Homicide ignores the fact the killing is because of a gun, though, so you lose information that the original wording, however flawed, provided. Homicide-with-gun, perhaps?
Maybe my sense of history is off, but I really wouldn't associate the word 'homeland' with a sovereign nation we had essentially annexed around 50 years before WWII due to business interests.
Of course, her cute, wholesome, etc. thing may entirely also have been an act to sell records (see plenty of other groups that sell to a younger age group like she was doing). Most of the fifteen year old girls I knew when I was younger were certainly sweet, but they also certainly had a degree of sexuality too.
Likewise, it is reasonable to expect a college age girl (not sure how old Britney is now) to want to be very sexual (though certainly not sexy, as Madonna is just nasty...ewww). Though it pains me to say this, I am not sure the music industry should really be blamed for any possible change on Britney's views on sexuality.
The entertainment industry's motive is profit, as well it should be--that's what industry is for.
That isn't entirely true. Corporations and the like exist because We, the People, allow them to. If they don't benefit the people, or especiallu actively work against us and our rights for profit, we should put them down.
I don't mean to be picky, as I agree with the rest of your post. I just don't like to see that meme propogated, so I am speaking out.:)
Do some reading, buddy. This isn't just a practical joke pulled off by some friends. The posting kids broke several laws, and actively tried to ruin this kid's life. Jesus, they even tried to figure out a way to get that iPod for themselves. Punish the bastards, and their incompetent parents.
And while longterm Patriot would pose a greater threat to civil liberties I haven't heard of a lot of abuses of Patriot but DMCA is being wielded as a club against a LOT of people.
That is partially the reason, of course, why the Patriot act is so terrible - you simply won't hear about abuses of it, since that is the intention of it.
Let's hope you are right about the sunset clause being taken advantage of, because that is the only way the Patriot act is 'better' than the DMCA. Your other points are very solid, though.
The powerful Greek prostitutes already mentioned had no strict ties to religion (any more than a normal greek did). Regardless, the discussion topic was about prostitutes in general.
Since Reuters reported 80,000 Gamecube consoles SHIPPED, not sold, they were accurate. There is a reason Nintendo stopped manufacturing the system until later this Fall.
And most people here or on VE3D, etc. that talk about Gamecube being third place are talking about the USA (or Europe), because that is where we live. This isn't the Playstation 1 or Super Famicom era - Japan is no longer the biggest or most important market for videogames (the world-wide best selling game last year, Vice City, wasn't even released in Japan until recently). Even ignoring the current state of the market, Sega Saturn sold really well in Japan, even beating the Playstation for a long time - but that honestly didn't matter to most game fans in Europe or America. We didn't get the Japanese games, usually, and retailers didn't choose to keep stocking the Saturn here just because it was doing well in Japan!
That said, I think a lot of the people that seem against Nintendo are hoping Gamecube does poorly not necessarily out of malice, but because Nintendo has needed a big punch to the face for years. They need to finally get it through their heads that they aren't the number one videogame console company anymore, and that they have to sotp dictating what gamers want. For example, would any GC owner have really objected to the system using standard DVD media? The system was showing that this was limitation almost from launch. Can Miyamoto (and his various synchophants like that guy from Silicon Knights) stop giving interviews where they tell us that games like Vice City are not the future of gaming, whether we like it or not? How about stop trying to sell us the 'big idea' that GC and GBA connectivity is a huge revolution in console gaming? Or that online gaming doesn't add anything? How about lowering their licensing fees so they are no longer the most expensive in the industry?
Nintendo is starting to be more humble, and they are starting to make some good changes (not essentially ignoring third parties anymore is a nice touch). But they need to do more. I think going third party might even be really good for them, personally, but I know that I will get crucified for suggesting that.:P Perhaps a bloody nose via the Gamecube will be enough, however.
And? The parent's point was that some prostitutes have amassed great power through history, and that some cultures really celebrated them. The show also didn't take place in Babylon - that doesn't mean the point wasn't valid either.
That simply isn't correct. We need some numbers...
Jeepers Creepers 2 opened on Friday. Over the weekend it was seen by roughly 1.5 million people. I am not sure I would even classify it as a major motion picture, either. Certainly not as big as a Terminator, Matrix (considered a disappointment at more than 20 million tickets), Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo (more than 30 million tickets so far, it looks like), etc. But that weekend number still kills the sales of most console games.
