So if a company wants to restrict second-hand resale of their products in order to keep the market for new goods larger, they need to outsource the production to overseas?
(Note that I didn't RTFA; it's a crap page that's completely unreadable in Opera.)
And interesting article in my newspaper today claimed that it shouldn't be. It should be protected as the right to protest. You don't protest in your own back yard, you protest in front of the door of whoever you're protesting against.
I don't understand this Looks-versus-Personnality dillemma. I want both. The simple fact is (and you are right) we respond quickest to looks. Even if you have already corresponded blindly there is still going to be a moment when you see them for real the first time.
You know that dating sites tend to support photos, right? And even if someone doesn't have a photo on their profile, you can always share those later.
The question is how you select someone to invest the time and effort in of getting to know them better. Just based on looks? There might be hundreds of people (in the bar, club, wherever) that look good enough. Are you going to talk to all of them, check whether they're even available in the first place, and then figure out whether they have that evil temper you're afraid of?
Or you could select them based on some simple criteria (availability, interests, stuff you have in common), see their photos, and then select the ones that you like the look of, after you've established that you might have enough in common that it might actually work out.
I guess it depends on how common your tastes and interests are. The average club/pub-going girl is pretty unlikely to be my type.
Also, I prefer to date someone who's literate. Online, that's immediately obvious. In a pub not so much.
I was hoping you were going to say something insightful, but instead you're only proving GP's point. You only noticed that CGI because it had to be CGI; because you expected it. Look at all the tons of CGI in Forrest Gump or any other non-SF, non-horror film. You don't notice it, because you don't expect it to be CGI. And because it's well done. It's not the rub-it-in-their-faces CGI, which is what you usually get in SF and horror.
I concur with you on this. I would say that their only accomplishment is that, before Anonymous threw their antics, corporations were seen in public opinion as bullies who sued teenagers and who corrupted politicians to pass laws that screwed the consumers. Now, with the help of those self-elected heroes, the same corporations are getting free press staging as victims.
Interesting point. Anonymous is basically just the teenagers striking back at the corporations. The problem is that the corporations' attacks are legal and effective, whereas Anonymous's attacks are illegal and ineffective. Clearly, regular people need more effective legal weapons that they can use against corporations. (Well alright, there's always the boycott.)
The problem with those sites is that you don't. You're dependent on someone else paying. You can send messages to unpaid members, but they can never respond. That makes it practically impossible to actually find someone, even if you pay. Free ones, or at least sites where replies are free, are a lot better. You can actually meet people there, and that's what it's all about, isn't it?
I agree actually. I did the Match.com thing for ages and soon came to realise that this was a scam to defraud me out of my money. They were letting me waste hours sending emails to girls who are unlikely to be paid up members who can even read my emails, to say nothing of responding to them.
The best compromise I've seen is a site where you could send messages if you'd paid, and you could always respond to messages that had been sent by a paid member. So only one person needs to pay in order to meet somebody.
I've also seen a site where paid members could send longer messages. Or maybe they could send more messages. In any case, such a semi-paid site can work. The fully paid sites (which are also more expensive) are just scams.
had bad luck dating people based on what they looked like.
That's the real point of dating sites, I think. With people you meet in person, you're likely to respond first to what they look like. Interests come later. For a long relationship, interests and personality are more important than looks, I think. Dating sites can make a lot of sense.
Even so, keep in mind that the paid ones are populated with people who think that money can buy them love. There's a lot of creeps out there.
There may be good reasons to do this, such as legal reasons. Just because they are public knowledge and everyone in the world has access to them, it doesn't mean all these documents are suddenly unclassified.
Classifying public information sounds a lot like they're trying to create their own reality. Though that might be common practice in the US military and government lately.
No more so than a credit card for the vast, vast majority of purchases.
Yes more so than a credit card. Credit cards are way too expensive for small amounts. I know of no shop that even accepts credit cards for small amounts.
I can't even remember the last place I saw that could have processed a debit card transaction but not a credit card.
I remember going to shops. Restaurants, hotels and furniture shops accept credit cards, but shops where you buy small stuff rarely do. Well, maybe credit cards that are suitable for pin transactions.
Many (most?) debit cards these days can be used without a PIN for online purchases. They work like a credit card but the money comes straight out of your account.
Only when I go through my bank's internet banking site. Well, you can authorize someone to take money from your account, and that can be faked, but it's every bit as easy to reverse as with credit cards.
I'm not, because I pay my credit card off in time. People who incur interest charges or don't use the services are the ones paying for it. My credit cards probably cost me $500 per year, but I *easily* get more than that back in value from the services they provide.
$500 a year? Good lord! I pay EUR 25 for mine. And I find even that unreasonably expensive. I honestly think we need a better, cheaper, more modern and more interoperable system than the current credit card system.
