I think you may be confusing anticipation with prior art. Prior art can be anything that teaches an element of a claim. The combination of prior art makes an invention obvious. A single piece of prior art renders it anticipated. Iaapl (I am a patent lawyer).
You are, of course, correct.
Open mouth, insert foot. I should be more careful about my own terminology before I go on trying to correct other people for theirs.
How embarrassing.
Hopefully people see this and mod my previous comment down.
First off, IANAL. I am a law student with IP and patent law classes under my belt, but I'm still just a law student. Take the following with a grain of salt.
In a lot of the patent articles on Slashdot, where someone will ask "Isn't X prior art?" Often, even though it seems intuitively that it should be, it's not.
Actual prior art, which would be sufficient to legally defeat a patent, must read on all of a patent's claims. Assume the patent in question has claims (basically, technical description of features) A, B, and C. You research patents, and you find older patents:
Patent 1 has claims A and B. Patent 2 has claims B and C. Patent 3 has claims A and C.
None of those will defeat the patent in question on prior art grounds, because none of them include all of the claims A, B, and C.
What you may have at that point is an obviousness objection. You could argue that because there are patents 1-3 exist, that combining them to create A, B, and C was so obvious to someone skilled in the art that the patent should be invalidated for failing to be non-obvious. But that's different than prior art.
Having a patent invalidated for prior art is actually pretty uncommon. Obviousness issues are more common, but often, it's cheaper to just settle.
Well, a typical textbook from West or Aspen, which most classes use, runs about $150.
Then you have other materials; treatises, study aids, course packs, outlines, supplements, etc. Prices vary wildly depending on what you buy. Some of these, like the hornbooks, are just as expensive as your textbook. And since the majority (or at least about half) of the courses offered after your first year's required courses are only two credits, it's entirely conceivable that you could be shopping for books for six classes.
I'd say $5,000 is definitely towards the upper limit of what would be necessary. I've never come all that close to $5,000 in required books, but picking up, say, five textbooks, a couple treatises, some Q&A books, and a nutshell or two (or something equivalent)... that'll put you well over $1000/term. A good number of my classes have had more than $600 worth of books, if you picked up all the recommended materials.
Of course, I should've pointed out that I was considering software for laptop exams (which you need to purchase every year) and other supplies (e.g. the highlighters I go through by the case) in that figure, too.
Overall, $5,000 is a high estimate, and I personally spend less, but it's not unrealistic.
It gets far, far worse. Think about rent and cost of living.
I attend a law school that costs ~$1,000/credit hour. That works out to $36,000 year, full-time, in tuition alone. Furthermore, students enrolled full-time are not allowed to work more than 18 hours/week. And although you may think a JD candidate could make a fair amount of money, they don't. You're looking at the same $8-10/hour pay you could get as an undergraduate, except now you're clerking or doing paralegal work.
As you'd expect, law school is far more academically intensive than your average undergraduate program. The rule of thumb is that you'll spend a minimum of three hours studying for every one hour of class time. On a standard full-time track, that's 12 credits per term; 12 hours per week in every class, another 36 hours studying. So, 48 hours/week devoted to academics. Let's assume that you get a job at $10/hour, and work the full 18 hours/week. That's $180/week, or $720/month.
The short of it is that any job you get as a full-time law student isn't even going to put a dent in tuition costs.
But now, add, say, $700/month for rent. Then you have bills. And food. And transportation. Let's say the student's frugal, and he gets by on about $1200/month (obviously this varies based on where you're living, but I'm trying to pick a number that would be typical of a suburban law school). And upwards of $5000 worth of books every year.
YEARLY TOTAL: $46,796 TOTAL TO GRADUATION: $140,388
Now, consider the time constraints.
1 week is 168 hours. You're spending 48 hours/week in class or studying. You sleep 8 hours/night (or 56 hours/week). You're working 18 hours/week. That's 122/168 hours per week spoken for. That leaves 46 hours/week on average for leisure, additional studying, eating, and transportation time. That's almost 7 hours per day. In my personal experience, it's about 2-3 hours/day for relaxing and/or working out. It's not an impossible task, but it's stressful, and not fun. But going tens of thousands of dollars into debt for the "privilege" of being too damned busy all the time isn't much fun. Clinic and volunteer work - both of which the school pushes pretty hard - all come out of this time, too.
Thankfully, I'm at the school I'm at (as opposed to a more prestigious one) because they offered me an enormous scholarship. But I have friends that are borrowing their whole way through. One of them half-heartedly jokes that the only way to get through it is to pretend that loans aren't real money, because the debt is otherwise just stifling.
There's nothing truly unconstitutional about the law
Actually, that's not entirely true.
The leading case on the constitutionality of damages is BMW v. Gore. You can read it here if you're interested.
Out of that case came three guideposts that the Supreme Court uses to assess whether or not damages are constitutional.
1. The degree of reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct 2. The portion of the damages that are compensatory 3. Statutory punitive damages/penalties that could be imposed
So, that the statute allows such damages only satisfies one of the three guideposts. However, punitive damages in this case vastly outstripped the compensatory damages. I remember reading it in an article when the verdict was announced, but the punitive:compensatory damages were, what, on the order of 9000:1? The court has said, in Phillip Morris USA v. Williams, that damages that were only 100:1 punitive:compensatory were "grossly excessive."
The only issue to be resolved, at this point, is how reprehensible the court finds the defendant's conduct.
It seems to me that, if this question of damages managed to get before the US Supreme Court, it'd be thrown out as unconstitutional in a hurry.
But I'm just a law student offering my armchair lawyer analysis. Take the above with a grain of salt.
I believe strongly in the idea of free speech, and don't much care for censorship or other speech restrictions. That said, on some level I think I can agree with the idea that lawyers are part of our legal justice system, and therefore to be held to a higher standard of conduct than we mere mortals.
Lawyers are held to a much higher standard of conduct than "mere mortals." Although it is ultimately decided by each state's bar association, you can find the ABA's model rules of professional conduct here. Virtually every accredited law school teaches those in Professional Responsibility.
These rules are, incidentally, a large part of the reason that slimeball lawyers tend to have a short shelf life. They create something of an ethical minefield for attorneys, and govern everything from what an attorney is allowed to say to the media during trial, to what his duties to non-clients are, to what sort of information he can disclose about a case.
Without having a copy of the actual complain handy, I can't say exactly what the RIAA is accusing Beckerman of, but the quotes from the Wired article make it sound like a meritorious claims and contentions issue; in effect, they're saying Beckerman violated his ethical duty to only make meritorious arguments by dragging out the trial with motions, claims, etc. that he knew were not valid.
For what it's worth, I've followed Beckerman's blog somewhat closely. And if my speculation about the actual claims being levied at Beckerman are true, I'd be inclined to say that this isn't just a case of the pot calling the kettle black in some general "the RIAA is bad!" kind of sense. It seems to me that, in that case, they'd be violating the exact same rule they're accusing Beckerman of violating by filing this complaint.
But, I'm just a law student playing armchair lawyer here. Take the above with a grain of salt.
So what is preventing competition from existing? What is stopping someone from springing up to start a local alternative to their crappy service? Or, what is stopping an existing large company that provides a similar service from expanding to provide this service that you and so many others demand? See my subject for the answer.
