Many thanks for the correction. Are you referring only to US stations? If so, then yeah, that's a lot different than I'd been led to believe. Though on the semi-rare occasions that I venture beyond public radio (I'm in Nashville; so very many country stations...), I do hear a lot of "a Clear Channel station" following the callsign declaration.
[points to the various independent labels comprising 3% (made up statistic--I've no real data) of the market via word of mouth and the 20 or 30 (again made up, and hyperbolic I'm sure) non-ClearChannel stations nationwide]
See? No monopoly here!
I still like the copyright disclaimer on CDs released under Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label: "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing."
Also, a plug for Righteous Babe-published Andrew Bird. Has a song or two available for download on his site.
I'm pretty sure Syberia 1 and 2 were point-and-click affairs with realtime 3D characters in prerendered environments. There might have also been keyboard control of sorts, but the point-and-click interface worked well.
Novels: Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (finished Quicksilver, need to start Confusion) Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Attempts to gain knowledge/familiarity in various useful and/or interesting coding/computing sectors: Programming PHP (O'Reilly) PHP and MySQL for something-or-other (the Visual Quckpro one) ASP.NET (one of those SAMS "Teach youself [technology] in [deceptively short time frame]" books) Java 2 for Dummies Linux Pocket Guide (O'Reilly -- I love how the Linux books are the only O'Reilly books with people on them; this one has a cowboy)
Comics: The Goon Several varieties of Spider-Man Rising Stars (concludes next week) Supreme Power The Punisher New Avengers Captain America The Incredible Hulk Savage Dragon Concrete Fantastic Four Gotham Central Human Target Fallen Angel Green Lantern: Rebirth Several others that escape me at the moment
I should probably exercise some focus so I can get more done.
I imagine the "education" here is not educating about Linux but having the Linux boxes function transparently enough to be easily used as tools in education of other subjects. Like Windows boxes are supposed to be in most schools, or the old Apple//e computers gathering dust in corners in the late 80s/early 90s when kids weren't playing Oregon Trail on it after class.
Also, you are quite possibly (probably, even?) trolling. Ah, well.
The problem here seems to be that even the press images created by the developer/publisher/whatever feature a character that looks just like a slightly elongated version of the Wind Waker protagonist wearing an outfit strikingly similar to one worn by another character in Wind Waker (pirate girl) and using an art style apparently almost identical to that used in Wind Waker. The body proportions (elongated torso, shortened legs that taper to small feet, large round head with wide-set round large-pupiled eyes and thick black eyebrows above an understated nose and thin-bordered mouth) are strikingly similar to the previously unique style used in Wind Waker. To be honest, I had to look twice to realize that the picture was from the non-Nintendo game Wiki, whose logo even features Wind-Waker-esque dust-whorls.
I understand your point of the vendor not being liable for infringing after-market modifications and uses, but in this case, these shots are coming from those making and selling the game. To use your car analogy, it's like GM advertising their Corvette as easily modified to look like a Mustang and featuring such a modification in their press material.
Your post, especially the title, reminded me of the Poochie creation scene from the "Itchy Scratchy and Poochie Show" episode:
Myers: No, no, no! He was supposed to have attitude.
Silverman: Um... wh-what do you mean, exactly?
Myers: Oh, you know, attitude, attitude! Uh... sunglasses!
Lady: Could we put him in more of a "hip-hop" context?
Krusty: Forget context, he's gotta be a surfer. Give me a nice shmear of surfer.
Lady: I feel we should Rasta-fy him by... 10 percent or so.
[the resulting dog is rather... proactive]
[all stare at it w/o any expression]
Myers: Hmm... I think he needs a little more attitude.
[Silverman blackens in Poochie's sunglasses]
All Three: [variously] Oh, yeah, bingo. Yeah, that's it! There it is, right there! I love it!
Haven't most games these days abandoned the hardware accelerated sound and do their processing in software? I'm pretty sure I recall that Doom 3 was among the first true 5.1 games, with actually a good deal of attention spent on the sound, and it still did all of its sound processing in software.
As far as I can tell, if you just have 2-channel analog speakers and no need for any of the advanced multiple/digital input/output or DVD-audio high frequency type processing that newer cards offer, you'd be doing okay with a Soundblaster 16.