(I am rounding up ticket prices to $10, too, which is largely not true. So ticket sales are even higher, perhaps significantly so! This is also all US-centric - it is hard enough to compile numbers for just the USA. For reference, some Japanese console game sales can be found here, though of course more games are sold in America or Europe.)
I can't find very accurate sales for the Nintendo games (which aside from Pokemon, have not sold as well as anticipated - Metroid Prime in particular), but I know Vice City broke all sales records in America by selling a million copies in two days. I am estimating here, but by now Vice City has maybe sold close to 10 million copies (it was at 4.4 million back in January - I am being a little charatible). I am sure it will still sell pretty well for a while, especially the coming port to Xbox. But the number of copies sold is still dwarfed by ticket sales for something like Finding Nemo. And really we should include future video/DVD sales, as well, seeing as how popular games have a much longer 'sell life' than a film at the theaters.
The original Super Marios Brothers is one of the best selling games of all time: ~40 million copies. Very good numbers, but this is partially because it was bundled with the NES itself! Super Mario Brothers 3 (which was not bundled AFAIK) sold 'only' around 17 million copies.
Now, I won't disagree that games like Vice City make more money than films like Finding Nemo (they do), or that they have far better profit margins than most films (again, they do - though maybe not for much longer, unfortunately. Let's see how Half Life 2 does...). But the truth is that big films nearly always sell more tickets than even the biggest games do.
Maybe it doesn't work in Linux or on your specific setup, but my 'suffiently accelerated ATI card' has a hardware MPEG decoder. All of them have had it for years, AFAIK - the original Radeon did, and I am pretty sure later Rage Pros also did. So maybe you actually are using a hardware decoder without realizing it?
I know it is a Slashdot tradition not to read an article, but judging from the responses to your comment, this is the first time I have seen so many comments from people who didn't even read the summary. Only in an Apple article, right?:)
Hint: the summary mentioned that the benchmarks showed the G5 would be good at games. The "titles" mentioned by the parent poster is referring to games. Hence, no one cares if you don't want a Mac to play a variety of games - that isn't the subject being talked about.
I think you might have missed some important info about art somewhere down the road. The whole point of art is 'putting up with it' - to partially surrrender to the artist's work. If there was nothing you have to 'put up with', then it probably isn't art (as in an expression of another person's passion/thoughts/feelings), but propaganda (an expression designed to merely reinforce what's already in your head).
How is it a 'perverted domination fantasy' that my GF finds other women erotic? She enjoys looking at women (and more when appropriate)- real women, TV women, animated women, written women. Who are you to insist she should find something like that offensive? This is something she enjoys, and has since a very early age. Yeah yeah, the culture obviously had an influence - but there is no escaping that in anything we do, and it is a form madness to take the approach you are advocating. You have the freedom to shut your eyes, your ears, your nose. You have the freedom to tell others you don't like this art, or that art. Choosing to force others to shut their eyes, etc. leads to that wonderful fighting over imaginary friends we see around the world. And though you don't go right out and say it, that seems to be what you are advocating here.
And a newsflash for ya: 'Progress' is one of the oppressive patriarch's favorite tools.
I just don't know what more I can say. I just can't understand why an exaggerated display of sexuality is so terrible. I hope it is just that maybe my irony detector is broken today...
From your example it actually sounds like MEN are the sex objects. If their attractiveness cannot be disassociated from the sexual act, aren't they the sex objects?
(Ah, the wonders of the malleable academic feminism!)
I remember being acutely uncomfortable with Lara Croft and her Breasts of Impalement being a role model for those girls; talk about your unrealistic images! Even Barbie is rather staid and normal-looking compared to Lara Croft.
I would assume that the girls are clever enough to not see Lara Croft as a role model they need to perfectly emulate in real life, just as my younger brother doesn't see the terrorists in Counterstrike as role models. Just as a personal example, speaking as someone who has been involved with a 'post'-anorexic woman for more than six years, it seems to both of us that the 'unrealistic images' claim is mostly BS. She didn't have an eating problem because of Barbie, etc., she had an eating problem because of two things: A. Direct peer pressure ('friends' had eating disorders). B. Lots of fighting and the like with her mother, along with her mom's general behavior ("I feel fat, I hate fat, isn't aunt soandso getting heavy, heh heh, so will you someday!", etc.). This was the primary reason.
