This whole affair has shown how ridiculously people can act toward each other but the evolving discussion seems to be that if research starts to show that people with malformed brains really can't comprehend how their actions affect others how should we as a society treat them?
As someone said, fMRI scans show that in some individuals areas of the brain associated with empathy don't light up upon seeing images of people hurt. It would follow that these people won't conform to our expectations of a polite society; how will we deal with that? This has been a problem for all of civilization but what happens now that we have more data to back it up?
All that aside, these guys deserved their TSG article and I can only hope that they have to go through an equal amount of irritation to the damages they caused. $50,000 is a lot of money, and that was just one prank.
I bought a Zune (brown one) during the big fire sale last year for around $80. The hardware is top-notch; I'd even say that it sounds better than my iPod, and I'm no audiophile. The battery life was passable and 30GB wasn't anything to sneeze at.
Problem was, I had to use their god-awful sync software to get the thing working. That meant going through WGA, all the.NET updates, interminable loading screens and restarts for each new update.
Once I had the device out in the wild it worked fine but I was always reluctant to put more music on it because it was such a chore. When I realized that I was maintaining a Windows box just to use the Zune and a few programs (like uTorrent), I switched to Mint and haven't looked back.
Now the thing just languishes along with all the other stuff that isn't 'essential' in my daily routine.
I use a current gen iPod nano (8GB) now and it works like a charm, so-so audio quality and all. I use gPodder to sync podcasts and GTKPod to sync my music. MP3 players are so ubiquitous nowadays I don't see why people are willing to be locked into one company's store or software.
Of course, it'd be great if Apple explained how to unencrypt their firmware so we could get Rockbox running on it but that's not gonna happen. At least my iPod supports FLAC.
Much as I love Ricky Gervais's work writing The Office and Extras, I don't think that he created that joke. In fact, brush that joke off, it's so old its got whiskers.:)
But is there a precedent for "illegal software"? Who determines what I can run and what I can't run on my system?
If I choose to install a piece of software that was originally developed outside of the US is someone going to come audit my system and try to bring charges against me?
I guess my problem is that I don't see how this is possible going to get enforced, other than on cases that are already in court.
It seems that the genie is already out of the bottle on P2P anyway. Even if you inform users that "Your entire downloaded torrents directory will be shared and you might get sued for this" I don't think that it will be an effective deterrent.
Instead of focusing on this nanny bill we ought to establish services that allow people to easily pay for consuming massive amounts of content.
FTFA ""This is the last major console cycle," Perlman said. "If not this one, then definitely the next one."
So which is it?
This sounds like a steaming cloud of vapor. Also, check out the link to the painfully vague Rearden Labs video http://www.reardenlabs.com/ from the developer of the service. Remember, Rearden and the Objectivists don't mind selling you nothing at all as long as they benefit.
When there's a real world video I'll be more inclined to believe this but for now it's Phantom Version 2. Kudos to whoever convinced a firm to give them capital in this recession though.
Not to be a jerk but from what I understand global warming will cause weather effects to become more pronounced i.e. heavier snowfall, bigger floods, warmer summers and cooler winters...
somanyrobots said: This is not just scratched discs, and it is not blatantly shaking your hardware. It sounds like even fairly small shifts of the console can cause the discs to be "deeply gouged". That's not just normal scratching, that's an issue with the hardware.
And Microsoft's actions are a little questionable here. They were aware that it was a problem, so they considered several technical solutions; they decided that all the technical solutions were too costly, so they just put in a disclaimer. That's fine.
Then they added in a "disc replacement program" at $20 a pop.
RazorSharp said: The problem with the 360 is that THIS PROBLEM OCCURS EVEN WHEN THE USER DOES NOT MOVE THE CONSOLE.
Sure I agree with you slot loaders can have their own problems but ->
Gamers tend to be less careful with their disc, borrow discs, and when high even insert discs with peanut butter and jelly on them. This destroys front loaders rather fast and adds to their ability to harm disc with just a bit of crusted dirt or PB&J on the roller, your discs may continue to work, but you are slowly pitting them, and if the roller 'spins' on the disc, you are getting scratches.
