What amuses me is the bias. The submitter wrote "hideously encumbered H.264 format." Hideously encumbered? Give me a break. It's as "encumbered" as MP3 is, and everybody uses MP3s.
Even Theora's developers say full H.264 edges out Theora. We're just supposed to adopt Theora simply because it's not "encumbered." Well, outside the echo chamber, not a lot of people care about that. Not to mention that H.264 has hardware acceleration support.
I love that 50% figure that you pulled out of thin air. What you're proposing is the classic "someone else will pay the artist" mentality. People like to trot that out when they say musicians will make their money from concert tours and t-shirts. It's just an excuse to not pay and avoid feeling guilty.
You're right that you can't force people to pay whatever you want for music, movies, and games. Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything. That's because music, movies, and games aren't necessities, so people can just NOT BUY THEM. You're not justified in pirating something just because you think it's expensive.
One thing I notice Slashdot loves to do is cite how copyrights used to last shorter periods of time way back when, ignoring the fact that we live in a more connected society where media like films, album master tapes, and so on last longer, and so content owners can make money on something for many more decades than in the past. Copyrights were extended to reflect the times. The ONLY reason Slashdotters want shorter copyright laws is because they want shit for free, so they latch onto copyright battles to make themselves feel like they're part of some kind of movement and not just pirating things. There's always a self-serving motive.
Not to mention the amusing fact that the GPL relies on copyright, since it's a copyright license. It's interesting that Slashdotters don't apply their anti-copyright attitudes toward GPL code reuse.
Copyright owners? According to Slashdot, copyright law is wrong and piracy is okay. Hell, this website supports the "pirate party" of Sweden. So Google can distribute all it wants according to Slashdotters, because the GPL is a copyright license that requires copyright law in order to be enforceable.
Which is it, Slashdotters? If copyright law is wrong, then nobody has to follow the GPL. You can't pick and choose which parts of copyright you want to serve you.
If piracy is okay, then I can use GPL code however I want, because if copyright law is wrong, then the GPL has no legal standing. The GPL relies on copyright law in order to be a legally binding license.
Do Slashdotters even think their positions through, or are they too self-serving to see through their own bullshit?
Bravo, more freeloaders voting for the "free stuff party."
Do Slashdotters seriously not see this as a joke? You really believe piracy is okay? Slashdot has shut down websites for copyright infringement--did you think that was right? What about when a company uses GPL code? If copyright is wrong, then the GPL has no legal standing as a copyright license, and companies can use GPL code however they want.
It's not "crap" just because you don't have a counterargument. Every Slashdotter, deep inside, knows that piracy is wrong and that it screws hard-working people over. Nobody wants to admit it because they don't want to lose their ability to pirate, so to avoid feeling guilty, they justify it with various smoke and mirrors by calling it a socio-economic revolution, a strike against allegedly evil entities like the RIAA, and so on. It's selfish human nature at play. It's unfortunate that many people here don't notice it at work in their heads. They just fire up Bittorrent without a second thought while some poor schmuck somewhere doesn't get paid.
No. People voted for the "free stuff!" party (seriously, why do you think they call themselves pirates) because they're leeches who don't want to lose their free ride. Slashdot has become notorious in the last decade for becoming a closed-minded pro-piracy haven, arguing that no content creators have any rights to make money off their work and constantly bashing the RIAA, day after day after day, to convince its readers that people who legally pursue copyright infringers are somehow the bad guys (never mind that Slashdot said during the Napster trial they should do that, which is another example of the goofy hypocrisy around here).
I think it's really strange how piracy is lauded around here and how people don't want to admit that their motives are strictly selfish. Nobody wants to consider the consequences that if artists don't get paid for their work, they won't be able to make a living off their work, and it will be harder to contribute anything to the world. There's this idealistic notion that people will just happily give everything away for free, and money will magically spring out of thin air to keep them going. Even Linux is a well-funded corporate creation these days, sponsored by companies who offer support contracts and such and developed by employees and volunteers with a vested interest.