This is very well put. It also explains why the Scouring of the Shire is missing, and why that's so bad. It's when the hobbits finally take matters in their own hand and put things in order. And it doesn't happen in the movies.
Me too. I love all the Shire scenes, both the start and the end of the trilogy. But in the books, I got extremely annoyed by the increasingly morose Frodo.
My GF has never read LotR but she loved the movies - I even gave her my copy of the books to read after she'd seen the movie but she just couldn't get interested in them at all. You don't need to have enjoyed a story in one medium to be able to enjoy it in another.
LotR isn't a game, it's a book. It's already a fully fleshed-out linear story. You just need to add visuals. That's a lot easier to do for the visually oriented movie industry than turning gameplay into a linear story that somehow does justice to the gameplay.
My point is that the only redeeming value a movie adaptation of a game has, is that gamers love the source material. Turning it into a good movie is not trivial, and apparently it's really easy to get so far away from the source material that the gamers won't like it either. Books are different. By turning them into a movie, you can keep most of the plot, but you translate it to a more accessible medium.
It seems like that's the problem - Hollywood struggles for good ideas and original stories. Mainstream gaming often suffers the same issue, but there does at least seem to be some variety in gaming, and because the story is told over a longer arc than a movie, there's more opportunity to try something different in the course of the game.
That just makes it even harder to turn them into movies. But the real problem is that the majority of games aren't about stories at all. Yes, they have some cool ideas, but in the end, they're about gameplay, and story and setting and all that are just an excuse to spotlight the gameplay. By turning them into a movie, you lose the most important part.
That doesn't mean there's nothing worth salvaging in games, but it requires more work and more creativity than when you use a book.
That makes them a potentially lucrative source of ideas for movie-makers if they can just figure out how to adapt them in such a way that non-gamers don't dismiss them as being "just about games" and gamers dismiss them as being an insult to the world described in their favourite game.
But that's hard to do. It's easier to just drop the game and make something that's free from all that uncomfortable baggage.
Tomb Raider worked well enough. No idea how far it strayed from the original, as I haven't played it, but Indiana Jones-clone-with-hot-chick-and-SFX-overdose is a perfectly valid movie concept, apparently.
All (most?) of those happy endings were actually in the books. It's just that they still had quite a bit of story in between them, and that got skipped. If you skip the story leading up to it, you'd better skip the ending too.
I don't mind that some stuff got cut. And some of the additions were brilliant even! (The ring is much scarier and has real personality in the movie.) The problem is that also some unnecessary nonsense was added, and some of the cuts necessitated more cuts that weren't made. It's still the best fantasy adaptation ever, and a really impressive movie, very inspired at some points (Gollum, the Ring), but the book it was based on is often considered the best book ever. You can't possibly do that justice.
Computer games with A-grade plots are extremely rare. Mostly, you want stuff to do, so there's a quest and maybe a bunch of side quests. Meet people, explore new areas, talk a bit here and there, and kill stuff. Unless your name is Lord of the Rings, people have done this before and done it better. You're going to get a B-movie at best.
Very, very few games have more interesting plots than that. Planescape: Torment stands out here. Maybe the original Fallout games. Half-Life perhaps. I can't think of anything else that has a movie-worthy plot. And even of these, only Torment is truly interesting, plot-wise. The others are still "figure out what the problem is and kill it" stories, just good ones.
Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like". This is when marketing execs see golden opportunity. Not only will you get most of the fans of the game to see it at least once, you'll probably get the people who wouldn't have touched a game with a barge poll.
Why would people who don't care about the game be interested in a movie adaptation of that game? Game movies are every bit as nerdy as the games themselves. Possibly even more so; The Sims and Farmville aren't terribly nerdy as far as I can tell, but simply make The Sims: The Movie or Farmville: The Movie, and all of a sudden it's nerdy.
Movies are a different medium than games. A story doesn't translate well from an active, participatory medium like games to a passive consumption medium like movies. And if you want to attract people who don't care about the game, why would you even try to make such an adaptation? Just make an original story that's designed to be good for that medium.
Have you noticed that games based on movies also almost always suck? The mediums are too different, despite the similar visuals.
Slashdot Mirror
So if a company wants to restrict second-hand resale of their products in order to keep the market for new goods larger, they need to outsource the production to overseas?
(Note that I didn't RTFA; it's a crap page that's completely unreadable in Opera.)
Are denial of service "attacks" even a crime?
And interesting article in my newspaper today claimed that it shouldn't be. It should be protected as the right to protest. You don't protest in your own back yard, you protest in front of the door of whoever you're protesting against.
I know you didn't pay for the software.