WTF?! Whenever I pay $50 for a pressed DVD I take good care of it. Also, this is a manufacturing defect, not an unholy union of food and hardware.
zelda : links awakening and metroid II for the original gameboy were good games for ignoring your family on a long trip.
nowadays, Zelda : the minish cap and fire emblem and the wario games, but wario can be too much movement for car trips and failing a 50 minigame long streak cause of a pothole will make you throw your gba through the windshield.
i was just reading the letters section of the new 2600 (summer 2005) and there's a fairly lengthy letter from a hacker named Stormbringer about RFID hacking that seems like a good primer. Following his work may lead to a relatively easy to use scanner for RFID.
What worries me most is if the US adopts this system and makes it illegal to disable any gov't issued RFIDs. I think that the excuse "hmm, i dunno why its not working officer" will only work for the first few years; after that people are going to be assumed as hostiles if they choose to defend their privacy by breaking these tracking devices...
anyone notice the "mother" reference about Miyamoto working with Shigesato Itoi on a game set in modern times that will be coming to the NES in the future. Nintendo Power is untrustable!
The guy who designed the Virtual Boy was Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Super Scope, ROB, and the original Game Boy. He also lead the team that produced Metroid and Super Metroid. Much like everyone else is saying here, one flop doesn't mean that a designer is a blathering idiot.
Actually I see your logic but I don't agree with your system.
I propose that Japanese studios take a hands-on approach in the US and release the shows here themselves. As long as I'm making utopian systems I should go the whole way and say that Japanese studios should make agreements with the fansub community and pay small royalties to the group that subbed the anime in the US, in exchange for using their high-quality subs. They could release online and I would be able to download any show I wanted right after it aired using my Gigabit ethernet connection. ^_^
But since all that doesn't exist (and wouldn't work anyway) I'm stuck in regards to what anime I do buy. I live in America, where 0% of Japanese animation is produced. But since a company that dubs and badly translates a show sells a copy of that here, people seem to think that I'm compelled to buy that copy no matter what. ADVFilms doesn't make anime. They liscense a product that has already been created, modify it slightly (modifications I don't care for: dubbing) and they sell it for an unreasonably high price (yes, in Japan some DVDs are 2 epis and $40, but that's not the norm, and since it's on TV there no one is compelled to buy every set).
I think that buying anime here is a waste because you are giving more support to the US dubbing community than the Japanese stidio that made the content to begin with. I will admit that IANAL and I don't know what the profit breakdown for liscensing rights are in these agreements though.
This is a similar issue to what is being faced in the American television show market. If I Tivo and burn a show like '24' that was broadcast publically on an 'antenna' station like Fox why am I somehow a worse consumer than if I were to buy the special DVD editions? Since it was shown freely (plus advertisements, yada yada) what makes it wrong for me to make a copy for myself? Anime is also shown on television, just on televisions too far away for mine to see.
Is your proposal that a fan subbing group:
1) find a show like Naruto
2) sub two episodes as advertisement to Americans
3) wait an unknown amount of time (sometimes forever) until a studio liscenses that anime in the US
4) buy DVDS, while the show has already ended in Japan years ago
??
I am unwilling to wait for content in the US because a company hasn't decided to be gracious enough to let me buy it here. Also, I would be more willing to buy the fan-subbed versions of anime in the US if they were liscensed but I don't want to be forced to choose between pirated fan-subs and US releases with botched translations, though I am in that situation.
You understand that Stand Alone Complex was a big budget show that followed the release of a theatrically movie, right?
How many other anime movies were released nationally in theatres in the US? All I can think of are Studio Ghibli movies, Akira, and GITS.
What about a show like FLCL? A 6 episode side project of a big studio (Gainax) that doesn't really make any sense in English to begin with. It somehow got dubbed and aired on Adult Swim, and without the fan sub community it would have been left on the wayside like any other low budget show.
Just BTW here, American distribution companies charge $25 for 4 25 minute episodes on DVD with the English dubbed. They charge $30 for that same DVD with subtitles. This has gotten better recently, where both subs and dub track are inculded, but personally I don't want to pay extra money for their half-assed translation.