It's not just the government's fault. Certainly, they've been an enabler. But can you imagine trying to pitch a system of government-owned infrastructure in the US?
Part of the problem is the way ownership of the infrastructure works in the United States. Specifically, it's that infrastructure clashing with property rights that provides the problem. If, say, Comcast owns their own lines, in order to provide service, they need to go into a neighborhood (likely with permission from the local government), and tear up everyone's lawns to lay cable. Now that neighborhood has a single provider. You want competition? Now Charter has to come along, tear up your line, and lay more cable. You've got two providers now. That's not much competition. So you want a third? You can see where this is going. And at the end of the day, we've got X lines in the ground for X services, and X number of upgrades that need to be made to the hardware to increase speed and capacity. The system leads to local monopolies and utterly eviscerates competition.
What the US needs is a system when the government owns and is responsible for maintaining the lines. Something like what they have in Norway. There, every time there's a municipal digging project, they lay fiber. Sewer? Add fiber. Construction? Add fiber. After a while of doing this, you have a massive, single-owner infrastructure. The government then leases those lines to the ISPs, who provide the service to the customers. And compared to the US system, they have less garbage in the ground, less tearing up your lawn, more opportunity for competition, faster deployment/upgrade times, and more even distribution of high-speed coverage. The end result is they have more people with faster connections paying more reasonable prices than here in the US.
We should, of course, adopt that model. But given the state of US politics, can you even imagine the outcry if our government tried to implement such a system? The telcos would scream bloody murder, and everyone more inclined to mindlessly shout "Ra! Ra! Go Capitalism!" than understand simple economics (read: most of the US) and their collective - and unfortunate - voting power, would shout down any politician backing the thing.
What we can quite squarely blame the government for, though, are two things (although this is likely not exhaustive):
1) Paying the telcos hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, ostensibly to upgrade our nation's collective internet connection, and seeing that money vanish into the ether.
2) Allowing telcos to have exclusivity deals with apartment complexes and the like.
So, sure, the government's in the best position to improve things. But I don't think it's quite fair to lay the blame squarely at their feet.
Not the same. I said, "UNLAWFUL copies." If a news agency wants to put up their copyrighted photos on a website, then someone browsing their site isn't a copyright infringer. Ditto for a search engine that POINTS to those sites. The index is to a bunch of LAWFUL copies. What you're neglecting to take into consideration, though, is that Google isn't just indexing the copyright-owners' own sites.
Try looking for Transformers on Google. That fan site with the picture of Optimus Prime? That's infringement; it's unlawful. The wiki hosting a sound clip of some exchange between Star Scream and Megatron? That's infringment. The fanfic? Infringement. Google's linking to it all. They're even hosting thumbnails of some of it.
The distinction between linking to lawful and unlawful copyright works is something that can't be sustained in the face of a modern search engine. It would be asinine to tell Google that it couldn't link to anything without first ascertaining that the site has a clear and lawful copyright on the substance. A search engine just couldn't work in such a case. Likewise, saying a search engine is guilty of contributory copyright infringement when it does link to infringing material is no more sustainable, because the internet is a minefield. The liability imposed would be so monstrous as to either destroy the entire industry or create such legal liability that we're left with the last situation: search engines only able to link to things after they verify the owner's valid copyright claims.
For this to be good precedent, there needs to be a distinction made by the courts as to what makes these sites different from Google, Yahoo, and the like, and it can't be based on a post hoc determination of the host site's copyright validity.
Actually, it is. What does Google link to that isn't copyrighted? For example, try a Google Image Search for virtually any topic you can think of, and you get Google-created thumbnailed versions of copyrighted works that link directly to the often-infringing images themselves.
Our copyright in the US works largely on the owners' good graces, apathy, and ignorance. Copyright infringement, in a technical sense, happens constantly. And not just from music and movie downloaders, but ordinary people. Tattoos of cartoon characters, playing some popular song on your guitar, hosting images someone else created on your own server.
This may, in fact, have appeared on Slashdot before, but John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, estimates that a typical person could easily rack up $12.45 million in copyright liability doing ordinary things like sending email, sketching on a notepad, the afore-mentioned cartoon tattoo, writing poetry, and singing "Happy Birthday." And then there's this:
At the end of the day, John checks his mailbox, where he finds the latest issue of an artsy hipster rag to which he subscribes. The 'zine, named Found, is a nationally distributed quarterly that collects and catalogues curious notes, drawings, and other items of interest that readers find lying in city streets, public transportation, and other random places. In short, Jogn has purchased a magazine containing the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public display of fifty copyrighted notes and drawings. His knowing, material contribution to Found's fifty acts of infringment subjects Jogn to secondary liability in the amount of $7.5 million.
You can find the entirety of Professor Tehranian's article in PDF here.
The entire structure of our copyright law in the US is based on what strikes me as being the courts' absolutely blind willingness to enforce laws, the language of which criminalizes the day-to-day acts of normal people, and therefore makes the system open to the sort of hyper-technical abuse characterized in the article.
Of course, our national legislators are to blame for the sloppy language, not the courts. But the courts are still the agents enforcing these laws that just fly in the face of any reasonable or well-considered social policy.
I signed up for Sprint about three years ago; they had that two week trial period, and I figured if I was unhappy, I could just cancel it and move on to a different carrier.
Well, quite predictably, the service sucked. The area around my apartment had no coverage at all, and I couldn't get a signal at all inside (despite the fact that Verizon, Cingular, etc. seemed to work fine). So, I canceled my service and returned the phone. Problem done, right?
Nope.
For the next couple months, Sprint continued to bill me. And not just once, mind you, but twice. I was getting two bills a month from them, despite the fact that I had only one phone. Their excuses were "oh, billing must have just not caught up yet, ignore that bill" to "we'll cancel that bill, sorry for the inconvenience" to finally actually canceling the bill. Their explanation for the second bill? Some sort of billing goof-up, and it shouldn't be an issue.
So, the bill for the account I actually had finally stopped coming after three months, but the other one kept coming. I ignored it. They sent letters threatening to terminate my service? Good I thought! Then, finally, they sent a notice saying that I had the pay the $300-some balance within two weeks, or they'd send me to collections. At this point, I took a closer look at the bill. You see, when you call Sprint customer service, the first thing they do is ask you for your phone number with some automated prompt. With my original bill, that wasn't an issue - I punched in my old phone number. This time? The bill didn't even have a phone number. I couldn't get past the initial voice prompt; pressing zero didn't work, holding on the line didn't work. If you didn't enter a phone number, there was no way to talk to someone.
So, I dug up my old phone number, entered that, then after literally 3 or 4 disconnects, being transfered to departments that apparently didn't exist, and telling my story to no less than half a dozen different people, most utterly useless because they were reading from a script (and would then transfer me to a 'manager' that would also read from a script), I was told to contact the fraud department. They were more useful, but of course, told me that the issue was a billing problem, and that I would have to take it up with customer service! Argh!
I finally got a higher-up in their customer service department, who told me he would cancel the bill. I thought the whole mess was finally behind me, when next month, I got another bill. Turned out, he had zeroed the balance, but not canceled the account. I finally called back to the fraud department and pleaded for them to help, but they kept trying to transfer me to customer service. "Look," I said "there isn't even a phone number associated with the account. There is no phone. No account. I never had this service. Cancel it!" Of course, I was just transfered.