I suppose I should note that I did not intend at all to address recording or distribution of the show after its initial airing. I've no problem with fair use, and my interpretation of such use is reasonably broad.
I was saying that if a show is profitable, then the fair increase in wages of those involved in its production would make the show more expensive. If a show becomes successful, then it becomes expensive. I was responding to the assertion in the parent of my other post that good shows are not necessarily expensive. While that's often true initially, if a show becomes popular, advertisers invest more, and if previous popular shows are valid precedents (see Seinfeld), then the actors and others involved will be paid more, thus making the show more expensive.
It doesn't require lots of money to make a good TV show. You have been brainwashed into thinking a good show has to have famous people and a huge budget.
If a show is good and gains popularity, it will attract more advertising dollars. If a portion of those extra dollars is not then forwarded to those responsible for the show's quality, there seems to be a bit of unfairness there. Unless some Creative Commons analog of television evolves in which copies of the shows are distributed for free to those who don't wish to pay, the corporate incentive (which is currently the incentive that matters) for producing good shows will always be money, and if you advocate any sort of fairness, those that make (rather than own) the show should be compensated accordingly. Of course, this is assuming that "good" necessarily results in "popular," which I suppose is not an assumption that can seriously be made looking at the current state of most popular television. That situation is an entirely different subject, though. For the purposes of this post, I'll use "good" as functionally synonymous to "having a large viewership," since generally even a great show will not be produced for long without satisfactory ratings, regardless of its production cost--if a more expensive but also more popular show can be aired in its place, it will be.
Agreed. If the judge had allowed it as evidence, the precedent it set and the implications thereof would be downright frightening. I guess that's the sticky wicket of the justice system. Even if it was a murder trial with illegally obtained but incontrovertible proof of guilt, allowing the evidence would still be a precedent that should not be set.
Not necessarily. At my non-Berkeley alma mater, CE = Civil Engineering, ChemE = Chemical Engineering, and CompE = Computer Engineering (my major). Why are there so many "C" fields of engineering? Look at all the unused letters! And best of all, abbreviations tend to differ between schools, so I can't just say I have a "CompE B.E." No, I have to say "Computer Engineering."
As long as you can prove in court that the person being monitored indicated that he had read and agreed to said EULA and that the EULA's language unarguably describes the monitoring that would happen. Or so I would think.
And now for my first Slashdot declaration that IANAL.
When you don't click through the EULA, yeah, that should be illegal. But the ones that piggyback on other programs generally present their functions but are just clicked through without a second thought. While shady and arguably immoral, I think those are probably legal.
I know in some states the recording has to be known by at least one involved party, and some states require that both are made aware. In this case, it seems that neither party involved in the communications was aware of what was functionally a wiretap. The ruling, while good for privacy, seems extremely frustrating for those hoping to use the logs as evidence.
I'd personally be very interested in Sims in Space or Horatio Simsman's Grand Adventure in Lower Eastwick Commons or something of the like, and they could indeed be great games with enough attention given them, but their appeal would not be nearly so massive as the core Sims titles whose gameplay revolves around modern interactions in modern and recognizable situations and environments.
Your Hollywood analogy is apt, and something I meant to make more clear in my initial reply to you. The big moneymakers are often fairly empty in terms of substance, and the successful movies that are also substantial either include the substance within typical blockbuster material(e.g. Spider-Man 1 & 2), or benefit greatly from advertising and Oscar-talk. Similarly, there are already gaming masterpieces out there. I can't help but bring up ICO as a masterful example of brilliant overall game design whose limited popularity came primarily from word of mouth.
In both industries, success often comes from inclusion of material to appeal to as broad an audience or large a demographic as possible. Your typical box-office lineup is romantic comedies, action movies, personal degradation comedy (see most recent Ben Stiller comedies), and an occasional smattering of movies within those categories with substance beyond the standard trappings of the genre. And occasionally the substance comes merely from masterful execution of the core elements of the genre.
