Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs - items are constantly produced, and nothing ever really goes away. (and, as a result, the poor (in this case, new gamers) find it a LOT more difficult to make money, whereas the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation.
The tax was introduced as an attempt to counteract this, and to ensure that property values for EVERYONE stayed as close to nominal as possible, at the "expense" of a relative few of the richer players.
Does this sound familiar? It should. This protest is a virtual recreation of the on-going real-world economics battles between Left-leaning and Right-leaning policies.
Do you spare the rich by saying "hands off, make money however you can", but in doing so make life harder on the poor? Or do you intentionally tax the wealthy few to make life better for everyone else?
And the great thing about MMORPGs is that you can use them as an experimentive toolkit for economic policies, without risking the lives of millions of real citizens.
I could see economic think tanks intentionally creating MMORPG worlds with different starting conditions, just to see how they evolve.
I'm not being some sort of commu-terrorist, I'm trying to figure this out. The Dewey system was invented in the 1870s. It's something around 130 years old. How can it POSSIBLY still have its rights tied up?
I thought until around 1930 our Congress was still rational enough to see that having things going to the Public Domain was a good thing.
How exactly do you figure Intel announcing a home 23/64 chip would PUSH AMD's sales? AMD is still widely seen as the 2nd stringer in the processor arena.
Processors aren't like jewelry. People don't buy whole new systems just because something has gone out of style. If Intel DID have a processor coming out in, say, four months, and didn't say a word, everyone who wanted a 32/64-bit proc would have already bought one.
However, in the tech world, customers who've waited a long time for a product are almost always willing to wait a little longer. So you distract them with FUD of how your Extra Special Super Shiny chip is gonna blow AMD's out of the water, if only they wait another couple months. Just look at Apple buying figures - I don't have the specifics, but a LOT of people wait until after their major conventions to buy new stuff specifically so they know whether or not something new and shiny will be coming up a little later.
So, again, we're back to "the chip is vapor, they're just trying to keep a few people from going AMD in the meantime."
In at least one state, all restaurant and prepared food is taxed, as is any food that is not deemed a *necessity*.
And THAT would be Texas. We may not have income tax, but you better believe they make up for it everywhere else.
I'm sorry, but fundamentally, taxing food is just *wrong*. I'm surprised someone here hasn't figured out how to tax breathing. (call it the CO2 Pollution Stipend)
Someone with points mod this up.
If Intel ACTUALLY had a 64-bitter coming out soon, they'd be trumpeting it like it was the Second Coming. With AMD's new chip about to hit, it would be the only sensible thing to do, even if it's months off. There's no reason they would sit on it (and let just-above-tabloid tech sites "break" the story) *unless* they didn't actually have a competing product envisioned anytime soon.
Why didn't the article say more about under what exact conditions the plasmoids replicated and communicated? I mean, you can say they "duplicated themselves" when all you really did was cut one in half.
Whether they were doing these things spontaneously (or in response to only environmental stimulii) would make a huge difference in how big this is.
Oh, I'm not arguing that it doesn't suck and that Verisign didn't do a very, very naughty thing.
But at the same time, if you take a step back, the rapid mobillization of the response to this is VERY impressive, and the rate at which the Internet is reconfiguring itself to get rid of the trouble is quite amazing.
Remember, three days ago, people were moaning about how this would be a disaster, DNS would be broken, spam filters would be rendered impotent, etc etc.
I'm just saying that, objectively, if you look at this sort of like a body repelling a bacterial attack, the rate at which it's been countered is quite amazing, and shows how well the Internet is fundamentally put together.
I was just thinking about this. At this point, pretty much the entire Internet has mobilized to counter their redirection trick. ISPs are getting filters installed, virus software is getting rewritten, ICANN will likely jump into the fray any time now.
At the rate things are going, in a couple weeks, no one will be able to get to their search engine site at all, whether they want to or not.
Someone probably deserves recompensation for the hassle, but it's looking like the Internet has proven resilient to even this "high level" attack.
Well, the term has gotten expanded to mean pretty much "owning a domain you don't use." But originally it referred to people who would, say, buy the rights to a celebrity's name.com, and then extort them into paying lots of money to get the rights to it.
This ended once the first trademark-infringement case went to court.
However, the general term stuck around and is now (IMHO) generally way over-used.
And here are a bunch more: http://www.animewallpapers.com/wallpapers/ffx2/
Having expressed my moral outrage, I can go back to a semi-meditative state of "mmmm... bouncccyyy...";-)
Um... did I say *one word* about the gameplay? I was just griping about the blatant unnecessary sexualization of it. I don't see anything in those quotes talking about how having the cast running around in bras is essential to the engrossing story.