The whole mess went on for about six months and had me spending tens of hours on the phone with Sprint, explaining the problem to dozens of people, and having an infuriating number of disconnects, before a local Sprint store opened up. I went in with a stack of bills for this non-existent phone, and told one of the employees my story. He spent 10 minutes on the phone, and solved the whole problem. I never got a bill again.
I will never, ever do business with that company again.
So, I've been kicking around the idea of getting a 360 for months, now. I was close, but put off by the sticker shock, and decided to hold off for a bit longer. Maybe until a price drop.
A couple days ago, though, I went over to a friend's place; she manages a small EBgames store, and has a 360 and just about every notable game for it. It was just a small get-together, so a bunch of us spent some time browsing through her collection of 360 games. I'm glad I didn't buy one.
Gears of War. Rainbow 6: Vegas. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. FEAR. YAWW2FPS (Call of Duty something, I think). Dead Rising. Saint's Row. Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Dead or Alive 4.
Incidentally, most of these games are the most popular on the 360. Notice something? It's almost entirely FPS. R6:V, CoD and GRAW are your archetypical boring, generic, sequel shovelware. Gears of War and FEAR are both good games in their own right, but considering the company they're in, they don't exactly stand out. Then you have yet another Splinter Cell game, which falls in the same boat: a good game, but reeking of been-there-done-that. Next is Dead Rising, a good game with a few very, very deep flaws, but basically fun, and Dead or Alive 4: an uninspired button-masher fighter that doesn't look like its had its sprites updated in years. Nevermind that the game ought to come with a jar of vaseline, as it's mainly beat-off material for teenagers.
It's not that the 360's game lineup is all that bad, it's just that the console's been out for a year now, and the best game on it is a FPS, on a console that's drowning in FPSes. Yet where are the RPGs? Oblivion and its broken leveling system and litany of cut-and-paste caves/dungeons? Bottom-of-the-JRPG barrel drek like Enchanted Arms (if you're not acquainted with how agonizingly bad this game is, take a look at some of the gameplay videos on Gametrailers)?
If the 360 really has a weakness, its the utter lack of diversity in its games. It's a hell of generic sequelism. That's fine in a launch console, but not a year after release.
I'm going to start with a disclaimer: my understanding of quantum physics is largely based on discussion that's come up in the context of philosophy classes (e.g. metaphysics), so it's sort of the for dummies version.
...but it seems like our understanding of quantum probability stems from in inability to account for all of the forces that may be acting upon subatomic particles. Take Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for example: we treat an electron's position as probabilistic because the wavelengths of light necessary to observe an electron have such energy as to move the electron. So, it's mathematically convenient to start assigning probabilities to an electron's exact location, because we don't have the means to say "Ah, there it is!" without moving it somewhere else.
Doesn't that seem a bit presumptuous? Sure, we can treat subatomic particles as probabilistic - and in many cases, with out current means, we have to - but it seems a bit hasty to jump to the conclusion that many quantum physicists have, and argue that there's a schism between quantum-level physics - which are strictly probabilistic - and non-quantum physics, which aren't.
Let's be honest: quantum theory just isn't exactly understood as well as simple mechanics. I'm not arguing that quantum behavior isn't probabilistic, just that it seems a bit hasty to claim that it must be so patently different when it's just not understood all that well.
...at least that's the impression I've always been left with when the discussion came up in class. I understand my camp is currently on the losing side of the debate, though. Am I missing something?
There's a simple mechanism at work, here, and it's not just K-12 that's really screwing us.
Company A, decades ago, says "we only want the best workers, so don't apply unless you have a college degree." Since they're asking for more qualified employees, they tend to pay better. Thus, additional demand is created for college degrees.
Over time, Companies B-Z also begin to demand that their employees hold degrees. But, see, they're run by penny-pinchers. The jobs aren't as prestigious, and really don't require a college degree, but statistically, a degree holder does tend to do a better job than a non-degree holder. But because everyone's on board with this college degree bit, now, they don't have to pay more than average, because no matter where you go, they want a college degree for any job that requires pushing papers across a desk.
Then, the universities catch on: everyone needs a college degree, but there's more demand for these degree-holding employees than there is supply. So, how do you create more? Well, you can fix K-12, and make more viable candidates, but that'd be difficult. It's easier to just lower the bar. So, now, every idiot that has a pulse and a way to scratch together $30,000 can get a college degree.
The ultimate situation: we've gone in a circle. College degrees have been devalued by the ever-lowering barrier to entry almost to the point of being meaningless, but it's a $30,000+ dollar hoop just about anyone wishing to join the white collar workforce has to jump through, now. And with HR departments more concerned with avoiding sexual harassment lawsuits than hiring decent, effective employees, it doesn't look like it's going to change from the business side. And it doesn't look like the government's going to get its act together and fix K-12. or regulate schools' accredidation. So what do we do? Wait for another cycle.
My degree today holds roughly the same meaning as a high school diploma when my dad was my age. I bet that by the time my kids are in college, masters, JDs, PhDs, and MDs will be the norm. We'll have to come up with a whole new level of post-graduate work just to allow the people who should've been the only ones getting degrees in the first place to set themselves apart from the pack.
Seriously, if the students can blow off lecture, or it's not necessary, why is that a problem?
Take the case of a university student who does as you say, and skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and still does well in the class. The university still gets paid. The professor still gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing greater attention to the students who do choose to be there. The skipping student does well, and gets a good grade, and the professor has a more attentive and interested audience. Everyone wins.
Now, take the case of the student who skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and bombs the course. The university gets paid. The professor gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing for greater attention for the students who are there. The skipping student does poorly, and either learns to go to lecture in the future, or gets booted out of school. Everyone wins except for the student, who only screwed himself.
But the proponents of PC gaming Armageddon forget that the game play styles of PC games versus console games are different.
This gets bandied about all the time, and I wonder if anyone saying it ever stops to think.
PC and console games tend to be different because the systems have different capabilities. Your PC's monitor has, traditionally, crammed a lot more pixels onto the screen than your TV's. This has tended to favor genres that need a lot of screen real-estate, like RTS, and the genres that typically go heaviest on the eye candy, like FPS. Furthermore, every PC comes equipped with a keyboard and mouse (spare me the pedantry of your 8086 not having a mouse), which gives a more precise control setup than a typical gamepad. What needs precision in control more than anything? FPS games. Hence, the PC has dominated RTS and FPS, while the console has played to its strengths (or, at least, to minimize its weaknesses), giving us menu-based RPGs, sports, platformers, and the like.
But think about it - HDTV? A 1080p TV is pushing a lot more pixels than most peoples' monitors. Even at 720p, you've got a whole lot of pixels on that screen. And the consoles are taking advantage. RTS is looking more and more feasible on the console. Meanwhile, they've got the "ooh, wow, eye candy!" effect from the resolution increase. So does anyone think it's really a major stretch to see a KBM setup on a console? Hell, the Xbox already has one! And for all we (no pun intended) know, the Wiimote is going to blow the KBM setup out of the water for FPS gameplay.
So, I'm not saying the PC is dying, but looking at this zomg pc gamez r difrent then console games argument: the gameplay experiences are different because of the hardware differences, and the hardware differences are decreasingly significant.
The PC once had exclusive dominion over online play, superior control, superior display, and moddability, at the expense of higher cost and (potentially) having to deal with the headache of PC hardware/compatibility issues.
