Story title is misleading. At 14", this is NOT tiny. It is on par with small toy airplanes.
Am I the only one tired of these science stories that sound cool...but then you read them and get to the part where they say "and one day in the distant future...asuminig we get funding which is the whole reason for this press release....we could POSSIBLY do X, Y and Z with this!"
Seriously...every time I read one of these and get to the "punchline" at the end I feel like I've been had for 2 minutes of my life.
I think a large part is due to the lack of exciting new games...but what is interesting is how there have been quite a few blockbusters that pulled in many from non-traditional gamer demographics. Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft for example.
I really think this is just the regular ebb and flow of the games industry. I have a hard time believing that people are becoming less interested in games, although the one thing that might contribute to it would be the increase in interactive media. Rather than play a game, people are browsing on YouTube, updating MySpace, etc.
While there are many here who use legal methods of watching TV shows...up until now it has basically been considered a grey area when it comes to downloading TV shows. Yes, you are skipping the commercials...but if you receive the channel normally, you're timeshifting.
Now that their online site will compete directly with.torrent sites, I wonder if we will start to see lawsuits and some serious crackdowns on the available TV torrent sites.
All I know is that this will not affect me downloading the show. The nice part about it will be ease of archiving without the huge wait from BT for older files though.
What I'd love to see, which they could easily do now that this is on the web would be to have a rating system for the commercials. This could provide good info to advertisers to realize when their commercials suck balls or when they are good. Similar to what Tivo has.
What I'd love to see are the sales of the horse armor. Something tells me that despite all the backlash and player resentment towards this, they will release a statement along the lines of "Customer feedback has been extremely positive and we've sold tons! Look forward to more content scraped from the original release to be sold to you as we bend you over even further!"
"I agree with you, though- I'd love to hear how bad it was, if someone knows of it being worse..."
You know...I think your comment simply states lot about the current state of things....its so bad that the only way to see any hope in things is to hear about a worse time.
Last time I heard about things being so bad that that kind of thinking was rampant was (pardon me Godwin) in the concentration camps.
Stories about AT&T handing over traffic to the NSA...now this...
Honestly, there are some days when the news just makes me embarrassed to live in this country. And when I'm done being embarrassed, I become scared, because of how little power is left to we the people to incite change in the governmental powers that rule and abuse us.
As a 22 year old who admittedly does not know very much about the history of our government...can any older Slashdotters explain what it was like when there were even worse government abuses than this, and what the catalyst was that finally got the people to act? I understand that an effective catalyst from back then might not be effective today...but I'm just trying to gain some hope from the fact that some day soon, the people will collectively say "ENOUGH!" and we will be able to go about trying to fix this country into what it should be, and try to patch up the horrible mess we've made of ourselves to the rest of the world.
Although honestly part of me thinks that my youth might be the enabler of this naivety I have that there is any hope of seeing things get better in my lifetime.
(Note: To any who find this off-topic...I would pose that it is on-topic in terms of the government screwing us over yet again, mod me down if you disagree...whatever, I feel like everything is kinda pointless right now.)
"at what point do you realise that the current administration is out of control , perhaps when soldiers are knocking on your door ?"
I think a lot of us have realized it was out of control for quite some time. However aside from voting and writing our congress critters and protesting and trying to stir things up in the media, we are left with few to zero direct options for fixing the situation.
In the old days if you didn't like your government, you would take up arms and overthrow them or have them arrested. These days the government is above the law, and if you were to take up arms against them you would either be killed or considered a terrorist and secretly shipped away to some torture camp.
Honestly, what other options do we have? As much as I love fighting the good fight...I'm strongly considering moving to another country at this point, although from the looks of things globally, it doesn't really seem like there are any places that much better off!
"If you pronounce the "&" as the Latin "et" (from which the & letterform was based) it's "How et Ser Moving Company". And they don't even force Latin on the MIT students any more."
Bingo...for those who are feeling a little slow today (or who don't have the military knowledge to know this...) the "howitzer" is a very famous type of cannon. For more info, check out the Wikipedia entry on the beast.
"This isn't about morality or ethics, if you can afford a $2,000 computer, you can afford software. If you don't want to pay for it, there is plenty of free software out there."
Look...I didn't want to get into this issue because it is such a highly debated subject...but it is not your place to determine that if I can drop $2k on a computer, than I can afford to spend money on software as well. You do not know how I budget my money or what I decide to purchase or how much discretionary income I have. If I don't want to pay for it, there are free options, but if I determine that those are not of high enough quality for me or that they don't meet my needs, I will pirate. Period. I am not going to argue the ethics of it, I'm just saying that your point that if I can afford the computer I can afford the software is baseless and ignorant.
The problem is...I don't want an entirely new operating system just to do this. I just want a piece of software, like Front Row, that I can purchase with a remote.