This whole idea that sexual or unrealistic images 'conditioning' youths is completely overstated. The things that condition people (and I do agree that 'nurture' is powerful stuff) nowadays are pretty much the same things that always did: the people they are involved closely with.
Sure, being surrounded by certain types of imagery will affect your thinking, somehow. But it isn't like the brain is just a sponge - it processes this data, it responds to it in different ways (rejecting parts of it, for example), it modifies it via selective memory. You just can't say how an idea will really affect somone. But people (even children) are pretty tough, and I think they can more than handle a little exaggerated (and cartoonish) sexuality.
Just to attack your own idea of what the world's like...
One of my girlfriend's favorite games is the "big tittie girl" game DOAXBV. Relationship sims (which is what that game covertly is) generally are very popular with women as well as men. Im my experience, I also find 'chill games' like DOAXBV and the various Sim games to be especially popular with women. And plenty of women (and men!) are able to play a game, watch a movie, etc. involving someone with large breasts (or just a large amount of sexuality) and not simply write if off as completely worthless because of said qualities! Amazing!;P
I am mostly just teasing you, but the amazing sexual puritanism displayed by so many gamers [any sexuality = terrible game] has been driving me nuts - most people don't shoot down a movie or book just because it has some sex appeal, but apparently they will for games. Seems to be mainly an American thing, thankfully. And just to add to your example (and mine), I know Lara Croft is one of the few Western characters that is really popular among Japanese girls. They apparently see playing as her to be (rightfully, IMO) empowering. I imagine the Japanese culture being so less afraid of sexuality than America has something to do with it.
I am confused - it is very possible I am reading you wrong. So a game only has "true" value if it had a large budget? Are expensive Hollywood action blockbusters the only type of film that matters, too?
And I would be very happy with a world where a wide variety of games were sold for a wide variety of price points - it could really revitalize certain 'dead' genres like shmups, as well as exploding the market size for games.
Very, very true. Though I would imagine Smilebit would be insane not to make a JSRF2, with how many copies the game has 'sold' with the bundle (more than Halo!).
Actually, the world is a hungrier place BECAUSE of farming. Non-subsistance (or as it is also know, totalilarian) farming leads to the huge populations that are affected so much by things like famines. And incidentally, if all we cared about was subsistance, most people wouldn't get their food from farming of any kind, anyway. All data points to farming being probably the hardest way to get food for most of human history (the 'average' gatherer-hunter spent around 3 hours a day to get all of the food they needed, for example). Modern science has made farming far more efficient, though the environmental cost of it has gotten even higher.
Sorry I don't really have any links (I am a bit of an anthro geek, so this is just kind of 'common knowledge' for me), but I would suggest you read the books Ishmael or the Story of B, both my Daniel Quinn. I prefer the second book, but if you are very (Christian) religious you may find it too unsettling... I found both books rather enlightening. Really changed the way I saw the world.
And you give too little credit to Luddhism (not sure how to spell it either). It wasn't really about a fear of technology, it was about fighting to preserve your (comfortable) way of life. I think it is very hard to reasonably argue against that.
$25 plus shipping sounds a lot like $30-40 to me. And even without shipping, that still doesn't compare to the Tower price stated ($15).
As a bit of an aside, I know one of the things that bug me the most about buying real Japanese CDs is just how short so many of them are. All too often, you pay close to $30 for something a little more than a half an hour in length. The fact is that by most people's standards, the CDs are overpriced - Japan at least allows you to rent them at stores (which sell CD-R blanks as well), but that isn't an option for an importer.
Seeing the raw numbers puts things in a much different light than most of the big pro-xbox sites around and what microsoft wants people to think.
Does any of that affect your enjoyment of various videogames? Would Halo (or JSRF, or DOA3, or PDO, or etc.) play that much better if Xbox sales tripled? Why are you interested in videogames exactly? Got tired of fighting over religious beliefs?
Slashdot Mirror
Homicide ignores the fact the killing is because of a gun, though, so you lose information that the original wording, however flawed, provided. Homicide-with-gun, perhaps?
Maybe my sense of history is off, but I really wouldn't associate the word 'homeland' with a sovereign nation we had essentially annexed around 50 years before WWII due to business interests.
