However, if somebody else finds about it, they are entirely within their rights to distribute an identically modified version in source form -- and now it's you who can't do anything about it.
I don't know what you're trying to claim there. Most of the GPL only kicks in when someone distributes a modified version. If you create a modified version, but don't distribute it, then you haven't broken any copyright laws, so you don't need permission from the original author, so you don't need to agree to the GPL.
If a hypothetical burglar found the modified version and wanted to distribute it, he'd have no right to do so. Until YOU (the modifier) distribute the new version, the GPL doesn't yet apply to it.
The nation's collective IQ is lowered 20 points just by their continued existence.
But IQ is by definition a relative measurement, where 100 points is always equal to the average. Therefore in reality, those of us not watching Fox have seen a 20 pt gain. (I can apply for Mensa now!)
Oh, I don't know - maybe training for the military?
America's Army would make an especially poor training tool, primarily because it has no OPFOR.
Everybody in that game is a US Soldier, using US Army equipment and techniques. Furthermore, the game conflicts are always between two equally-sized and equally-powerful forces... and it is explicit doctrine that the US Army will never attack unless they outgun the enemy 4 to 1.
So, training for situations that you have orders never to enter isn't too useful. AA would be a better trainer if it allowed unequal force allocations (especially including a handful of civilians whose only goal is to escape the battlefield alive). But of course, making the fights unfair to increase training value would make it less fun as a game.
You attack the sound quality, the file, the configuration...
I attack those things because they are indicative of a disinclination to share information. If you want to communicate over the internet, do it with a simple webpage or a bulleted list. Do you know why people send emails as text instead of mailing WAV files to each other? Because reading is better than listening.
Failure to utilize the easiest and most reliable communication mechanisms suggests that honest exchange of information is not your priority.
The natural conclusion is that you haven't presented the DFC ideas in an acessible format because to do so would make it easier for others to pinpoint the gaping problems.
The response from USC Cinema-Television was 100% positive. How do you explain that?
It seems USCCT doesn't know much about game development. They were probably impressed by the lofty goals, while I'm more focused on the fact that you have no way to approach those goals.
What would it take to convince you?
Screenshots. Renders. Slides. Charts. Design docs. Anything like that would restore a little faith.
Basically, I'd want any mod-related file that's not you reading into a microphone for an hour. Lacking any of those things, DFC doesn't even deserve the title of vaporware.
I think most of it is in future tense,
Wrong. In this post (from your alternate account) you stated "I speak from experience, being the creator of Doom for Columbine". That is clearly an attempt to claim to have already created something, which you didn't do. It implies that DFC has already been created, when it hasn't (otherwise, you could show me a screencap).
What a totally ridiculous statement. I have not announced that I have accomplished anything. I have not misrepresented myself or this project, either.
In slashdot posts you represent the "project" as "in progress", but visiting your actual website makes it appear that there is no progress at all. If you have in fact made some progress that hasn't been publicized, I suggest you do so before attempting further recruiting.
When you get enough experience with failure, you can succeed because you learn where the land mines are and you step around them.
I call it a "land mine" if the mod's goal is to completely reverse the play style of the game it's based on.
Just look at it from the high-level: you plan to implement a game about popularity and social hierarchy on top of DOOM, an engine whose only means of interpersonal interaction is firing bullets! If you want to create a project exploring clique behavior of adolescents, try starting from a base that actually supports "human relationship" as a concept; something like The Sims.
so that someone has to listen to the whole thing before making a judgement
As they say in Hollywood, if you can't hook em in 25 words, you got nothin'.
I did not give you permission to reproduce anything from this file and therefore you have broken the EULA, which clearly states you may not reproduce it in any way.
Ha ha ha! Ha, ha ha. Ha ha ha. Whew, where to start on that one?
There is nothing labelled "EULA" in that file.
EULAs have no legal validity. Especially if there is no software involved.
Heard about Fair Use? Heard about quoting small sections of a work as part of a critique? You have no right to prohibit me from advising others as to the nature of the file.
Your antagonism to posting your data as accessible text further reinforces my impression that sharing information is not your priority.
PS. I also find it inapproriate to utilize sourceforge to distribute content more suitable to an audioblog.