A wonderfully insightful (not) post from a guy with the name of P3NIS CLEAVER (not that I should just this book by its cover...)....
Look, as an American who is concerned about the environment and does his part (recycling, public transportation when possible, etc), you should really be more careful about lumping us all together.
A more accurate statement would have been, "it doesn't appear that a MAJORITY of US citizens or the government and media organizations who should be responsible for spearheading this even care about global warming".
And that would be more accurate, because the reality is, they only care about lining their pockets in the short term and humanity's future be damned.
The end result of all this is that big sites will be able to squash their smaller competitors by paying in to this, and the end users will ultimately be paying for the destruction of the internet in the US as we know it as companies pass on these extra costs to users.
I use a Mac at work and have a PC at home. For some reason, I feel like I have the ability to tinker with the PC more.
Also, another major factor is pirating things. Lets not get into the moral/ethical/legal arguments over this. The fact of the matter is that for a lot of people who are PC gamers...there is no good source of pirated Mac software (not that I've found at least). Believe it or not, that affects a lot of peoples decisions, especially since a decent Mac for gaming is quite expensive on its own.
However the one thing I'd LOVE for a PC is Frontrow, since my PC is also my media center. If they came out with that for the PC, complete with a remote and possibly a wireless adapter to stream to my TV, I'd buy it in an instant.
As it is, I'm considering getting a Macbook so I can dual-boot into Windows and have hte best of both worlds...although I'm really wondering how the Macbooks stack up comparison wise to a regular PC notebook when it comes to running games.
No offense...but its easy enough for you to say this when you're not a poor college student who most likely does not have the technological knowhow to find the holes in their arguments.
Now...if you're a law student studying IP law and know quite a bit about computers, go nuts and become a hero!
"Only way you can prove it is to go to court, at which time the court will order your computer seized to be scoured for evidence, "
Here's a question I'm hoping someone with a legal background can answer...
Lets hypothetically say that you were positive you did not download the song they were dragging you to court for. And you wanted to fight it.
If the court seized your computer and you have...oh...lets say around 200GB worth of illegally copied music, movies and software...would you be busted for it? Or can they just bust you for the items listed in the lawsuit? Also, if the RIAA found out you had all of that in court, could they then come back and sue you for that content even though the initial legal action wasn't for any of those other files?
I hope you also reported him to the police/FBI. He may be cute, and he may be a kid, but that doesn't mean he should get off scott free for something that is considered a criminal offence.
You bring up an interesting point on paying a monthly fee by paying as you go.
I guess it all really comes down to a single variable to determine which is the better value for you: time.
If you have lots of free time on your hand, then by paying a monthly fee, you are getting a great value for your monthly fee and the content updates that come with it.
However for someone with very little free time on their hands, you do not get anywhere near the same value, and suddenly it becomes a waste of money to pay that much for a game you play that little. This is why games like Guild Wars are successful. The cost of the game is essentially amortized by the duration you play it. However, this is affected of course by factoring the costs of any expansions/additional content you purchase.
Can anybody recommend any actual papers on this topic? I'd love to read more on it.
The issue at heart is that gamers feel like they got slapped in the face by being asked to pay ANY AMOUNT for what amounts to a purely aesthetic skin. Even if it DID do something, gamers shouldn't pay for it. It is disgusting that companies feel they can nickle and dime us on an item by item basis. They want to sell us more crap? Put it together in an actual game, or a decent sized expansion pack and sell that.
The problem is, when they start putting a price on all the individual items, they will eventually RAISE that price on all items, whereby if they put them all in an expansion, once the box was in stores for a while it would eventually become cheaper.
This is nothing but a money grab, plain and simple, and they are rightly feeling the enormous community backlash that results from such utter stupidity and greed.
"You're going to see a lot of developers holding back content so they can make you pay more through XBox Live."
You think this is just for XBox Live? I got news for you...this kind of bullshit has already been pulled, quite successfully, by EA with BF2.
First, they started with their regular expansions. You know the drill...some cool new gameplay elements (like rocketpack, etc), a slew of items, and MANY new maps. Then we had the bullshit that was Special Forces. Now, by itself, it was pretty cool. However, what was utterly unexceptable was that EA allowed people who purchased that expansion to use their new uber-weapons in the regular BF2 game. And the only way players who didn't have the expansion could obtain those weapons was to pick them up off the corpses of people carrying them. In essence, EA enabled players to pay to upgrade their weapons in the game.
Then it progressed to crap like the Euro forces expansion, which is basically $10 for 3 maps, 4 vehicles and 7 weapons. Now, many have said it was a good value...I personally feel it was an over-priced money grab. And they are continually trying to crank out mini-expansion packs at an inflated cost.