It would be interesting to hear what you guys would say to an artist whose work is getting pirated. They're just supposed to accept it? What would you tell John Carmack--that the years of his life he spent on Doom 3 don't deserve compensation?
A lot of Slashdotters are college kids soaking up dorm room bandwidth in uTorrent. The rest have been pirating things for years using everything from Napster to Bittorrent, so people are just used to getting the free ride and will brush off any guilty thoughts because it's easy and convenient. Remember that Slashdot is very pro-Linux and pro-GPL, so there's an attitude of providing things for free. The thing is, the GPL relies on copyright to exist. It's actually a copyright and usage license, even though Slashdot often posts stories about how evil copyright laws and EULAs are. And, of course, there are the stories of "stolen" GPL code, even though we constantly hear that "piracy isn't theft." It's pointless to point out these kinds of hypocrisies, because the mod system is so easily gamed to drown those kinds of criticisms out. A lot of people come here to pat each other on the back for thinking a certain way, rewarding themselves with +5 Insightful ratings. It's just how it is around here, but sometimes you get the dissenting opinions that are actually responded to rather than censored by overreacting mods, and you get an interesting discussion out of it.
Digital copies and other convenient copy methods didn't exist before copyright, you idiot. You HAD to buy unique copies of stuff or go see a performance. Your argument falls apart with simple logic.
I love how Slashbots are anti-copyright without realizing that the GPL relies on copyright. It's a copyright license.
The judge is a member of copyright organizations. So? Isn't copyright the law? Knowing copyright law is probably why he's on the case.
I fail to see where the "circus" is. Frankly, I'm not sure why Slashdot has become so pro-piracy in the last few years, especially when Slashdot in its past has gone after other sites for copying its content--due to "copyright infringement."
Another person already wrote an "I'm going to flip things on you!" post. It wasn't clever then, either. It's not "hypocrisy" to question why somebody would click Read More to a story they didn't think should have been posted.
Did you actually say "FTW" like a 14 year old kiddie? Do you live on 4chan and Facebook and use emoticons like ^__^?
Wow, you posted an entire spastic paragraph--your second post in a story you claim not to care about. Clearly you DO care--not only about the story, but about what I think of you. You even follow it up with a link to a kook lefty site. Stereotypes galore (Chomsky story on the front page, what a surprise!).
Questions to ask yourself if you don't like a story Slashdot has posted:
- What's wrong with discussing it for the sake of nerdy discussion? - Why did you click Read More on the story instead of scrolling past it? - Why did you click reply and write a post to the story?
One of the most annoying things about Slashdot is people who post to a story questioning its relevance or quality.
If you think the story shouldn't have been posted: - Why did you click Read More? - Why did you write a reply? Did you think people care about your opinion on stories so much that you needed to post? - What's wrong with simply discussing interesting technical history? This is a nerd site.
You say the press was "exceedingly kind," yet the very Slashdot article you're discussing says otherwise. This hasn't been the only media study on this issue, either.
Your example is completely wrong. If Mother Theresa runs for a political position and gets painted in a better light, that is media bias. Her being Mother Theresa shouldn't have any bearing on the coverage of her qualifications for a position, just as Barack Obama being a black Democrat shouldn't mean he deserves better coverage than the white Republican. You're actually equating an inexperienced senator to Mother Theresa...proving the critics right about his baseless glorification.
When Palin gets bashed by the press for being stupid, yet Biden claims Americans were huddled around televisions watching the president during the Great Depression and nobody mocks him for it, it's clear the press is not being "exceedingly kind." Give me a break. If McCain had attended a church for 20 years that, say, blamed black people for all our troubles, his campaign would be over. Obama gets to hang out in the church of Reverend Wright, yet he claims he never knew Wright preached what he preached...it's so ridiculous that you'd have to be purposely biased to not be skeptical of such a stupid claim. And so the press was.
You actually demonstrate the press's bias right in your post. You can't justify bias by saying "We're more positive about this guy because he's doing more positive things," because that's a circular dependency. You report him positively, he goes up in the polls because of it, and then you cite his favor in the polls as a reason you're covering him more positively...and so on.