Thats like saying that "Because its slower than a 'Vette, a Beetle isn't a car."
She never said that. The exact words were: "The XBox lacks (compared to a typical computer)". And it is emphatically true that in most of those categories (CPU speed, RAM, disk, expandability, flexibility) the XBox loses out to a bottom-shelf $250 desktop PC. (It makes up for it in other ways, of course, mainly price). She further said "But it is no more a PC than the PS2"
If you want to use a very generalized definition of computer, then of course the XBox qualifies. But so does a PS2, and a PSOne, and a cellphone, and even many wristwatches. But if you look at the term "full-fledged computer", which she later clarified to "PC", then the XBox certainly won't qualify without some serious warranty-breaking modification first.
Yep, I even meta-moderate 3-4 times/week.
Maybe you're too active. Your visible posting history shows 24 comments over 4 days. I never get modpoints unless 48 hours have elapsed since my last post- this is probably to encourage people who don't contribute in one way to do so in another.
And I must say, your possession of two active Slashdot accounts is one of the reasons for my antipathy- from the surface, it seems like an exploit of the BBS system. The only obvious reasons to run two accounts is to farm modpoints for boosting trolls, or to astroturf. Neither explanation does you credit- so is there a better reason?
I think I can make a fun, interesting game out of it using the Doom 3 engine. What's wrong with that?
I think you can't. Call me a curmudgeon, but it looks like a waste of time and resources (which you and your helpers might've instead devoted to a successful mod that'll actually have players).
Every successful mod has started out with a core of gameplay created by one or two dedicated programmer/artists who rely on the proven fun of the young project to entice others to make serious contributions. They start small, and build up from there.
You, on the other hand, appear to take a the naive attitude that some highly skilled modelers had between appear out of thin air and start working for you now, or else you'll never get done. Well, since that'll never happen, you may as well admit you won't get done.
(A realistically detailed modern highschool and the people who study there are at once one of the most difficult subjects to represent in 3-d art, and one of the less entertaining to model)
Even if it were completely successful, DFC would be a disturbing, uncomfortable game- and one just can't attract volunteers to work hard to subtly disturb the playing public.
Why don't you listen to what I've said in the seminar with USC Cinema-Television and get back to me?
I gave that an honest try, believe me. Even though it seemed little more than an attempt to suck unspecting web-surfers into 80+ minutes of oral wandering, I listened to most of it. And I think I've gleaned some good pointers on how to withhold information, while claiming to be providing it:
How to obfuscate the fact you have almost nothing to say:
Don't bother communicating to people who aren't willing to devote at least a solid hour to listening before they know anything else about you.
Don't type anything out. Especially, don't provide a simple 3 paragraphs of text on what you have don't and what you plan next.
Instead, read out the whole thing in a huge single audio file. Do record this into a single 47 megabyte ogg vorbis file.
Do encode the file at more than 75k/s, even though 20k/s is more than enough for speech.
Don't allow any skilled future audio-techs from that cinema school to record you. Instead, do it yourself- and remember to blow across the microphone on every other sentence.
Do spend at least 15 minutes to start off detailing the history of every game mod you've played or worked on, before ever mentioning the supposed topic at hand.
Don't even think about posting your script online. Why, then people could read it in only 4-8 minutes, and miss the subtlties measured intonation.
Do post a sign on the frontpage reading "Beware of Leopard".
I actually have great respect for the people who do projects along these lines (I admire Powerkill for example)- I simply have no belief that you are actually doing one! You post about DFC in the present tense, which is premature at best. This seems to be an attempt to give your public opinions more credibility, by creating the illusion of some firsthand experience.
Ideas are a "dime a dozen". Many, many people have had oddball game ideas that'll never come to anything. But much of them have the decency not to pretend do have accomplished something until they actually do . Id software has a philosophy: "When its done"- think about it sometime.
I've been in the mod-scene too... and I've seen many over-ambitious projects that had such grand ideas that they obviously were never going to get off the ground. DFC ranks up there with the very least plausible of them.
