Percentage of Internet discussions which conclude with: "I see now that I was wrong, and you have won me over with your arguments. Thank you for the lively, spirited debate." : 0%
I believe the actual quote was: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google,"
Yeah, good point. I guess none of the managers or executives responsible for that really egregiously unethical shit they pulled, as recently as 2008, are still at Microsoft. Stand up guys like these, who have only just joined MS, are, as we type, turning Microsoft into the fine, ethical company it is today. Remember kids: "It's not unethical if Microsoft does it".
Wow, the average subscriber only have 300million isk? They must have no clue how to play the game. I have only been playing for 8 months now and I have well over 3-4 billion isk. I even make enough to pay for a second account with game money via the PLEX system (and am about to start doing the same for all my accounts once I get a little more established). In EVE, you need isk to make isk. Once you have a few billion, you can simply just invest that in the market and can very easily make 10-20% a week of your investment. I make about 100-200 million a week just spending 5-20 minutes a day. And if I actually play the game, I make about 60-80 million an hour.
Soooo.... US$30 == 350,000,00ISK
You take in 70,000,00ISK per hour (Median of your estimate).
Using exchange rate / acquirement rate, we arrive at your USD income.
350,000,000 / 70,000,000 = 5
Congratulations, you make US$5/hr.
Well done, genius. You indeed have expert mastery of basic mathematics. But your thinly-veiled insult only makes sense if he's busting his hump to acquire wealth, when in fact what's happening is that he's playing a game. And it sounds like his playing of the game is subsidising his playing of the game by paying toward his subscription. It's like poking fun at someone who enjoys painting and occasionally sells pieces so they can afford more paint. If your only goal is acquisition of wealth, then $5/hour sucks. If you can make $5/hour doing something in your spare time, doing something that you enjoy, doing something that not only would you do for free but that you would pay someone else to let you do, then in what way is that a bad thing? (Hint: In no way is it a bad thing)
He probably misread it as "0.02% of people in the states". 0.02% of Floridians is 3600 by the way. Which is still way too fucking high. Hell, 1 would be too many.
I'm more concerned by the fact that he didn't actually address your point. I.e. "If Jim-Bob wants to bugger his own sheep, why the hell shouldn't he be allowed to" and, "Why legislate against it?" There are laws, or should be, to stop animals being raped by people who should know better. If they don't, they should be punished. You may say "why waste time legislating against it?", well, why waste time writing any law? So that you can prosecute people who commit, what a vast majority agree should be, a crime, committed against another living being. So that you don't waste time in court and appeal, arguing about whether the sex-act caused torment/harm in order to prosecute based on some other animal cruelty law. If you think sex with animals isn't common enough to warrant legislation in its own right, Here, havesomeexamples. From a state that has put so much time and energy into preventing same-sex couples from getting married it's a bit fucking much for them to turn around and say that there are more pressing issues to deal with than making rape of an animal illegal. Granted, the state has a lot of problems, but stilll...
I think the real problem is how fucking stupid some of the people involved are:
Rich's legislation would target only those who derived or helped others derive "sexual gratification'' from an animal, specifying that conventional dog-judging contests and animal-husbandry practices are permissible.
That last provision tripped up Miami Democratic Sen. Larcenia Bullard.
"People are taking these animals as their husbands? What's husbandry?" she asked.
Some senators stifled their laughter as Sen. Charlie Dean, an Inverness Republican, explained that husbandry is raising and caring for animals.
"Those are sales lost as the person would normally use real money to buy the points to get the game."
Small point perhaps, but: maybe. This argument is used a lot when calculating the harm of music/film/video game piracy but it doesn't hold much water. If Pw|\|3rB01_13 is some 14 year old peon who gets $10 a month pocket money and $100 at Christmas, Microsoft might sell him one or two games a year. Or $100 worth of MS points, whatever. If he gets his hands on $1600 worth of free MS points and goes on a spending spree, Microsoft hasn't lost $1600 in sales because there was never any chance of him buying $1500 of those points and only some chance that he'd buy $100. This isn't a physical good that will run out either, so the "theft" of these MS points won't stop MS selling millions of other MS point codes.