Now, the consoles have online play. They've got the great displays, and tentatively, even better control, with none of the hassles of PC gaming.
The only thing the PC's got a leg up on, now, is moddability, and with the likes of XBL, how long can we expect that to last, maybe this generation?
First off, the list of available genres. Everything these days is FPS or the odd RTS. Adventure games are dead. Brawlers have ceased to exist. Action-RPGs? Hope you like tired re-treads of four year old PS2 games. More traditional RPGs? Gone. Dungeon crawlers? Prepared to be overwhelmed by mediocrity. You're lucky to get one solid entry in any given genre every couple years.
Then, you've got the compatibility issues. The release-it-now-even-though-its-broken-and-maybe-if -enough-people-buy-it-and-bitch-about-it-we-might- keep-enough-people-employed-at-the-development-stu dio-long-enough-to-release-a-patch-that-fixes-some-issues mentality. The game's likely going to be broken in some significant way when you get it home, and getting a fix put out is solely dependant on equal parts popularity and divine intervention.
Next up, you've got the absurd hardware costs. And I'm not talking about $500 GPUs (although those can certainly be a factor in games like Oblivion), but the overall costs of maintaining an up-to-date PC to run the newest games at a smooth framerate with reasonably high settings. You've got a GPU, and RAM, and the CPU. We scoff at $500 for an Xbox 360, or even more for a PS3, but that $500 PC from Best Buy can't even handle games made 3 years ago.
And then of course, the fucking malware copy protection so many developers insist on packaging with their games... which makes me wonder: if this stuff is so impotent that piracy is still killing off the gaming industry, why don't they simply stop using it? If anything, it provides yet another source of motivation to drive would-be consumers to piracy. They'd save money on having to buy this bullshit, possibly doing something to stem the enormous tide of ill will it breeds with their customers, and maybe, just maybe cause a few more people to worry more about "is this game good," rather than "if I buy the retail version, will it break my PC?"
It may not be tech-specific, but Memory Alpha has the most detailed technological descriptions behind Star Trek technology that I've seen. For example, take a look at their phaser page.
When was the last US-based Anime convention this guy went to? You could engrave the katakana for "Super Happy Fun Watermelon Millard Fillmore" on a bologna sandwich, leave it out on the dealers floor, and someone will buy it for $50.
Not that I disagree with you about how rabid the US otaku-Japanese-fetish crowd can be, but consider the number of them against the number of people buying the yearly installments of Madden. I'd imagine it's miniscule in comparison.
This is in no way meant to disparage Guild Wars. It's a fine game with some really cool ideas. But it is simply not a MMOG. Even the developers have said it's not a MMOG. From their FAQ:
Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience.
It's just a pet peeve of mine. MMOGs typically entail a large, explorable, public, cooperative world. Guild Wars is highly instanced. The only public areas are small towns that only serve as staging areas for the instances. Guild Wars' gameplay actually has more in common with Diablo 2 than it does a standard MMO, like EverQuest.
I used to be a pretty hardcore gamer, but these days, my time's dominated by school and work. But I still know some really hardcare gamer types, including some competetive Quake players.
Invariably, when I ask them about fatal1ty, the response I get is either "Who?" or along the lines of "Fuck that nob gobbler!"
Is this the exception, or is plastering this guy's name on their products basically a waste of money? I mean, independant of the mouse itself - do they thing anyone gives a flying fuck that it says Fatal1ty on it?
While mobile-phone internet use is currently low, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is optimistic: "People are going to spend all their time on it eventually," he said."
Not any time soon, they aren't.
With carriers charging obscene rates for data transfer (my plan with Cingular is $15/month extra for 5MB), charging by the kilobyte for overage, and the realistic speed you get off their gee-whiz-bang-super-ultra new networks delivering an experience similar to visiting a Flash-heavy site on a 9600 baud modem, and phones so absurdly underpowered (yet still overpriced) that they choke running a text-only browser, you'd have to be delusional to think mobile phone internet access will increase by any substantial amount in the near future.
Case in point: about a year ago, I got the much-hyped V3 Razr from Cingular. Remember the commercials? This thing was supposed to be a home entertainment center, PDA, and PC all in one device. Obviously I was skeptical, but I liked the form factor. And it's really hard to do much multimedia work with only 5MB of memory and no flash card capability.
Turns out, even in an area covered by what Cingular claims to be their hi-speed network, it takes me roughly a minute just to launch the browser and get my text-only home page loaded (it may have a Cingular logo on there, too, admitedly). Just the other day, I was sitting in the pharmacy, waiting on a perscription to be filled, and really wanted to know what time the Red Wings game started. It took ten fucking minutes to load a page only 3 clicks deep off my homepage and find out the start time.
...and this is on a supposedly high-end phone. Sure, if you buy one of those PDAs with a phone tacked on (i.e. the Treo), the experience is dramatically better, but the Razr is (sadly) still one of the better (best?) phones on the market, and if this is the dismal experience I'm getting now, how long until phones progress to the point that going online is tolerable and affordable for Joe User and the phone that came free with his plan? Quite a few years, I'd imagine.
It's sad, really. The biggest barrier to the adoption of mobile phone-based internet usage are the people trying to sell you the service in the first place. And the phone manufacturers aren't helping any. Cell phone providers suck the big one - who knew?;)
Actually, no. There are generally considered to be two types of atheism: weak and strong.
Weak atheists are similar to agnostics in that they allow for the possibility that some sort of supreme being exists. They just don't believe there is one. Strong atheists believe a supreme being absolutely does not (or can not) exist.
So how is weak atheism not agnosticism? An agnostic believes we don't know (and in some cases, can not know) whether or not god exists.
To sum it up:
Agnostic: "We don't know if god exists."
Weak Atheist: "There's no good reason to believe god exists, but we don't know everything some god, not necessarily one described by any religion, could exist."
Strong Atheist: "God does not exist" or "God can not exist."
A lot of self-professed agnostics are actually weak atheists.
Unfortunately the terminology has, as usual, been co-opted and distorted by the masses, who tend to think that weak atheists are agnostics, and all atheists are strong atheists.
I used Miranda for about a year and a half, and I was pretty happy with it, but it has two utterly glaring issues:
First, it's AIM protocol is absolute garbage. They've been using TOC since Miranda's inception, saying an OSCAR plugin was in the works, and it never materialized. Their TOC protocol didn't support reading away messages, auto response, file transfer, or anything but the most basic messaging. It was also tempramental and required constantly pointing it at new IPs and ports as it would stop working. A month or three back, AOL killed their TOC servers, breaking Miranda's already limited ability to use AIM. Now, there's a beta OSCAR protocol out there, but work is going painfully slow, and it still doesn't support any new features.
Second, everything is plugin-based. Which means that while, if you're happy with the standard beige and ugly-ass icons that it comes with, it's a no-brainer to use. If you want to skin it, good fucking luck. While Trillian, for example, will have a skin file you can just download and install effortlessly, doing much of anything in Miranda is like pulling teeth. The last "theme" I was using (if you can even call it that) was simply to make the contact list transparent with nice-looking icons and having it pinned to the desktop (basically, making it look like Adium). It took half a dozen plugins, each of which had virtually no documentation and had to be configured individually....I eventually figured it'd be easier to heckle my few friends I actually talk to online to getting Google Talk, and I use that on my Windows box, and glorious, beautiful Adium on my iBook.
