Not to mention that it's also against the YouTube terms of use if they used someone's submission in a broadcast that didn't involve literally playing the video back from the YouTube web page.
C. You agree not to access User Submissions (defined below) or YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate.
(Not that anyone pays attention to that one, I'm sure:P)
I know this isn't quite the topic (as it isn't an upgrade) but I think the real sting in what Apple does is the differences in regional pricing of the same product.
Case in point, check out the prices of the MacBook Pro in Australian dollars on the website, then check out the price in US dollars. Then look at the exchange rate. Last time I checked there was about a AU$800 markup on it when buying in Australia.
I won't be surprised (if|when) the same thing happens to the iPhone when it comes out here later this month.
It scares me that schools even *consider* mixed ability classes.
Speaking as someone who teaches in a mid-sized country town school, the logistics of streaming anything but core subjects (and sometimes not even them) and still keeping within allocated funding doesn't really make it feasible in a lot of situations.
Funding is allocated based on the number of students, not the number of classes. Streaming subjects means that classes may not be of optimum size to maintain the staffing formula, and suddenly either money has to come from other areas or you can't afford enough teachers.
In non-core areas (I mainly teach IT-based subjects, with some science and math when required) you just can't afford to stream kids because you might only have one class (and a small one at that) for any given subject.
Quite frankly I find it frightening that you believe that education system is driven by ideology rather than the bottom line:)
I only read the executive summary because I am on slow intertubes, but even it mentions that the top end kids improved more in non-accountable states than in accountable states. This suggests that the top end kids are actually worse off. Not that their scores haven't gone up, but that they haven't gone up as much as they could have.
When I read the headline (I'm a highschool teacher, albeit Australian), I immediately thought to myself "Well duh." I teach a lot of classes of very mixed ability, and it's quite heartbreaking to just not have the time and energy to extend the smarter kids because I need to spend so much time bringing the lower ability kids up to speed. This is not really a problem of being accountable for test marks, it's a streaming problem. It's easy to see why accountable testing might have an effect on teachers who cared less about the low end, however.
the story reminds me (and may remind you) of a D6-laden past
D6?? I associate D6 with Monopoly and Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy books, not D&D. I think I still have my d20 (if I can still call it that without getting permission from Hasbro;P) from my first edition of D&D.
I thought that the commentary was one of the hightlights as well. So much so that I had to fraps a few of the levels with commentary running to bring in to show my students studying interactive media (high schoolers - always sceptical about these nebulous ideas of 'design', 'testing' and 'evaluation').
I'm not sure how much actually sunk in, but hey, I'm sure it made a few extra dollars for Valve:P
...I'm going to hold out for the Renaissance Faire Scheduler, so that I can finally get some use out of the Elizabethan hardware I've been hanging on to for so long.
Really the 'ISP not passing along emails' bit seems to be the only sensible part of the whole thing, since you can tell when something like Kazaa is installed either by the tray icon or the fact your computer runs like a pregnant sow:P
Aanyway. A few people have mentioned the ISP not blocking the file transfer angle and it not being the responsibility of the ISP to monitor traffic and prevent anything (as it should be, being a service provider). Now I don't know about overseas, but here in Oz, many ISPs have implemented P2P traffic throttling, which makes me wonder how large a step it is (legally) to say that a company is monitoring and reacting to the type of traffic compared to being responsible for the actual traffic itself, and thus legally obligated to do something about it.
I know this deals with steam powered generation, but I can't help remembering the article that was on/. a while back about converting heat to sound to electricity. I wonder how well that'd scale, if it came to burying a whole bunch of the converters.
(I'm no physicist, armchair or others, but I'd love this explained to me in nice simple small words:)
It has nothing to do with whether a game is good or bad, balanced or unbalanced. I am saying that (to my mind, at least) using gaming as a spectator sport has the potential to encourage two things above all others: eye candy and head to head multiplayer. While this in itself is good in that it could encourage both publishers and authors in the direction of decent testing and quality control, I think it would be to the detriment of other game genres. The more media attention that gets put the game industry's way, the less they seem to be inclined to be creative (rather than jumping on the latest realistic-physics-pixel-shaded-$world_conflict_of_ the_moment-multiplayer-only yawnfest bandwagon).