Obama went negative many times, and not just on policy. You only think Obama was the honest one because your support for Obama lends you to believing him over McCain and selectively remembering what was put out by Obama's campaign. The dirt that came out when Palin was announced was the worst. The New York Times actually ran four front page stories on her pregnant daughter. It was bizarre. Biden flat-out lied multiple times (especially in the VP debate...the coal power one is most amusing because there's a YouTube video where he directly contradicts himself) and nobody called him on it.
Worst of all, the Obama campaign kept drifting out passive accusations of racism. They'd never directly accuse--they'd just instill the thought in people to keep it in their minds. It was sickening.
I wonder if the Democrats will apply the upcoming "Fairness Doctrine" (a name as evil as "Patriot Act") to their own mainstream media outlets? If so, I guarantee it would affect more than just your MSNBC...
I'll be honest, you're an idiot if you think people are pirating Sex and the City or Good Charlotte as a form of "civil disobedience" and not because they just want shit for free. That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
YOU JUST WANT THINGS FOR FREE. WHY WON'T PIRATES ADMIT THAT? Geez.
It's like you've spent so many years convincing yourself that you're not a pirate but an "internet rebel sticking it to the man" that you can't recognize obvious things anymore.
I would argue today's games are about fun. I don't sit down after work to prove my awesomeness to the game. I want to have fun, not pass a gauntlet of impossible challenges.
Today's games are about catering to a mainstream. Games are ridiculously mainstream now, and developer studios are no longer the smaller companies of 10 years ago. The games are dumbed down and streamlined like a Hollywood movie in order to target mass demographics. They focus test and poll players to determine what to do next.
That being said, a game shouldn't be TOO easy, and by and large action games with the regen system *aren't* too easy, simply by the fact that now you are facing a barrage of fire from all sides, and dying is still a distinct possibility. All it does is keep the player IN the game, as opposed to slinking off to look for medkits.
Slinking off looking for medkits, or slinking off to auto-heal...what's the difference? What you're talking about in terms of a "barrage of fire" is the result of the lazy game design of auto-healing. Now, developers don't have to balance their levels and can just spam enemies. Previously, a gamer would have to strategically keep going with low health until they found a medkit. Gamers were better gamers, and designers were better designers.
Now, the mainstream demographic must be coddled, because these people nerd-rage at the slightest hint of failure. They need to be made to feel special every minute. They can't handle the game getting the best of them or the need to improve their own skill. This dumbification is even infecting RPGs like Deus Ex. It's sickening.
One of the major problems with old games is that the player is never aware of what's coming next. Various small battles can whittle him down to, say, 10 percent health, and suddenly you hit him with a boss battle. He can't go back and heal, now he just has to reload a gajillion times because you made him beat a boss with only 10 health points.
That's why they must reload and play again, this time aware of what's coming around the corner. They had to improve their skill at the game, some of it through trial-and-error. Now, games are made so you are guaranteed to beat them. You never have to repeat an area through trial-and-error to improve yourself. It's easy, and it's boring.
IMHO the state of the gameplay art has advanced substantially since then, and regenerating health is one way of doing it.
Ha! The "state of the gameplay art" hasn't advanced very much, if at all.:) First-person shooters are the same games they were 10 years ago, just easier and dumber.
I have nothing against reloading the game to try again. I have a problem when the game forces me into a situation where I have to do this 15 times over.
The game didn't force you into that situation. You entered it by not playing well enough, so you need to reload and play better. In the weird, bizarro, pseudo-socialist gaming world of today, such a thing is considered "harsh."
I'm not immersed if the game is holding my hand and magically auto-healing me so that I never lose. I find it amusing that you consider "thinking" a negative for a game, especially Deus Ex. Says everything I need to know about you and your gaming tastes. What you want is the EZ-mode gameplay that has become the mainstay of console shooters. They're games made for mouthbreathing high school kiddies amped up on caffeine who never want to experience any failure or they'll get nerd-raged.