I got into anime because I study Japanese language, and I used to watch it as listening practice. I can say that most of the American releases have sub-par translation and pander to the non-native speaker. Instead of keeping a word that has no direct translation in Japanese (like Gestalt for german) studios like ADV Films make the closest english translation they can. [example Keroro Gunsou = Sergeant Frog, but to american studios = Sergeant Toad.] That sounds like a small thing, but 26 episodes of listening to some studio garbage up a show is irritating.
Personally, I use sites like animesuki.com to stay ahead of the American liscensing curve. Just because someone in the US offers a badly done copy of something from another country doesn't mean I have to choose to buy it.
How exactly should game companies find out if there is interest in re-realeasing old games? Nintendo only re-released old nes games that sold well, and added some generic space shooters and side scrollers into the mix to make a larger collection of 'nintendo minis'.
The best example of a fan community lobbying to get an old game released was the Starmen.net effort. Starmen.net (used to be earthbound.net) collected a huge number of sigs to get Nintendo to realize that there was a very real interest in seeing another Earthbound/Mother game in the USA. So far, nothing has been done by Nintendo to help out these fans. In fact, Nintendo released a GBA version of both Earthbound games bundled together in Japan only (Mother 1+2). There are no plans to release this in the US.
Also, the SNES was 2 generations of hardware ago and there have been no re-releases of SNES games except for the Mario and Zelda games re-done for GBA. I don't think that I should have to wait until Nintendo decides if they want to realease one of the 1,000+ SNES games for whatever happens to be the current hardware generation to enjoy these great games using my own hardware.
If you want to check it out and learn about a great SNES game that gets either a 1 or a 10 on gamefaqs go to:
[Starmen.net]
Not to be a jerk, but how is it a personal organizer? I guess someone could write software for it, but so far there haven't been any announcements about something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole affair has shown how ridiculously people can act toward each other but the evolving discussion seems to be that if research starts to show that people with malformed brains really can't comprehend how their actions affect others how should we as a society treat them?
As someone said, fMRI scans show that in some individuals areas of the brain associated with empathy don't light up upon seeing images of people hurt. It would follow that these people won't conform to our expectations of a polite society; how will we deal with that? This has been a problem for all of civilization but what happens now that we have more data to back it up?
All that aside, these guys deserved their TSG article and I can only hope that they have to go through an equal amount of irritation to the damages they caused. $50,000 is a lot of money, and that was just one prank.
I bought a Zune (brown one) during the big fire sale last year for around $80. The hardware is top-notch; I'd even say that it sounds better than my iPod, and I'm no audiophile. The battery life was passable and 30GB wasn't anything to sneeze at.
.NET updates, interminable loading screens and restarts for each new update.
Problem was, I had to use their god-awful sync software to get the thing working. That meant going through WGA, all the
Once I had the device out in the wild it worked fine but I was always reluctant to put more music on it because it was such a chore. When I realized that I was maintaining a Windows box just to use the Zune and a few programs (like uTorrent), I switched to Mint and haven't looked back.
Now the thing just languishes along with all the other stuff that isn't 'essential' in my daily routine.
I use a current gen iPod nano (8GB) now and it works like a charm, so-so audio quality and all. I use gPodder to sync podcasts and GTKPod to sync my music. MP3 players are so ubiquitous nowadays I don't see why people are willing to be locked into one company's store or software.
Of course, it'd be great if Apple explained how to unencrypt their firmware so we could get Rockbox running on it but that's not gonna happen. At least my iPod supports FLAC.
Thank you! I'd mod you up if I could.
Much as I love Ricky Gervais's work writing The Office and Extras, I don't think that he created that joke. In fact, brush that joke off, it's so old its got whiskers. :)
But is there a precedent for "illegal software"? Who determines what I can run and what I can't run on my system?
If I choose to install a piece of software that was originally developed outside of the US is someone going to come audit my system and try to bring charges against me?
I guess my problem is that I don't see how this is possible going to get enforced, other than on cases that are already in court.
It seems that the genie is already out of the bottle on P2P anyway. Even if you inform users that "Your entire downloaded torrents directory will be shared and you might get sued for this" I don't think that it will be an effective deterrent.
Instead of focusing on this nanny bill we ought to establish services that allow people to easily pay for consuming massive amounts of content.
