"I met a goblin and I killed it. Then I met an orc and I killed it. Then I saw a troll and I ran away. My dog got killed."
If that's a story, then there's no game that doesn't have a story. Maybe nearly dying and escaping from a deadly situation is dramatic enough for a story, but the same could be said about any game where you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Agreed. The TOS is pretty darn clear on this and as such there is no reason to complain, they are fully in their rights to do this.
In their full rights to do what exactly? Ban users? Sure. But threatening/faking DMCA takedowns? Not really. Of course they're in their full rights to ask people nicely not to do this, but it's too late. Cat's out of the bag.
Roguelikes don't have anywhere near enough roleplaying (none whatsoever, generally) to be RPGs. They're basically simple hack & slash games, but what makes them interesting is the tactical problem solving. You encounter a monster, swarm of monsters or other situation that's just too hard to overcome by your usual methods, so you need to think of something clever. You need to think, and you need time to think (which you don't have in an action game).
This is something all true roguelikes (nethack, moria, angband, adom) have in common. They are incredibly challenging and almost impossible to win. (I only managed to finish adom once through outrageous save scumming.) They require thinking and creativity. They need to be turn based and have a ridiculous number of options. They have to be fucking hard. It's about overcoming the challenges, not about experiencing some story (because there is none).
I don't restrict myself to reading only PS3 threads. On almost every single Microsoft-related thread, Microsoft gets its fair share of criticism (which is quite a lot). I suspect your view is somewhat biased.
Of course they wouldn't admit defeat. They're not looking for truth, they're looking for support for their beliefs. Any facts that don't support them will be ignored and declared irrelevant. It's a very bad but surprisingly popular way to do "science".
Becoming insensitive to something doesn't automatically imply you lose all morals concerning it. It just means you're not shocked when somebody does get stabbed. You might be less disgusted by the idea of stabbing someone, but you still need the right lack of morals or conscience to actually do it.
Evangelizing Microsoft? On what alternate slashdot have you been hanging out? During Slashdot's existence, Microsoft has received far more hate than all other companies put together. If it's receiving less hate now than in previous years, that's because Microsoft isn't doing quite as dirty deals as it used to, and occasionally seems to be bettering itself. At least in comparison to where companies like Oracle, Sony and Apple are heading.
I agree with you that the military-industrial complex, big pharma and big oil are generally more evil than most computer-related companies, but they're generally more hidden, and things in those industries don't change anywhere near as fast as in software. And the weird stuff that software major companies do, does tend to have a very real effect on the lives of programmers.
In any case, not every for-profit corp really does evil. Google is a big name that's struggling against it, and there are many smaller companies that do the same. But it is true that our economic system practically forces them to be evil. Making less profit seems to be punished a lot worse than doing massive damage to society. Maybe we should fix that.
When you start attributing qualities like "evil" and "good" to abstract entities like a huge multitude of individuals just in order to try and make points AGAINST such entities as you might be biased against, is when you lose credibility.
Oh, come on. There's nothing biased or incredible about calling Sony evil. They do not have any lofty goals whatsoever. They care only about two things: money and power (control). And they've proven several times that they have very little in the way of scruples in how they get that money and power. I think you can safely call that evil.
Are they more evil than a company like Monsanto that willfully deals with corrupt civil servants in Africa in order to restrict the freedom of African farmers? Probably not. But due to their singular drive for money, combined with the anonymity of the decision makers, most large corporations do behave evilly quite often. Not all, mind you. Google, for example, often tries to do really honestly good, but even they, despite their "don't be evil" motto, do find themselves occasionally doing evil. Apparently it's hard for an abstract multitude of people to not be evil.
Usually I find the primary group of people who call Sony "evil" in regards to their gaming platform have an overwhelming affection for the Microsoft platform.
In my experience, people who call Sony evil, also call Microsoft evil. The discussion is mostly about which is the most evil. (Probably Oracle.)
Sure, who cares about pirates? But what about the people who paid for a feature that was subsequently removed? That should be about as illegal as it gets, yet it's what Sony did. And it's Sony's crippling of their own product that caused people to try to re-enable it again. If that enabled piracy, then that's on Sony's head.
