Lack of maintenance doesn't really explain the linguistic shift scenarios such as the Jaffa and Goa'uld randomly switching between Goa'uld and "Ancientese." Surely they've all traveled through at least one gate with a working mechanism and should be fully fluent in "Ancientese." I suppose a conscious choice could be made to use one language over another, but then there's no mention of that whatsoever. On top of that, never mentioning this "Ancientese" mechanism at all because it's "taken for granted" is not acceptable. Someone would most certainly mention this. There are plenty of moments in season 1 of SG1 or the pilot where it surely would have been mentioned by at least Daniel if this were the case.
Also, if the gate teaches everyone the Ancients' language, why is the Ancient language then constantly depicted as a distinctly separate language that nobody but Daniel (and a few others) can understand? Why would the Ancients' gate mechanism teach every gate traveller a distinctly different language than the one they used for everything else? See? There are just too many holes. Don't get me wrong, I wish it could work. I love the show. Maybe if some day there's an episode where they try to make us swallow something to the effect of this I might, maybe buy it if it's thought through well enough and covers up most of the holes. Sort of like the Klingon forehead problem on Star Trek and Enterprise's hysterical solution in season 4.
The blu-ray content on the original disk is compressed though. So when you transcode blu-ray to x.264, you're compressing a compression. However, yes, I tend to agree with you that any 9gb x.264 2 hour film is going to look worse than its equivalent 50gb blu-ray counterpart, even if the x.264 was transcoded from the original source as well.
The earliest Stargate episodes, including the original movie, required having Daniel Jackson as the interpreter. But that got cumbersome very fast, and it's not very interesting to have Dances With Wolves style dialogue all the time.
That's a very, very poor excuse.
They could have come up with a perfectly adequate rationalization in season one of SG1 had they just taken the time to think of one and then stick to its implications. Now it's impossible to retroactively think of an adequate rationalization without some facet of the canon violating it.
I always marvel at how all planets appear to have the exact same atmospheric pressure all over the galaxy...
That's not really a problem. Stargates were placed exclusively on Earth-like planets intentionally by the Ancients.
It's every bit as surprising as how well most aliens speak English.
That's a very serious, show stopping problem that very few people seem to notice or care about. It's also a problem other science fiction shows lack, or solve adequately. Congratulations, in a thread with over 500 comments, you were the first and only person to mention it (so far).:(
Ultima Online (at least on the free shard UOGamers) doesn't require any kind of interaction with other players on any meaningful level. I quite commonly solo my way through PVM as well as PVP in the dueling system without having to talk to anybody or organize people like other more guild-centric MMORPGs require. The most I ever typically interact with people is the occasional chat with someone I encounter or buying/selling stuff.
Honestly I don't really know anyone that doesn't accept evolution by natural selection. Who are they talking to?!
Try moving to the midwest, son. I lived in Kansas for five years and boy I'll tell ya I met more than a few folks who don't accept it. I once had a conversation with somebody who literally believed the Earth was only six thousand years old. When I brought up that carbon dating of fossilized dinosaurs revealed their age to be millions of years old and radiometric dating of the oldest rocks on Earth revealed their age to be in the billions of years old, this person replied with, "God creates false readings to test our faith." There's really no winning an argument like that.
Hey, don't single out Google! When I worked at Yahoo! in 2006 I noticed they did the whole goat-mowing thing in the summer months as well. I imagine it's a fairly common practice here in the valley.
No, Deus Ex Machina requires the resolution to drop in that moment, without story support. God suddenly appears, and fixes things.
That's not at all what BSG did. BSG pre-seeded their resolutions a year or more in advance. Sure, they were miracles, but they were miracles we'd been told a year ago would happen, all the finale did was show us exactly how they happened.
You can not like the way it was resolved, but that doesn't mean it was Deus Ex Machina.
You're right, there has been religion in the show for a long time. Since day one even. But it's always been presented in a deliberately ambiguous way so that it could be interpreted either scientifically and rationally or spiritually by the audience or the characters.
But this time, there is absolutely no rational or scientific explanation for the events of the show other than a supernatural god or gods and angels. The show crossed a line here it's never crossed before.
The aesthetic of the narrative up until this point promised us we'd have rational explanations for Kara and Baltar's head people, but we didn't get it because the writers wrote themselves into a corner and literally had no other explanation.
So the suddenness component you require is the unexpected lack of an explanation alternative to god, something the show has never done before. There's always been an alternative possible explanation since the day Roslin gave the order to destroy the Olympic Carrier.
