A strange maxim to apply: the principles of capitalism say that if Sony decided to discontinue the PS3 and brick every system (say, directly after the release of the PS4), consumers would be free not to purchase Sony products anymore and a competitor would exploit the company's poor behavior and corrective action would naturally result. On the other hand, the principles of jurisprudence over property say that the same action would be trespass to chattels (i.e. something similar to destruction of property) without the normal coupling of aftermark modification. A party cannot interfere with the lawful possession of property by another.
But that argument returns to the client/server nature of the property in question: is it intentional conversion if your wireless company stopped accepting connections from your particular model of phone? The phone is clearly property that you own and free from restriction beyond the federal regulations regarding airborne communication, but so are the towers owned by the service provider.
These questions just go to show that a large portion of property law is theoretical and has not been litigated. Fascinating nonetheless.
Finally, a way to incessantly argue with insensitive clods combined with an excuse to never wear pants again! Nothing says, "I so ferverently disagree with your contention that only this cleverly-placed sock can demonstrate the level of my dismay" like SlashRoulette!
And anyone who doesn't like it is a socialist pederast!
Director of Public Health in Great Britain? So this guy is in charge of their teeth, too, right? I think he may want to stop spending time on Facebook and more time looking into that... situation.
If I read the transcript of Terminator, I notice that there is a main character with depth. And a supporting character with even more depth. And an original plot. And a villain that was not taken from a Captain Planet episode.
I think the problem lies in the fact that Avatar is so close to moving from a "good" movie to a "great" one. When Cameron writes a script with such a singular, juvenile perspective on strip mining for minerals, it's frustrating because it's dumbed down for... I'm not sure. Are morons a key target demographic now? Even kids could understand this concept. In any case, the villain is practically copied from a Captain Planet episode.
The question shouldn't be: Why does Avatar portray a technologically-advanced society negatively and a savage society positively, but why doesn't Avatar equalize the conflict by adding an appeal by Parker (the corporate goon) about the uses of unobtainium (P.S. unobtain-- ohhhhhh, I see what you did there). Just add some shots of sick kids or a barren wasteland on Earth and a heartfelt monologue about how badly the humans need the mineral, and the physical conflict in the movie becomes a moral conflict with infinitely more meaning. Make Sully a real character with some internal emotions while you're there.
I agree with your reasoning, but be careful about the limits of caveat emptor. Several guidelines apply when selling goods above $500, and even more apply for real property. There is a duty to disclose in many cases. Your realtor will know what to do.
(I am a lawyer.)
Totally agree. All those eastern ivy league elitists with their "degrees" and "applicable training". I can take my kid to the park and teach him about biology. "See that butterfly, son? That's a mollusk! Or is that a moth? Or a bat? I can never tell." Of course, if I want to raise my kids that way, that's my American right! Schools are run by egghead communists who have some semblance of a chance of identifying my kid's talents and aptitudes, and fostering them to their full potential.
...
Please send your children to school. If you don't like your public school, do what everyone else does and move until you find one you like. You, I, and 99% of all parents are ridiculously underequipped to educate their children independently of trained professionals. Your kid could cure cancer. Please?
I'm not getting you. Are you saying that we shouldn't be enforcing the laws that protect us because it's too expensive? Or we shouldn't be testing people for narcotics that would totally impair their ability to drive because our founding fathers came to this great land with the expectation that they could get high on smack in the privacy of their horse-drawn carraiges?
The poor, innocent, AOL-mail-hacking, Paypal-record-falsifying, cybersquatter, you mean? The one whose defense is that he says he convinced three domain speculators to sell a domain for which they paid $160,000 to him for $900? Yeah, he's totally the victim.
Quick! Someone book all the Wayans brothers for other engagements during filming so there's no chance they'll be cast as lovable, doofus sidekicks to the 20-year-old white kid!
I think the overarching question ought to be what you define skill as.
Premise 1: Skill is not time.