I'll leave with a few quotes from the audio file, as an aid to anyone else who might read this and wonder what's in the "seminar":
The goth class, maybe I can give them special powers for all the tattoos they get.... mystics and sorcerors are going to use real magic behind the scenes to make things happen....
Lets face it- the consequences to Columbine were not available before Columbine... there were no videogames about it... and I think if people had the opportunity to learn what these kids go through, cuz we're gonna show it, we're gonna show this...
The premise in Doom For Columbine is the idea that demons or some evil force are preying on our students in... these demons communicating back and forth on how they're gonna corrupt souls, and that figures a lot into this game
Ok, right, you have a separate account for troll-plugging. I stand by the "0% complete" accusation, as by definition a mod for an unreleased game can hardly have started yet. DFC smells like a media-scam; a crafty way to score hot-button interviews with credulous reporters.
But more generously, can't you look at the "troll" label in a positive way? What is your project really, besides an attempt to elicit emotional responses from others? And isn't that the very essense of "trolling"?
Wouldn't it be just as easy to immunize everyone with nanobots to defend against the attacking nanobots?
No, it would not. There is a fundamental inequality in the progress rates of offensive and defensive technologies. Essentially, when technology increases to double its previous power, the ability to defend also doubles, but the ability to attack quadruples.
We can easily build stronger guns, but can't make much tougher armor. Or consider atomic bombs. Several fairly small countries have the ability to use them to attack, but even the leading scientists in the USA haven't created a working missile-defense system yet.
There are billions more ways to kill a human than to leave him alive.
Another way to look at it is as maintenannce costs. One missed chance for attack = try again tommorrow. Missed chance to defend = you're dead!
It was an entertaining book, but so nonsensical so as to be worthless as a predictive tool. (It can be edifying, but only as a starting point for discussion: "Why nanotech can never proceed like this")
The motif of "scattered small independent states handling their own security needs" is a continuation from his earlier works like Snow Crash, and didn't make sense then either. (Wherein a man just drove around from town to town with an atom bomb in his passenger seat, and no federal agents tried to blast him with a cruise missile)
Yeah, I don't really see why the world would be better of with a "anti-genocide using nanotech" law...
Do you also think that atomic bombs should be legalized, as long as they aren't used for genocide?
The thinking is that a few categories of technology are so potentially dangerous that their very possession is forbidden or highly controlled, regardless of the intent (claimed or actual) of the owner.
Radioactive materials are one such thing. Smallpox and anthrax are others. In all reasonableness, nanotech "universal assemblers" will be another, since they could quickly generate any kind of chemical or biological weapon.
Probably not as much as a cloud of plain old ricin gas
Nope, the nanotech delivery method is vastly more effective. The thing about a simple cloud of poison is that people will stop walking into it after a few minutes of corpse-accumulation.
But the aforementioned nano-assasins could hold onto their lethal payload until a predetermined timer had elapsed, simulataneously killing everyone who passed near the release point for a whole 4 hour period. That's 1000s of times as deadly.
On a side note: anyone else notice the resemblance between Max Payne story author Sam Lake, and Mr. Needs a Maalox himself?
Uh, the skin textures in Max Payne were taken from photos of random members of their development team. Even Max himself was just some game artist plopped before a camera.
(For the sequel, they hired actors. But the main characters still had to resemble the guys from the original game)
you could just dismiss my examples as "absolutely not" true, "poor examples", and "untrue in general"
I can only dismiss them because they're bad examples or obviously false conclusions. Most especially wrong is the final claim that US games are any less linear than Japanese ones; a topic that is mostly unrelated to and wholely unsupported by your Presentl vs. Representl discussion. There are valid arguments for that position, but you didn't make any of them.
I'd suggest then reading the cultural works of noted scholar Donald Richie (A Hundred Years of Japanese Film where he talks of the Presentational and Representational
Translation: I read this great book and tried to reproduce its ideas in a Slashdot comment without attribution, when actually referencing the book in the first place would've been more useful to anyone really interested.
That poster's a troll. He attempts to plug his own 0% complete Doom mod in every topic relating to FPS or violent games.
In actuality, there have been 100s of accurate school-models converted into FPS maps constructed by bored students all over the USA. They're not newsworthy.