How is it hypocritical? It might be wrong, but that's not the same thing as hypocritical.
No doubt the nazis killed many Russian civilians, but that doesn't mean that the Red Army didn't consider individual soldiers' lives expendable too. During the early years of the war, the Red Army didn't bother with sophisticated infantry tactics, but simply attacked in massive infantry waves, most of which would die. And due to a lack of weapons, later waves were often unarmed and expected to pick up the weapons of their fallen comrades in earlier waves. Of course there were good strategic reasons for this; Russia had many people, and lacked the intensive training for officers that Britain and especially Germany had. They had to work with what they had, and one of the things they had was a culture where the lives of individuals were of less importance than the needs of the czar or the state.
Later in the war, things improved a lot. In Stalingrad's streetfighting, Russian tactics often turned out to be superior to the German ones.
It might be useful to point out that in WW1, almost every single country (with the possible exception of Germany) used tactics that were incredibly wasteful of human lives.
As for atrocities, they were common on both sides on the eastern front. Germany was probably to blame for the incredible viciousness, because they started the entire war to gain living space towards the east. Space for Germans to live in, and therefore preferably not occupied by other people. With the German genocidal attitude, Russians are hardly to blame for fighting an equally ruthless war. And it paid off for them, but at an incredible cost in lives.
Maybe OtherOS did make it easier somehow, but the removal of OtherOS is what made it necessary. Apparently it's still necessity and not convenience that's the mother of invention.
Are you sure? I remember that a few years ago, one of the first publicized successes of Wikileaks was the leaking of Australia's secret block list. Officially censoring only child porn of course, but in practice turned out to block a bit more than that.
According to the report Brazil, the only listed South American country, has 'Free' internet.
Venezuela is also on the list. "Partly free".
I have little knowledge about it but South America seems to have a high standards with Chile being the first (and only) country to legislate for net nutrality.
Peru has a law requiring the government to use open source. (Not necessarily GPL or BSD, but they need to have access to the source and be allowed to hire other contractors if necessary, I believe.)
On the whole, I'm optimistic about the direction South America has been taking in the last decade. Only Venezuela is a bit kooky. And there's the everlasting mess in Columbia, of course.
The fact that worse things happen does not mean that something shouldn't be done about the 'lesser' things. The reason you probably hear so much about the USA's 'wrongdoings' is because they, for some reason, seem to be the center of attention (and they claim to be a bastion of freedom, or at least that's what people think). So when this 'great' country does something wrong, people will criticize them more than other countries that they already knew were 'bad'. They may see other places as lost causes (and believe that their criticism will be wasted on them).
The US really was a bastion of freedom for a long time. In the past, the US has done quite a lot to spread the notion of the importance of freedom, and set some good examples. And that's exactly why it hurts so much when the US chooses against freedom. China was never in the freedom camp to begin with. Of course they are worse. But now the free world sees their former champion hurrying to join the Chinese camp, and that hurts. Criticizing that is entirely justified.
The US is FAR more dangerous in my mind than the nations you listed. China, Iran, and Cuba are relatively open about their censorship and restrictions while the US does its best to portray the opposite. The US eliminates almost all practical freedom, requires government permits for the vast majority of daily activity, provides almost no government services while being among the highest taxing nation relative to controlled wealth, and proactively concentrates wealth into the hands of a tiny portion of the population. The US however does all these things but gives justifications for all these actions indicating they are for the public good or are unavoidable side effects.
Oh come on. China also claim that all the stuff they do is for the common good. There's no way the US could possibly be considered worse than China, and it really is a lot better in quite a lot of ways. The problem is that many Americans think that "better than China" means something and is something to be proud of, when it's damningly faint praise.
I do think developments in the US are dangerous, exactly because the US was always supposed to be on the side of freedom, its greatest champion even, but lately has been seriously reconsidering that position. And unfortunately a lot of other "free" nations are following the bad example of their former champion. China was never in the "free" camp to begin with, so when they do something bad, it's usually not much of a thread to the western way of life (though it is a sign that we still haven't spread our western ideals of freedom to China).