Frankly, I think that this is a problem for video games (for consumers, not necessarily for the industry). If televising video games ever really takes off, which I doubt it will, I think it will only exacerbate the 'graphics over gameplay' problem which we currently face because suddenly companies won't just be making games for gamers[1], they'll be making them for spectators as well. Think of a couple of your favorite games and then think about how much fun they are to watch (I'm a fan of RPGs, for example:P)
You could argue that broadcasting competetive gaming will broaden the market enough not to make an impact on the genres that don't lend themselves to competetive play, but I doubt it'll happen, unless they're going to start televising Nintendo's expanding market in playoffs of Wii Sports or Mario Party
1 - Remember 'By Gamers for Gamers'? How about 'By Corporate Whores for Consumer Whores'? I'm looking at you Hollywood.
I propose we change this terrible chauvinistic term to (wait for it): 'man-made There you go, centuries of gender bias solved with a simple apostrophe!
Maybe we can take a picture of a police officer, photocopy it a few times (with the the officer's written consent, of course!) and put them on the case right away!
I would. There's very little good information on copyright that I've seen that's easily digestible by kids. (In no way saying Captain Copyright is 'good' information, just saying that I've not found a lot to use for my kids.)
Just because people tend to go overboard about what copyright should or shouldn't do, doesn't mean that kids should be informed about it. I realise that this would qualify me for a 'you must be new here', but just because you might have a low opinion of copyright doesn't make it less worth leaning about, because it's something that people will need to deal with at some point (and probably already are without knowing it).
When you watched a movie and thought the actor looked familiar, but didn't know who it was. You called a friend, told them to tune in, and they told you who it was. Usually this would prompt a conversation and maybe some plans to hang out.
Really. In the old days I'd watch a movie, think I saw someone that looked familiar, and since I didn't want to ring up a friend to bother them about the failings of my memory, it'd nag the back of my mind for ages.
Now I look it up on IMDB, go trawling through what else they've acted in, and often find something else to hire out next time I'm out. This is usually accompanied by IMing friends something along the lines of "did you know [random actor in mainstream movie] also did the voice for [character x] in [video game y]?", usually leading to, gosh, a conversation and occasionally plans to hang out.
How many people do you know who have dated a friend from an on-line game? What are the odds that that person you're playing with is reasonably nearby, of compatible age, and actually the gender they claim to be? How on earth, then, do we get to nearly 1/3 of female players participating in real-life dates with people they've met in-game?
In the last 10 years of online gaming (mainly MUDs, with the graphical MMOGs only being the last couple of years for me) I've probably seen a good 10-15 relationships formed, and at least 3 marriages as a result. And that's just through the relatively small number of people I socialised with. (That's successful relationships, btw. Plenty more failures.)
As to the age issue, from the games that I've played, the vast majority of people were in one of two age groups, those being highschool and early-mid 20s. Now bear in mind that this is mainly the MUDding community I'm talking about, although my experiences with WoW lead me to believe that things haven't changed much.
Frankly I don't find relationships forming through shared gaming experiences that strange at all, since you are interacting with people in real time working to achieve shared goals. Ignore the fact that the shared goals are completely fictional. Now what really baffles me is people forming relationships out of things like MySpace, Orkut etc, which to my mind should be treated as one huge group of used car salespeople.
What you state doesn't sound that contradictory to me. Selling the entire shebang isn't transferring virtual assets (as in, it's staying with the original account), whereas selling gold is counted as transferrance, as it is going from your account to someone else's.
I tend to disagree with both, as it's a game. Selling accounts ends up with high end characters in the hands of people who, well, are willing to buy accounts, and there are enough asshats out there without adding lazy asshats to the equation. Selling gold just drives up prices for everyone else. Both make the game less fun.