I intended to mention The Sims in both of my posts and somehow forgot. It is indeed an interesting phenomenon and notable for its wide appeal to a variety of demographics, some of which were not significant in terms of game sales previously. Part of the difficulty with Sims clones is context. The Sims got it right by placing the player in a relatively modern setting with familiar situations and interactions. For another game to atmpt that would be pretty obviously a ripoff, and one of few ways to go in a modern setting is simply to "sex it up." There was a game last year or thereabouts that got a fair amount of press on gaming sites called Singles or something, which from reviews seemed to be The Sims with extra "adult" situations. Reviews were okay but not spectacular, and I assume that sales were relatively low. Try making a sci-fi, fantasy, or 19th-century The Sims and not only will interest be limited, but developers' knowledge of the interactions would be limited to, for the 19th-century example, history books and novels by the likes of the Brontes, Thackeray, and Jane Austen.
As for strategy games, many still revolve around violent conflict, even if the violence isn't always graphic or explicit. Such classics as Warcraft II feature gore on an individual unit scale. I'm extremely sad to admit I've played little of Civilization, but do understand its appeal to particular people. A game like that, though, requires patience and ability to abstract certain societal concepts that more focused and smaller-scoped games like The Sims do not require, and thus appeals to a smaller market.
I'm finding this conversation enjoyable, by the way. I'm usually not pressed to detail and support my views to this extent, and I'm enjoying the opportunity and practice.
Good topics there. I think that certain core gameplay styles--notably FPS--have evolved around a framework conducive to violence, which may have been technologically necessary when the style was developed. Would Wolfenstein have been worth playing without the challenge of dispatching Nazis? You'd just be running around looking for keys. And since then, the genre has pretty much evolved around those frameworks. Games whose challenges are essentially nonviolent are extremely hard to pull off and in my estimation tend to take the form of puzzle (Tetris, Myst...) or sports (in which I'll include various racing titles) games. I suppose the major problem with games featuring human-scale avatars is that the targets tend to be human-scale as well, and to achieve the immersion necessary for the enjoyment of some games, it's hard to do without some blatant violence. Admittedly, some games could do without excessive blood, but I'll note that a recurring complaint of Doom 3 was that the corpses of enemies tend to disappear. It's assumed that it's due to technological limitations, but widely noted that it detracts from the immersion and sense of continuity within the game. So unless the game is in a relatively cartoonish context (Jak & Daxter et al.) or the enemies are explainably gore-free (ICO), graphic violence is occasionaly necessary to complete the gameplay style being used.
Your point that some games add it in needlessly still stands to some degree, though, and those particular games are generally not praised on the violence so much as the gameplay. Developing similar games without the violence and testing their appeal would go a long way to determine the need therefor, but development difficulty, costs, and risks would be high.
As for sales, I point to Halo/Halo 2 which are pretty much singlehandedly carrying the XBox, and by far are outselling all other games on the system. This argument could of course e argued fown as an anomaly, and I'm afraid I don't have access to sales figures to confidently posit other games as examples.
The excerpt you have there, while it does raise a couple of interesting points, is decidedly lopsided to the point of losing credibility. "Sleazy" games are not the only games on the market, they are not the only ones advertised, and gaming is not the only industry to aggrandize sleaze. The point where the author completely loses credibility in my eyes is the mention of BMX XXX. I saw not a single instance of "anticipation" for the game. Since its initial announcement, all I saw regarding it was derisive comments on its very baseness and obvious sleaze quotient.
I play my share of shooters, including the oddly mentioned Half-Life, which, while it undeniably contained scenes of gore, was probably among the worst examples to posit as a game that reveled in it. I'd also note that with the limited controls available to games, it's really hard to create a fast-paced experience without employing the rather simple point-and-click video game abstraction of guns, especially in games from a first person perspective. You can't very easily simulate less extreme activities and still have it deliver the fast-paced gameplay that shooters do, especially in the days of Wolfenstein, whose controls consisted of arrow keys to move, Ctrl to shoot, Space to open doors, and weapon selection.
And that doesn't even address the fact that there is a multitude of non-grisly games out there that are very good, and are advertised as heavily as some of the higher profile gorefests. And this ignores the fact that the games with more base themes often sell better than some less violent ones with arguably better gameplay, regardless of advertising.