This is the great divide in Japanese versus Western cinema as well.
That divide does exist, but of course you exaggerate its strength. Filmmakers in the USA's Hollywood also contend with questions of how much to break "reality" (meaning whatever semi-fake rules apply to a particular movie) in service of "art".
And actually, most American films are Presentational, and ignore laws of reality in favor of what they want to portray- BUT what they are presenting is normally chosen from a certain well-defined genre. So they are "Representative" of one fairly standardized set of unreal rules. But because the audience is already familiar with how the rules have been twisted, they doesn't see it as ludicrous when a single pissed-off cop kills 85 assorted terrorists and rogue CIA assasins.
The examples you chose were quite bad: The killer chasing the coed is trapped in the sewer, now he's in front of her! This would cause Western audiences to throw a fucking fit.
Absolutely not. The ability to inexplicably escape from a collapsed room and lay an ambush ahead of fleeing girls is a well-established ability of villians in the horror genre. If he couldn't escape, audiences would be more surprised.
So if a character walks through a door in his house and ends up on Moon, that is fine since the director is trying to say something. American audiences will expect some sort of rationale for it happening
Another poor example... or at least, I can't recall any Japanese film/anime with something so blatant. Features like that are more appropriate to the divide between "arthouse surrealism" and "popular realism", as exemplified by "Being John Malkovich" (a rare surrealist movie that become popular)
As you recall, it featured a character walking through a door in his office and ending up in Malkovich's head, without any "Malkovich teleportation machine" being found. The US saddles the player with the primary responsibility.
Untrue in general. Sample 30 random USA games from a shop, and the majority will have a plotline just as pre-planned as anything from Japan (moreso, actually, because there are probably fewer subplots). The existence of some totally nonlinear outliers like The Sims or GTA can't change the categorization of the majority of games.
All I can say to this part is "Huh?" How can it have a CPU(x86, no less) and not have CPU speed? Or a Hard Drive, but no HDD space?
Let me help you understand with automobile analogies. "Compared to a Corvette, the Beetle lacks speed." "Compared to an Explorer, the Jetta lacks space".
Get it now? To "lack" something, you don't have to have zero of it... just significantly less than the competitor.
That depends on what you mean by "wildly". Anime is popular enough to have around 20 new shows each season. (Contrast that to the USA, which produces maybe 1/2 a new anime each year)
And yes, anime is mostly for children... so what? Children count towards overall popularity. Especially when the topic is videogames! After all, kids play more games, so the TV they prefer is disproportionately influential.
My host brother won't buy Dead or Alive, 'cause he says he doesn't like violent games.
Explain to him that the game "Dead or Alive" (which is violent and sexy) is not related to the Japanese movie Dead or Alive (which is violent, sexual, and excessively gruesome)
the storyline is as interactive as Half-Life's.; There is only one story impacting descision that you actually get to make in the entire game, right at the end,
Half-Life had no such desicion. You must be referring to how the hero can choose to live or die... but that's not unique to the end! He could make that same choice at thousands of other places throughout the game ("Jump into acid, or not jump into acid? Kiss the bull-squid, or not kiss the bull-squid?")
No, the original Kite was absolutely porn. It was a good film, but the producer wanted to target the porn market, so he ordered it stuffed with excessive sex scenes.
Two of those scenes (between the heroine and the villain) are important to the plot, and another scene is also marginally relevant. But there's a lot of other completely random sex, including between anonymous characters never seen again.
But even when the sex act itself is important to the story, the way it's presented is pornographic. Just use the rule-of-thumb: "Looped humping from 4 positions followed by the money shot".
As a dramatic action film, Kite's overall quality was greatly improved by clipping out the sex- even though this leaves 1 or 2 places where it feels something is missing.
People have known that humans are the most insecure link for much longer than Mitnick. Look up your WWI and WWII history,
But the fact is that back in WWII, humans were not the weakest link! Technology and encryption techniques were. If the Axis had been smart enough to make more use of OTP and rely less on the ill-concieved Enigma machine, the outcome of the entire war could've been different. (Basically, no US invasion of France, so German and Japan maintain split control of Asia)
By far more and more valuable intelligence was collected by intercepting and decoding radio messages than by any human interaction.