I recall reading some years ago that it's preferable to watch television or listen to radio in the hour before sleep than to read a book or solve crossword puzzles, for similar reasons to those stated in the summary. It's a pity the poll didn't include more traditional "interactive" media as well.
Or the more obvious option: The mice are merely extensions into our universe of supremely intelligent pan-dimensional beings. They wanted to get loaded and trained grad students to put booze in their mazes. Simples.
This is it people! Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
I'm ready...ready for the big ride baby! Yeeeeeehaw!
Another "default search" tale: Angry Birds has the option to hit a button and search Bing for walkthroughs etc. At least it does on my Android version of the game.
And why say "Tea"? Earl Grey tea...as opposed to what? Earl Grey bread? Earl Grey cheese? Henry George Grey, The 3rd Earl Grey? The 24th century scares me...
The best thing to come out of that was the media reaction to it. The Daily Star couldn't make its mind up whether it was for or against paedophilia as shown here. The Daily Fail as ever was keen to contradict itself by publishing a shock reaction to the satire, while in the same issue publishing pictures of Princesses Beatrice & Eugenie (13 & 11) in their bikinis.
Quibbling over D&D alignments aside. Batman is the "good guy", if he bends the rules then the audience doesn't recoil in horror, they say "the law" is an ass, he's getting the "bad guy" where "the law" is impotent. Some of his actions may be morally ambiguous but they aren't anywhere near as hard-hitting as the worst choices in Bioshock. Breaking an (unambiguously bad) mob boss's legs doesn't compare to killing an innocent child. Not Mirandising a suspect and *shock* punching them in the face is pretty tame for a comic book hero.
For what Bioshock could be, look at the adaptation of Watchmen. Rorschach's actions are based on the idea of "good guys" and "bad guys". He's a "good guy" who kills "bad guys". Hard. In the film, he repeatedly plunges a meat cleaver into the skull of a child rapist/murderer. He pours boiling fat over a criminal's face. And yet when Adrian Veidt detonates bombs in major cities to unite the world against Dr. Manhattan, killing millions of innocents but preventing the deaths of billions more that would result from a nuclear tit-for-tat, Rorschach refuses to be complicit in the lie. "Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon." How could you adapt Watchmen without Rorschach, or without his unwavering objective morality?
Why shouldn't Bioshock also receive an adaptation that true(ish) to the source material? Why hamstring it by forcing a director to chase a PG-13 rating when the entire concept of the game is to throw the player into this fucked up setting, having to make shitty choices that are morally objectionable.
You don't have to, that's the point. There's a moral choice, kill the girls and be rewarded immediately with more "ADAM", or save the girls and be rewarded with less ADAM now, but a clean conscience and a happier ending/easier Big Bad fight at the climax when the little girls come to help you. The "base concept" is a little fucked up, not because it condones child murder, but because it explores/critiques moral objectivism by taking them all the way to some pretty out-there conclusions.
Errr..huh? You trolling? Batman is a story about an almost completely unambiguously good protagonist, fighting against an unambiguously bad antagonist. At the end of the story the protagonist triumphs. There is so much leeway in that cookie-cutter template of a movie that you could drive a fucking truck through the gap. The real work a director/writer has to do with that is to add to it until it *becomes* sinister and brooding, and suspenseful. Compare with Bioshock, where the story is already complex, suspenseful and has a fairly morally ambiguous set of characters. Depending on the choices made, the "most good" character is not the player character at all. Christopher Nolan did a good job of The Dark Knight (& Batman Begins) and I enjoyed them, but ultimately he was rebooting a franchise whose fans are so used to retcon, and liberal re-interpretations of characters in film that he would have had to work pretty hard to fuck up, especially with Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Ken Watanabe etc. etc.