You can choose to like the way it was resolved, but let's be honest here. It absolutely was deus ex machina.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO SHOUT, WE CAN HEAR YOU JUST FINE!:(
Who cares about the philosophical question of whether or not "professional" music (whatever that is) is such a life necessity that everyone should be taxed to subsidize it?
The bottom line here is the subsidization is fundamentally untenable because it's too inefficient and fraud prone. As for the three strikes alternative, that's just practically unenforceable.
So we're left with your original conclusion, but with more pragmatic reasoning. The content industry is going to have to stop clamoring "you can't compete with free" and start doing just that.
Long answer: the headline got it right when it said from the depends-how-the-pirate-bay-trial-goes-right dept.
For better or worse, rampant, unmitigated, unstoppable noncommercial copyright infringement committed by ordinary consumers is here to stay and it's getting more and more popular every year. All digital information with any kind of a price tag costs too much when the competition be it legal or not offers it for free.
That is an economic reality, and no amount of moralizing or legislating is going to make it go away. It's time for us to face this already.
I do live in California and took a moment to write her a short, thoughtful note that her actions have alarmed those of her constituency that are proponents of net neutrality. I also provided her with a few relevant links. Hopefully she will take our concerns to heart.
The latest in a string of bad lawmaking in an attempt to solve the piracy problem with a bad solution.
Let's just take a step back and look at the big picture for a moment. Piracy is only a problem because some (not all!) information and media businesses depend on a consumer cost downloads business model, which is marginalized by mass consumer circumvention of piracy.
Our collective response (or rather the collective response of our lawmakers) has been to increase penalties and (attempt to) increase control and regulation of the internet. This, however, always fails to achieve the desired effect. The endgame to this trend is complete and total regulation of the internet.
What does that mean? The only way to logistically enforce noncommercial copyright infringement committed by ordinary internet users is to monitor absolutely everything and cripple everyone's ability to make encrypted transmissions. The very openness of the internet has to be totally and utterly obliterated before true enforcement of antipiracy laws can occur.
I submit that since this is an unattainable goal, that we should just say screw is and legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. An unenforceable law doesn't belong on the books. As soon as lawmakers and our economy stop subsidizing clearly obsolete business models, then we can truly move on and realize the full potential of what the internet offers our society: limitless copying of information at negligible costs to everyone. A truly amazing ability.
The only alternative is to destroy the openness of the internet, which won't happen, or the slow, painful, inevitable market failure of businesses which depend on consumer cost downloads. For better or worse, they'll die at the hands of piracy if they don't find a business model that's actually enforceable.
And for those of you who might counter with an argument about how prices are decided by what the market is willing to pay, I respectfully ask you to again look at the bigger picture. What the market is willing top pay is fluid and is on a downward trend. The mp3 is 99 cents now. In ten years it may be 50 cents. In twenty it may be 10 cents. In thirty it may be less than ten cents. In forty it may be fractions of a cent. In fifty it may be free.
Actual time lines may very, but the end will be the same, a race to the bottom. If consumers don't get what they want from the market, they will resort to piracy. Businesses impacted today and in the future will either have to adapt or die. Draconian laws will not save them, nor will misguided moralizing. It's not our moral responsibility to subsidize their obsolescence, nor is it our duty to invent replacement business models for them.
Kate is the only reason I even bothered to try out KDE on Windows. However, Kate is useless on Windows without the built-in SFTP feature working so I can edit remote files. I've been waiting for them to fix this on the Windows port for ages. I just tried out the latest release and it's still broken. I guess I'll keep waiting!
[Y]ou should not have to compete against your own product being offered for free.
Should and shouldn't plays no part in this. The internet and internet piracy are never going away. Thus, you will always have to compete with piracy whether or not you consider it moral. People will always be doing it. On top of that, more and more people do it every year. This is an economic reality. Smart businesses compete against economic realities instead of bitching about them.
[T]here's no way for a game developer to compete with free[.]
This is the fallacy in your and cliffski's argument. The fact is, there are any number of business models capable of subsidizing development which would effectively allow the product to be offered to consumers for free while still paying developers a living wage.
And don't forget, piracy shows no signs of slowing down. So it follows that one day, people who run businesses like cliffski's will suffer so many losses to piracy that they'll simply go out of business. But as I said, someone with a better business model will take his place.