Mitnick is a criminal, and should be treated as such.
Bill Clinton and George W Bush are also criminals. Let's treat them the same!
Slashdot Mirror
However, if somebody else finds about it, they are entirely within their rights to distribute an identically modified version in source form -- and now it's you who can't do anything about it.
I don't know what you're trying to claim there. Most of the GPL only kicks in when someone distributes a modified version. If you create a modified version, but don't distribute it, then you haven't broken any copyright laws, so you don't need permission from the original author, so you don't need to agree to the GPL.
If a hypothetical burglar found the modified version and wanted to distribute it, he'd have no right to do so. Until YOU (the modifier) distribute the new version, the GPL doesn't yet apply to it.
The nation's collective IQ is lowered 20 points just by their continued existence.
But IQ is by definition a relative measurement, where 100 points is always equal to the average. Therefore in reality, those of us not watching Fox have seen a 20 pt gain. (I can apply for Mensa now!)
Oh, I don't know - maybe training for the military?
America's Army would make an especially poor training tool, primarily because it has no OPFOR.
Everybody in that game is a US Soldier, using US Army equipment and techniques. Furthermore, the game conflicts are always between two equally-sized and equally-powerful forces... and it is explicit doctrine that the US Army will never attack unless they outgun the enemy 4 to 1.
So, training for situations that you have orders never to enter isn't too useful. AA would be a better trainer if it allowed unequal force allocations (especially including a handful of civilians whose only goal is to escape the battlefield alive). But of course, making the fights unfair to increase training value would make it less fun as a game.
I attack those things because they are indicative of a disinclination to share information. If you want to communicate over the internet, do it with a simple webpage or a bulleted list. Do you know why people send emails as text instead of mailing WAV files to each other? Because reading is better than listening.
Failure to utilize the easiest and most reliable communication mechanisms suggests that honest exchange of information is not your priority.
The natural conclusion is that you haven't presented the DFC ideas in an acessible format because to do so would make it easier for others to pinpoint the gaping problems.
The response from USC Cinema-Television was 100% positive. How do you explain that?
It seems USCCT doesn't know much about game development. They were probably impressed by the lofty goals, while I'm more focused on the fact that you have no way to approach those goals.
What would it take to convince you?
Screenshots. Renders. Slides. Charts. Design docs. Anything like that would restore a little faith.
Basically, I'd want any mod-related file that's not you reading into a microphone for an hour. Lacking any of those things, DFC doesn't even deserve the title of vaporware.
I think most of it is in future tense,
Wrong. In this post (from your alternate account) you stated "I speak from experience, being the creator of Doom for Columbine". That is clearly an attempt to claim to have already created something, which you didn't do. It implies that DFC has already been created, when it hasn't (otherwise, you could show me a screencap).
What a totally ridiculous statement. I have not announced that I have accomplished anything. I have not misrepresented myself or this project, either.
In slashdot posts you represent the "project" as "in progress", but visiting your actual website makes it appear that there is no progress at all. If you have in fact made some progress that hasn't been publicized, I suggest you do so before attempting further recruiting.
When you get enough experience with failure, you can succeed because you learn where the land mines are and you step around them.
I call it a "land mine" if the mod's goal is to completely reverse the play style of the game it's based on.
Just look at it from the high-level: you plan to implement a game about popularity and social hierarchy on top of DOOM, an engine whose only means of interpersonal interaction is firing bullets! If you want to create a project exploring clique behavior of adolescents, try starting from a base that actually supports "human relationship" as a concept; something like The Sims.
so that someone has to listen to the whole thing before making a judgement
As they say in Hollywood, if you can't hook em in 25 words, you got nothin'.
I did not give you permission to reproduce anything from this file and therefore you have broken the EULA, which clearly states you may not reproduce it in any way.
Ha ha ha! Ha, ha ha. Ha ha ha. Whew, where to start on that one?
PS. I also find it inapproriate to utilize sourceforge to distribute content more suitable to an audioblog.
Thats like saying that "Because its slower than a 'Vette, a Beetle isn't a car."