So we should call this a "shooting", right? Just looking for clarification.
Of course, her cute, wholesome, etc. thing may entirely also have been an act to sell records (see plenty of other groups that sell to a younger age group like she was doing). Most of the fifteen year old girls I knew when I was younger were certainly sweet, but they also certainly had a degree of sexuality too.
Likewise, it is reasonable to expect a college age girl (not sure how old Britney is now) to want to be very sexual (though certainly not sexy, as Madonna is just nasty...ewww). Though it pains me to say this, I am not sure the music industry should really be blamed for any possible change on Britney's views on sexuality.
The entertainment industry's motive is profit, as well it should be--that's what industry is for.
:)
That isn't entirely true. Corporations and the like exist because We, the People, allow them to. If they don't benefit the people, or especiallu actively work against us and our rights for profit, we should put them down.
I don't mean to be picky, as I agree with the rest of your post. I just don't like to see that meme propogated, so I am speaking out.
Do some reading, buddy. This isn't just a practical joke pulled off by some friends. The posting kids broke several laws, and actively tried to ruin this kid's life. Jesus, they even tried to figure out a way to get that iPod for themselves. Punish the bastards, and their incompetent parents.
And while longterm Patriot would pose a greater threat to civil liberties I haven't heard of a lot of abuses of Patriot but DMCA is being wielded as a club against a LOT of people.
That is partially the reason, of course, why the Patriot act is so terrible - you simply won't hear about abuses of it, since that is the intention of it.
Let's hope you are right about the sunset clause being taken advantage of, because that is the only way the Patriot act is 'better' than the DMCA. Your other points are very solid, though.
The powerful Greek prostitutes already mentioned had no strict ties to religion (any more than a normal greek did). Regardless, the discussion topic was about prostitutes in general.
Since Reuters reported 80,000 Gamecube consoles SHIPPED, not sold, they were accurate. There is a reason Nintendo stopped manufacturing the system until later this Fall.
:P Perhaps a bloody nose via the Gamecube will be enough, however.
And most people here or on VE3D, etc. that talk about Gamecube being third place are talking about the USA (or Europe), because that is where we live. This isn't the Playstation 1 or Super Famicom era - Japan is no longer the biggest or most important market for videogames (the world-wide best selling game last year, Vice City, wasn't even released in Japan until recently). Even ignoring the current state of the market, Sega Saturn sold really well in Japan, even beating the Playstation for a long time - but that honestly didn't matter to most game fans in Europe or America. We didn't get the Japanese games, usually, and retailers didn't choose to keep stocking the Saturn here just because it was doing well in Japan!
That said, I think a lot of the people that seem against Nintendo are hoping Gamecube does poorly not necessarily out of malice, but because Nintendo has needed a big punch to the face for years. They need to finally get it through their heads that they aren't the number one videogame console company anymore, and that they have to sotp dictating what gamers want. For example, would any GC owner have really objected to the system using standard DVD media? The system was showing that this was limitation almost from launch. Can Miyamoto (and his various synchophants like that guy from Silicon Knights) stop giving interviews where they tell us that games like Vice City are not the future of gaming, whether we like it or not? How about stop trying to sell us the 'big idea' that GC and GBA connectivity is a huge revolution in console gaming? Or that online gaming doesn't add anything? How about lowering their licensing fees so they are no longer the most expensive in the industry?
Nintendo is starting to be more humble, and they are starting to make some good changes (not essentially ignoring third parties anymore is a nice touch). But they need to do more. I think going third party might even be really good for them, personally, but I know that I will get crucified for suggesting that.
And? The parent's point was that some prostitutes have amassed great power through history, and that some cultures really celebrated them. The show also didn't take place in Babylon - that doesn't mean the point wasn't valid either.
That simply isn't correct. We need some numbers...
Jeepers Creepers 2 opened on Friday. Over the weekend it was seen by roughly 1.5 million people. I am not sure I would even classify it as a major motion picture, either. Certainly not as big as a Terminator, Matrix (considered a disappointment at more than 20 million tickets), Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo (more than 30 million tickets so far, it looks like), etc. But that weekend number still kills the sales of most console games.