The other great example is Valve with their "episodic gaming" vision. While normally you'd pay roughly half of the price of the retail game for approx. 1/2 the value of the content of the full game for an expansion, they've now shifted that by charging you $20, or roughly 1/3 the price for what amounts to 1/5 the content.
The overall trend here is that all of these game companies are drooling over the success of the monthly revenue stream provided by subscriptions from MMO's and such while at the same time salivating over the potential to sell things on a per-item basis with next to zero distribution costs in the way that cell-phone companies sell ringtones etc.
Everybody ignores this slippery slope, but I'm glad players are standing up for this for once, even though its just because of the issue of Xbox players got charged while PC gamers didn't. The reality is that NEITHER should have been charged for something that insignificant.
Whatever happened to free patches that gave great new content? Nowadays the only free patches are those that fix horrendous bugs which the game shouldn't have even been released with in the first place.
End result: You pay $60 for the original game + what amounts to a monthly fee for as many "episodic expansions" as they can cram down your throat + whatever nickle & dime upgrades they can make you buy in order to even remain competitive with your fellow gamers.
It is utterly disgusting and unfortunately I see no hope of this situation improving at all.
I'm curious, making a horribly wild assumption that you know your stuff fairly well based on your low UID...what made you decide to take this course? I guess to put it bluntly (but please don't take this the wrong way), I'm wondering why you decided to pay $4k for a class that seems like somewhat of a joke. I mean...if it was at your employers expense, then hey, why not...but I'm just sayin...
But I really am curious as to your reason for taking it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one tired of these science stories that sound cool...but then you read them and get to the part where they say "and one day in the distant future...asuminig we get funding which is the whole reason for this press release....we could POSSIBLY do X, Y and Z with this!"
Seriously...every time I read one of these and get to the "punchline" at the end I feel like I've been had for 2 minutes of my life.
I really think this is just the regular ebb and flow of the games industry. I have a hard time believing that people are becoming less interested in games, although the one thing that might contribute to it would be the increase in interactive media. Rather than play a game, people are browsing on YouTube, updating MySpace, etc.
Now that their online site will compete directly with .torrent sites, I wonder if we will start to see lawsuits and some serious crackdowns on the available TV torrent sites.
All I know is that this will not affect me downloading the show. The nice part about it will be ease of archiving without the huge wait from BT for older files though.
You know...I think your comment simply states lot about the current state of things....its so bad that the only way to see any hope in things is to hear about a worse time.
Last time I heard about things being so bad that that kind of thinking was rampant was (pardon me Godwin) in the concentration camps.
Honestly, there are some days when the news just makes me embarrassed to live in this country. And when I'm done being embarrassed, I become scared, because of how little power is left to we the people to incite change in the governmental powers that rule and abuse us.
As a 22 year old who admittedly does not know very much about the history of our government...can any older Slashdotters explain what it was like when there were even worse government abuses than this, and what the catalyst was that finally got the people to act? I understand that an effective catalyst from back then might not be effective today...but I'm just trying to gain some hope from the fact that some day soon, the people will collectively say "ENOUGH!" and we will be able to go about trying to fix this country into what it should be, and try to patch up the horrible mess we've made of ourselves to the rest of the world.
Although honestly part of me thinks that my youth might be the enabler of this naivety I have that there is any hope of seeing things get better in my lifetime.
(Note: To any who find this off-topic...I would pose that it is on-topic in terms of the government screwing us over yet again, mod me down if you disagree...whatever, I feel like everything is kinda pointless right now.)
I think a lot of us have realized it was out of control for quite some time. However aside from voting and writing our congress critters and protesting and trying to stir things up in the media, we are left with few to zero direct options for fixing the situation.
In the old days if you didn't like your government, you would take up arms and overthrow them or have them arrested. These days the government is above the law, and if you were to take up arms against them you would either be killed or considered a terrorist and secretly shipped away to some torture camp.
Honestly, what other options do we have? As much as I love fighting the good fight...I'm strongly considering moving to another country at this point, although from the looks of things globally, it doesn't really seem like there are any places that much better off!
Bingo...for those who are feeling a little slow today (or who don't have the military knowledge to know this...) the "howitzer" is a very famous type of cannon. For more info, check out the Wikipedia entry on the beast.
Look...I didn't want to get into this issue because it is such a highly debated subject...but it is not your place to determine that if I can drop $2k on a computer, than I can afford to spend money on software as well. You do not know how I budget my money or what I decide to purchase or how much discretionary income I have. If I don't want to pay for it, there are free options, but if I determine that those are not of high enough quality for me or that they don't meet my needs, I will pirate. Period. I am not going to argue the ethics of it, I'm just saying that your point that if I can afford the computer I can afford the software is baseless and ignorant.