I have no problem with the omission of the Falklands or Liechtenstein from the list. But why is France not on the list? What about Sweden, Denmark, Netherland? It's a very arbitrary list, and doesn't say anything whatsoever about the relative internet freedom between western countries. All it says is that western countries are more free than non-western countries, but I don't think anyone is really surprised by that.
This incomplete list is completely non-news, unless anyone is actually surprised that the US or Australia is actually more free than Kenya or Kazakhstan.
The list isn't intended to compare freedom between different western nations. Too few of those are included in the survey. All it does is point out that western nations are more free than non-western ones. Big surprise there, I'm sure.
On any complete list, I doubt most of the top-4 of this list would even make the top-10.
The entire top 4 is weird. Australia is also well known for its censorship. The US certainly has some issues. These countries are at the top simply because the list only examined a handful of countries. Most of Europe has not been examined at all. Had it been, I'm sure Iceland and similar countries would have topped the list.
All that this list is saying is that some random countries in Europe and North America are better than some random countries in Africa, Asia or South America. I'm sure nobody here is surprised to learn that internet in Germany or Australia is more free than in China, Iran or Cuba. That doesn't mean it's as good as it should have been.
Better sitting there than holding merchandise while trying to answer her unanswerable questions.
Of course they are answerable. "It's not the dress."
(That's not entirely true; sometimes it is the dress. My wife recently tried a dress that emphasized all the wrong points. She was rather disappointed that I shot it down, but I was entirely correct.)
The problem is that most $60 games aren't really worth that much. Publishers are just clinging to an inflated price point and hope that everybody will believe them when they say that's a normal price for an average game. It's not. It's a fair price for a really big, awesome game. But every third-rate shooter costs the same nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pretty lousy story, though.
"I met a goblin and I killed it. Then I met an orc and I killed it. Then I saw a troll and I ran away. My dog got killed."
If that's a story, then there's no game that doesn't have a story. Maybe nearly dying and escaping from a deadly situation is dramatic enough for a story, but the same could be said about any game where you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
I noticed Ubuntu in the download top 10 of a torrent site. I admit I was surprised, but it was there.
Agreed. The TOS is pretty darn clear on this and as such there is no reason to complain, they are fully in their rights to do this.
In their full rights to do what exactly? Ban users? Sure. But threatening/faking DMCA takedowns? Not really. Of course they're in their full rights to ask people nicely not to do this, but it's too late. Cat's out of the bag.
Roguelikes don't have anywhere near enough roleplaying (none whatsoever, generally) to be RPGs. They're basically simple hack & slash games, but what makes them interesting is the tactical problem solving. You encounter a monster, swarm of monsters or other situation that's just too hard to overcome by your usual methods, so you need to think of something clever. You need to think, and you need time to think (which you don't have in an action game).
This is something all true roguelikes (nethack, moria, angband, adom) have in common. They are incredibly challenging and almost impossible to win. (I only managed to finish adom once through outrageous save scumming.) They require thinking and creativity. They need to be turn based and have a ridiculous number of options. They have to be fucking hard. It's about overcoming the challenges, not about experiencing some story (because there is none).
I don't restrict myself to reading only PS3 threads. On almost every single Microsoft-related thread, Microsoft gets its fair share of criticism (which is quite a lot). I suspect your view is somewhat biased.
Of course they wouldn't admit defeat. They're not looking for truth, they're looking for support for their beliefs. Any facts that don't support them will be ignored and declared irrelevant. It's a very bad but surprisingly popular way to do "science".
Becoming insensitive to something doesn't automatically imply you lose all morals concerning it. It just means you're not shocked when somebody does get stabbed. You might be less disgusted by the idea of stabbing someone, but you still need the right lack of morals or conscience to actually do it.
Evangelizing Microsoft? On what alternate slashdot have you been hanging out? During Slashdot's existence, Microsoft has received far more hate than all other companies put together. If it's receiving less hate now than in previous years, that's because Microsoft isn't doing quite as dirty deals as it used to, and occasionally seems to be bettering itself. At least in comparison to where companies like Oracle, Sony and Apple are heading.