She never said that. The exact words were: "The XBox lacks (compared to a typical computer)". And it is emphatically true that in most of those categories (CPU speed, RAM, disk, expandability, flexibility) the XBox loses out to a bottom-shelf $250 desktop PC. (It makes up for it in other ways, of course, mainly price). She further said "But it is no more a PC than the PS2"
If you want to use a very generalized definition of computer, then of course the XBox qualifies. But so does a PS2, and a PSOne, and a cellphone, and even many wristwatches. But if you look at the term "full-fledged computer", which she later clarified to "PC", then the XBox certainly won't qualify without some serious warranty-breaking modification first.
Yep, I even meta-moderate 3-4 times/week.
Maybe you're too active. Your visible posting history shows 24 comments over 4 days. I never get modpoints unless 48 hours have elapsed since my last post- this is probably to encourage people who don't contribute in one way to do so in another.
I see that by now you've marked me as a "foe" not just on this account, but your alternate one too.
And I must say, your possession of two active Slashdot accounts is one of the reasons for my antipathy- from the surface, it seems like an exploit of the BBS system. The only obvious reasons to run two accounts is to farm modpoints for boosting trolls, or to astroturf. Neither explanation does you credit- so is there a better reason?
I think I can make a fun, interesting game out of it using the Doom 3 engine. What's wrong with that?
I think you can't. Call me a curmudgeon, but it looks like a waste of time and resources (which you and your helpers might've instead devoted to a successful mod that'll actually have players).
Every successful mod has started out with a core of gameplay created by one or two dedicated programmer/artists who rely on the proven fun of the young project to entice others to make serious contributions. They start small, and build up from there.
You, on the other hand, appear to take a the naive attitude that some highly skilled modelers had between appear out of thin air and start working for you now, or else you'll never get done. Well, since that'll never happen, you may as well admit you won't get done.
(A realistically detailed modern highschool and the people who study there are at once one of the most difficult subjects to represent in 3-d art, and one of the less entertaining to model)
Even if it were completely successful, DFC would be a disturbing, uncomfortable game- and one just can't attract volunteers to work hard to subtly disturb the playing public.
I gave that an honest try, believe me. Even though it seemed little more than an attempt to suck unspecting web-surfers into 80+ minutes of oral wandering, I listened to most of it. And I think I've gleaned some good pointers on how to withhold information, while claiming to be providing it:
How to obfuscate the fact you have almost nothing to say:
I actually have great respect for the people who do projects along these lines (I admire Powerkill for example)- I simply have no belief that you are actually doing one! You post about DFC in the present tense, which is premature at best. This seems to be an attempt to give your public opinions more credibility, by creating the illusion of some firsthand experience.
Ideas are a "dime a dozen". Many, many people have had oddball game ideas that'll never come to anything. But much of them have the decency not to pretend do have accomplished something until they actually do . Id software has a philosophy: "When its done"- think about it sometime.
I've been in the mod-scene too... and I've seen many over-ambitious projects that had such grand ideas that they obviously were never going to get off the ground. DFC ranks up there with the very least plausible of them.
I'll leave with a few quotes from the audio file, as an aid to anyone else who might read this and wonder what's in the "seminar":
The goth class, maybe I can give them special powers for all the tattoos they get.... mystics and sorcerors are going to use real magic behind the scenes to make things happen.
Lets face it- the consequences to Columbine were not available before Columbine... there were no videogames about it... and I think if people had the opportunity to learn what these kids go through, cuz we're gonna show it, we're gonna show this
The premise in Doom For Columbine is the idea that demons or some evil force are preying on our students in... these demons communicating back and forth on how they're gonna corrupt souls, and that figures a lot into this game
This is simply untrue.
Ok, right, you have a separate account for troll-plugging. I stand by the "0% complete" accusation, as by definition a mod for an unreleased game can hardly have started yet. DFC smells like a media-scam; a crafty way to score hot-button interviews with credulous reporters.
But more generously, can't you look at the "troll" label in a positive way? What is your project really, besides an attempt to elicit emotional responses from others? And isn't that the very essense of "trolling"?
Wouldn't it be just as easy to immunize everyone with nanobots to defend against the attacking nanobots?