The game Bioshock is a story about a man, the protagonist, who is programmed to kill a man, ostensibly the main antagonist, who has built a vast under-water utopian society that has failed for reasons that are gradually revealed. Not least of all the un-checked use of physical augmentation and EVE (drug) use that results in large swathes of the population going insane and laying waste to anything that stands between them and more ADAM. It involves the cynical mental conditioning of small girls to harvest the dead bodies of splicers (augmented with plasmids and users of EVE). These small girls are accompanied by large men who are mentally conditioned and surgically attached to diving suits with drills for hands who react violently toward anyone who approaches their Little Sister charges. The player is forced to make a moral(?) choice whether or not to harvest these little girls, killing them, in order to get the most ADAM from them, or to "save" them. In order to progress in the game, you have to make these choices. You also have to augment your body with plasmids, and inject yourself intravenously with EVE. Is the player character, Jack, unambiguously good? He starts off "good"/neutral, but quickly has to kill or be killed. He eventually kills Andrew Ryan but that is due to his conditioning. Whether or not he harvests Little Sisters is up to the player. Harvesting all is Really Evil. Harvesting none is "good". Portraying this moral choice is not as simple as telling Christian Bale to lower his voice and sound mean. Is Andrew Ryan unambiguously evil? Is Atlas/Fontaine? Is Tenenbaum? Is Suchong?
The stumbling blocks to getting a 13/PG/whatever rating are so integral to the plot that if you removed them, it would no longer be a "Bioshock" movie, it would be..I don't know..."The Manchurian Candidate...underwater". Remove the moral choice of whether or not to harvest the Little Sisters or fail to adequately show the consequences of harvesting the Little Sisters, not Bioshock. Remove the Little Sisters entirely, not Bioshock. Remove the Big Daddys, not Bioshock. Remove the injection of EVE (teh bad bad "drugs") into the protagonists arm, not Bioshock. Remove the bastard chimera splicers, not Bioshock.
There is a real danger that, while chasing a rating, so much of what made Bioshock "Bioshock", would be removed, and you'll be left with something that no fan of the game will ever want to see.
No, it started as a series of sketches performed by the Cambridge Footlights, then that was made into the radio drama. That was then novelised by an enterprising young pornographer of some disrepute. (This pulp novelisation was later serialised on television by Michael Winner and Ken Russell but almost no-one ever acknowledges this). Anyway, it was only made into a book when the original sketches' notes were found and interpreted by the Red Baron, (using Alan Turing and other captured code-breakers from Bletchley Park), who believed them to be the D-Day invasion plans. Turing's recollections of this experience to Tolkien then went on to form the basis for the outline of the canonical version of the LotR books. They languished in obscurity for 50 years before eventually, a young man named Peter Jackson stumbled upon a copy of them in his grand-father's attic while investigating a sort of a musty, damp smell. But don't you try and tell that to the wikipedia editors. Bastards.
You're right, they're thinking, "only kids play video games, so why is this movie going to be rated R", but they're also looking at statistics saying "12-18 year olds go see more movies than 35 year olds" and they're thinking, why shouldn't we try to appeal to as many potential customers as possible. Which is wrong, but that's how it works.
They are also considering the fact that there is some non-zero percentage of those people who bought the game but who buy and play games in preference to and in stead of going to the movies. Do a straw poll of everyone you know who played Doom/Doom 3 and see how many went to see the Doom movie in theatres. Now what about Resident Evil, or Silent Hill or Mortal Kombat or Super Mario Bros. or House Of The Dead or Tomb Raider?
It's all wrong and it all sucks but "The Suits" don't want to gamble on "the next Exorcist". They want something that they can take to the bank.
OK, having now read the fine article, the budget that the studio asked to be cut, was $160m, but the point stands.1,600,000 donating $100 or 800,000 donating $200.
(Incidentally, $10 is silly money because it would take 16 million people to get the movie made, which is doubtful, and to get people to donate more than that, they need more inducement than "you can have a free copy of the movie". )
Slashdot Mirror
"Profanity is the crutch of the ignorant, but every now and again you have to talk to one of those ignorant motherfuckers."
I was more concerned by your reference to "blocked pilot tubes". OUCH! ;)
Did you just discover your parents' computer?