Or is it? One of the largest complaints about a level-based system is that without a significant penalty for
failure, eventually, everyone can pass the level. Therefore, anything that anyone can do does not require skill.
The counterargument is that time builds muscle memory, which is a vital element for most games. Though I hate to
draw the comparison, professional athletes use repetition to increase performance. Care to guess at the number of
balls that Tiger Woods has hit in his life? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Now, Tiger Woods is an awe-inspiring
athlete. He has natural talent and is (arguably) the most skilled golfer of all time. How much of that "skill" is
based on repetition?
Do you think the world's best Starcraft player is actually looking at what he's building? Do you think the top
Counterstrike team is actually thinking about the menu structure when purchasing weapons at the start of a round?
Similarly, take World of Warcraft PvP. It's not enough to understand that the Warlock counter to a Death Knight's
Death Grip is Demonic Circle. You have to have the presence of mind to see the spell graphic and immediate react
with the teleport. Regardless of your understanding of the mechanic, it's muscle memory that will play the primary
role. So, in a way, time breeds skill.
Premise 2: Skill is not money.
Or is it? It's easy to empathize with the anger of people who expend a lot of energy (I'll refrain from calling
that energy "time", see above) competing with others who take the shortcut of using cash to upgrade their avatar.
Regardless of the morality of a game company allowing such actions or the potential effects on the game's economy,
it cheapens the former's accomplishment when it is made to be easily accessed by those who have the resources to skip
the work.
The counterargument has two basic facets:
A lot of people have called the level-system of World of Warcraft "a 79-level tutorial to prepare your
character for the real game". Under that theory, what if you're already familiar with your character? Shouldn't you
be able to skip the tutorial since you are already just as skilled as someone who went through the leveling process? Or, if
that analysis doesn't suit your fancy ("No one would choose to go through levels if they didn't have to!"), how many of those
79 levels did you need to get as skilled as you are at your character? Did you need them all? Would 50 suffice? 25?
10? Do you think you'd be able to try a new class and pick it up in 10 levels? Before you answer, keep in mind that
Blizzard starts Death Knights at level 55!
Now, apply that logic to other games. If you've been playing FPS's for the last ten years, how much practice would you really need to become familiar with Team Fortress 2?
Dude, you just called the game "work". It's right there. You don't want people to be rewarded for not
doing the work. I don't know about you, brah, but I get enough work at work. I'm not in college / high
school / the military / the Siberian Tundra anymore. I don't have unlimited amounts of time. And if I can plop down
$20 to avoid 100+ hours (and, in some cases, this is a ludicrously low estimate; see also: Lineage II, Vanguard) of
mundane, mindless tasks solely designed to make me want to play more, do you take Visa?
Plus, you mind
telling me how me doing so affects you in any way? Even if my gear doesn't mark me as a twink and we look the exact
same, what were you hoping for? Recognition of your accomplishment from other players? Seriously, is that what
you're playing for? Validation that all that time (see above) was well-spent? Are you really that desperate for
popularity that you'd waste months of your life trying to garner it from people you don't even know?
Personally, I'd like to see a variable level system. In theory, you would enter level 1 an
Let me get this straight... you want me to hire a corporate entity to oversee the law and order of my community, authorize their employees to arm themselves and potentially use lethal force with internal oversight only, and let the free market make fiscal corrections based on their performance?
And then, on top of that, you want me to allow their agents to use force preemptively to prevent property damage loss, in order to reduce collective insurance premiums?
Yeah, "Swine flu" becomes "Colbert Flu"! That would be totally awesome. Then when our children and grandparents start dying from complications arising from the disease, we'll say they've been "truthified"! Hilarious!
But why stop there? Let's rename "Darfur Genocide" to "Obama's Birth Certificate". Owned! That's so funny. How about "death by lethal injection" to "The Laura Maddox Show". Wouldn't that be so cool, guys? Guys? Where are you going?