No, it would not. There is a fundamental inequality in the progress rates of offensive and defensive technologies. Essentially, when technology increases to double its previous power, the ability to defend also doubles, but the ability to attack quadruples.
We can easily build stronger guns, but can't make much tougher armor. Or consider atomic bombs. Several fairly small countries have the ability to use them to attack, but even the leading scientists in the USA haven't created a working missile-defense system yet.
There are billions more ways to kill a human than to leave him alive.
Another way to look at it is as maintenannce costs. One missed chance for attack = try again tommorrow. Missed chance to defend = you're dead!
If you've read (and remembered) The Diamond Age,
It was an entertaining book, but so nonsensical so as to be worthless as a predictive tool. (It can be edifying, but only as a starting point for discussion: "Why nanotech can never proceed like this")
The motif of "scattered small independent states handling their own security needs" is a continuation from his earlier works like Snow Crash, and didn't make sense then either. (Wherein a man just drove around from town to town with an atom bomb in his passenger seat, and no federal agents tried to blast him with a cruise missile)
Yeah, I don't really see why the world would be better of with a "anti-genocide using nanotech" law...
Do you also think that atomic bombs should be legalized, as long as they aren't used for genocide?
The thinking is that a few categories of technology are so potentially dangerous that their very possession is forbidden or highly controlled, regardless of the intent (claimed or actual) of the owner.
Radioactive materials are one such thing. Smallpox and anthrax are others. In all reasonableness, nanotech "universal assemblers" will be another, since they could quickly generate any kind of chemical or biological weapon.
Probably not as much as a cloud of plain old ricin gas
Nope, the nanotech delivery method is vastly more effective. The thing about a simple cloud of poison is that people will stop walking into it after a few minutes of corpse-accumulation.
But the aforementioned nano-assasins could hold onto their lethal payload until a predetermined timer had elapsed, simulataneously killing everyone who passed near the release point for a whole 4 hour period. That's 1000s of times as deadly.
On a side note: anyone else notice the resemblance between Max Payne story author Sam Lake, and Mr. Needs a Maalox himself?
Uh, the skin textures in Max Payne were taken from photos of random members of their development team. Even Max himself was just some game artist plopped before a camera.
(For the sequel, they hired actors. But the main characters still had to resemble the guys from the original game)
At 25, I want something I can *play* in 2 hours.. not "get all set up to start playing."
Congrats! You can now get 2 hours worth of playtime for almost any major PC game for free! Just download what's called a demo, and enjoy.
you could just dismiss my examples as "absolutely not" true, "poor examples", and "untrue in general"
I can only dismiss them because they're bad examples or obviously false conclusions. Most especially wrong is the final claim that US games are any less linear than Japanese ones; a topic that is mostly unrelated to and wholely unsupported by your Presentl vs. Representl discussion. There are valid arguments for that position, but you didn't make any of them.
I'd suggest then reading the cultural works of noted scholar Donald Richie (A Hundred Years of Japanese Film where he talks of the Presentational and Representational
Translation: I read this great book and tried to reproduce its ideas in a Slashdot comment without attribution, when actually referencing the book in the first place would've been more useful to anyone really interested.
That poster's a troll. He attempts to plug his own 0% complete Doom mod in every topic relating to FPS or violent games.
In actuality, there have been 100s of accurate school-models converted into FPS maps constructed by bored students all over the USA. They're not newsworthy.
This is the great divide in Japanese versus Western cinema as well.
That divide does exist, but of course you exaggerate its strength. Filmmakers in the USA's Hollywood also contend with questions of how much to break "reality" (meaning whatever semi-fake rules apply to a particular movie) in service of "art".
And actually, most American films are Presentational, and ignore laws of reality in favor of what they want to portray- BUT what they are presenting is normally chosen from a certain well-defined genre. So they are "Representative" of one fairly standardized set of unreal rules. But because the audience is already familiar with how the rules have been twisted, they doesn't see it as ludicrous when a single pissed-off cop kills 85 assorted terrorists and rogue CIA assasins.
The examples you chose were quite bad:
The killer chasing the coed is trapped in the sewer, now he's in front of her! This would cause Western audiences to throw a fucking fit.
