vastly different rules, to the point where we had real trouble remembering all those details, even with cheat sheets.
It really isn't even a look at SOE - it only talks about EQ2, with casual mention of the three buildings in San Diego that house much of their business. They do have other games, but only EQ2 is considered to be in serious contention with World of Warcraft.
I did read the article, and I don't see how it makes any difference with respect to my earlier comment whether the law applies to brokering in e-mail addresses or sending spam to them. People can't say with any certainty whether an e-mail address belongs to a Canadian or not. If Canadian laws were having an impact, then spammers would be less likely to swap *or* spam e-mail addresses in general, and all of us regardless of nationality could expect our inboxes to be less abused.
In fact, the assertion discussed/refuted by the OP was that Canadian laws were having an effect on spamming, whether direct or indirect. Seems reasonable to me that even if PIPEDA is designed only to restrict brokering in e-mail addresses, the difference really isn't relevant since the assertion is plainly about the receipt of spam.
Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Star Wars Galaxies, for example, originally tried to make the route to becoming a Jedi so incredibly difficult and unpalatable that few would go through with the task. (You had to master several professions which were selected by the game, whether you were actually interested in those professions or not.) The idea was that when the task was made so difficult that nobody would intentionally *try* to complete it, the result would be that only the few who happened to pick their combination by accident would succeed.
Of course, this didn't work. People were so enamored with becoming uber leet Jedi that they would suffer through the intense boredom to crank out professions on a character they would never play again after they opened their Jedi character slot.
Now, I realize that you're saying that without the mindless/boring tasks in the first place, this would never develop. But the problem is that there will always be the *possibility* of undertaking even a fun task in the most boring way possible. I honestly don't believe that it's possible to design a game that makes the fun way equal to the most time-efficient way while maintaining persistence.
So, people who don't play the game for the journey but rather "for teh win" will always take the quickest, most boring route. If they can make it even quicker by spending money on it, they will. The best way to stem this problem is to take care of it on the supply-side.
Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in.ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.
Presumably, the accounts are banned permanently, which means the characters, and all the cash stored on them, is permanently inaccessible. But, as it turns out, there's no downside here.
The way these gold-farming rings work, the people who own the vast bulk of the accounts which were closed were not really playing the game.
For a given gold-farming ring, you have a number of accounts which are shared by several people. These people log in, farm gold for several hours, and then give all of the gold and items they received to a boss. The boss tabulates how much they received from a person on their shift and sells the items in-game for more gold (in WoW, this happens in the Auction House). When a customer purchases gold, the boss transfers the gold to the customer (either by trading with the customer, or as happens in WoW, through in-game mail). If one of the grunt farmers doesn't meet a quota on their gold-farming shift, they don't get paid. The grunt farming accounts, being shared by several people, are generally logged in 24/7. Even the individual characters are shared. They are powerleveled up without doing any quests, meaning they have substandard gear and make inferior opponents to regular players' characters; however, they are tailor-designed for farming whatever monsters make for the best farming.
The vast majority - if not all - of the closed accounts were involved with these gold-farming rings. That means that, with the possible exception of the bosses, it's very unlikely that a particular account was ever used by just one person to *play* the game. Since most of these rings are based in China, it's also unlikely that Blizzard will ever have to worry about somebody trying to sue them for the account closures.
but Blizzard should let it happen because it attracts people to the game.
I doubt the correctness of this statement.
First of all, in a market that's increasingly competitive, people will jump ship for the next new game if they think the company running their current game isn't running it properly. That's a ton of people who don't want their game ruined by gold farmers like they ruined FFXI/Lineage 2. Keeping them happy by doing something to stop gold farming is a good business decision.
And second, there are two big obstacles that stand in the way of growing the MMOG market further: an uninformed populace and the cost of playing the game. Both of these indicate that gold farming will do nothing to increase customer base. If people don't know about a game - even if the game permits or encourages third-party gold farmers - they won't buy it. And if people are already reluctant to pay the monthly subscription costs for a game, they're certainly not going to fork over extra cash to buy gold in that same game.
The thing is, at least some of these games (including WoW) aren't mindlessly repetitive and boring. If you actually play the game with the intentions of enjoying it while you level up, you can have a lot of fun even if you aren't yet level 60 with tons of uber gear and a huge bank account.
Unfortunately, our on-demand society has trained people from childhood to expect something now if enough cash is thrown at it. The result is that a game that's fun to play is reduced to (a) a game that is, for the gold buyer, a fraction of the size of what's been designed for them; and (b) a mindlessly repetitive and boring chore for gold farmers (because while you can get plenty of gold just playing the game normally, the most efficient way involves mindless repetition).