The problem was that game pace was getting broken up when players ran low on health. Instead of having fun shooting things players were scrounging around for medkits (or worse, quickloading constantly).
Oh, the horror! They had to reload a save game and play better! They actually faced the prospect of failure!
Today's games coddle the player. They're way too easy.
Slashdot Mirror
What amuses me is the bias. The submitter wrote "hideously encumbered H.264 format." Hideously encumbered? Give me a break. It's as "encumbered" as MP3 is, and everybody uses MP3s.
Even Theora's developers say full H.264 edges out Theora. We're just supposed to adopt Theora simply because it's not "encumbered." Well, outside the echo chamber, not a lot of people care about that. Not to mention that H.264 has hardware acceleration support.
Uh, what's wrong with charging stupid teenagers as sex offenders? They're charged not because of overly broad laws but on purpose as a deterrent.
You say that as if the story was implying it was a bad idea.
I love that 50% figure that you pulled out of thin air. What you're proposing is the classic "someone else will pay the artist" mentality. People like to trot that out when they say musicians will make their money from concert tours and t-shirts. It's just an excuse to not pay and avoid feeling guilty.
You're right that you can't force people to pay whatever you want for music, movies, and games. Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything. That's because music, movies, and games aren't necessities, so people can just NOT BUY THEM. You're not justified in pirating something just because you think it's expensive.
One thing I notice Slashdot loves to do is cite how copyrights used to last shorter periods of time way back when, ignoring the fact that we live in a more connected society where media like films, album master tapes, and so on last longer, and so content owners can make money on something for many more decades than in the past. Copyrights were extended to reflect the times. The ONLY reason Slashdotters want shorter copyright laws is because they want shit for free, so they latch onto copyright battles to make themselves feel like they're part of some kind of movement and not just pirating things. There's always a self-serving motive.
Not to mention the amusing fact that the GPL relies on copyright, since it's a copyright license. It's interesting that Slashdotters don't apply their anti-copyright attitudes toward GPL code reuse.
Copyright owners? According to Slashdot, copyright law is wrong and piracy is okay. Hell, this website supports the "pirate party" of Sweden. So Google can distribute all it wants according to Slashdotters, because the GPL is a copyright license that requires copyright law in order to be enforceable.
Which is it, Slashdotters? If copyright law is wrong, then nobody has to follow the GPL. You can't pick and choose which parts of copyright you want to serve you.
Slashdotters think copyright law is wrong and piracy is okay. Yet, they expect people to follow the copyright license of the the GPL. Which is it?
If piracy is okay, then I can use GPL code however I want, because if copyright law is wrong, then the GPL has no legal standing. The GPL relies on copyright law in order to be a legally binding license.
Do Slashdotters even think their positions through, or are they too self-serving to see through their own bullshit?
Bravo, more freeloaders voting for the "free stuff party."
Do Slashdotters seriously not see this as a joke? You really believe piracy is okay? Slashdot has shut down websites for copyright infringement--did you think that was right? What about when a company uses GPL code? If copyright is wrong, then the GPL has no legal standing as a copyright license, and companies can use GPL code however they want.
I mean, do you think these things through at all?
It's not "crap" just because you don't have a counterargument. Every Slashdotter, deep inside, knows that piracy is wrong and that it screws hard-working people over. Nobody wants to admit it because they don't want to lose their ability to pirate, so to avoid feeling guilty, they justify it with various smoke and mirrors by calling it a socio-economic revolution, a strike against allegedly evil entities like the RIAA, and so on. It's selfish human nature at play. It's unfortunate that many people here don't notice it at work in their heads. They just fire up Bittorrent without a second thought while some poor schmuck somewhere doesn't get paid.
No. People voted for the "free stuff!" party (seriously, why do you think they call themselves pirates) because they're leeches who don't want to lose their free ride. Slashdot has become notorious in the last decade for becoming a closed-minded pro-piracy haven, arguing that no content creators have any rights to make money off their work and constantly bashing the RIAA, day after day after day, to convince its readers that people who legally pursue copyright infringers are somehow the bad guys (never mind that Slashdot said during the Napster trial they should do that, which is another example of the goofy hypocrisy around here).