Having gone to have a read of the EULA that the game installed with and the terms of use on the website what does appear contradictory is in the EULA it states (as one of the parent posters mentioned) that
You may permanently transfer ownership of the Game and all parts thereof
whereas the terms of use state that
Blizzard Entertainment does not recognize the transfer of Accounts, and any authorized transfer of the World of Warcraft software (as set forth on the worldofwarcraft.com website) will result in the permanent deletion of the Account attached to that software.
So uh, you can transfer the game (with media etc) to someone else, but if you do so, the account gets deleted, meaning they're left with some useless physical material?
The hero system in Warcraft 3 wasn't particularly good though. The implementation in the Warlords Battlecry series was far better (as were issues like unit difference).
For example, in Battlecry, your heroes could be trained, and retained items they acquired, spells (through a talent tree), and experience between battles. After they learned to separate single player scenario heroes with multiplayer heroes, this was really quite good. They at least attempted to address the imbalance problems of playing against heroes lower or higher than yourself as well by giving lower level players more points to purchase extra units before the game began.
If there's anything I really respect Blizzard for it's polish (which I felt was a bit lacking in Warcraft 3). The attention to lore in the Warcraft franchise and in Starcraft, voice acting, cutscenes and so on.
(And damn, if Blizz is B-grade, it's a good thing I like less than perfect games, because there are precious few A-grade around...Black Isle? Looking Glass? uh, uh, can't think of any others)
Lego has dumbed down their sets too much. When I played legos as a kid, we'd only buy "sets" so that we had more pieces to make our own creations. Nowadays, the sets they sell have all these wierd specialized pieces which make constructing whatever model they have prepared for you easier.
Definitely. I started teaching secondary kids this year, and went shopping to get some bits and pieces for them to do stop-motion animation, and all I could find were these crappy mini sets that had one person with enough bits to make a motorbike or something.
When I'm trying to get kids to be creative, the last thing I want to give them is something that barely has enough pieces to make anything other than what they want you to, and a lego person that isn't anywhere near as generic (ie is only ever going to look like a pirate, or a police officer etc) as what I had when I was a kid.
It'd probably also be the end of me wandering around the shopping center looking for what I want, and incidentally also buying an equal amount of stuff I really didn't need.
So they pay money to make me spend less money with them (and probably make me thinner in the process:P)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that it's also against the YouTube terms of use if they used someone's submission in a broadcast that didn't involve literally playing the video back from the YouTube web page.
From the Terms of Use:
(Not that anyone pays attention to that one, I'm sure :P)
I know this isn't quite the topic (as it isn't an upgrade) but I think the real sting in what Apple does is the differences in regional pricing of the same product.
Case in point, check out the prices of the MacBook Pro in Australian dollars on the website, then check out the price in US dollars. Then look at the exchange rate. Last time I checked there was about a AU$800 markup on it when buying in Australia.
I won't be surprised (if|when) the same thing happens to the iPhone when it comes out here later this month.
Speaking as someone who teaches in a mid-sized country town school, the logistics of streaming anything but core subjects (and sometimes not even them) and still keeping within allocated funding doesn't really make it feasible in a lot of situations.
Funding is allocated based on the number of students, not the number of classes. Streaming subjects means that classes may not be of optimum size to maintain the staffing formula, and suddenly either money has to come from other areas or you can't afford enough teachers.
In non-core areas (I mainly teach IT-based subjects, with some science and math when required) you just can't afford to stream kids because you might only have one class (and a small one at that) for any given subject.
Quite frankly I find it frightening that you believe that education system is driven by ideology rather than the bottom line :)
I only read the executive summary because I am on slow intertubes, but even it mentions that the top end kids improved more in non-accountable states than in accountable states. This suggests that the top end kids are actually worse off. Not that their scores haven't gone up, but that they haven't gone up as much as they could have.
When I read the headline (I'm a highschool teacher, albeit Australian), I immediately thought to myself "Well duh." I teach a lot of classes of very mixed ability, and it's quite heartbreaking to just not have the time and energy to extend the smarter kids because I need to spend so much time bringing the lower ability kids up to speed. This is not really a problem of being accountable for test marks, it's a streaming problem. It's easy to see why accountable testing might have an effect on teachers who cared less about the low end, however.