(I am rounding up ticket prices to $10, too, which is largely not true. So ticket sales are even higher, perhaps significantly so! This is also all US-centric - it is hard enough to compile numbers for just the USA. For reference, some Japanese console game sales can be found here, though of course more games are sold in America or Europe.)
I can't find very accurate sales for the Nintendo games (which aside from Pokemon, have not sold as well as anticipated - Metroid Prime in particular), but I know Vice City broke all sales records in America by selling a million copies in two days. I am estimating here, but by now Vice City has maybe sold close to 10 million copies (it was at 4.4 million back in January - I am being a little charatible). I am sure it will still sell pretty well for a while, especially the coming port to Xbox. But the number of copies sold is still dwarfed by ticket sales for something like Finding Nemo. And really we should include future video/DVD sales, as well, seeing as how popular games have a much longer 'sell life' than a film at the theaters.
The original Super Marios Brothers is one of the best selling games of all time: ~40 million copies. Very good numbers, but this is partially because it was bundled with the NES itself! Super Mario Brothers 3 (which was not bundled AFAIK) sold 'only' around 17 million copies.
Now, I won't disagree that games like Vice City make more money than films like Finding Nemo (they do), or that they have far better profit margins than most films (again, they do - though maybe not for much longer, unfortunately. Let's see how Half Life 2 does...). But the truth is that big films nearly always sell more tickets than even the biggest games do.
The videogame consoles are your friend. Especially seeing as they are now starting to get a lot more games with a 'PC complexity level'.
Maybe it doesn't work in Linux or on your specific setup, but my 'suffiently accelerated ATI card' has a hardware MPEG decoder. All of them have had it for years, AFAIK - the original Radeon did, and I am pretty sure later Rage Pros also did. So maybe you actually are using a hardware decoder without realizing it?
I know it is a Slashdot tradition not to read an article, but judging from the responses to your comment, this is the first time I have seen so many comments from people who didn't even read the summary. Only in an Apple article, right? :)
Hint: the summary mentioned that the benchmarks showed the G5 would be good at games. The "titles" mentioned by the parent poster is referring to games. Hence, no one cares if you don't want a Mac to play a variety of games - that isn't the subject being talked about.
They shouldn't have to put up with it at all.
I think you might have missed some important info about art somewhere down the road. The whole point of art is 'putting up with it' - to partially surrrender to the artist's work. If there was nothing you have to 'put up with', then it probably isn't art (as in an expression of another person's passion/thoughts/feelings), but propaganda (an expression designed to merely reinforce what's already in your head).
How is it a 'perverted domination fantasy' that my GF finds other women erotic? She enjoys looking at women (and more when appropriate)- real women, TV women, animated women, written women. Who are you to insist she should find something like that offensive? This is something she enjoys, and has since a very early age. Yeah yeah, the culture obviously had an influence - but there is no escaping that in anything we do, and it is a form madness to take the approach you are advocating. You have the freedom to shut your eyes, your ears, your nose. You have the freedom to tell others you don't like this art, or that art. Choosing to force others to shut their eyes, etc. leads to that wonderful fighting over imaginary friends we see around the world. And though you don't go right out and say it, that seems to be what you are advocating here.
And a newsflash for ya:
'Progress' is one of the oppressive patriarch's favorite tools.
I just don't know what more I can say. I just can't understand why an exaggerated display of sexuality is so terrible. I hope it is just that maybe my irony detector is broken today...
From your example it actually sounds like MEN are the sex objects. If their attractiveness cannot be disassociated from the sexual act, aren't they the sex objects?
(Ah, the wonders of the malleable academic feminism!)
I remember being acutely uncomfortable with Lara Croft and her Breasts of Impalement being a role model for those girls; talk about your unrealistic images! Even Barbie is rather staid and normal-looking compared to Lara Croft.
I would assume that the girls are clever enough to not see Lara Croft as a role model they need to perfectly emulate in real life, just as my younger brother doesn't see the terrorists in Counterstrike as role models. Just as a personal example, speaking as someone who has been involved with a 'post'-anorexic woman for more than six years, it seems to both of us that the 'unrealistic images' claim is mostly BS. She didn't have an eating problem because of Barbie, etc., she had an eating problem because of two things:
A. Direct peer pressure ('friends' had eating disorders).
B. Lots of fighting and the like with her mother, along with her mom's general behavior ("I feel fat, I hate fat, isn't aunt soandso getting heavy, heh heh, so will you someday!", etc.). This was the primary reason.