Percentage of Internet discussions which conclude with:
"I see now that I was wrong, and you have won me over with your arguments. Thank you for the lively, spirited debate." : 0%
I believe the actual quote was: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google,"
Yeah, good point. I guess none of the managers or executives responsible for that really egregiously unethical shit they pulled, as recently as 2008, are still at Microsoft. Stand up guys like these, who have only just joined MS, are, as we type, turning Microsoft into the fine, ethical company it is today. Remember kids: "It's not unethical if Microsoft does it".
Wow, the average subscriber only have 300million isk? They must have no clue how to play the game. I have only been playing for 8 months now and I have well over 3-4 billion isk. I even make enough to pay for a second account with game money via the PLEX system (and am about to start doing the same for all my accounts once I get a little more established). In EVE, you need isk to make isk. Once you have a few billion, you can simply just invest that in the market and can very easily make 10-20% a week of your investment. I make about 100-200 million a week just spending 5-20 minutes a day. And if I actually play the game, I make about 60-80 million an hour.
Soooo.... US$30 == 350,000,00ISK You take in 70,000,00ISK per hour (Median of your estimate).
Using exchange rate / acquirement rate, we arrive at your USD income. 350,000,000 / 70,000,000 = 5
Congratulations, you make US$5/hr.
Well done, genius. You indeed have expert mastery of basic mathematics. But your thinly-veiled insult only makes sense if he's busting his hump to acquire wealth, when in fact what's happening is that he's playing a game. And it sounds like his playing of the game is subsidising his playing of the game by paying toward his subscription. It's like poking fun at someone who enjoys painting and occasionally sells pieces so they can afford more paint. If your only goal is acquisition of wealth, then $5/hour sucks. If you can make $5/hour doing something in your spare time, doing something that you enjoy, doing something that not only would you do for free but that you would pay someone else to let you do, then in what way is that a bad thing? (Hint: In no way is it a bad thing)
I'm more concerned by the fact that he didn't actually address your point. I.e. "If Jim-Bob wants to bugger his own sheep, why the hell shouldn't he be allowed to" and, "Why legislate against it?" There are laws, or should be, to stop animals being raped by people who should know better. If they don't, they should be punished. You may say "why waste time legislating against it?", well, why waste time writing any law? So that you can prosecute people who commit, what a vast majority agree should be, a crime, committed against another living being. So that you don't waste time in court and appeal, arguing about whether the sex-act caused torment/harm in order to prosecute based on some other animal cruelty law. If you think sex with animals isn't common enough to warrant legislation in its own right, Here, have some examples. From a state that has put so much time and energy into preventing same-sex couples from getting married it's a bit fucking much for them to turn around and say that there are more pressing issues to deal with than making rape of an animal illegal. Granted, the state has a lot of problems, but stilll...
I think the real problem is how fucking stupid some of the people involved are:
Rich's legislation would target only those who derived or helped others derive "sexual gratification'' from an animal, specifying that conventional dog-judging contests and animal-husbandry practices are permissible.
That last provision tripped up Miami Democratic Sen. Larcenia Bullard.
"People are taking these animals as their husbands? What's husbandry?" she asked.
Some senators stifled their laughter as Sen. Charlie Dean, an Inverness Republican, explained that husbandry is raising and caring for animals.
Bullard didn't get it.
I'd better go see a doctor.
Or a veterinarian.
Or a waxer.
Small point perhaps, but: maybe. This argument is used a lot when calculating the harm of music/film/video game piracy but it doesn't hold much water. If Pw|\|3rB01_13 is some 14 year old peon who gets $10 a month pocket money and $100 at Christmas, Microsoft might sell him one or two games a year. Or $100 worth of MS points, whatever. If he gets his hands on $1600 worth of free MS points and goes on a spending spree, Microsoft hasn't lost $1600 in sales because there was never any chance of him buying $1500 of those points and only some chance that he'd buy $100. This isn't a physical good that will run out either, so the "theft" of these MS points won't stop MS selling millions of other MS point codes.