Also, unless you abstract gameplay into the puzzle or sports realm or something similar, it's hard to have good gameplay without some kind of way to bypass obstacles permanently or at least effectively. Whether it veers toward realism or cartoonishness, this is often most easily achieved through violence of some sort. Even family friendly Mario squashes, kicks, shoots, and drops into lava his enemies, and that was a kids' game from 1985.
Violence/sleaze in games is not recent, it's not all-pervasive, and at least among the gaming community it is not gaining in popularity or pervasiveness. The games that revel solely in gore and vice tend not to do well. Postal 2 comes to my mind as a game advertised solely on its violence that players, if they even bought it, tired of quickly. Games don't need violence or base themes; they need good gameplay, good stories, good characters, or preferably all of the above. And the best and most liked developers realize that and try to deliver, even if their final product does also include "sleaze."
Another game came to mind just now. The latest Prince of Persia game had significant stylistic changes from its critically lauded predecessor, primarily by making it "darker" to appeal to, oh, I see, a wider audience, since the previous game, which was universally lauded by those who played it, did not sell well. Reviewers of the new game lamented the total shift in tone but still found gameplay elements that redeemed it. I.e. despite the increased sleaze which was apparently to appeal to a wider market, the core gameplay is enough to recommend it. In this case the company was indeed the one to add the "sleaze," but did it apparently because that alone made an excellent game more marketable. Whether this is a result of the market itself being formed by previous trends in released games I don't know, but I highly doubt that games were the only influence to change the public tastes if they were indeed changed.
Half of 2^160 is 2^159. 2^80 is the square root of 2^160. Regardless, all of these are amazingly huge numbers, though some are more amazingly huge than others. Crazy convenient binary math is something I've only recently begun to automatically register.
Also, I know next to nothing about any of these encryption schemes, and feel pretty stupid reading most of this thread. Except the endless stream of "ROT-13" jokes and their variants, spewed by people who think they're cryptocomedians or baiting the uninitiated so they can let them know how stupid they are for not realizing that 13 is half of 26 (hm. Now I feel bad for correcting you on a similar mistake), and the mods who feel obliged to mod them up to prove their own inside knowledge of this commonly circulated gag.
Slashdot Mirror
Many thanks for the correction. Are you referring only to US stations? If so, then yeah, that's a lot different than I'd been led to believe. Though on the semi-rare occasions that I venture beyond public radio (I'm in Nashville; so very many country stations...), I do hear a lot of "a Clear Channel station" following the callsign declaration.
See? No monopoly here!
I still like the copyright disclaimer on CDs released under Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label: "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing."
Also, a plug for Righteous Babe-published Andrew Bird. Has a song or two available for download on his site.
I'm pretty sure Syberia 1 and 2 were point-and-click affairs with realtime 3D characters in prerendered environments. There might have also been keyboard control of sorts, but the point-and-click interface worked well.
Reference: http://www.ocremix.org/detailmix.php?mixid=OCR0002 2
Novels:
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (finished Quicksilver, need to start Confusion)
Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Attempts to gain knowledge/familiarity in various useful and/or interesting coding/computing sectors:
Programming PHP (O'Reilly)
PHP and MySQL for something-or-other (the Visual Quckpro one)
ASP.NET (one of those SAMS "Teach youself [technology] in [deceptively short time frame]" books)
Java 2 for Dummies
Linux Pocket Guide (O'Reilly -- I love how the Linux books are the only O'Reilly books with people on them; this one has a cowboy)
Comics:
The Goon
Several varieties of Spider-Man
Rising Stars (concludes next week)
Supreme Power
The Punisher
New Avengers
Captain America
The Incredible Hulk
Savage Dragon
Concrete
Fantastic Four
Gotham Central
Human Target
Fallen Angel
Green Lantern: Rebirth
Several others that escape me at the moment
I should probably exercise some focus so I can get more done.
Also, you are quite possibly (probably, even?) trolling. Ah, well.
I understand your point of the vendor not being liable for infringing after-market modifications and uses, but in this case, these shots are coming from those making and selling the game. To use your car analogy, it's like GM advertising their Corvette as easily modified to look like a Mustang and featuring such a modification in their press material.