My first job out of college was working as a web developer for the Walgreen Company at their headquarters in Deerfield, IL (just outside of Chicago). One particularly cold february, the heater busted in our building, and temperatures rapidly fell to around 55-58 degrees in the afternoon. First thing in the morning, it was barely 40 degrees in the office. We wore our coats and most people bought fingerless gloves (Dickensian fingerless gloves, that is) to continue to type.
The worst part was that management was totally silent about what was happening, and acted like nothing was wrong. We would literally schedule meetings because a conference room full of people was warmer. This went on for over two weeks. Finally, the pipes burst and everyone got a day off. Hooray!
I know there are a great many video editing tools out there, but here is how to do it in Sony Vegas.
Highlight the audio track that is flagged.
Choose Options -> Audio -> Apply Audio FX (or something to that effect; I don't have it in front of me)
Choose Pitch Shift
The top scroll bar is for very large shifts in pitch. You want a small one, so use the second slider. I am not sure what kind of threshold is necessary to avoid detection by YouTube, but a quarter-step (moving the slider to about 1/4 of the way from the left or right edge) should do the trick.
If this track is already part of a video you've made, you probably want to choose "Preserve Duration". Pick one of the filters labeled as "Music". I use the "Best for Loud Bass" one.
Finish.
The theory behind this is simple: music operates in a key. It's a "baseline" set of notes that are usually pleasing when played together. What people usually don't understand is that any song can be played in any key, and it will sound basically the same. When you hear the pitch shift in effect the first time, the song will sound "wrong", but unless you are listening to it side-by-side, it won't matter.
YouTube scans audio using small pieces of WMG songs as "fingerprints". They naturally assume that the songs they are looking for are in the same key as the original recording. By shifting the pitch a quarter step, the audio track will be impossible to match to their fingerprint. Keep in mind that this is a "workaround", that is, you could not rerecord a song in a different key and claim that it doesn't infringe on the original's copyright. But your YouTube videos are safe!
Good luck finding the Pitch Shift feature in your video editing software. It's relatively simple, and should be available in most.
And thus began Aquaman's cruel campaign of dominance over the feeble human race. Only decades later, put to work as slaves at the endless seaweed farms, did the puny nautical scientists determine that deafening dolphins was probably not a smart idea.
Sorry, but anyone who thinks Dark Knight Returns is more important than Maus hasn't read Maus. It won a Pulitzer, fellas. Frank Miller is great, yes, but he's not part of the Big 3.
Slashdot Mirror
A strange maxim to apply: the principles of capitalism say that if Sony decided to discontinue the PS3 and brick every system (say, directly after the release of the PS4), consumers would be free not to purchase Sony products anymore and a competitor would exploit the company's poor behavior and corrective action would naturally result. On the other hand, the principles of jurisprudence over property say that the same action would be trespass to chattels (i.e. something similar to destruction of property) without the normal coupling of aftermark modification. A party cannot interfere with the lawful possession of property by another.
But that argument returns to the client/server nature of the property in question: is it intentional conversion if your wireless company stopped accepting connections from your particular model of phone? The phone is clearly property that you own and free from restriction beyond the federal regulations regarding airborne communication, but so are the towers owned by the service provider.
These questions just go to show that a large portion of property law is theoretical and has not been litigated. Fascinating nonetheless.
In other news, Android phone sales have increased by 4000%.
Finally, a way to incessantly argue with insensitive clods combined with an excuse to never wear pants again! Nothing says, "I so ferverently disagree with your contention that only this cleverly-placed sock can demonstrate the level of my dismay" like SlashRoulette!
And anyone who doesn't like it is a socialist pederast!
Director of Public Health in Great Britain? So this guy is in charge of their teeth, too, right? I think he may want to stop spending time on Facebook and more time looking into that... situation.
If I read the transcript of Terminator, I notice that there is a main character with depth. And a supporting character with even more depth. And an original plot. And a villain that was not taken from a Captain Planet episode.