$15 monthly video download amnesty fee anyone?
This sounds like it will be a bear to enforce. Also, it sounds like more legal fluff to prosecute users under.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse right?
YouTube has been annoying me lately with their unreadable links. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As6758oOuYs doesn't mean much.
/.
At least a link like http://www.youtube.com/Somebody_sticks_it_to_the_man would give me some kind of inkling as to what I'm clicking on.
I'm liking the more current blog notation like:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/27/usb-3-0-cables-go-on-sale-one-year-early/
Sure makes sense to me.
Sorry it doesn't have anything to do with your comment, just felt like something I would read on
FTFA ""This is the last major console cycle," Perlman said. "If not this one, then definitely the next one." So which is it? This sounds like a steaming cloud of vapor. Also, check out the link to the painfully vague Rearden Labs video http://www.reardenlabs.com/ from the developer of the service. Remember, Rearden and the Objectivists don't mind selling you nothing at all as long as they benefit. When there's a real world video I'll be more inclined to believe this but for now it's Phantom Version 2. Kudos to whoever convinced a firm to give them capital in this recession though.
comeon, how isn't that modded funny yet?
Not to be a jerk but from what I understand global warming will cause weather effects to become more pronounced i.e. heavier snowfall, bigger floods, warmer summers and cooler winters...
somanyrobots said: This is not just scratched discs, and it is not blatantly shaking your hardware. It sounds like even fairly small shifts of the console can cause the discs to be "deeply gouged". That's not just normal scratching, that's an issue with the hardware. And Microsoft's actions are a little questionable here. They were aware that it was a problem, so they considered several technical solutions; they decided that all the technical solutions were too costly, so they just put in a disclaimer. That's fine. Then they added in a "disc replacement program" at $20 a pop.
RazorSharp said: The problem with the 360 is that THIS PROBLEM OCCURS EVEN WHEN THE USER DOES NOT MOVE THE CONSOLE.
Gamers tend to be less careful with their disc, borrow discs, and when high even insert discs with peanut butter and jelly on them. This destroys front loaders rather fast and adds to their ability to harm disc with just a bit of crusted dirt or PB&J on the roller, your discs may continue to work, but you are slowly pitting them, and if the roller 'spins' on the disc, you are getting scratches.
WTF?! Whenever I pay $50 for a pressed DVD I take good care of it. Also, this is a manufacturing defect, not an unholy union of food and hardware.
zelda : links awakening and metroid II for the original gameboy were good games for ignoring your family on a long trip. nowadays, Zelda : the minish cap and fire emblem and the wario games, but wario can be too much movement for car trips and failing a 50 minigame long streak cause of a pothole will make you throw your gba through the windshield.
what show was that on? im looking on npr's site right now and i dont see anything... my search for "RFID" only found articles from 3 years ago..
i was just reading the letters section of the new 2600 (summer 2005) and there's a fairly lengthy letter from a hacker named Stormbringer about RFID hacking that seems like a good primer. Following his work may lead to a relatively easy to use scanner for RFID. What worries me most is if the US adopts this system and makes it illegal to disable any gov't issued RFIDs. I think that the excuse "hmm, i dunno why its not working officer" will only work for the first few years; after that people are going to be assumed as hostiles if they choose to defend their privacy by breaking these tracking devices...
Luigi's Mansion was actually a great game once you spent 5 minutes learning the unorthodox control style...
anyone notice the "mother" reference about Miyamoto working with Shigesato Itoi on a game set in modern times that will be coming to the NES in the future. Nintendo Power is untrustable!
The guy who designed the Virtual Boy was Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Super Scope, ROB, and the original Game Boy. He also lead the team that produced Metroid and Super Metroid. Much like everyone else is saying here, one flop doesn't mean that a designer is a blathering idiot.
Actually I see your logic but I don't agree with your system.