Look, as an American who is concerned about the environment and does his part (recycling, public transportation when possible, etc), you should really be more careful about lumping us all together.
A more accurate statement would have been, "it doesn't appear that a MAJORITY of US citizens or the government and media organizations who should be responsible for spearheading this even care about global warming".
And that would be more accurate, because the reality is, they only care about lining their pockets in the short term and humanity's future be damned.
Hey, I may be poor but that's no reason to go about calling me a long-feathered bird you insensitive clod!
Also, another major factor is pirating things. Lets not get into the moral/ethical/legal arguments over this. The fact of the matter is that for a lot of people who are PC gamers...there is no good source of pirated Mac software (not that I've found at least). Believe it or not, that affects a lot of peoples decisions, especially since a decent Mac for gaming is quite expensive on its own.
However the one thing I'd LOVE for a PC is Frontrow, since my PC is also my media center. If they came out with that for the PC, complete with a remote and possibly a wireless adapter to stream to my TV, I'd buy it in an instant.
As it is, I'm considering getting a Macbook so I can dual-boot into Windows and have hte best of both worlds...although I'm really wondering how the Macbooks stack up comparison wise to a regular PC notebook when it comes to running games.
Now...if you're a law student studying IP law and know quite a bit about computers, go nuts and become a hero!
Here's a question I'm hoping someone with a legal background can answer...
Lets hypothetically say that you were positive you did not download the song they were dragging you to court for. And you wanted to fight it.
If the court seized your computer and you have...oh...lets say around 200GB worth of illegally copied music, movies and software...would you be busted for it? Or can they just bust you for the items listed in the lawsuit? Also, if the RIAA found out you had all of that in court, could they then come back and sue you for that content even though the initial legal action wasn't for any of those other files?
I guess it all really comes down to a single variable to determine which is the better value for you: time.
If you have lots of free time on your hand, then by paying a monthly fee, you are getting a great value for your monthly fee and the content updates that come with it.
However for someone with very little free time on their hands, you do not get anywhere near the same value, and suddenly it becomes a waste of money to pay that much for a game you play that little. This is why games like Guild Wars are successful. The cost of the game is essentially amortized by the duration you play it. However, this is affected of course by factoring the costs of any expansions/additional content you purchase.
Can anybody recommend any actual papers on this topic? I'd love to read more on it.
The problem is, when they start putting a price on all the individual items, they will eventually RAISE that price on all items, whereby if they put them all in an expansion, once the box was in stores for a while it would eventually become cheaper.
This is nothing but a money grab, plain and simple, and they are rightly feeling the enormous community backlash that results from such utter stupidity and greed.
You think this is just for XBox Live? I got news for you...this kind of bullshit has already been pulled, quite successfully, by EA with BF2.
First, they started with their regular expansions. You know the drill...some cool new gameplay elements (like rocketpack, etc), a slew of items, and MANY new maps. Then we had the bullshit that was Special Forces. Now, by itself, it was pretty cool. However, what was utterly unexceptable was that EA allowed people who purchased that expansion to use their new uber-weapons in the regular BF2 game. And the only way players who didn't have the expansion could obtain those weapons was to pick them up off the corpses of people carrying them. In essence, EA enabled players to pay to upgrade their weapons in the game.
Then it progressed to crap like the Euro forces expansion, which is basically $10 for 3 maps, 4 vehicles and 7 weapons. Now, many have said it was a good value...I personally feel it was an over-priced money grab. And they are continually trying to crank out mini-expansion packs at an inflated cost.
The other great example is Valve with their "episodic gaming" vision. While normally you'd pay roughly half of the price of the retail game for approx. 1/2 the value of the content of the full game for an expansion, they've now shifted that by charging you $20, or roughly 1/3 the price for what amounts to 1/5 the content.
The overall trend here is that all of these game companies are drooling over the success of the monthly revenue stream provided by subscriptions from MMO's and such while at the same time salivating over the potential to sell things on a per-item basis with next to zero distribution costs in the way that cell-phone companies sell ringtones etc.
Everybody ignores this slippery slope, but I'm glad players are standing up for this for once, even though its just because of the issue of Xbox players got charged while PC gamers didn't. The reality is that NEITHER should have been charged for something that insignificant.
Whatever happened to free patches that gave great new content? Nowadays the only free patches are those that fix horrendous bugs which the game shouldn't have even been released with in the first place.
End result: You pay $60 for the original game + what amounts to a monthly fee for as many "episodic expansions" as they can cram down your throat + whatever nickle & dime upgrades they can make you buy in order to even remain competitive with your fellow gamers.
It is utterly disgusting and unfortunately I see no hope of this situation improving at all.
But I really am curious as to your reason for taking it in the first place.
....and if you tell ANYONE, I will come to your house and I will CUT you!