I agree with you that the military-industrial complex, big pharma and big oil are generally more evil than most computer-related companies, but they're generally more hidden, and things in those industries don't change anywhere near as fast as in software. And the weird stuff that software major companies do, does tend to have a very real effect on the lives of programmers.
In any case, not every for-profit corp really does evil. Google is a big name that's struggling against it, and there are many smaller companies that do the same. But it is true that our economic system practically forces them to be evil. Making less profit seems to be punished a lot worse than doing massive damage to society. Maybe we should fix that.
When you start attributing qualities like "evil" and "good" to abstract entities like a huge multitude of individuals just in order to try and make points AGAINST such entities as you might be biased against, is when you lose credibility.
Oh, come on. There's nothing biased or incredible about calling Sony evil. They do not have any lofty goals whatsoever. They care only about two things: money and power (control). And they've proven several times that they have very little in the way of scruples in how they get that money and power. I think you can safely call that evil.
Are they more evil than a company like Monsanto that willfully deals with corrupt civil servants in Africa in order to restrict the freedom of African farmers? Probably not. But due to their singular drive for money, combined with the anonymity of the decision makers, most large corporations do behave evilly quite often. Not all, mind you. Google, for example, often tries to do really honestly good, but even they, despite their "don't be evil" motto, do find themselves occasionally doing evil. Apparently it's hard for an abstract multitude of people to not be evil.
Usually I find the primary group of people who call Sony "evil" in regards to their gaming platform have an overwhelming affection for the Microsoft platform.
In my experience, people who call Sony evil, also call Microsoft evil. The discussion is mostly about which is the most evil. (Probably Oracle.)
Sure, who cares about pirates? But what about the people who paid for a feature that was subsequently removed? That should be about as illegal as it gets, yet it's what Sony did. And it's Sony's crippling of their own product that caused people to try to re-enable it again. If that enabled piracy, then that's on Sony's head.
How is it hypocritical? It might be wrong, but that's not the same thing as hypocritical.
No doubt the nazis killed many Russian civilians, but that doesn't mean that the Red Army didn't consider individual soldiers' lives expendable too. During the early years of the war, the Red Army didn't bother with sophisticated infantry tactics, but simply attacked in massive infantry waves, most of which would die. And due to a lack of weapons, later waves were often unarmed and expected to pick up the weapons of their fallen comrades in earlier waves. Of course there were good strategic reasons for this; Russia had many people, and lacked the intensive training for officers that Britain and especially Germany had. They had to work with what they had, and one of the things they had was a culture where the lives of individuals were of less importance than the needs of the czar or the state.
Later in the war, things improved a lot. In Stalingrad's streetfighting, Russian tactics often turned out to be superior to the German ones.
It might be useful to point out that in WW1, almost every single country (with the possible exception of Germany) used tactics that were incredibly wasteful of human lives.
As for atrocities, they were common on both sides on the eastern front. Germany was probably to blame for the incredible viciousness, because they started the entire war to gain living space towards the east. Space for Germans to live in, and therefore preferably not occupied by other people. With the German genocidal attitude, Russians are hardly to blame for fighting an equally ruthless war. And it paid off for them, but at an incredible cost in lives.
Maybe OtherOS did make it easier somehow, but the removal of OtherOS is what made it necessary. Apparently it's still necessity and not convenience that's the mother of invention.
Are you sure? I remember that a few years ago, one of the first publicized successes of Wikileaks was the leaking of Australia's secret block list. Officially censoring only child porn of course, but in practice turned out to block a bit more than that.
But if that has been stopped, that's awesome.
According to the report Brazil, the only listed South American country, has 'Free' internet.
Venezuela is also on the list. "Partly free".
I have little knowledge about it but South America seems to have a high standards with Chile being the first (and only) country to legislate for net nutrality.
Peru has a law requiring the government to use open source. (Not necessarily GPL or BSD, but they need to have access to the source and be allowed to hire other contractors if necessary, I believe.)
On the whole, I'm optimistic about the direction South America has been taking in the last decade. Only Venezuela is a bit kooky. And there's the everlasting mess in Columbia, of course.
South America also looks pretty free.
Brazil. Venezuela not so much. But again, no surprises there.