Myers: No, no, no! He was supposed to have attitude.
Silverman: Um... wh-what do you mean, exactly?
Myers: Oh, you know, attitude, attitude! Uh... sunglasses!
Lady: Could we put him in more of a "hip-hop" context?
Krusty: Forget context, he's gotta be a surfer. Give me a nice shmear of surfer.
Lady: I feel we should Rasta-fy him by... 10 percent or so.
[the resulting dog is rather... proactive]
[all stare at it w/o any expression]
Myers: Hmm... I think he needs a little more attitude.
[Silverman blackens in Poochie's sunglasses]
All Three: [variously] Oh, yeah, bingo. Yeah, that's it! There it is, right there! I love it!
Many thanks to SNPP for the transcript.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q= movie%3Achristmas+lights/
As far as I can tell, if you just have 2-channel analog speakers and no need for any of the advanced multiple/digital input/output or DVD-audio high frequency type processing that newer cards offer, you'd be doing okay with a Soundblaster 16.
I suppose I should note that I did not intend at all to address recording or distribution of the show after its initial airing. I've no problem with fair use, and my interpretation of such use is reasonably broad.
I was saying that if a show is profitable, then the fair increase in wages of those involved in its production would make the show more expensive. If a show becomes successful, then it becomes expensive. I was responding to the assertion in the parent of my other post that good shows are not necessarily expensive. While that's often true initially, if a show becomes popular, advertisers invest more, and if previous popular shows are valid precedents (see Seinfeld), then the actors and others involved will be paid more, thus making the show more expensive.
If a show is good and gains popularity, it will attract more advertising dollars. If a portion of those extra dollars is not then forwarded to those responsible for the show's quality, there seems to be a bit of unfairness there. Unless some Creative Commons analog of television evolves in which copies of the shows are distributed for free to those who don't wish to pay, the corporate incentive (which is currently the incentive that matters) for producing good shows will always be money, and if you advocate any sort of fairness, those that make (rather than own) the show should be compensated accordingly. Of course, this is assuming that "good" necessarily results in "popular," which I suppose is not an assumption that can seriously be made looking at the current state of most popular television. That situation is an entirely different subject, though. For the purposes of this post, I'll use "good" as functionally synonymous to "having a large viewership," since generally even a great show will not be produced for long without satisfactory ratings, regardless of its production cost--if a more expensive but also more popular show can be aired in its place, it will be.
Using the term "built-in" to refer to that makes me laugh. Appreciatively, mind you, not derisively.
Agreed. If the judge had allowed it as evidence, the precedent it set and the implications thereof would be downright frightening. I guess that's the sticky wicket of the justice system. Even if it was a murder trial with illegally obtained but incontrovertible proof of guilt, allowing the evidence would still be a precedent that should not be set.
Not necessarily. At my non-Berkeley alma mater, CE = Civil Engineering, ChemE = Chemical Engineering, and CompE = Computer Engineering (my major). Why are there so many "C" fields of engineering? Look at all the unused letters! And best of all, abbreviations tend to differ between schools, so I can't just say I have a "CompE B.E." No, I have to say "Computer Engineering."
And now for my first Slashdot declaration that IANAL.
When you don't click through the EULA, yeah, that should be illegal. But the ones that piggyback on other programs generally present their functions but are just clicked through without a second thought. While shady and arguably immoral, I think those are probably legal.
I know in some states the recording has to be known by at least one involved party, and some states require that both are made aware. In this case, it seems that neither party involved in the communications was aware of what was functionally a wiretap. The ruling, while good for privacy, seems extremely frustrating for those hoping to use the logs as evidence.
Your Hollywood analogy is apt, and something I meant to make more clear in my initial reply to you. The big moneymakers are often fairly empty in terms of substance, and the successful movies that are also substantial either include the substance within typical blockbuster material(e.g. Spider-Man 1 & 2), or benefit greatly from advertising and Oscar-talk. Similarly, there are already gaming masterpieces out there. I can't help but bring up ICO as a masterful example of brilliant overall game design whose limited popularity came primarily from word of mouth.