That's our free market doing exactly what it was designed for. I know, it's hard to deal with. But life is hard. Tough. Deal with it.
I hope you realize your belligerence in trying to enforce your copyright is, for better or worse, only going to result in more people circumventing it. With the internet, it's impossible to stop noncommercial copyright infringement. Look at the RIAA's miserable litigation campaign.
You're going to have to learn to compete with free instead of fight it. Because you won't win. And if that means you won't make games anymore, then so be it. Somebody more willing to work with the economic realities of the internet will take your place while you scream "get off my lawn!" til you turn blue.
Okay, firstly, the latter is not what you actually said. Second, even if it was, it still wouldn't be reasonable because it implies ad hominem. An "idiotic" argument could be fallacious or flawed in some way, but there is a burden of proof on you to specify what fallacy or flaw there is. You can't just call me an idiot, or even my argument idiotic and call it good.
That isn't the point. The article contends that the iPhone developer program "democratizes" game development. Closed platforms are not democratic in nature. The size of the fee or how quickly a developer could possibly make it back is irrelevant.
So running all the datacenters and having all the staff and paying all the electricity bills... all "costs nothing"?
Red herring. An alternative business model can more than adequately subsidize such costs. Being efficient doesn't hurt either, e.g. using Bit Torrent. I wrote in more detail regarding alternative business models here.
That's not correct. The price of anything is determined by the amount the buyer is willing to pay.
Yes it can, with a game that only costs $5 most people will pay just because its more convenient than pirating the game. Why spend time cracking a phone and risk getting a virus when it only saves you a few bucks.
The inconvenience of putting pirated apps on the iPhone will not always be so. In all likelihood, Apple will be forced to open their platform due to competition and general outrage over it being closed, in which case pirating apps and putting them on your phone will become far less inconvenient.
In the broader scope, pirating stuff in general is getting easier and easier and will continue to do so until anyone can do it.
When given the option I prefer to pay a dollar or two if it keeps me from having to watch advertisements.
You won't be given that option though. Because if you were, you wouldn't have to pay the dollar. You could just pirate the version of the app without ads.
You're ignoring the physical resources expended in the production of the McDonalds hamburger which have a much higher cost of reproduction than digital information.
As for "how we value products" you're making a pretty standard "people charge what the market is willing to pay" argument and I think you'll find that can change very quickly. Many, many people no longer believe mp3s are worth even $1, so they turn to p2p.
The same is happening with all forms of digital downloads. Everything from books, to software, to films. And as p2p gets easier and easier and people slowly begin to realize p2p is not morally wrong, what monetary value people place on digital downloads will, for better or worse, slowly crash to zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Lack of maintenance doesn't really explain the linguistic shift scenarios such as the Jaffa and Goa'uld randomly switching between Goa'uld and "Ancientese." Surely they've all traveled through at least one gate with a working mechanism and should be fully fluent in "Ancientese." I suppose a conscious choice could be made to use one language over another, but then there's no mention of that whatsoever. On top of that, never mentioning this "Ancientese" mechanism at all because it's "taken for granted" is not acceptable. Someone would most certainly mention this. There are plenty of moments in season 1 of SG1 or the pilot where it surely would have been mentioned by at least Daniel if this were the case.
Also, if the gate teaches everyone the Ancients' language, why is the Ancient language then constantly depicted as a distinctly separate language that nobody but Daniel (and a few others) can understand? Why would the Ancients' gate mechanism teach every gate traveller a distinctly different language than the one they used for everything else? See? There are just too many holes. Don't get me wrong, I wish it could work. I love the show. Maybe if some day there's an episode where they try to make us swallow something to the effect of this I might, maybe buy it if it's thought through well enough and covers up most of the holes. Sort of like the Klingon forehead problem on Star Trek and Enterprise's hysterical solution in season 4.
The blu-ray content on the original disk is compressed though. So when you transcode blu-ray to x.264, you're compressing a compression. However, yes, I tend to agree with you that any 9gb x.264 2 hour film is going to look worse than its equivalent 50gb blu-ray counterpart, even if the x.264 was transcoded from the original source as well.
That's a very, very poor excuse.
They could have come up with a perfectly adequate rationalization in season one of SG1 had they just taken the time to think of one and then stick to its implications. Now it's impossible to retroactively think of an adequate rationalization without some facet of the canon violating it.
Lazy writing, plain and simple.
That's not really a problem. Stargates were placed exclusively on Earth-like planets intentionally by the Ancients.