Considering it was OpenOffice, I'm inclined to agree.
If I come out with a press release saying that "Us KKK members killed hundreds of black people." I wouldn't be arrested right?
I believe the KKK is alright by US government/corporate standards. MasterCard/Visa still do business with them.
Writing a PDF is criminal now?
I don't understand this Looks-versus-Personnality dillemma. I want both. The simple fact is (and you are right) we respond quickest to looks. Even if you have already corresponded blindly there is still going to be a moment when you see them for real the first time.
You know that dating sites tend to support photos, right? And even if someone doesn't have a photo on their profile, you can always share those later.
The question is how you select someone to invest the time and effort in of getting to know them better. Just based on looks? There might be hundreds of people (in the bar, club, wherever) that look good enough. Are you going to talk to all of them, check whether they're even available in the first place, and then figure out whether they have that evil temper you're afraid of?
Or you could select them based on some simple criteria (availability, interests, stuff you have in common), see their photos, and then select the ones that you like the look of, after you've established that you might have enough in common that it might actually work out.
I guess it depends on how common your tastes and interests are. The average club/pub-going girl is pretty unlikely to be my type.
Also, I prefer to date someone who's literate. Online, that's immediately obvious. In a pub not so much.
Why do you think people will pay anything if they don't have to?
Because they can.
I tried Aquaria. Nice atmosphere, but there just wasn't enough to it to continue.
World of Goo was genius. The others were meh. Well, Samarost was cute for a while, but ultimately pointless.
I was hoping you were going to say something insightful, but instead you're only proving GP's point. You only noticed that CGI because it had to be CGI; because you expected it. Look at all the tons of CGI in Forrest Gump or any other non-SF, non-horror film. You don't notice it, because you don't expect it to be CGI. And because it's well done. It's not the rub-it-in-their-faces CGI, which is what you usually get in SF and horror.
I concur with you on this. I would say that their only accomplishment is that, before Anonymous threw their antics, corporations were seen in public opinion as bullies who sued teenagers and who corrupted politicians to pass laws that screwed the consumers. Now, with the help of those self-elected heroes, the same corporations are getting free press staging as victims.
Interesting point. Anonymous is basically just the teenagers striking back at the corporations. The problem is that the corporations' attacks are legal and effective, whereas Anonymous's attacks are illegal and ineffective. Clearly, regular people need more effective legal weapons that they can use against corporations. (Well alright, there's always the boycott.)
I'd rather pasteurize PayPal....
You mean boil them quickly in order to kill the bugs?
That's what people generally do. They blame the director for focusing on effects rather than story and acting.
In any case, the best special effects are the ones you don't notice because they're so natural.
Well you do get what you pay for
The problem with those sites is that you don't. You're dependent on someone else paying. You can send messages to unpaid members, but they can never respond. That makes it practically impossible to actually find someone, even if you pay. Free ones, or at least sites where replies are free, are a lot better. You can actually meet people there, and that's what it's all about, isn't it?
I agree actually. I did the Match.com thing for ages and soon came to realise that this was a scam to defraud me out of my money. They were letting me waste hours sending emails to girls who are unlikely to be paid up members who can even read my emails, to say nothing of responding to them.
The best compromise I've seen is a site where you could send messages if you'd paid, and you could always respond to messages that had been sent by a paid member. So only one person needs to pay in order to meet somebody.
I've also seen a site where paid members could send longer messages. Or maybe they could send more messages. In any case, such a semi-paid site can work. The fully paid sites (which are also more expensive) are just scams.
I've known people who met online and got married in 1993. Trawling pubs or clubs for a date seems a lot more losery to me.
had bad luck dating people based on what they looked like.
That's the real point of dating sites, I think. With people you meet in person, you're likely to respond first to what they look like. Interests come later. For a long relationship, interests and personality are more important than looks, I think. Dating sites can make a lot of sense.
Even so, keep in mind that the paid ones are populated with people who think that money can buy them love. There's a lot of creeps out there.
There may be good reasons to do this, such as legal reasons. Just because they are public knowledge and everyone in the world has access to them, it doesn't mean all these documents are suddenly unclassified.
Classifying public information sounds a lot like they're trying to create their own reality. Though that might be common practice in the US military and government lately.
No more so than a credit card for the vast, vast majority of purchases.
Yes more so than a credit card. Credit cards are way too expensive for small amounts. I know of no shop that even accepts credit cards for small amounts.
I can't even remember the last place I saw that could have processed a debit card transaction but not a credit card.
I remember going to shops. Restaurants, hotels and furniture shops accept credit cards, but shops where you buy small stuff rarely do. Well, maybe credit cards that are suitable for pin transactions.
Many (most?) debit cards these days can be used without a PIN for online purchases. They work like a credit card but the money comes straight out of your account.