I think the story is: "Despite all the crazy and poorly thought out internet rules, Australia is still not as bad as China."
The fact that worse things happen does not mean that something shouldn't be done about the 'lesser' things. The reason you probably hear so much about the USA's 'wrongdoings' is because they, for some reason, seem to be the center of attention (and they claim to be a bastion of freedom, or at least that's what people think). So when this 'great' country does something wrong, people will criticize them more than other countries that they already knew were 'bad'. They may see other places as lost causes (and believe that their criticism will be wasted on them).
The US really was a bastion of freedom for a long time. In the past, the US has done quite a lot to spread the notion of the importance of freedom, and set some good examples. And that's exactly why it hurts so much when the US chooses against freedom. China was never in the freedom camp to begin with. Of course they are worse. But now the free world sees their former champion hurrying to join the Chinese camp, and that hurts. Criticizing that is entirely justified.
The US is FAR more dangerous in my mind than the nations you listed. China, Iran, and Cuba are relatively open about their censorship and restrictions while the US does its best to portray the opposite. The US eliminates almost all practical freedom, requires government permits for the vast majority of daily activity, provides almost no government services while being among the highest taxing nation relative to controlled wealth, and proactively concentrates wealth into the hands of a tiny portion of the population. The US however does all these things but gives justifications for all these actions indicating they are for the public good or are unavoidable side effects.
Oh come on. China also claim that all the stuff they do is for the common good. There's no way the US could possibly be considered worse than China, and it really is a lot better in quite a lot of ways. The problem is that many Americans think that "better than China" means something and is something to be proud of, when it's damningly faint praise.
I do think developments in the US are dangerous, exactly because the US was always supposed to be on the side of freedom, its greatest champion even, but lately has been seriously reconsidering that position. And unfortunately a lot of other "free" nations are following the bad example of their former champion. China was never in the "free" camp to begin with, so when they do something bad, it's usually not much of a thread to the western way of life (though it is a sign that we still haven't spread our western ideals of freedom to China).
I have no problem with the omission of the Falklands or Liechtenstein from the list. But why is France not on the list? What about Sweden, Denmark, Netherland? It's a very arbitrary list, and doesn't say anything whatsoever about the relative internet freedom between western countries. All it says is that western countries are more free than non-western countries, but I don't think anyone is really surprised by that.
This incomplete list is completely non-news, unless anyone is actually surprised that the US or Australia is actually more free than Kenya or Kazakhstan.
The list isn't intended to compare freedom between different western nations. Too few of those are included in the survey. All it does is point out that western nations are more free than non-western ones. Big surprise there, I'm sure.
On any complete list, I doubt most of the top-4 of this list would even make the top-10.
The entire top 4 is weird. Australia is also well known for its censorship. The US certainly has some issues. These countries are at the top simply because the list only examined a handful of countries. Most of Europe has not been examined at all. Had it been, I'm sure Iceland and similar countries would have topped the list.
All that this list is saying is that some random countries in Europe and North America are better than some random countries in Africa, Asia or South America. I'm sure nobody here is surprised to learn that internet in Germany or Australia is more free than in China, Iran or Cuba. That doesn't mean it's as good as it should have been.
Tevas are more suitable for a wet environment, walking, and outdoorsy stuff. For some indoor sitting, I prefer Birkenstocks.
Here's the correct answer to that question:
"Do you own a car? What type?"
- "(names a type of car)"
"Did you have lessons to get your driving license? In what kind of car was that?"
- "(they name a different type of car)"
"So how did you learn to drive your current car?"
- "They both have a steering wheel, clutch, throttle, etc. Not all that different, really."
"Well, that's polymorphism."
Better sitting there than holding merchandise while trying to answer her unanswerable questions.
Of course they are answerable. "It's not the dress."
(That's not entirely true; sometimes it is the dress. My wife recently tried a dress that emphasized all the wrong points. She was rather disappointed that I shot it down, but I was entirely correct.)
The problem is that most $60 games aren't really worth that much. Publishers are just clinging to an inflated price point and hope that everybody will believe them when they say that's a normal price for an average game. It's not. It's a fair price for a really big, awesome game. But every third-rate shooter costs the same nowadays.