That's a very serious, show stopping problem that very few people seem to notice or care about. It's also a problem other science fiction shows lack, or solve adequately. Congratulations, in a thread with over 500 comments, you were the first and only person to mention it (so far). :(
Ultima Online (at least on the free shard UOGamers) doesn't require any kind of interaction with other players on any meaningful level. I quite commonly solo my way through PVM as well as PVP in the dueling system without having to talk to anybody or organize people like other more guild-centric MMORPGs require. The most I ever typically interact with people is the occasional chat with someone I encounter or buying/selling stuff.
Try it out. http://uogamers.com/
Try moving to the midwest, son. I lived in Kansas for five years and boy I'll tell ya I met more than a few folks who don't accept it. I once had a conversation with somebody who literally believed the Earth was only six thousand years old. When I brought up that carbon dating of fossilized dinosaurs revealed their age to be millions of years old and radiometric dating of the oldest rocks on Earth revealed their age to be in the billions of years old, this person replied with, "God creates false readings to test our faith." There's really no winning an argument like that.
I think it has more to do with Libertarian political beliefs not being popular on this site at times.
Hey, don't single out Google! When I worked at Yahoo! in 2006 I noticed they did the whole goat-mowing thing in the summer months as well. I imagine it's a fairly common practice here in the valley.
You're right, there has been religion in the show for a long time. Since day one even. But it's always been presented in a deliberately ambiguous way so that it could be interpreted either scientifically and rationally or spiritually by the audience or the characters.
But this time, there is absolutely no rational or scientific explanation for the events of the show other than a supernatural god or gods and angels. The show crossed a line here it's never crossed before.
The aesthetic of the narrative up until this point promised us we'd have rational explanations for Kara and Baltar's head people, but we didn't get it because the writers wrote themselves into a corner and literally had no other explanation.
So the suddenness component you require is the unexpected lack of an explanation alternative to god, something the show has never done before. There's always been an alternative possible explanation since the day Roslin gave the order to destroy the Olympic Carrier.
You can choose to like the way it was resolved, but let's be honest here. It absolutely was deus ex machina.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO SHOUT, WE CAN HEAR YOU JUST FINE! :(
Who cares about the philosophical question of whether or not "professional" music (whatever that is) is such a life necessity that everyone should be taxed to subsidize it?
The bottom line here is the subsidization is fundamentally untenable because it's too inefficient and fraud prone. As for the three strikes alternative, that's just practically unenforceable.
So we're left with your original conclusion, but with more pragmatic reasoning. The content industry is going to have to stop clamoring "you can't compete with free" and start doing just that.
Ah the irony. ;)
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: the headline got it right when it said from the depends-how-the-pirate-bay-trial-goes-right dept.
For better or worse, rampant, unmitigated, unstoppable noncommercial copyright infringement committed by ordinary consumers is here to stay and it's getting more and more popular every year. All digital information with any kind of a price tag costs too much when the competition be it legal or not offers it for free.
That is an economic reality, and no amount of moralizing or legislating is going to make it go away. It's time for us to face this already.
I do live in California and took a moment to write her a short, thoughtful note that her actions have alarmed those of her constituency that are proponents of net neutrality. I also provided her with a few relevant links. Hopefully she will take our concerns to heart.
The latest in a string of bad lawmaking in an attempt to solve the piracy problem with a bad solution.
Let's just take a step back and look at the big picture for a moment. Piracy is only a problem because some (not all!) information and media businesses depend on a consumer cost downloads business model, which is marginalized by mass consumer circumvention of piracy.
Our collective response (or rather the collective response of our lawmakers) has been to increase penalties and (attempt to) increase control and regulation of the internet. This, however, always fails to achieve the desired effect. The endgame to this trend is complete and total regulation of the internet.
What does that mean? The only way to logistically enforce noncommercial copyright infringement committed by ordinary internet users is to monitor absolutely everything and cripple everyone's ability to make encrypted transmissions. The very openness of the internet has to be totally and utterly obliterated before true enforcement of antipiracy laws can occur.
I submit that since this is an unattainable goal, that we should just say screw is and legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. An unenforceable law doesn't belong on the books. As soon as lawmakers and our economy stop subsidizing clearly obsolete business models, then we can truly move on and realize the full potential of what the internet offers our society: limitless copying of information at negligible costs to everyone. A truly amazing ability.