Save your venom for someone who warrants it, 'kay?
Jeez, then I guess I'm one serious old geezer since I remember playing the original Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES.
It's funny, though how much the genre has changed. Have you tried playing Dragon Warrior recently? That game was EVIL. Random encounters every step, and monsters guaranteed to kick your ass a hundred times over. Looking back, I can't believe I actually struggled through it. And FF was in some ways worse, considering some of the absolutely random subquests you had to go on - collect 99 potions to get into a cave? Huh? I wonder if anyone ever got through it without the Nintendo Power guides...
Square's hand-holding in the newer FF games has really shifted things.
Are they still going to bother releasing FFXI here? From what I understand, once the fervor of "Oh wow! MMORPG Final Fantasy!" died down, it was seen to be just another online RPG without too much to recommend it over any of the others, besides the name tie-in. Seems like, considering the trouble of setting up servers and localizations and whatnot in the US, it doesn't stand too much chance of being profitable...
True, but it's still odd the way they're handling it. Reportedly the "International" version was an improvement on the original in a number of ways.
And if you hunt around online it's not that difficult to find a rip of the new ending movie. I saw it shortly after International was released.
Considering how ludicrously short the original ending was, compared to the time invested in the game, it desperately needs to be reinserted. (but then the ending did have one of the single best tracks Uematsu has composed yet...)
Probably just because it would be impossible to top. I mean, we had a planet bearing down on the world, and a final bad guy so powerful you had to harness the very powers of Gaea to stop him. And then the resolution is SO definitive that you have to skip hundreds of years into the future before anything interesting could possibly happen again.
There'd just be no way of making a sequel that would come close to living up to the original.
Hmm... You seem to be forgetting Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
I'd say THAT was Square's most blatant cash-in blunder. Even the not-actually Final Fantasy Game Boy games were at least pretty good titles.
Final Fantasy Fanservice.
And was it REALLY necessary to make Rikku look like Christina Aguliera? They already modeled the girls to look like various J-pop idols, but geez...
Of course, it's also funny that they're releasing this, when the US hasn't gotten the "updated" FFX with the expanded ending that sets up the sequel.
I guess the moral of the story is, when you overstate profits, investors lose confidence and your company goes bankrupt; run a Hollywood movie studio, claim you never make a profit, and you stay in business forever.
Oh, they post end-of-the-year profits, alright. And plenty of them. What they DO try to do, whenever possible, is bury profits on a film-by-film basis.
Like, say a studio has two sci-fi movies coming out in one year, and they're cross-marketing them in some way. So Movie A comes out first, does well enough in the box office, and nets $10 million in profits. They turn turn around, sink that $10 million into the ad budget of Movie B, and claim NO profits on Movie A. (instead, they have $10 million in unused advertising budget which can be put in the "wins" column at the end of the year - but it's not attached to Movie A any more)
This is a simplified example, but not overmuch. They pull that trick ALL THE TIME. Remember Stan Lee suing Sony over Spiderman? They did exactly that on him - sank all the movie profits into the merchandising budget (if memory serves) and counted the whole thing as one big mass from which he got absolutely nothing.
I'd have to go dig up press releases from a few months back (which I'm really too lazy to do at the moment, sorry) but the basic rationale from ALL of the groups was they were too afraid of the media falling into unsympathetic hands.
One minor benefit of the current "liberal media!" "conservative media!" battle is that all the special interest groups are QUITE paranoid about media consolidation - most of them are legitimately convinced that the media is fundamentally against their cause, whatever it might be.
In other words, it was recognized that it was overall in everyone's best interests for the media to remain diversified, and no one wants to gamble on it. So I consider it a victory in rational clear-thinking and enlightened self interest.
Don't forget, when the FCC opened this up for comment, they got thousands of e-mails against and less than a dozen for. And this is the issue that got the ACLU and the NRA to link arms in saying "this is a bad idea." The feelings of the public AND all the interest groups, regardless of overall political affiliation, is that this would be a spectacularly bone-headed move. I mean, this wasn't just politics making for strange bedfellows, this was an all-out bipartisan orgy. NO ONE besides the media owners is in favor of it.
So Bush vowing to veto basically means he's disdainfully ignoring the will of the population he was supposedly elected to represent.
And we ARE still in a *representative* Republic? Right?... right? Bueller?
Nah. The people on these committees are appointees, so it's accepted they will occasionally screw up and do something silly in the name of ideology. The next admininstration comes it, it changes hands, life goes on.
Just our checks & balances (hopefully) in action.