Firstly, welcome to The Internet. Secondly, I believe elrous0 was using a rhetorical device, common in English, called "Hyperbole"
I recall reading some years ago that it's preferable to watch television or listen to radio in the hour before sleep than to read a book or solve crossword puzzles, for similar reasons to those stated in the summary. It's a pity the poll didn't include more traditional "interactive" media as well.
Or the more obvious option: The mice are merely extensions into our universe of supremely intelligent pan-dimensional beings. They wanted to get loaded and trained grad students to put booze in their mazes. Simples.
This is it people! Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
I'm ready...ready for the big ride baby! Yeeeeeehaw!
Another "default search" tale: Angry Birds has the option to hit a button and search Bing for walkthroughs etc. At least it does on my Android version of the game.
And tell us, do the rest of your acquaintances mind that you keep calling them Flo? Or do they not use oxygen? :-o
And why say "Tea"? Earl Grey tea...as opposed to what? Earl Grey bread? Earl Grey cheese? Henry George Grey, The 3rd Earl Grey? The 24th century scares me...
The best thing to come out of that was the media reaction to it. The Daily Star couldn't make its mind up whether it was for or against paedophilia as shown here. The Daily Fail as ever was keen to contradict itself by publishing a shock reaction to the satire, while in the same issue publishing pictures of Princesses Beatrice & Eugenie (13 & 11) in their bikinis.
Source: The Observer.
tl;dr watch this.
I'm glad I finished my coffee before I read that.
Quibbling over D&D alignments aside. Batman is the "good guy", if he bends the rules then the audience doesn't recoil in horror, they say "the law" is an ass, he's getting the "bad guy" where "the law" is impotent. Some of his actions may be morally ambiguous but they aren't anywhere near as hard-hitting as the worst choices in Bioshock. Breaking an (unambiguously bad) mob boss's legs doesn't compare to killing an innocent child. Not Mirandising a suspect and *shock* punching them in the face is pretty tame for a comic book hero.
For what Bioshock could be, look at the adaptation of Watchmen. Rorschach's actions are based on the idea of "good guys" and "bad guys". He's a "good guy" who kills "bad guys". Hard. In the film, he repeatedly plunges a meat cleaver into the skull of a child rapist/murderer. He pours boiling fat over a criminal's face. And yet when Adrian Veidt detonates bombs in major cities to unite the world against Dr. Manhattan, killing millions of innocents but preventing the deaths of billions more that would result from a nuclear tit-for-tat, Rorschach refuses to be complicit in the lie. "Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon." How could you adapt Watchmen without Rorschach, or without his unwavering objective morality?
Why shouldn't Bioshock also receive an adaptation that true(ish) to the source material? Why hamstring it by forcing a director to chase a PG-13 rating when the entire concept of the game is to throw the player into this fucked up setting, having to make shitty choices that are morally objectionable.
You don't have to, that's the point. There's a moral choice, kill the girls and be rewarded immediately with more "ADAM", or save the girls and be rewarded with less ADAM now, but a clean conscience and a happier ending/easier Big Bad fight at the climax when the little girls come to help you. The "base concept" is a little fucked up, not because it condones child murder, but because it explores/critiques moral objectivism by taking them all the way to some pretty out-there conclusions.
Errr..huh? You trolling? Batman is a story about an almost completely unambiguously good protagonist, fighting against an unambiguously bad antagonist. At the end of the story the protagonist triumphs. There is so much leeway in that cookie-cutter template of a movie that you could drive a fucking truck through the gap. The real work a director/writer has to do with that is to add to it until it *becomes* sinister and brooding, and suspenseful. Compare with Bioshock, where the story is already complex, suspenseful and has a fairly morally ambiguous set of characters. Depending on the choices made, the "most good" character is not the player character at all. Christopher Nolan did a good job of The Dark Knight (& Batman Begins) and I enjoyed them, but ultimately he was rebooting a franchise whose fans are so used to retcon, and liberal re-interpretations of characters in film that he would have had to work pretty hard to fuck up, especially with Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Ken Watanabe etc. etc.