First off, why on Earth would anyone, even the most casual gamer, commit to spending the money on a brand new system to run the games he already has a system for? Buying a 360 to play old Xbox games doesn't make any sense. Anyone with half a brain will at least be waiting for one or two games to come out on the 360 that they want before they consider buying it.
Second, it's a money-making tactic. Some people don't want to spend $400 up-front. So when they buy the cheap model, and a couple months later, some game requires a HDD, that's another $100 or so in Microsoft's pocket that has a higher margin on it than the full 360 budle had. I remember seeing a price comparison before; to get a 360 Core system, then add all the additional components to it that the full Bundle had, it'd be over $500 (or something in that range). That's extra sales to report and more cash in Microsoft's pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
You are, of course, correct.
Open mouth, insert foot. I should be more careful about my own terminology before I go on trying to correct other people for theirs.
How embarrassing.
Hopefully people see this and mod my previous comment down.
First off, IANAL. I am a law student with IP and patent law classes under my belt, but I'm still just a law student. Take the following with a grain of salt.
In a lot of the patent articles on Slashdot, where someone will ask "Isn't X prior art?" Often, even though it seems intuitively that it should be, it's not.
Actual prior art, which would be sufficient to legally defeat a patent, must read on all of a patent's claims. Assume the patent in question has claims (basically, technical description of features) A, B, and C. You research patents, and you find older patents:
Patent 1 has claims A and B.
Patent 2 has claims B and C.
Patent 3 has claims A and C.
None of those will defeat the patent in question on prior art grounds, because none of them include all of the claims A, B, and C.
What you may have at that point is an obviousness objection. You could argue that because there are patents 1-3 exist, that combining them to create A, B, and C was so obvious to someone skilled in the art that the patent should be invalidated for failing to be non-obvious. But that's different than prior art.
Having a patent invalidated for prior art is actually pretty uncommon. Obviousness issues are more common, but often, it's cheaper to just settle.
Well, a typical textbook from West or Aspen, which most classes use, runs about $150.
Then you have other materials; treatises, study aids, course packs, outlines, supplements, etc. Prices vary wildly depending on what you buy. Some of these, like the hornbooks, are just as expensive as your textbook. And since the majority (or at least about half) of the courses offered after your first year's required courses are only two credits, it's entirely conceivable that you could be shopping for books for six classes.
I'd say $5,000 is definitely towards the upper limit of what would be necessary. I've never come all that close to $5,000 in required books, but picking up, say, five textbooks, a couple treatises, some Q&A books, and a nutshell or two (or something equivalent)... that'll put you well over $1000/term. A good number of my classes have had more than $600 worth of books, if you picked up all the recommended materials.
Of course, I should've pointed out that I was considering software for laptop exams (which you need to purchase every year) and other supplies (e.g. the highlighters I go through by the case) in that figure, too.
Overall, $5,000 is a high estimate, and I personally spend less, but it's not unrealistic.
It gets far, far worse. Think about rent and cost of living.
I attend a law school that costs ~$1,000/credit hour. That works out to $36,000 year, full-time, in tuition alone. Furthermore, students enrolled full-time are not allowed to work more than 18 hours/week. And although you may think a JD candidate could make a fair amount of money, they don't. You're looking at the same $8-10/hour pay you could get as an undergraduate, except now you're clerking or doing paralegal work.
As you'd expect, law school is far more academically intensive than your average undergraduate program. The rule of thumb is that you'll spend a minimum of three hours studying for every one hour of class time. On a standard full-time track, that's 12 credits per term; 12 hours per week in every class, another 36 hours studying. So, 48 hours/week devoted to academics. Let's assume that you get a job at $10/hour, and work the full 18 hours/week. That's $180/week, or $720/month.
The short of it is that any job you get as a full-time law student isn't even going to put a dent in tuition costs.
But now, add, say, $700/month for rent. Then you have bills. And food. And transportation. Let's say the student's frugal, and he gets by on about $1200/month (obviously this varies based on where you're living, but I'm trying to pick a number that would be typical of a suburban law school). And upwards of $5000 worth of books every year.
So... add it all up.
Tuition: $36k/year
Books: $5k/year
Rent, food, bills, etc.: $14.4k/year
Working income: $8604
YEARLY TOTAL: $46,796
TOTAL TO GRADUATION: $140,388
Now, consider the time constraints.
1 week is 168 hours.
You're spending 48 hours/week in class or studying.
You sleep 8 hours/night (or 56 hours/week).
You're working 18 hours/week.
That's 122/168 hours per week spoken for. That leaves 46 hours/week on average for leisure, additional studying, eating, and transportation time. That's almost 7 hours per day. In my personal experience, it's about 2-3 hours/day for relaxing and/or working out. It's not an impossible task, but it's stressful, and not fun. But going tens of thousands of dollars into debt for the "privilege" of being too damned busy all the time isn't much fun. Clinic and volunteer work - both of which the school pushes pretty hard - all come out of this time, too.
Thankfully, I'm at the school I'm at (as opposed to a more prestigious one) because they offered me an enormous scholarship. But I have friends that are borrowing their whole way through. One of them half-heartedly jokes that the only way to get through it is to pretend that loans aren't real money, because the debt is otherwise just stifling.
Actually, that's not entirely true.
The leading case on the constitutionality of damages is BMW v. Gore. You can read it here if you're interested.
Out of that case came three guideposts that the Supreme Court uses to assess whether or not damages are constitutional.
1. The degree of reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct
2. The portion of the damages that are compensatory
3. Statutory punitive damages/penalties that could be imposed
So, that the statute allows such damages only satisfies one of the three guideposts. However, punitive damages in this case vastly outstripped the compensatory damages. I remember reading it in an article when the verdict was announced, but the punitive:compensatory damages were, what, on the order of 9000:1? The court has said, in Phillip Morris USA v. Williams, that damages that were only 100:1 punitive:compensatory were "grossly excessive."
The only issue to be resolved, at this point, is how reprehensible the court finds the defendant's conduct.
It seems to me that, if this question of damages managed to get before the US Supreme Court, it'd be thrown out as unconstitutional in a hurry.
But I'm just a law student offering my armchair lawyer analysis. Take the above with a grain of salt.
I believe strongly in the idea of free speech, and don't much care for censorship or other speech restrictions. That said, on some level I think I can agree with the idea that lawyers are part of our legal justice system, and therefore to be held to a higher standard of conduct than we mere mortals.
Lawyers are held to a much higher standard of conduct than "mere mortals." Although it is ultimately decided by each state's bar association, you can find the ABA's model rules of professional conduct here. Virtually every accredited law school teaches those in Professional Responsibility.
These rules are, incidentally, a large part of the reason that slimeball lawyers tend to have a short shelf life. They create something of an ethical minefield for attorneys, and govern everything from what an attorney is allowed to say to the media during trial, to what his duties to non-clients are, to what sort of information he can disclose about a case.
Without having a copy of the actual complain handy, I can't say exactly what the RIAA is accusing Beckerman of, but the quotes from the Wired article make it sound like a meritorious claims and contentions issue; in effect, they're saying Beckerman violated his ethical duty to only make meritorious arguments by dragging out the trial with motions, claims, etc. that he knew were not valid.