Re:I love the smell of maggots in the morning...
on
Worst Jobs In Science
·
· Score: 1
I suppose it's worth asking, are they any good to eat?
(don't go eewwwww... worms and grubs can be fine sources of protein and are eaten all over the world. And if they SMELL good cooked, that's usually a sign that they're edible...)
That's not hillarious, that's maddening beyond my ability to properly express.
Especially, #10 - Sole Remedy:
"YOUR USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH ANY OF THE MATERIALS, RESULTS OR OTHER CONTENTS OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR WITH THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, OUR PRIVACY STATEMENT, OR OTHER POLICIES, YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR OUR SITE."
If you don't like what Verisign is doing, get off the Internet.
This could well inspire even our current Administration to smack them down. This is the most hubris-laden abuse of a monopoly I've heard of in a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs - items are constantly produced, and nothing ever really goes away. (and, as a result, the poor (in this case, new gamers) find it a LOT more difficult to make money, whereas the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation.
The tax was introduced as an attempt to counteract this, and to ensure that property values for EVERYONE stayed as close to nominal as possible, at the "expense" of a relative few of the richer players.
Does this sound familiar? It should. This protest is a virtual recreation of the on-going real-world economics battles between Left-leaning and Right-leaning policies.
Do you spare the rich by saying "hands off, make money however you can", but in doing so make life harder on the poor? Or do you intentionally tax the wealthy few to make life better for everyone else?
And the great thing about MMORPGs is that you can use them as an experimentive toolkit for economic policies, without risking the lives of millions of real citizens.
I could see economic think tanks intentionally creating MMORPG worlds with different starting conditions, just to see how they evolve.
I'm not being some sort of commu-terrorist, I'm trying to figure this out. The Dewey system was invented in the 1870s. It's something around 130 years old. How can it POSSIBLY still have its rights tied up? I thought until around 1930 our Congress was still rational enough to see that having things going to the Public Domain was a good thing.
How exactly do you figure Intel announcing a home 23/64 chip would PUSH AMD's sales? AMD is still widely seen as the 2nd stringer in the processor arena. Processors aren't like jewelry. People don't buy whole new systems just because something has gone out of style. If Intel DID have a processor coming out in, say, four months, and didn't say a word, everyone who wanted a 32/64-bit proc would have already bought one. However, in the tech world, customers who've waited a long time for a product are almost always willing to wait a little longer. So you distract them with FUD of how your Extra Special Super Shiny chip is gonna blow AMD's out of the water, if only they wait another couple months. Just look at Apple buying figures - I don't have the specifics, but a LOT of people wait until after their major conventions to buy new stuff specifically so they know whether or not something new and shiny will be coming up a little later. So, again, we're back to "the chip is vapor, they're just trying to keep a few people from going AMD in the meantime."
In at least one state, all restaurant and prepared food is taxed, as is any food that is not deemed a *necessity*. And THAT would be Texas. We may not have income tax, but you better believe they make up for it everywhere else. I'm sorry, but fundamentally, taxing food is just *wrong*. I'm surprised someone here hasn't figured out how to tax breathing. (call it the CO2 Pollution Stipend)
... someone with points mod the PARENT up. Although if you'd like to share with me, that's cool too.
Someone with points mod this up. If Intel ACTUALLY had a 64-bitter coming out soon, they'd be trumpeting it like it was the Second Coming. With AMD's new chip about to hit, it would be the only sensible thing to do, even if it's months off. There's no reason they would sit on it (and let just-above-tabloid tech sites "break" the story) *unless* they didn't actually have a competing product envisioned anytime soon.
Whether they were doing these things spontaneously (or in response to only environmental stimulii) would make a huge difference in how big this is.
But at the same time, if you take a step back, the rapid mobillization of the response to this is VERY impressive, and the rate at which the Internet is reconfiguring itself to get rid of the trouble is quite amazing.
Remember, three days ago, people were moaning about how this would be a disaster, DNS would be broken, spam filters would be rendered impotent, etc etc.
I'm just saying that, objectively, if you look at this sort of like a body repelling a bacterial attack, the rate at which it's been countered is quite amazing, and shows how well the Internet is fundamentally put together.
At the rate things are going, in a couple weeks, no one will be able to get to their search engine site at all, whether they want to or not.
Someone probably deserves recompensation for the hassle, but it's looking like the Internet has proven resilient to even this "high level" attack.
Well, the term has gotten expanded to mean pretty much "owning a domain you don't use." But originally it referred to people who would, say, buy the rights to a celebrity's name .com, and then extort them into paying lots of money to get the rights to it.
This ended once the first trademark-infringement case went to court.
However, the general term stuck around and is now (IMHO) generally way over-used.