D6?? I associate D6 with Monopoly and Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy books, not D&D. I think I still have my d20 (if I can still call it that without getting permission from Hasbro ;P) from my first edition of D&D.
...+1 Pedantic nerd?
I thought that the commentary was one of the hightlights as well. So much so that I had to fraps a few of the levels with commentary running to bring in to show my students studying interactive media (high schoolers - always sceptical about these nebulous ideas of 'design', 'testing' and 'evaluation').
I'm not sure how much actually sunk in, but hey, I'm sure it made a few extra dollars for Valve :P
...I'm going to hold out for the Renaissance Faire Scheduler, so that I can finally get some use out of the Elizabethan hardware I've been hanging on to for so long.
The upside for the consumer is that whenever MS decides to patch their product, they can reboot their own damned computer for a change :P
The downside is of course that this takes out everyone else's "service" while they do so.
Really the 'ISP not passing along emails' bit seems to be the only sensible part of the whole thing, since you can tell when something like Kazaa is installed either by the tray icon or the fact your computer runs like a pregnant sow :P
Aanyway. A few people have mentioned the ISP not blocking the file transfer angle and it not being the responsibility of the ISP to monitor traffic and prevent anything (as it should be, being a service provider). Now I don't know about overseas, but here in Oz, many ISPs have implemented P2P traffic throttling, which makes me wonder how large a step it is (legally) to say that a company is monitoring and reacting to the type of traffic compared to being responsible for the actual traffic itself, and thus legally obligated to do something about it.
I know this deals with steam powered generation, but I can't help remembering the article that was on /. a while back about converting heat to sound to electricity. I wonder how well that'd scale, if it came to burying a whole bunch of the converters.
(I'm no physicist, armchair or others, but I'd love this explained to me in nice simple small words :)
It has nothing to do with whether a game is good or bad, balanced or unbalanced. I am saying that (to my mind, at least) using gaming as a spectator sport has the potential to encourage two things above all others: eye candy and head to head multiplayer. While this in itself is good in that it could encourage both publishers and authors in the direction of decent testing and quality control, I think it would be to the detriment of other game genres. The more media attention that gets put the game industry's way, the less they seem to be inclined to be creative (rather than jumping on the latest realistic-physics-pixel-shaded-$world_conflict_of_ the_moment-multiplayer-only yawnfest bandwagon).
Frankly, I think that this is a problem for video games (for consumers, not necessarily for the industry). If televising video games ever really takes off, which I doubt it will, I think it will only exacerbate the 'graphics over gameplay' problem which we currently face because suddenly companies won't just be making games for gamers[1], they'll be making them for spectators as well. Think of a couple of your favorite games and then think about how much fun they are to watch (I'm a fan of RPGs, for example :P)
You could argue that broadcasting competetive gaming will broaden the market enough not to make an impact on the genres that don't lend themselves to competetive play, but I doubt it'll happen, unless they're going to start televising Nintendo's expanding market in playoffs of Wii Sports or Mario Party
1 - Remember 'By Gamers for Gamers'? How about 'By Corporate Whores for Consumer Whores'? I'm looking at you Hollywood.
Absolutely!
I propose we change this terrible chauvinistic term to (wait for it):
'man-made
There you go, centuries of gender bias solved with a simple apostrophe!
Now where's my damned award?
Maybe we can take a picture of a police officer, photocopy it a few times (with the the officer's written consent, of course!) and put them on the case right away!
I would. There's very little good information on copyright that I've seen that's easily digestible by kids. (In no way saying Captain Copyright is 'good' information, just saying that I've not found a lot to use for my kids.)
Just because people tend to go overboard about what copyright should or shouldn't do, doesn't mean that kids should be informed about it. I realise that this would qualify me for a 'you must be new here', but just because you might have a low opinion of copyright doesn't make it less worth leaning about, because it's something that people will need to deal with at some point (and probably already are without knowing it).
I love giving these sorts of things to my digital media classes to play with when they're learning about digital audio.