I think it's really strange how piracy is lauded around here and how people don't want to admit that their motives are strictly selfish. Nobody wants to consider the consequences that if artists don't get paid for their work, they won't be able to make a living off their work, and it will be harder to contribute anything to the world. There's this idealistic notion that people will just happily give everything away for free, and money will magically spring out of thin air to keep them going. Even Linux is a well-funded corporate creation these days, sponsored by companies who offer support contracts and such and developed by employees and volunteers with a vested interest.
It would be interesting to hear what you guys would say to an artist whose work is getting pirated. They're just supposed to accept it? What would you tell John Carmack--that the years of his life he spent on Doom 3 don't deserve compensation?
A lot of Slashdotters are college kids soaking up dorm room bandwidth in uTorrent. The rest have been pirating things for years using everything from Napster to Bittorrent, so people are just used to getting the free ride and will brush off any guilty thoughts because it's easy and convenient. Remember that Slashdot is very pro-Linux and pro-GPL, so there's an attitude of providing things for free. The thing is, the GPL relies on copyright to exist. It's actually a copyright and usage license, even though Slashdot often posts stories about how evil copyright laws and EULAs are. And, of course, there are the stories of "stolen" GPL code, even though we constantly hear that "piracy isn't theft." It's pointless to point out these kinds of hypocrisies, because the mod system is so easily gamed to drown those kinds of criticisms out. A lot of people come here to pat each other on the back for thinking a certain way, rewarding themselves with +5 Insightful ratings. It's just how it is around here, but sometimes you get the dissenting opinions that are actually responded to rather than censored by overreacting mods, and you get an interesting discussion out of it.
Digital copies and other convenient copy methods didn't exist before copyright, you idiot. You HAD to buy unique copies of stuff or go see a performance. Your argument falls apart with simple logic.
I love how Slashbots are anti-copyright without realizing that the GPL relies on copyright. It's a copyright license.
The judge is a member of copyright organizations. So? Isn't copyright the law? Knowing copyright law is probably why he's on the case.
I fail to see where the "circus" is. Frankly, I'm not sure why Slashdot has become so pro-piracy in the last few years, especially when Slashdot in its past has gone after other sites for copying its content--due to "copyright infringement."
Oh, god, and we're so glad you did!
Another person already wrote an "I'm going to flip things on you!" post. It wasn't clever then, either. It's not "hypocrisy" to question why somebody would click Read More to a story they didn't think should have been posted.
Did you actually say "FTW" like a 14 year old kiddie? Do you live on 4chan and Facebook and use emoticons like ^__^?
Wow, you posted an entire spastic paragraph--your second post in a story you claim not to care about. Clearly you DO care--not only about the story, but about what I think of you. You even follow it up with a link to a kook lefty site. Stereotypes galore (Chomsky story on the front page, what a surprise!).
Questions to ask yourself if you don't like a story Slashdot has posted:
- What's wrong with discussing it for the sake of nerdy discussion?
- Why did you click Read More on the story instead of scrolling past it?
- Why did you click reply and write a post to the story?
One of the most annoying things about Slashdot is people who post to a story questioning its relevance or quality.
If you think the story shouldn't have been posted:
- Why did you click Read More?
- Why did you write a reply? Did you think people care about your opinion on stories so much that you needed to post?
- What's wrong with simply discussing interesting technical history? This is a nerd site.
You say the press was "exceedingly kind," yet the very Slashdot article you're discussing says otherwise. This hasn't been the only media study on this issue, either.
Your example is completely wrong. If Mother Theresa runs for a political position and gets painted in a better light, that is media bias. Her being Mother Theresa shouldn't have any bearing on the coverage of her qualifications for a position, just as Barack Obama being a black Democrat shouldn't mean he deserves better coverage than the white Republican. You're actually equating an inexperienced senator to Mother Theresa...proving the critics right about his baseless glorification.