This whole idea that sexual or unrealistic images 'conditioning' youths is completely overstated. The things that condition people (and I do agree that 'nurture' is powerful stuff) nowadays are pretty much the same things that always did: the people they are involved closely with.
Sure, being surrounded by certain types of imagery will affect your thinking, somehow. But it isn't like the brain is just a sponge - it processes this data, it responds to it in different ways (rejecting parts of it, for example), it modifies it via selective memory. You just can't say how an idea will really affect somone. But people (even children) are pretty tough, and I think they can more than handle a little exaggerated (and cartoonish) sexuality.
Just to attack your own idea of what the world's like...
;P
One of my girlfriend's favorite games is the "big tittie girl" game DOAXBV. Relationship sims (which is what that game covertly is) generally are very popular with women as well as men. Im my experience, I also find 'chill games' like DOAXBV and the various Sim games to be especially popular with women. And plenty of women (and men!) are able to play a game, watch a movie, etc. involving someone with large breasts (or just a large amount of sexuality) and not simply write if off as completely worthless because of said qualities! Amazing!
I am mostly just teasing you, but the amazing sexual puritanism displayed by so many gamers [any sexuality = terrible game] has been driving me nuts - most people don't shoot down a movie or book just because it has some sex appeal, but apparently they will for games. Seems to be mainly an American thing, thankfully. And just to add to your example (and mine), I know Lara Croft is one of the few Western characters that is really popular among Japanese girls. They apparently see playing as her to be (rightfully, IMO) empowering. I imagine the Japanese culture being so less afraid of sexuality than America has something to do with it.
I am confused - it is very possible I am reading you wrong. So a game only has "true" value if it had a large budget? Are expensive Hollywood action blockbusters the only type of film that matters, too?
And I would be very happy with a world where a wide variety of games were sold for a wide variety of price points - it could really revitalize certain 'dead' genres like shmups, as well as exploding the market size for games.
I DARE you to make a movie without loud music and ANY special effects of any kind, CGI or old school. You won't because you can't.
:P)
Sounds a bit like Gigli.
(Or at least so I understand - don't know anyone personally who has seen it
Very, very true. Though I would imagine Smilebit would be insane not to make a JSRF2, with how many copies the game has 'sold' with the bundle (more than Halo!).
Actually, the world is a hungrier place BECAUSE of farming. Non-subsistance (or as it is also know, totalilarian) farming leads to the huge populations that are affected so much by things like famines. And incidentally, if all we cared about was subsistance, most people wouldn't get their food from farming of any kind, anyway. All data points to farming being probably the hardest way to get food for most of human history (the 'average' gatherer-hunter spent around 3 hours a day to get all of the food they needed, for example). Modern science has made farming far more efficient, though the environmental cost of it has gotten even higher.
Sorry I don't really have any links (I am a bit of an anthro geek, so this is just kind of 'common knowledge' for me), but I would suggest you read the books Ishmael or the Story of B, both my Daniel Quinn. I prefer the second book, but if you are very (Christian) religious you may find it too unsettling... I found both books rather enlightening. Really changed the way I saw the world.
And you give too little credit to Luddhism (not sure how to spell it either). It wasn't really about a fear of technology, it was about fighting to preserve your (comfortable) way of life. I think it is very hard to reasonably argue against that.
$25 plus shipping sounds a lot like $30-40 to me. And even without shipping, that still doesn't compare to the Tower price stated ($15).
As a bit of an aside, I know one of the things that bug me the most about buying real Japanese CDs is just how short so many of them are. All too often, you pay close to $30 for something a little more than a half an hour in length. The fact is that by most people's standards, the CDs are overpriced - Japan at least allows you to rent them at stores (which sell CD-R blanks as well), but that isn't an option for an importer.
The stuff you are listing is not imports, though. They are domestic releases. Big difference, and not at all what the grandparent was talking about.
Seeing the raw numbers puts things in a much different light than most of the big pro-xbox sites around and what microsoft wants people to think.
Does any of that affect your enjoyment of various videogames? Would Halo (or JSRF, or DOA3, or PDO, or etc.) play that much better if Xbox sales tripled? Why are you interested in videogames exactly? Got tired of fighting over religious beliefs?