The only alternative is to destroy the openness of the internet, which won't happen, or the slow, painful, inevitable market failure of businesses which depend on consumer cost downloads. For better or worse, they'll die at the hands of piracy if they don't find a business model that's actually enforceable.
And for those of you who might counter with an argument about how prices are decided by what the market is willing to pay, I respectfully ask you to again look at the bigger picture. What the market is willing top pay is fluid and is on a downward trend. The mp3 is 99 cents now. In ten years it may be 50 cents. In twenty it may be 10 cents. In thirty it may be less than ten cents. In forty it may be fractions of a cent. In fifty it may be free.
Actual time lines may very, but the end will be the same, a race to the bottom. If consumers don't get what they want from the market, they will resort to piracy. Businesses impacted today and in the future will either have to adapt or die. Draconian laws will not save them, nor will misguided moralizing. It's not our moral responsibility to subsidize their obsolescence, nor is it our duty to invent replacement business models for them.
Kate is the only reason I even bothered to try out KDE on Windows. However, Kate is useless on Windows without the built-in SFTP feature working so I can edit remote files. I've been waiting for them to fix this on the Windows port for ages. I just tried out the latest release and it's still broken. I guess I'll keep waiting!
Should and shouldn't plays no part in this. The internet and internet piracy are never going away. Thus, you will always have to compete with piracy whether or not you consider it moral. People will always be doing it. On top of that, more and more people do it every year. This is an economic reality. Smart businesses compete against economic realities instead of bitching about them.
This is the fallacy in your and cliffski's argument. The fact is, there are any number of business models capable of subsidizing development which would effectively allow the product to be offered to consumers for free while still paying developers a living wage.
And don't forget, piracy shows no signs of slowing down. So it follows that one day, people who run businesses like cliffski's will suffer so many losses to piracy that they'll simply go out of business. But as I said, someone with a better business model will take his place.
That's our free market doing exactly what it was designed for. I know, it's hard to deal with. But life is hard. Tough. Deal with it.
I hope you realize your belligerence in trying to enforce your copyright is, for better or worse, only going to result in more people circumventing it. With the internet, it's impossible to stop noncommercial copyright infringement. Look at the RIAA's miserable litigation campaign.
You're going to have to learn to compete with free instead of fight it. Because you won't win. And if that means you won't make games anymore, then so be it. Somebody more willing to work with the economic realities of the internet will take your place while you scream "get off my lawn!" til you turn blue.
Okay, firstly, the latter is not what you actually said. Second, even if it was, it still wouldn't be reasonable because it implies ad hominem. An "idiotic" argument could be fallacious or flawed in some way, but there is a burden of proof on you to specify what fallacy or flaw there is. You can't just call me an idiot, or even my argument idiotic and call it good.
That isn't the point. The article contends that the iPhone developer program "democratizes" game development. Closed platforms are not democratic in nature. The size of the fee or how quickly a developer could possibly make it back is irrelevant.
That argument is addressed here.
That argument is addressed here.
Red herring. An alternative business model can more than adequately subsidize such costs. Being efficient doesn't hurt either, e.g. using Bit Torrent. I wrote in more detail regarding alternative business models here.
That argument is addressed here.
The inconvenience of putting pirated apps on the iPhone will not always be so. In all likelihood, Apple will be forced to open their platform due to competition and general outrage over it being closed, in which case pirating apps and putting them on your phone will become far less inconvenient.
In the broader scope, pirating stuff in general is getting easier and easier and will continue to do so until anyone can do it.
You won't be given that option though. Because if you were, you wouldn't have to pay the dollar. You could just pirate the version of the app without ads.
I have not forgotten, I have deliberately ignored it as it isn't relevant. I've covered that argument here.
You're ignoring the physical resources expended in the production of the McDonalds hamburger which have a much higher cost of reproduction than digital information.
As for "how we value products" you're making a pretty standard "people charge what the market is willing to pay" argument and I think you'll find that can change very quickly. Many, many people no longer believe mp3s are worth even $1, so they turn to p2p.
The same is happening with all forms of digital downloads. Everything from books, to software, to films. And as p2p gets easier and easier and people slowly begin to realize p2p is not morally wrong, what monetary value people place on digital downloads will, for better or worse, slowly crash to zero.
A negligible cost.
Cheaper to do it yourself then let Apple take 30%.
You still have to do that on the App Store. Sure, people will stumble on your app, but the real top contenders have external marketing.
You haven't substantiated that.
That argument is addressed here.