When Palin gets bashed by the press for being stupid, yet Biden claims Americans were huddled around televisions watching the president during the Great Depression and nobody mocks him for it, it's clear the press is not being "exceedingly kind." Give me a break. If McCain had attended a church for 20 years that, say, blamed black people for all our troubles, his campaign would be over. Obama gets to hang out in the church of Reverend Wright, yet he claims he never knew Wright preached what he preached...it's so ridiculous that you'd have to be purposely biased to not be skeptical of such a stupid claim. And so the press was.
You actually demonstrate the press's bias right in your post. You can't justify bias by saying "We're more positive about this guy because he's doing more positive things," because that's a circular dependency. You report him positively, he goes up in the polls because of it, and then you cite his favor in the polls as a reason you're covering him more positively...and so on.
Obama went negative many times, and not just on policy. You only think Obama was the honest one because your support for Obama lends you to believing him over McCain and selectively remembering what was put out by Obama's campaign. The dirt that came out when Palin was announced was the worst. The New York Times actually ran four front page stories on her pregnant daughter. It was bizarre. Biden flat-out lied multiple times (especially in the VP debate...the coal power one is most amusing because there's a YouTube video where he directly contradicts himself) and nobody called him on it.
Worst of all, the Obama campaign kept drifting out passive accusations of racism. They'd never directly accuse--they'd just instill the thought in people to keep it in their minds. It was sickening.
I wonder if the Democrats will apply the upcoming "Fairness Doctrine" (a name as evil as "Patriot Act") to their own mainstream media outlets? If so, I guarantee it would affect more than just your MSNBC...
I'll be honest, you're an idiot if you think people are pirating Sex and the City or Good Charlotte as a form of "civil disobedience" and not because they just want shit for free. That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
YOU JUST WANT THINGS FOR FREE. WHY WON'T PIRATES ADMIT THAT? Geez.
It's like you've spent so many years convincing yourself that you're not a pirate but an "internet rebel sticking it to the man" that you can't recognize obvious things anymore.
Today's games are about catering to a mainstream. Games are ridiculously mainstream now, and developer studios are no longer the smaller companies of 10 years ago. The games are dumbed down and streamlined like a Hollywood movie in order to target mass demographics. They focus test and poll players to determine what to do next.
Slinking off looking for medkits, or slinking off to auto-heal...what's the difference? What you're talking about in terms of a "barrage of fire" is the result of the lazy game design of auto-healing. Now, developers don't have to balance their levels and can just spam enemies. Previously, a gamer would have to strategically keep going with low health until they found a medkit. Gamers were better gamers, and designers were better designers.
Now, the mainstream demographic must be coddled, because these people nerd-rage at the slightest hint of failure. They need to be made to feel special every minute. They can't handle the game getting the best of them or the need to improve their own skill. This dumbification is even infecting RPGs like Deus Ex. It's sickening.
That's why they must reload and play again, this time aware of what's coming around the corner. They had to improve their skill at the game, some of it through trial-and-error. Now, games are made so you are guaranteed to beat them. You never have to repeat an area through trial-and-error to improve yourself. It's easy, and it's boring.
Ha! The "state of the gameplay art" hasn't advanced very much, if at all. :) First-person shooters are the same games they were 10 years ago, just easier and dumber.
The game didn't force you into that situation. You entered it by not playing well enough, so you need to reload and play better. In the weird, bizarro, pseudo-socialist gaming world of today, such a thing is considered "harsh."
I'm not immersed if the game is holding my hand and magically auto-healing me so that I never lose. I find it amusing that you consider "thinking" a negative for a game, especially Deus Ex. Says everything I need to know about you and your gaming tastes. What you want is the EZ-mode gameplay that has become the mainstay of console shooters. They're games made for mouthbreathing high school kiddies amped up on caffeine who never want to experience any failure or they'll get nerd-raged.
I like how I get modded off-topic, but the grandparent post who first brought it up is left alone.
Oh, the horror! They had to reload a save game and play better! They actually faced the prospect of failure!
Today's games coddle the player. They're way too easy.