Really. In the old days I'd watch a movie, think I saw someone that looked familiar, and since I didn't want to ring up a friend to bother them about the failings of my memory, it'd nag the back of my mind for ages.
Now I look it up on IMDB, go trawling through what else they've acted in, and often find something else to hire out next time I'm out. This is usually accompanied by IMing friends something along the lines of "did you know [random actor in mainstream movie] also did the voice for [character x] in [video game y]?", usually leading to, gosh, a conversation and occasionally plans to hang out.
It is just a normal mouse, except that middle-click is bound to chatting "[Arcane Crystal][Arcane Crystal][Arcane Crystal]" by default.</wow bias>
I don't know about anyone else, but as soon as I sell off a bit more gold, I'm getting one! ;P
In the last 10 years of online gaming (mainly MUDs, with the graphical MMOGs only being the last couple of years for me) I've probably seen a good 10-15 relationships formed, and at least 3 marriages as a result. And that's just through the relatively small number of people I socialised with. (That's successful relationships, btw. Plenty more failures.)
As to the age issue, from the games that I've played, the vast majority of people were in one of two age groups, those being highschool and early-mid 20s. Now bear in mind that this is mainly the MUDding community I'm talking about, although my experiences with WoW lead me to believe that things haven't changed much.
Frankly I don't find relationships forming through shared gaming experiences that strange at all, since you are interacting with people in real time working to achieve shared goals. Ignore the fact that the shared goals are completely fictional. Now what really baffles me is people forming relationships out of things like MySpace, Orkut etc, which to my mind should be treated as one huge group of used car salespeople.
74 comments and not a single Cthulhu joke :(
(And love in WoW? Not from anyone on the wrong end of inedible heart candy spam, I'll wager.)
What you state doesn't sound that contradictory to me. Selling the entire shebang isn't transferring virtual assets (as in, it's staying with the original account), whereas selling gold is counted as transferrance, as it is going from your account to someone else's.
I tend to disagree with both, as it's a game. Selling accounts ends up with high end characters in the hands of people who, well, are willing to buy accounts, and there are enough asshats out there without adding lazy asshats to the equation. Selling gold just drives up prices for everyone else. Both make the game less fun.
Having gone to have a read of the EULA that the game installed with and the terms of use on the website what does appear contradictory is in the EULA it states (as one of the parent posters mentioned) that
whereas the terms of use state that So uh, you can transfer the game (with media etc) to someone else, but if you do so, the account gets deleted, meaning they're left with some useless physical material?The hero system in Warcraft 3 wasn't particularly good though. The implementation in the Warlords Battlecry series was far better (as were issues like unit difference).
For example, in Battlecry, your heroes could be trained, and retained items they acquired, spells (through a talent tree), and experience between battles. After they learned to separate single player scenario heroes with multiplayer heroes, this was really quite good. They at least attempted to address the imbalance problems of playing against heroes lower or higher than yourself as well by giving lower level players more points to purchase extra units before the game began.
If there's anything I really respect Blizzard for it's polish (which I felt was a bit lacking in Warcraft 3). The attention to lore in the Warcraft franchise and in Starcraft, voice acting, cutscenes and so on.
(And damn, if Blizz is B-grade, it's a good thing I like less than perfect games, because there are precious few A-grade around...Black Isle? Looking Glass? uh, uh, can't think of any others)
Give me one thing in the next 50 years and it'll be the death of the password. Security through obscurity at its finest.
Definitely. I started teaching secondary kids this year, and went shopping to get some bits and pieces for them to do stop-motion animation, and all I could find were these crappy mini sets that had one person with enough bits to make a motorbike or something.
When I'm trying to get kids to be creative, the last thing I want to give them is something that barely has enough pieces to make anything other than what they want you to, and a lego person that isn't anywhere near as generic (ie is only ever going to look like a pirate, or a police officer etc) as what I had when I was a kid.
It'd probably also be the end of me wandering around the shopping center looking for what I want, and incidentally also buying an equal amount of stuff I really didn't need.
So they pay money to make me spend less money with them (and probably make me thinner in the process :P)