I propose that Japanese studios take a hands-on approach in the US and release the shows here themselves. As long as I'm making utopian systems I should go the whole way and say that Japanese studios should make agreements with the fansub community and pay small royalties to the group that subbed the anime in the US, in exchange for using their high-quality subs. They could release online and I would be able to download any show I wanted right after it aired using my Gigabit ethernet connection. ^_^
But since all that doesn't exist (and wouldn't work anyway) I'm stuck in regards to what anime I do buy. I live in America, where 0% of Japanese animation is produced. But since a company that dubs and badly translates a show sells a copy of that here, people seem to think that I'm compelled to buy that copy no matter what. ADVFilms doesn't make anime. They liscense a product that has already been created, modify it slightly (modifications I don't care for: dubbing) and they sell it for an unreasonably high price (yes, in Japan some DVDs are 2 epis and $40, but that's not the norm, and since it's on TV there no one is compelled to buy every set).
I think that buying anime here is a waste because you are giving more support to the US dubbing community than the Japanese stidio that made the content to begin with. I will admit that IANAL and I don't know what the profit breakdown for liscensing rights are in these agreements though.
This is a similar issue to what is being faced in the American television show market. If I Tivo and burn a show like '24' that was broadcast publically on an 'antenna' station like Fox why am I somehow a worse consumer than if I were to buy the special DVD editions? Since it was shown freely (plus advertisements, yada yada) what makes it wrong for me to make a copy for myself? Anime is also shown on television, just on televisions too far away for mine to see.
Is your proposal that a fan subbing group:
1) find a show like Naruto
2) sub two episodes as advertisement to Americans
3) wait an unknown amount of time (sometimes forever) until a studio liscenses that anime in the US
4) buy DVDS, while the show has already ended in Japan years ago
??
I am unwilling to wait for content in the US because a company hasn't decided to be gracious enough to let me buy it here. Also, I would be more willing to buy the fan-subbed versions of anime in the US if they were liscensed but I don't want to be forced to choose between pirated fan-subs and US releases with botched translations, though I am in that situation.
You understand that Stand Alone Complex was a big budget show that followed the release of a theatrically movie, right?
How many other anime movies were released nationally in theatres in the US? All I can think of are Studio Ghibli movies, Akira, and GITS.
What about a show like FLCL? A 6 episode side project of a big studio (Gainax) that doesn't really make any sense in English to begin with. It somehow got dubbed and aired on Adult Swim, and without the fan sub community it would have been left on the wayside like any other low budget show.
Just BTW here, American distribution companies charge $25 for 4 25 minute episodes on DVD with the English dubbed. They charge $30 for that same DVD with subtitles. This has gotten better recently, where both subs and dub track are inculded, but personally I don't want to pay extra money for their half-assed translation.
I got into anime because I study Japanese language, and I used to watch it as listening practice. I can say that most of the American releases have sub-par translation and pander to the non-native speaker. Instead of keeping a word that has no direct translation in Japanese (like Gestalt for german) studios like ADV Films make the closest english translation they can. [example Keroro Gunsou = Sergeant Frog, but to american studios = Sergeant Toad.] That sounds like a small thing, but 26 episodes of listening to some studio garbage up a show is irritating.
Personally, I use sites like animesuki.com to stay ahead of the American liscensing curve. Just because someone in the US offers a badly done copy of something from another country doesn't mean I have to choose to buy it.
How exactly should game companies find out if there is interest in re-realeasing old games? Nintendo only re-released old nes games that sold well, and added some generic space shooters and side scrollers into the mix to make a larger collection of 'nintendo minis'.
The best example of a fan community lobbying to get an old game released was the Starmen.net effort. Starmen.net (used to be earthbound.net) collected a huge number of sigs to get Nintendo to realize that there was a very real interest in seeing another Earthbound/Mother game in the USA. So far, nothing has been done by Nintendo to help out these fans. In fact, Nintendo released a GBA version of both Earthbound games bundled together in Japan only (Mother 1+2). There are no plans to release this in the US.
Also, the SNES was 2 generations of hardware ago and there have been no re-releases of SNES games except for the Mario and Zelda games re-done for GBA. I don't think that I should have to wait until Nintendo decides if they want to realease one of the 1,000+ SNES games for whatever happens to be the current hardware generation to enjoy these great games using my own hardware.
If you want to check it out and learn about a great SNES game that gets either a 1 or a 10 on gamefaqs go to: [Starmen.net]
Not to be a jerk, but how is it a personal organizer? I guess someone could write software for it, but so far there haven't been any announcements about something like that.