If they really want an analogy, here's one: the anti-decryption portion of the DMCA is equivalent to making it illegal to pick bike locks (to bring it home to the original poor analogy). Now, if it's my lock, and I paid to be able to use the bike personally however I want, why should the government tell me I'm not allowed to use picks on my bike lock if I prefer not to use the key (or if I'm not given one in the first place)?
Half the point of cracks (the legal half) is so you don't *need* to go rooting around for the CD just so you can play a game. Besides, if I'd wanted a console game system, I'd have bought one.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately, the best thing that could happen to research publications is to separate the peer review process from the publishing process. This would facilitate "just-in-time" publishing while maintaining the credentials for a peer-accepted work. Then, other interested parties can download the paper and read it from their computers, or print it out to a hardcopy (as school libraries might do).
Yes, it takes the whole aspect of "profit" out of the equation, but this is science, not entertainment.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 63BLG8?v=glance
Specifically, this one.
It's probably just cheaper to sit on a stockpile of phones they know they'll sell later anyway than to pay the cash to market the things themselves. But I agree with you, Motorola should suck it up and market their own damn products.
Whole categories of (at least in my game) often happening situations were completely untouched upon, or mentioned only in passing.
Mod parent up! This is exactly what we ran into when we played, and it drove us to extreme madness, especially after having been coddled by the extremely polished 3rd edition D&D before we picked up Shadowrun. Of course, WotC decided 3.0 D&D wasn't good enough, so they released a 3.5 that really does seem to address a lot of issues with 3.0 - our group has found ourselves using bits of the 3.5 rules more and more recently. FanPro has their work cut out for them in this case, though....
For a Sci-Fi look at how it would be read the Man-Machine Interface graphic novel by Masamune Shirow. It's almost enough to make me want to play SR again.
Probably more accessible to folks is the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex which also features a future where lots of people are cyberized in some way, and many of those people can wirelessly access the Net directly with their brains. It airs on the weekends on Cartoon Network, though they're already up to episode 19 or so.
I played Shadowrun back in the early 90s as well, and (as I mention in another post around here) a different group of friends and I picked it up for a little while. They already had changed the look of the Matrix from being a series of functional interconnected nodes that needed to be traversed to accomplish a goal into a single VR entity which the decker operated within. That change was almost certainly done to help prevent a decker's player from, as you say, needing to show up four hours early. It helped some, but I definitely think this next change will help much more if they do it right.
4. Jumping the Shark (Malcolm in the Middle, Will and Grace)
5. The thing everyone waited for happened (Cheers, Moonlighting, soon will happen to Lost and Desperate Hosuewives)
These are usually considered to be the same thing. In fact, at http://www.jumptheshark.com/, Character A and Character B Finally Having Sex After Six Seasons Of The Fans Wanting It To Happen is one of the biggest reasons a show jumps the shark.
I guess for that matter, changes in the cast can cause a show to jump the shark as well. Lots of people felt that Happy Days (the original shark-jumper) jumped the shark upon losing Richie Cunningham to the void.
Interesting that FanPro says they're revising Shadowrun to be "simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play". My RPG group tried Shadowrun (at my suggestion/insistence, as I'd played it back in my teen years), and it lasted less than a year because the game system was too cumbersome. There were so many things to remember that we spent more time flipping through the rules than we did playing the game. Each additional subgame system (Matrix, vehicles, magic) had its own vastly different rules, to the point where we had real trouble remembering all those details, even with cheat sheets.
It really isn't even a look at SOE - it only talks about EQ2, with casual mention of the three buildings in San Diego that house much of their business. They do have other games, but only EQ2 is considered to be in serious contention with World of Warcraft.
Lemme guess, you read this on teh Intarweb, right?
Nono, it's okay. Company-on-company: bad. Company-on-individual: bad. But individual-on-company is good, because it's the little guy winning for once.
No mod points today, huh?
I did read the article, and I don't see how it makes any difference with respect to my earlier comment whether the law applies to brokering in e-mail addresses or sending spam to them. People can't say with any certainty whether an e-mail address belongs to a Canadian or not. If Canadian laws were having an impact, then spammers would be less likely to swap *or* spam e-mail addresses in general, and all of us regardless of nationality could expect our inboxes to be less abused.
In fact, the assertion discussed/refuted by the OP was that Canadian laws were having an effect on spamming, whether direct or indirect. Seems reasonable to me that even if PIPEDA is designed only to restrict brokering in e-mail addresses, the difference really isn't relevant since the assertion is plainly about the receipt of spam.
Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Star Wars Galaxies, for example, originally tried to make the route to becoming a Jedi so incredibly difficult and unpalatable that few would go through with the task. (You had to master several professions which were selected by the game, whether you were actually interested in those professions or not.) The idea was that when the task was made so difficult that nobody would intentionally *try* to complete it, the result would be that only the few who happened to pick their combination by accident would succeed.
Of course, this didn't work. People were so enamored with becoming uber leet Jedi that they would suffer through the intense boredom to crank out professions on a character they would never play again after they opened their Jedi character slot.
Now, I realize that you're saying that without the mindless/boring tasks in the first place, this would never develop. But the problem is that there will always be the *possibility* of undertaking even a fun task in the most boring way possible. I honestly don't believe that it's possible to design a game that makes the fun way equal to the most time-efficient way while maintaining persistence.
So, people who don't play the game for the journey but rather "for teh win" will always take the quickest, most boring route. If they can make it even quicker by spending money on it, they will. The best way to stem this problem is to take care of it on the supply-side.
Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in .ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.
Presumably, the accounts are banned permanently, which means the characters, and all the cash stored on them, is permanently inaccessible. But, as it turns out, there's no downside here.
The way these gold-farming rings work, the people who own the vast bulk of the accounts which were closed were not really playing the game.
For a given gold-farming ring, you have a number of accounts which are shared by several people. These people log in, farm gold for several hours, and then give all of the gold and items they received to a boss. The boss tabulates how much they received from a person on their shift and sells the items in-game for more gold (in WoW, this happens in the Auction House). When a customer purchases gold, the boss transfers the gold to the customer (either by trading with the customer, or as happens in WoW, through in-game mail). If one of the grunt farmers doesn't meet a quota on their gold-farming shift, they don't get paid. The grunt farming accounts, being shared by several people, are generally logged in 24/7. Even the individual characters are shared. They are powerleveled up without doing any quests, meaning they have substandard gear and make inferior opponents to regular players' characters; however, they are tailor-designed for farming whatever monsters make for the best farming.
The vast majority - if not all - of the closed accounts were involved with these gold-farming rings. That means that, with the possible exception of the bosses, it's very unlikely that a particular account was ever used by just one person to *play* the game. Since most of these rings are based in China, it's also unlikely that Blizzard will ever have to worry about somebody trying to sue them for the account closures.
but Blizzard should let it happen because it attracts people to the game.
I doubt the correctness of this statement.
First of all, in a market that's increasingly competitive, people will jump ship for the next new game if they think the company running their current game isn't running it properly. That's a ton of people who don't want their game ruined by gold farmers like they ruined FFXI/Lineage 2. Keeping them happy by doing something to stop gold farming is a good business decision.
And second, there are two big obstacles that stand in the way of growing the MMOG market further: an uninformed populace and the cost of playing the game. Both of these indicate that gold farming will do nothing to increase customer base. If people don't know about a game - even if the game permits or encourages third-party gold farmers - they won't buy it. And if people are already reluctant to pay the monthly subscription costs for a game, they're certainly not going to fork over extra cash to buy gold in that same game.
Oh, it's real. Let's just say the guy has actual TV commercials every bit as annoying as the website, if not more.
The thing is, at least some of these games (including WoW) aren't mindlessly repetitive and boring. If you actually play the game with the intentions of enjoying it while you level up, you can have a lot of fun even if you aren't yet level 60 with tons of uber gear and a huge bank account.
Unfortunately, our on-demand society has trained people from childhood to expect something now if enough cash is thrown at it. The result is that a game that's fun to play is reduced to (a) a game that is, for the gold buyer, a fraction of the size of what's been designed for them; and (b) a mindlessly repetitive and boring chore for gold farmers (because while you can get plenty of gold just playing the game normally, the most efficient way involves mindless repetition).
Gonzo: I call it, "Gonzo fiddles, while George Burns!"
George Burns: Finally, a joke that's as old as I am.
Somehow, when Nixon died, he was "remembered" as a great American.
He was?
If you download the contraption.avi then read the credits.
Given the MPAA's penchant for litigation, one might not consider it wise to put what they put at the very end of those credits.
That's my favorite kind of ad. Perhaps you prefer your advertising like this.
That certainly won't stop Legolass, Leggolas, Legollas, or Legolous from making appearances in Middle Earth Online.
If they really want an analogy, here's one: the anti-decryption portion of the DMCA is equivalent to making it illegal to pick bike locks (to bring it home to the original poor analogy). Now, if it's my lock, and I paid to be able to use the bike personally however I want, why should the government tell me I'm not allowed to use picks on my bike lock if I prefer not to use the key (or if I'm not given one in the first place)?
Half the point of cracks (the legal half) is so you don't *need* to go rooting around for the CD just so you can play a game. Besides, if I'd wanted a console game system, I'd have bought one.