In both industries, success often comes from inclusion of material to appeal to as broad an audience or large a demographic as possible. Your typical box-office lineup is romantic comedies, action movies, personal degradation comedy (see most recent Ben Stiller comedies), and an occasional smattering of movies within those categories with substance beyond the standard trappings of the genre. And occasionally the substance comes merely from masterful execution of the core elements of the genre.
As for strategy games, many still revolve around violent conflict, even if the violence isn't always graphic or explicit. Such classics as Warcraft II feature gore on an individual unit scale. I'm extremely sad to admit I've played little of Civilization, but do understand its appeal to particular people. A game like that, though, requires patience and ability to abstract certain societal concepts that more focused and smaller-scoped games like The Sims do not require, and thus appeals to a smaller market.
I'm finding this conversation enjoyable, by the way. I'm usually not pressed to detail and support my views to this extent, and I'm enjoying the opportunity and practice.
Your point that some games add it in needlessly still stands to some degree, though, and those particular games are generally not praised on the violence so much as the gameplay. Developing similar games without the violence and testing their appeal would go a long way to determine the need therefor, but development difficulty, costs, and risks would be high.
As for sales, I point to Halo/Halo 2 which are pretty much singlehandedly carrying the XBox, and by far are outselling all other games on the system. This argument could of course e argued fown as an anomaly, and I'm afraid I don't have access to sales figures to confidently posit other games as examples.
I play my share of shooters, including the oddly mentioned Half-Life, which, while it undeniably contained scenes of gore, was probably among the worst examples to posit as a game that reveled in it. I'd also note that with the limited controls available to games, it's really hard to create a fast-paced experience without employing the rather simple point-and-click video game abstraction of guns, especially in games from a first person perspective. You can't very easily simulate less extreme activities and still have it deliver the fast-paced gameplay that shooters do, especially in the days of Wolfenstein, whose controls consisted of arrow keys to move, Ctrl to shoot, Space to open doors, and weapon selection.
And that doesn't even address the fact that there is a multitude of non-grisly games out there that are very good, and are advertised as heavily as some of the higher profile gorefests. And this ignores the fact that the games with more base themes often sell better than some less violent ones with arguably better gameplay, regardless of advertising.
Also, unless you abstract gameplay into the puzzle or sports realm or something similar, it's hard to have good gameplay without some kind of way to bypass obstacles permanently or at least effectively. Whether it veers toward realism or cartoonishness, this is often most easily achieved through violence of some sort. Even family friendly Mario squashes, kicks, shoots, and drops into lava his enemies, and that was a kids' game from 1985.
Violence/sleaze in games is not recent, it's not all-pervasive, and at least among the gaming community it is not gaining in popularity or pervasiveness. The games that revel solely in gore and vice tend not to do well. Postal 2 comes to my mind as a game advertised solely on its violence that players, if they even bought it, tired of quickly. Games don't need violence or base themes; they need good gameplay, good stories, good characters, or preferably all of the above. And the best and most liked developers realize that and try to deliver, even if their final product does also include "sleaze."
Another game came to mind just now. The latest Prince of Persia game had significant stylistic changes from its critically lauded predecessor, primarily by making it "darker" to appeal to, oh, I see, a wider audience, since the previous game, which was universally lauded by those who played it, did not sell well. Reviewers of the new game lamented the total shift in tone but still found gameplay elements that redeemed it. I.e. despite the increased sleaze which was apparently to appeal to a wider market, the core gameplay is enough to recommend it. In this case the company was indeed the one to add the "sleaze," but did it apparently because that alone made an excellent game more marketable. Whether this is a result of the market itself being formed by previous trends in released games I don't know, but I highly doubt that games were the only influence to change the public tastes if they were indeed changed.
Also, I know next to nothing about any of these encryption schemes, and feel pretty stupid reading most of this thread. Except the endless stream of "ROT-13" jokes and their variants, spewed by people who think they're cryptocomedians or baiting the uninitiated so they can let them know how stupid they are for not realizing that 13 is half of 26 (hm. Now I feel bad for correcting you on a similar mistake), and the mods who feel obliged to mod them up to prove their own inside knowledge of this commonly circulated gag.
Tangent-rant a-go-go!
Yup! '04 CompE here.