I think the problem lies in the fact that Avatar is so close to moving from a "good" movie to a "great" one. When Cameron writes a script with such a singular, juvenile perspective on strip mining for minerals, it's frustrating because it's dumbed down for... I'm not sure. Are morons a key target demographic now? Even kids could understand this concept. In any case, the villain is practically copied from a Captain Planet episode.
The question shouldn't be: Why does Avatar portray a technologically-advanced society negatively and a savage society positively, but why doesn't Avatar equalize the conflict by adding an appeal by Parker (the corporate goon) about the uses of unobtainium (P.S. unobtain-- ohhhhhh, I see what you did there). Just add some shots of sick kids or a barren wasteland on Earth and a heartfelt monologue about how badly the humans need the mineral, and the physical conflict in the movie becomes a moral conflict with infinitely more meaning. Make Sully a real character with some internal emotions while you're there.
I agree with your reasoning, but be careful about the limits of caveat emptor. Several guidelines apply when selling goods above $500, and even more apply for real property. There is a duty to disclose in many cases. Your realtor will know what to do. (I am a lawyer.)
Totally agree. All those eastern ivy league elitists with their "degrees" and "applicable training". I can take my kid to the park and teach him about biology. "See that butterfly, son? That's a mollusk! Or is that a moth? Or a bat? I can never tell." Of course, if I want to raise my kids that way, that's my American right! Schools are run by egghead communists who have some semblance of a chance of identifying my kid's talents and aptitudes, and fostering them to their full potential.
...
Please send your children to school. If you don't like your public school, do what everyone else does and move until you find one you like. You, I, and 99% of all parents are ridiculously underequipped to educate their children independently of trained professionals. Your kid could cure cancer. Please?
It ain't nobody's business what drugs/substances I use, drink, smoke or eat if if it doesn't harm anyone else.
So driving while lit up on three tabs of meth shouldn't be illegal unless you actually get into an accident?
I'm not getting you. Are you saying that we shouldn't be enforcing the laws that protect us because it's too expensive? Or we shouldn't be testing people for narcotics that would totally impair their ability to drive because our founding fathers came to this great land with the expectation that they could get high on smack in the privacy of their horse-drawn carraiges?
Something to consider.
Uhhhh... no. Not something I will be considering.
Madsen is the guy who bought the domain from the thief. Brief glance at the article before posting, k?
The poor, innocent, AOL-mail-hacking, Paypal-record-falsifying, cybersquatter, you mean? The one whose defense is that he says he convinced three domain speculators to sell a domain for which they paid $160,000 to him for $900? Yeah, he's totally the victim.
Wow, what an amazing but totally unverifiable story!
Quick! Someone book all the Wayans brothers for other engagements during filming so there's no chance they'll be cast as lovable, doofus sidekicks to the 20-year-old white kid!
I think the overarching question ought to be what you define skill as.
Premise 1: Skill is not time.
Or is it? One of the largest complaints about a level-based system is that without a significant penalty for failure, eventually, everyone can pass the level. Therefore, anything that anyone can do does not require skill.
The counterargument is that time builds muscle memory, which is a vital element for most games. Though I hate to draw the comparison, professional athletes use repetition to increase performance. Care to guess at the number of balls that Tiger Woods has hit in his life? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Now, Tiger Woods is an awe-inspiring athlete. He has natural talent and is (arguably) the most skilled golfer of all time. How much of that "skill" is based on repetition?
Do you think the world's best Starcraft player is actually looking at what he's building? Do you think the top Counterstrike team is actually thinking about the menu structure when purchasing weapons at the start of a round? Similarly, take World of Warcraft PvP. It's not enough to understand that the Warlock counter to a Death Knight's Death Grip is Demonic Circle. You have to have the presence of mind to see the spell graphic and immediate react with the teleport. Regardless of your understanding of the mechanic, it's muscle memory that will play the primary role. So, in a way, time breeds skill.