For what it's worth, I've followed Beckerman's blog somewhat closely. And if my speculation about the actual claims being levied at Beckerman are true, I'd be inclined to say that this isn't just a case of the pot calling the kettle black in some general "the RIAA is bad!" kind of sense. It seems to me that, in that case, they'd be violating the exact same rule they're accusing Beckerman of violating by filing this complaint.
But, I'm just a law student playing armchair lawyer here. Take the above with a grain of salt.
So what is preventing competition from existing? What is stopping someone from springing up to start a local alternative to their crappy service? Or, what is stopping an existing large company that provides a similar service from expanding to provide this service that you and so many others demand? See my subject for the answer.
It's not just the government's fault. Certainly, they've been an enabler. But can you imagine trying to pitch a system of government-owned infrastructure in the US?
Part of the problem is the way ownership of the infrastructure works in the United States. Specifically, it's that infrastructure clashing with property rights that provides the problem. If, say, Comcast owns their own lines, in order to provide service, they need to go into a neighborhood (likely with permission from the local government), and tear up everyone's lawns to lay cable. Now that neighborhood has a single provider. You want competition? Now Charter has to come along, tear up your line, and lay more cable. You've got two providers now. That's not much competition. So you want a third? You can see where this is going. And at the end of the day, we've got X lines in the ground for X services, and X number of upgrades that need to be made to the hardware to increase speed and capacity. The system leads to local monopolies and utterly eviscerates competition.
What the US needs is a system when the government owns and is responsible for maintaining the lines. Something like what they have in Norway. There, every time there's a municipal digging project, they lay fiber. Sewer? Add fiber. Construction? Add fiber. After a while of doing this, you have a massive, single-owner infrastructure. The government then leases those lines to the ISPs, who provide the service to the customers. And compared to the US system, they have less garbage in the ground, less tearing up your lawn, more opportunity for competition, faster deployment/upgrade times, and more even distribution of high-speed coverage. The end result is they have more people with faster connections paying more reasonable prices than here in the US.
We should, of course, adopt that model. But given the state of US politics, can you even imagine the outcry if our government tried to implement such a system? The telcos would scream bloody murder, and everyone more inclined to mindlessly shout "Ra! Ra! Go Capitalism!" than understand simple economics (read: most of the US) and their collective - and unfortunate - voting power, would shout down any politician backing the thing.
What we can quite squarely blame the government for, though, are two things (although this is likely not exhaustive):
1) Paying the telcos hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, ostensibly to upgrade our nation's collective internet connection, and seeing that money vanish into the ether.
2) Allowing telcos to have exclusivity deals with apartment complexes and the like.
So, sure, the government's in the best position to improve things. But I don't think it's quite fair to lay the blame squarely at their feet.
Try looking for Transformers on Google. That fan site with the picture of Optimus Prime? That's infringement; it's unlawful. The wiki hosting a sound clip of some exchange between Star Scream and Megatron? That's infringment. The fanfic? Infringement. Google's linking to it all. They're even hosting thumbnails of some of it.
The distinction between linking to lawful and unlawful copyright works is something that can't be sustained in the face of a modern search engine. It would be asinine to tell Google that it couldn't link to anything without first ascertaining that the site has a clear and lawful copyright on the substance. A search engine just couldn't work in such a case. Likewise, saying a search engine is guilty of contributory copyright infringement when it does link to infringing material is no more sustainable, because the internet is a minefield. The liability imposed would be so monstrous as to either destroy the entire industry or create such legal liability that we're left with the last situation: search engines only able to link to things after they verify the owner's valid copyright claims.
For this to be good precedent, there needs to be a distinction made by the courts as to what makes these sites different from Google, Yahoo, and the like, and it can't be based on a post hoc determination of the host site's copyright validity.
Our copyright in the US works largely on the owners' good graces, apathy, and ignorance. Copyright infringement, in a technical sense, happens constantly. And not just from music and movie downloaders, but ordinary people. Tattoos of cartoon characters, playing some popular song on your guitar, hosting images someone else created on your own server.
This may, in fact, have appeared on Slashdot before, but John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, estimates that a typical person could easily rack up $12.45 million in copyright liability doing ordinary things like sending email, sketching on a notepad, the afore-mentioned cartoon tattoo, writing poetry, and singing "Happy Birthday." And then there's this:
You can find the entirety of Professor Tehranian's article in PDF here.
The entire structure of our copyright law in the US is based on what strikes me as being the courts' absolutely blind willingness to enforce laws, the language of which criminalizes the day-to-day acts of normal people, and therefore makes the system open to the sort of hyper-technical abuse characterized in the article.
Of course, our national legislators are to blame for the sloppy language, not the courts. But the courts are still the agents enforcing these laws that just fly in the face of any reasonable or well-considered social policy.
I signed up for Sprint about three years ago; they had that two week trial period, and I figured if I was unhappy, I could just cancel it and move on to a different carrier.
Well, quite predictably, the service sucked. The area around my apartment had no coverage at all, and I couldn't get a signal at all inside (despite the fact that Verizon, Cingular, etc. seemed to work fine). So, I canceled my service and returned the phone. Problem done, right?
Nope.
For the next couple months, Sprint continued to bill me. And not just once, mind you, but twice. I was getting two bills a month from them, despite the fact that I had only one phone. Their excuses were "oh, billing must have just not caught up yet, ignore that bill" to "we'll cancel that bill, sorry for the inconvenience" to finally actually canceling the bill. Their explanation for the second bill? Some sort of billing goof-up, and it shouldn't be an issue.
So, the bill for the account I actually had finally stopped coming after three months, but the other one kept coming. I ignored it. They sent letters threatening to terminate my service? Good I thought! Then, finally, they sent a notice saying that I had the pay the $300-some balance within two weeks, or they'd send me to collections. At this point, I took a closer look at the bill. You see, when you call Sprint customer service, the first thing they do is ask you for your phone number with some automated prompt. With my original bill, that wasn't an issue - I punched in my old phone number. This time? The bill didn't even have a phone number. I couldn't get past the initial voice prompt; pressing zero didn't work, holding on the line didn't work. If you didn't enter a phone number, there was no way to talk to someone.
So, I dug up my old phone number, entered that, then after literally 3 or 4 disconnects, being transfered to departments that apparently didn't exist, and telling my story to no less than half a dozen different people, most utterly useless because they were reading from a script (and would then transfer me to a 'manager' that would also read from a script), I was told to contact the fraud department. They were more useful, but of course, told me that the issue was a billing problem, and that I would have to take it up with customer service! Argh!
I finally got a higher-up in their customer service department, who told me he would cancel the bill. I thought the whole mess was finally behind me, when next month, I got another bill. Turned out, he had zeroed the balance, but not canceled the account. I finally called back to the fraud department and pleaded for them to help, but they kept trying to transfer me to customer service. "Look," I said "there isn't even a phone number associated with the account. There is no phone. No account. I never had this service. Cancel it!" Of course, I was just transfered.
The whole mess went on for about six months and had me spending tens of hours on the phone with Sprint, explaining the problem to dozens of people, and having an infuriating number of disconnects, before a local Sprint store opened up. I went in with a stack of bills for this non-existent phone, and told one of the employees my story. He spent 10 minutes on the phone, and solved the whole problem. I never got a bill again.