The game Bioshock is a story about a man, the protagonist, who is programmed to kill a man, ostensibly the main antagonist, who has built a vast under-water utopian society that has failed for reasons that are gradually revealed. Not least of all the un-checked use of physical augmentation and EVE (drug) use that results in large swathes of the population going insane and laying waste to anything that stands between them and more ADAM. It involves the cynical mental conditioning of small girls to harvest the dead bodies of splicers (augmented with plasmids and users of EVE). These small girls are accompanied by large men who are mentally conditioned and surgically attached to diving suits with drills for hands who react violently toward anyone who approaches their Little Sister charges. The player is forced to make a moral(?) choice whether or not to harvest these little girls, killing them, in order to get the most ADAM from them, or to "save" them. In order to progress in the game, you have to make these choices. You also have to augment your body with plasmids, and inject yourself intravenously with EVE. Is the player character, Jack, unambiguously good? He starts off "good"/neutral, but quickly has to kill or be killed. He eventually kills Andrew Ryan but that is due to his conditioning. Whether or not he harvests Little Sisters is up to the player. Harvesting all is Really Evil. Harvesting none is "good". Portraying this moral choice is not as simple as telling Christian Bale to lower his voice and sound mean. Is Andrew Ryan unambiguously evil? Is Atlas/Fontaine? Is Tenenbaum? Is Suchong?
The stumbling blocks to getting a 13/PG/whatever rating are so integral to the plot that if you removed them, it would no longer be a "Bioshock" movie, it would be..I don't know..."The Manchurian Candidate...underwater". Remove the moral choice of whether or not to harvest the Little Sisters or fail to adequately show the consequences of harvesting the Little Sisters, not Bioshock. Remove the Little Sisters entirely, not Bioshock. Remove the Big Daddys, not Bioshock. Remove the injection of EVE (teh bad bad "drugs") into the protagonists arm, not Bioshock. Remove the bastard chimera splicers, not Bioshock.
There is a real danger that, while chasing a rating, so much of what made Bioshock "Bioshock", would be removed, and you'll be left with something that no fan of the game will ever want to see.
No, it started as a series of sketches performed by the Cambridge Footlights, then that was made into the radio drama. That was then novelised by an enterprising young pornographer of some disrepute. (This pulp novelisation was later serialised on television by Michael Winner and Ken Russell but almost no-one ever acknowledges this). Anyway, it was only made into a book when the original sketches' notes were found and interpreted by the Red Baron, (using Alan Turing and other captured code-breakers from Bletchley Park), who believed them to be the D-Day invasion plans. Turing's recollections of this experience to Tolkien then went on to form the basis for the outline of the canonical version of the LotR books. They languished in obscurity for 50 years before eventually, a young man named Peter Jackson stumbled upon a copy of them in his grand-father's attic while investigating a sort of a musty, damp smell. But don't you try and tell that to the wikipedia editors. Bastards.
You're right, they're thinking, "only kids play video games, so why is this movie going to be rated R", but they're also looking at statistics saying "12-18 year olds go see more movies than 35 year olds" and they're thinking, why shouldn't we try to appeal to as many potential customers as possible. Which is wrong, but that's how it works.
They are also considering the fact that there is some non-zero percentage of those people who bought the game but who buy and play games in preference to and in stead of going to the movies. Do a straw poll of everyone you know who played Doom/Doom 3 and see how many went to see the Doom movie in theatres. Now what about Resident Evil, or Silent Hill or Mortal Kombat or Super Mario Bros. or House Of The Dead or Tomb Raider?
It's all wrong and it all sucks but "The Suits" don't want to gamble on "the next Exorcist". They want something that they can take to the bank.
OK, having now read the fine article, the budget that the studio asked to be cut, was $160m, but the point stands.1,600,000 donating $100 or 800,000 donating $200.
(Incidentally, $10 is silly money because it would take 16 million people to get the movie made, which is doubtful, and to get people to donate more than that, they need more inducement than "you can have a free copy of the movie". )