Premise 2: Skill is not money.
Or is it? It's easy to empathize with the anger of people who expend a lot of energy (I'll refrain from calling that energy "time", see above) competing with others who take the shortcut of using cash to upgrade their avatar. Regardless of the morality of a game company allowing such actions or the potential effects on the game's economy, it cheapens the former's accomplishment when it is made to be easily accessed by those who have the resources to skip the work.
The counterargument has two basic facets:
Now, apply that logic to other games. If you've been playing FPS's for the last ten years, how much practice would you really need to become familiar with Team Fortress 2?
Plus, you mind telling me how me doing so affects you in any way? Even if my gear doesn't mark me as a twink and we look the exact same, what were you hoping for? Recognition of your accomplishment from other players? Seriously, is that what you're playing for? Validation that all that time (see above) was well-spent? Are you really that desperate for popularity that you'd waste months of your life trying to garner it from people you don't even know?
Personally, I'd like to see a variable level system. In theory, you would enter level 1 an
Daily Sex Helps Improve
...everything.
Let me get this straight... you want me to hire a corporate entity to oversee the law and order of my community, authorize their employees to arm themselves and potentially use lethal force with internal oversight only, and let the free market make fiscal corrections based on their performance?
And then, on top of that, you want me to allow their agents to use force preemptively to prevent property damage loss, in order to reduce collective insurance premiums?
Yeah, "Swine flu" becomes "Colbert Flu"! That would be totally awesome. Then when our children and grandparents start dying from complications arising from the disease, we'll say they've been "truthified"! Hilarious!
But why stop there? Let's rename "Darfur Genocide" to "Obama's Birth Certificate". Owned! That's so funny. How about "death by lethal injection" to "The Laura Maddox Show". Wouldn't that be so cool, guys? Guys? Where are you going?
It was my first job and I spent 6 months finding it. I wasn't calling anybody. :) But a good question.
My first job out of college was working as a web developer for the Walgreen Company at their headquarters in Deerfield, IL (just outside of Chicago). One particularly cold february, the heater busted in our building, and temperatures rapidly fell to around 55-58 degrees in the afternoon. First thing in the morning, it was barely 40 degrees in the office. We wore our coats and most people bought fingerless gloves (Dickensian fingerless gloves, that is) to continue to type.
The worst part was that management was totally silent about what was happening, and acted like nothing was wrong. We would literally schedule meetings because a conference room full of people was warmer. This went on for over two weeks. Finally, the pipes burst and everyone got a day off. Hooray!
I know there are a great many video editing tools out there, but here is how to do it in Sony Vegas.
The theory behind this is simple: music operates in a key. It's a "baseline" set of notes that are usually pleasing when played together. What people usually don't understand is that any song can be played in any key, and it will sound basically the same. When you hear the pitch shift in effect the first time, the song will sound "wrong", but unless you are listening to it side-by-side, it won't matter.
YouTube scans audio using small pieces of WMG songs as "fingerprints". They naturally assume that the songs they are looking for are in the same key as the original recording. By shifting the pitch a quarter step, the audio track will be impossible to match to their fingerprint. Keep in mind that this is a "workaround", that is, you could not rerecord a song in a different key and claim that it doesn't infringe on the original's copyright. But your YouTube videos are safe!
Good luck finding the Pitch Shift feature in your video editing software. It's relatively simple, and should be available in most.
And thus began Aquaman's cruel campaign of dominance over the feeble human race. Only decades later, put to work as slaves at the endless seaweed farms, did the puny nautical scientists determine that deafening dolphins was probably not a smart idea.
I will hunt you down and crush you, no matter how long it takes. Treebeard Supervisor, IS Ents Support
Sorry, but anyone who thinks Dark Knight Returns is more important than Maus hasn't read Maus. It won a Pulitzer, fellas. Frank Miller is great, yes, but he's not part of the Big 3.