I will never, ever do business with that company again.
So, I've been kicking around the idea of getting a 360 for months, now. I was close, but put off by the sticker shock, and decided to hold off for a bit longer. Maybe until a price drop.
A couple days ago, though, I went over to a friend's place; she manages a small EBgames store, and has a 360 and just about every notable game for it. It was just a small get-together, so a bunch of us spent some time browsing through her collection of 360 games. I'm glad I didn't buy one.
Gears of War. Rainbow 6: Vegas. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. FEAR. YAWW2FPS (Call of Duty something, I think). Dead Rising. Saint's Row. Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Dead or Alive 4.
Incidentally, most of these games are the most popular on the 360. Notice something? It's almost entirely FPS. R6:V, CoD and GRAW are your archetypical boring, generic, sequel shovelware. Gears of War and FEAR are both good games in their own right, but considering the company they're in, they don't exactly stand out. Then you have yet another Splinter Cell game, which falls in the same boat: a good game, but reeking of been-there-done-that. Next is Dead Rising, a good game with a few very, very deep flaws, but basically fun, and Dead or Alive 4: an uninspired button-masher fighter that doesn't look like its had its sprites updated in years. Nevermind that the game ought to come with a jar of vaseline, as it's mainly beat-off material for teenagers.
It's not that the 360's game lineup is all that bad, it's just that the console's been out for a year now, and the best game on it is a FPS, on a console that's drowning in FPSes. Yet where are the RPGs? Oblivion and its broken leveling system and litany of cut-and-paste caves/dungeons? Bottom-of-the-JRPG barrel drek like Enchanted Arms (if you're not acquainted with how agonizingly bad this game is, take a look at some of the gameplay videos on Gametrailers)?
If the 360 really has a weakness, its the utter lack of diversity in its games. It's a hell of generic sequelism. That's fine in a launch console, but not a year after release.
I'm going to start with a disclaimer: my understanding of quantum physics is largely based on discussion that's come up in the context of philosophy classes (e.g. metaphysics), so it's sort of the for dummies version.
...but it seems like our understanding of quantum probability stems from in inability to account for all of the forces that may be acting upon subatomic particles. Take Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for example: we treat an electron's position as probabilistic because the wavelengths of light necessary to observe an electron have such energy as to move the electron. So, it's mathematically convenient to start assigning probabilities to an electron's exact location, because we don't have the means to say "Ah, there it is!" without moving it somewhere else.
...at least that's the impression I've always been left with when the discussion came up in class. I understand my camp is currently on the losing side of the debate, though. Am I missing something?
Doesn't that seem a bit presumptuous? Sure, we can treat subatomic particles as probabilistic - and in many cases, with out current means, we have to - but it seems a bit hasty to jump to the conclusion that many quantum physicists have, and argue that there's a schism between quantum-level physics - which are strictly probabilistic - and non-quantum physics, which aren't.
Let's be honest: quantum theory just isn't exactly understood as well as simple mechanics. I'm not arguing that quantum behavior isn't probabilistic, just that it seems a bit hasty to claim that it must be so patently different when it's just not understood all that well.
There's a simple mechanism at work, here, and it's not just K-12 that's really screwing us.
Company A, decades ago, says "we only want the best workers, so don't apply unless you have a college degree." Since they're asking for more qualified employees, they tend to pay better. Thus, additional demand is created for college degrees.
Over time, Companies B-Z also begin to demand that their employees hold degrees. But, see, they're run by penny-pinchers. The jobs aren't as prestigious, and really don't require a college degree, but statistically, a degree holder does tend to do a better job than a non-degree holder. But because everyone's on board with this college degree bit, now, they don't have to pay more than average, because no matter where you go, they want a college degree for any job that requires pushing papers across a desk.
Then, the universities catch on: everyone needs a college degree, but there's more demand for these degree-holding employees than there is supply. So, how do you create more? Well, you can fix K-12, and make more viable candidates, but that'd be difficult. It's easier to just lower the bar. So, now, every idiot that has a pulse and a way to scratch together $30,000 can get a college degree.
The ultimate situation: we've gone in a circle. College degrees have been devalued by the ever-lowering barrier to entry almost to the point of being meaningless, but it's a $30,000+ dollar hoop just about anyone wishing to join the white collar workforce has to jump through, now. And with HR departments more concerned with avoiding sexual harassment lawsuits than hiring decent, effective employees, it doesn't look like it's going to change from the business side. And it doesn't look like the government's going to get its act together and fix K-12. or regulate schools' accredidation. So what do we do? Wait for another cycle.
My degree today holds roughly the same meaning as a high school diploma when my dad was my age. I bet that by the time my kids are in college, masters, JDs, PhDs, and MDs will be the norm. We'll have to come up with a whole new level of post-graduate work just to allow the people who should've been the only ones getting degrees in the first place to set themselves apart from the pack.
Seriously, if the students can blow off lecture, or it's not necessary, why is that a problem?
Take the case of a university student who does as you say, and skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and still does well in the class. The university still gets paid. The professor still gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing greater attention to the students who do choose to be there. The skipping student does well, and gets a good grade, and the professor has a more attentive and interested audience. Everyone wins.
Now, take the case of the student who skips lecture, downloads the podcasts, and bombs the course. The university gets paid. The professor gets paid. Class size is smaller, allowing for greater attention for the students who are there. The skipping student does poorly, and either learns to go to lecture in the future, or gets booted out of school. Everyone wins except for the student, who only screwed himself.
Just put up the podcasts.
This gets bandied about all the time, and I wonder if anyone saying it ever stops to think.
PC and console games tend to be different because the systems have different capabilities. Your PC's monitor has, traditionally, crammed a lot more pixels onto the screen than your TV's. This has tended to favor genres that need a lot of screen real-estate, like RTS, and the genres that typically go heaviest on the eye candy, like FPS. Furthermore, every PC comes equipped with a keyboard and mouse (spare me the pedantry of your 8086 not having a mouse), which gives a more precise control setup than a typical gamepad. What needs precision in control more than anything? FPS games. Hence, the PC has dominated RTS and FPS, while the console has played to its strengths (or, at least, to minimize its weaknesses), giving us menu-based RPGs, sports, platformers, and the like.
But think about it - HDTV? A 1080p TV is pushing a lot more pixels than most peoples' monitors. Even at 720p, you've got a whole lot of pixels on that screen. And the consoles are taking advantage. RTS is looking more and more feasible on the console. Meanwhile, they've got the "ooh, wow, eye candy!" effect from the resolution increase. So does anyone think it's really a major stretch to see a KBM setup on a console? Hell, the Xbox already has one! And for all we (no pun intended) know, the Wiimote is going to blow the KBM setup out of the water for FPS gameplay.
So, I'm not saying the PC is dying, but looking at this zomg pc gamez r difrent then console games argument: the gameplay experiences are different because of the hardware differences, and the hardware differences are decreasingly significant.
The PC once had exclusive dominion over online play, superior control, superior display, and moddability, at the expense of higher cost and (potentially) having to deal with the headache of PC hardware/compatibility issues.
Now, the consoles have online play. They've got the great displays, and tentatively, even better control, with none of the hassles of PC gaming.
The only thing the PC's got a leg up on, now, is moddability, and with the likes of XBL, how long can we expect that to last, maybe this generation?