Only when I go through my bank's internet banking site. Well, you can authorize someone to take money from your account, and that can be faked, but it's every bit as easy to reverse as with credit cards.
I'm not, because I pay my credit card off in time. People who incur interest charges or don't use the services are the ones paying for it. My credit cards probably cost me $500 per year, but I *easily* get more than that back in value from the services they provide.
$500 a year? Good lord! I pay EUR 25 for mine. And I find even that unreasonably expensive. I honestly think we need a better, cheaper, more modern and more interoperable system than the current credit card system.
This is very well put. It also explains why the Scouring of the Shire is missing, and why that's so bad. It's when the hobbits finally take matters in their own hand and put things in order. And it doesn't happen in the movies.
Me too. I love all the Shire scenes, both the start and the end of the trilogy. But in the books, I got extremely annoyed by the increasingly morose Frodo.
My GF has never read LotR but she loved the movies - I even gave her my copy of the books to read after she'd seen the movie but she just couldn't get interested in them at all. You don't need to have enjoyed a story in one medium to be able to enjoy it in another.
LotR isn't a game, it's a book. It's already a fully fleshed-out linear story. You just need to add visuals. That's a lot easier to do for the visually oriented movie industry than turning gameplay into a linear story that somehow does justice to the gameplay.
My point is that the only redeeming value a movie adaptation of a game has, is that gamers love the source material. Turning it into a good movie is not trivial, and apparently it's really easy to get so far away from the source material that the gamers won't like it either. Books are different. By turning them into a movie, you can keep most of the plot, but you translate it to a more accessible medium.
It seems like that's the problem - Hollywood struggles for good ideas and original stories. Mainstream gaming often suffers the same issue, but there does at least seem to be some variety in gaming, and because the story is told over a longer arc than a movie, there's more opportunity to try something different in the course of the game.
That just makes it even harder to turn them into movies. But the real problem is that the majority of games aren't about stories at all. Yes, they have some cool ideas, but in the end, they're about gameplay, and story and setting and all that are just an excuse to spotlight the gameplay. By turning them into a movie, you lose the most important part.
That doesn't mean there's nothing worth salvaging in games, but it requires more work and more creativity than when you use a book.
That makes them a potentially lucrative source of ideas for movie-makers if they can just figure out how to adapt them in such a way that non-gamers don't dismiss them as being "just about games" and gamers dismiss them as being an insult to the world described in their favourite game.
But that's hard to do. It's easier to just drop the game and make something that's free from all that uncomfortable baggage.
Tomb Raider worked well enough. No idea how far it strayed from the original, as I haven't played it, but Indiana Jones-clone-with-hot-chick-and-SFX-overdose is a perfectly valid movie concept, apparently.
All (most?) of those happy endings were actually in the books. It's just that they still had quite a bit of story in between them, and that got skipped. If you skip the story leading up to it, you'd better skip the ending too.
I don't mind that some stuff got cut. And some of the additions were brilliant even! (The ring is much scarier and has real personality in the movie.) The problem is that also some unnecessary nonsense was added, and some of the cuts necessitated more cuts that weren't made. It's still the best fantasy adaptation ever, and a really impressive movie, very inspired at some points (Gollum, the Ring), but the book it was based on is often considered the best book ever. You can't possibly do that justice.
Computer games with A-grade plots are extremely rare. Mostly, you want stuff to do, so there's a quest and maybe a bunch of side quests. Meet people, explore new areas, talk a bit here and there, and kill stuff. Unless your name is Lord of the Rings, people have done this before and done it better. You're going to get a B-movie at best.
Very, very few games have more interesting plots than that. Planescape: Torment stands out here. Maybe the original Fallout games. Half-Life perhaps. I can't think of anything else that has a movie-worthy plot. And even of these, only Torment is truly interesting, plot-wise. The others are still "figure out what the problem is and kill it" stories, just good ones.
Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like". This is when marketing execs see golden opportunity. Not only will you get most of the fans of the game to see it at least once, you'll probably get the people who wouldn't have touched a game with a barge poll.
Why would people who don't care about the game be interested in a movie adaptation of that game? Game movies are every bit as nerdy as the games themselves. Possibly even more so; The Sims and Farmville aren't terribly nerdy as far as I can tell, but simply make The Sims: The Movie or Farmville: The Movie, and all of a sudden it's nerdy.
Movies are a different medium than games. A story doesn't translate well from an active, participatory medium like games to a passive consumption medium like movies. And if you want to attract people who don't care about the game, why would you even try to make such an adaptation? Just make an original story that's designed to be good for that medium.
Have you noticed that games based on movies also almost always suck? The mediums are too different, despite the similar visuals.