And here are a bunch more: http://www.animewallpapers.com/wallpapers/ffx2/ Having expressed my moral outrage, I can go back to a semi-meditative state of "mmmm... bouncccyyy..." ;-)
To each his own, I suppose. I liked the FF/SaGa games. The whole meat-eating mutation thing was cool.
Um... did I say *one word* about the gameplay? I was just griping about the blatant unnecessary sexualization of it. I don't see anything in those quotes talking about how having the cast running around in bras is essential to the engrossing story. Save your venom for someone who warrants it, 'kay?
It's funny, though how much the genre has changed. Have you tried playing Dragon Warrior recently? That game was EVIL. Random encounters every step, and monsters guaranteed to kick your ass a hundred times over. Looking back, I can't believe I actually struggled through it. And FF was in some ways worse, considering some of the absolutely random subquests you had to go on - collect 99 potions to get into a cave? Huh? I wonder if anyone ever got through it without the Nintendo Power guides...
Square's hand-holding in the newer FF games has really shifted things.
Are they still going to bother releasing FFXI here? From what I understand, once the fervor of "Oh wow! MMORPG Final Fantasy!" died down, it was seen to be just another online RPG without too much to recommend it over any of the others, besides the name tie-in. Seems like, considering the trouble of setting up servers and localizations and whatnot in the US, it doesn't stand too much chance of being profitable...
And if you hunt around online it's not that difficult to find a rip of the new ending movie. I saw it shortly after International was released.
Considering how ludicrously short the original ending was, compared to the time invested in the game, it desperately needs to be reinserted. (but then the ending did have one of the single best tracks Uematsu has composed yet...)
There'd just be no way of making a sequel that would come close to living up to the original.
Hmm... You seem to be forgetting Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. I'd say THAT was Square's most blatant cash-in blunder. Even the not-actually Final Fantasy Game Boy games were at least pretty good titles.
Final Fantasy Fanservice. And was it REALLY necessary to make Rikku look like Christina Aguliera? They already modeled the girls to look like various J-pop idols, but geez... Of course, it's also funny that they're releasing this, when the US hasn't gotten the "updated" FFX with the expanded ending that sets up the sequel.
Oh, they post end-of-the-year profits, alright. And plenty of them. What they DO try to do, whenever possible, is bury profits on a film-by-film basis.
Like, say a studio has two sci-fi movies coming out in one year, and they're cross-marketing them in some way. So Movie A comes out first, does well enough in the box office, and nets $10 million in profits. They turn turn around, sink that $10 million into the ad budget of Movie B, and claim NO profits on Movie A. (instead, they have $10 million in unused advertising budget which can be put in the "wins" column at the end of the year - but it's not attached to Movie A any more)
This is a simplified example, but not overmuch. They pull that trick ALL THE TIME. Remember Stan Lee suing Sony over Spiderman? They did exactly that on him - sank all the movie profits into the merchandising budget (if memory serves) and counted the whole thing as one big mass from which he got absolutely nothing.
I'd have to go dig up press releases from a few months back (which I'm really too lazy to do at the moment, sorry) but the basic rationale from ALL of the groups was they were too afraid of the media falling into unsympathetic hands. One minor benefit of the current "liberal media!" "conservative media!" battle is that all the special interest groups are QUITE paranoid about media consolidation - most of them are legitimately convinced that the media is fundamentally against their cause, whatever it might be. In other words, it was recognized that it was overall in everyone's best interests for the media to remain diversified, and no one wants to gamble on it. So I consider it a victory in rational clear-thinking and enlightened self interest.
So Bush vowing to veto basically means he's disdainfully ignoring the will of the population he was supposedly elected to represent.
And we ARE still in a *representative* Republic? Right? ... right? Bueller?
Nah. The people on these committees are appointees, so it's accepted they will occasionally screw up and do something silly in the name of ideology. The next admininstration comes it, it changes hands, life goes on. Just our checks & balances (hopefully) in action.
I suppose it's worth asking, are they any good to eat? (don't go eewwwww... worms and grubs can be fine sources of protein and are eaten all over the world. And if they SMELL good cooked, that's usually a sign that they're edible...)
That's not hillarious, that's maddening beyond my ability to properly express. Especially, #10 - Sole Remedy: "YOUR USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH ANY OF THE MATERIALS, RESULTS OR OTHER CONTENTS OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR WITH THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, OUR PRIVACY STATEMENT, OR OTHER POLICIES, YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR OUR SITE." If you don't like what Verisign is doing, get off the Internet. This could well inspire even our current Administration to smack them down. This is the most hubris-laden abuse of a monopoly I've heard of in a long time.