You know what's really killing PC gaming?
f -enough-people-buy-it-and-bitch-about-it-we-might- keep-enough-people-employed-at-the-development-stu dio-long-enough-to-release-a-patch-that-fixes-some -issues mentality. The game's likely going to be broken in some significant way when you get it home, and getting a fix put out is solely dependant on equal parts popularity and divine intervention.
First off, the list of available genres. Everything these days is FPS or the odd RTS. Adventure games are dead. Brawlers have ceased to exist. Action-RPGs? Hope you like tired re-treads of four year old PS2 games. More traditional RPGs? Gone. Dungeon crawlers? Prepared to be overwhelmed by mediocrity. You're lucky to get one solid entry in any given genre every couple years.
Then, you've got the compatibility issues. The release-it-now-even-though-its-broken-and-maybe-i
Next up, you've got the absurd hardware costs. And I'm not talking about $500 GPUs (although those can certainly be a factor in games like Oblivion), but the overall costs of maintaining an up-to-date PC to run the newest games at a smooth framerate with reasonably high settings. You've got a GPU, and RAM, and the CPU. We scoff at $500 for an Xbox 360, or even more for a PS3, but that $500 PC from Best Buy can't even handle games made 3 years ago.
And then of course, the fucking malware copy protection so many developers insist on packaging with their games... which makes me wonder: if this stuff is so impotent that piracy is still killing off the gaming industry, why don't they simply stop using it? If anything, it provides yet another source of motivation to drive would-be consumers to piracy. They'd save money on having to buy this bullshit, possibly doing something to stem the enormous tide of ill will it breeds with their customers, and maybe, just maybe cause a few more people to worry more about "is this game good," rather than "if I buy the retail version, will it break my PC?"
It may not be tech-specific, but Memory Alpha has the most detailed technological descriptions behind Star Trek technology that I've seen. For example, take a look at their phaser page.
Not that I disagree with you about how rabid the US otaku-Japanese-fetish crowd can be, but consider the number of them against the number of people buying the yearly installments of Madden. I'd imagine it's miniscule in comparison.
This is in no way meant to disparage Guild Wars. It's a fine game with some really cool ideas. But it is simply not a MMOG. Even the developers have said it's not a MMOG. From their FAQ:
It's just a pet peeve of mine. MMOGs typically entail a large, explorable, public, cooperative world. Guild Wars is highly instanced. The only public areas are small towns that only serve as staging areas for the instances. Guild Wars' gameplay actually has more in common with Diablo 2 than it does a standard MMO, like EverQuest.
Okay, done being pedantic, now.
So, I'm curious.
I used to be a pretty hardcore gamer, but these days, my time's dominated by school and work. But I still know some really hardcare gamer types, including some competetive Quake players.
Invariably, when I ask them about fatal1ty, the response I get is either "Who?" or along the lines of "Fuck that nob gobbler!"
Is this the exception, or is plastering this guy's name on their products basically a waste of money? I mean, independant of the mouse itself - do they thing anyone gives a flying fuck that it says Fatal1ty on it?
Not any time soon, they aren't.
With carriers charging obscene rates for data transfer (my plan with Cingular is $15/month extra for 5MB), charging by the kilobyte for overage, and the realistic speed you get off their gee-whiz-bang-super-ultra new networks delivering an experience similar to visiting a Flash-heavy site on a 9600 baud modem, and phones so absurdly underpowered (yet still overpriced) that they choke running a text-only browser, you'd have to be delusional to think mobile phone internet access will increase by any substantial amount in the near future.
Case in point: about a year ago, I got the much-hyped V3 Razr from Cingular. Remember the commercials? This thing was supposed to be a home entertainment center, PDA, and PC all in one device. Obviously I was skeptical, but I liked the form factor. And it's really hard to do much multimedia work with only 5MB of memory and no flash card capability.
Turns out, even in an area covered by what Cingular claims to be their hi-speed network, it takes me roughly a minute just to launch the browser and get my text-only home page loaded (it may have a Cingular logo on there, too, admitedly). Just the other day, I was sitting in the pharmacy, waiting on a perscription to be filled, and really wanted to know what time the Red Wings game started. It took ten fucking minutes to load a page only 3 clicks deep off my homepage and find out the start time.
It's sad, really. The biggest barrier to the adoption of mobile phone-based internet usage are the people trying to sell you the service in the first place. And the phone manufacturers aren't helping any. Cell phone providers suck the big one - who knew?
Actually, no. There are generally considered to be two types of atheism: weak and strong.
Weak atheists are similar to agnostics in that they allow for the possibility that some sort of supreme being exists. They just don't believe there is one. Strong atheists believe a supreme being absolutely does not (or can not) exist.
So how is weak atheism not agnosticism? An agnostic believes we don't know (and in some cases, can not know) whether or not god exists.
To sum it up:
Agnostic: "We don't know if god exists."
Weak Atheist: "There's no good reason to believe god exists, but we don't know everything some god, not necessarily one described by any religion, could exist."
Strong Atheist: "God does not exist" or "God can not exist."
A lot of self-professed agnostics are actually weak atheists.
Unfortunately the terminology has, as usual, been co-opted and distorted by the masses, who tend to think that weak atheists are agnostics, and all atheists are strong atheists.
I used Miranda for about a year and a half, and I was pretty happy with it, but it has two utterly glaring issues:
...I eventually figured it'd be easier to heckle my few friends I actually talk to online to getting Google Talk, and I use that on my Windows box, and glorious, beautiful Adium on my iBook.
First, it's AIM protocol is absolute garbage. They've been using TOC since Miranda's inception, saying an OSCAR plugin was in the works, and it never materialized. Their TOC protocol didn't support reading away messages, auto response, file transfer, or anything but the most basic messaging. It was also tempramental and required constantly pointing it at new IPs and ports as it would stop working. A month or three back, AOL killed their TOC servers, breaking Miranda's already limited ability to use AIM. Now, there's a beta OSCAR protocol out there, but work is going painfully slow, and it still doesn't support any new features.
Second, everything is plugin-based. Which means that while, if you're happy with the standard beige and ugly-ass icons that it comes with, it's a no-brainer to use. If you want to skin it, good fucking luck. While Trillian, for example, will have a skin file you can just download and install effortlessly, doing much of anything in Miranda is like pulling teeth. The last "theme" I was using (if you can even call it that) was simply to make the contact list transparent with nice-looking icons and having it pinned to the desktop (basically, making it look like Adium). It took half a dozen plugins, each of which had virtually no documentation and had to be configured individually.
Nothing shy of launching as a completely different game with an entirely different set of developers would've made Planetside a huge success.
Two things:
First off, why on Earth would anyone, even the most casual gamer, commit to spending the money on a brand new system to run the games he already has a system for? Buying a 360 to play old Xbox games doesn't make any sense. Anyone with half a brain will at least be waiting for one or two games to come out on the 360 that they want before they consider buying it.
Second, it's a money-making tactic. Some people don't want to spend $400 up-front. So when they buy the cheap model, and a couple months later, some game requires a HDD, that's another $100 or so in Microsoft's pocket that has a higher margin on it than the full 360 budle had. I remember seeing a price comparison before; to get a 360 Core system, then add all the additional components to it that the full Bundle had, it'd be over $500 (or something in that range). That's extra sales to report and more cash in Microsoft's pocket.