Absolutely not. The ability to inexplicably escape from a collapsed room and lay an ambush ahead of fleeing girls is a well-established ability of villians in the horror genre. If he couldn't escape, audiences would be more surprised.
So if a character walks through a door in his house and ends up on Moon, that is fine since the director is trying to say something. American audiences will expect some sort of rationale for it happening
Another poor example... or at least, I can't recall any Japanese film/anime with something so blatant. Features like that are more appropriate to the divide between "arthouse surrealism" and "popular realism", as exemplified by "Being John Malkovich" (a rare surrealist movie that become popular)
As you recall, it featured a character walking through a door in his office and ending up in Malkovich's head, without any "Malkovich teleportation machine" being found.
The US saddles the player with the primary responsibility.
Untrue in general. Sample 30 random USA games from a shop, and the majority will have a plotline just as pre-planned as anything from Japan (moreso, actually, because there are probably fewer subplots). The existence of some totally nonlinear outliers like The Sims or GTA can't change the categorization of the majority of games.
All I can say to this part is "Huh?" How can it have a CPU(x86, no less) and not have CPU speed? Or a Hard Drive, but no HDD space?
Let me help you understand with automobile analogies. "Compared to a Corvette, the Beetle lacks speed." "Compared to an Explorer, the Jetta lacks space".
Get it now? To "lack" something, you don't have to have zero of it... just significantly less than the competitor.
Anime isn't wildly popular there. That's a myth.
That depends on what you mean by "wildly". Anime is popular enough to have around 20 new shows each season. (Contrast that to the USA, which produces maybe 1/2 a new anime each year)
And yes, anime is mostly for children... so what? Children count towards overall popularity. Especially when the topic is videogames! After all, kids play more games, so the TV they prefer is disproportionately influential.
Ironically the greatest starcraft player of all time was from the U.K.
Wrong. Tillerman couldn't beat the champion players from Korea. He's the most famous player internationally, but not quite the best.
My host brother won't buy Dead or Alive, 'cause he says he doesn't like violent games.
Explain to him that the game "Dead or Alive" (which is violent and sexy) is not related to the Japanese movie Dead or Alive (which is violent, sexual, and excessively gruesome)
the storyline is as interactive as Half-Life's.; There is only one story impacting descision that you actually get to make in the entire game, right at the end,
Half-Life had no such desicion. You must be referring to how the hero can choose to live or die... but that's not unique to the end! He could make that same choice at thousands of other places throughout the game ("Jump into acid, or not jump into acid? Kiss the bull-squid, or not kiss the bull-squid?")
Just for the record, Kite is not "Japanese porn".
No, the original Kite was absolutely porn. It was a good film, but the producer wanted to target the porn market, so he ordered it stuffed with excessive sex scenes.
Two of those scenes (between the heroine and the villain) are important to the plot, and another scene is also marginally relevant. But there's a lot of other completely random sex, including between anonymous characters never seen again.
But even when the sex act itself is important to the story, the way it's presented is pornographic. Just use the rule-of-thumb: "Looped humping from 4 positions followed by the money shot".
As a dramatic action film, Kite's overall quality was greatly improved by clipping out the sex- even though this leaves 1 or 2 places where it feels something is missing.
People have known that humans are the most insecure link for much longer than Mitnick. Look up your WWI and WWII history,
But the fact is that back in WWII, humans were not the weakest link! Technology and encryption techniques were. If the Axis had been smart enough to make more use of OTP and rely less on the ill-concieved Enigma machine, the outcome of the entire war could've been different. (Basically, no US invasion of France, so German and Japan maintain split control of Asia)
By far more and more valuable intelligence was collected by intercepting and decoding radio messages than by any human interaction.
Mitnick is a criminal, and should be treated as such.
Bill Clinton and George W Bush are also criminals. Let's treat them the same!
"Hacking in this sense refers to modifying these devices to perform in a manner not originally intended; not compromising the security of the devices"
Of course, compromising security is only one of many ways to use a device in an unintended manner.
Computer-vandalism is a subset of hacking, so using the word "hacker" to mean an electronic intruder is not wrong, despite occasional heated protests.