Okay so IANAL but I do work for the Finnish government and I have to deal with the Police Board every once in a while.
The police in Finland are a national organization (cities or provinces don't have their own police, they are all under the same organization) and they have jurisdiction over a lot of permit and license matters, like residence permits, raffles and lotteries, and in this case the raising of funds. This side of the police administration is taken care of by the Police Board instead of any local police department. They answer directly to the Ministry of the Interior. They do not investigate crimes or prosecute people, the Board is a purely administrative organ. In other words Wikipedia is not under criminal investigation, though the Board could refer this to a police department in Finland to see what they make of this, since the police departments are responsible for actual investigation. Requesting a statement from an entity that may be raising funds is a pretty regular bureaucratic procedure, in a sense.
The problem here is not that the police board have "too much spare time" (my personal experience is the exact opposite, and reading the request, it would have been written within an hour or two by a junior official), or that they are petty power-hungry tyrants out to suppress the freedom of information, it's that their job is to interpret Finnish law and the Finnish law when it comes to fundraising is terrible and about two decades out of date. Hopefully this will get enough media attention in Finland to start a political discussion that leads to a proper reform of the law.
I doubt they expect the police will be able to initiate anything against Wikipedia, but they would be negligent in their duty as public officers to not do anything about the issue once it came to their attention.
I find it unlikely that Kyösti Kallio declared war on Russia after Barbarossa began, since Kallio left office in 1940 and Barbarossa began in June 1941. However, my credentials aren't quite as good: my granduncle Akseli Anttila was merely a General of the Red Army who had left to Russia during the Civil War. He was also the Defence Minister of Kuusinen's puppet government.
Churchill certainly sang Finland's praises during the Winter War, but the planned military aid operation via Norway never materialized, only some volunteers from Sweden and a few Allied countries, primarily the UK. This goodwill disappeared after a Finland lead by President Risto Ryti accepted German trade and soldiers into the country during the so-called interwar period, which culminated in German airplanes using Finland as a landing area in the early phases of Barbarossa in late June 1941. By this time, Northern Finland was housing German soldiers, who had the frontlines in the Petsamo/Murmansk direction during Barbarossa. This obvious pact lead to the Soviet Union doing the logical thing and bombing Finnish cities and installations, which lead to declarations of war.
But you can certainly say Finland was screwed both ways several times, what with first having to deal with the Soviet Union enabled by German consent, then the Soviet Union while working with the Germans, and then finally having to deal with the stragglers of the German forces after signing a peace deal with the Soviets - a deal that was struck in the nick of time, when the Finnish forces presented just enough resistance so that the Soviets couldn't bother and preferred to focus on Central Europe instead of Finland.
"One thing that seperates Australia from the rest of the world is we don't pay income tax on gambling earnings. The only main cavert is as long as the winnings weren't gained as a professional gambler."
This is also the case in the European Economic Area if the winnings originate from within the area - they're tax free. All casino games including poker, even if it's a game of skill, are included, and it doesn't matter if you're a professional or not. I'm not certain of the details but as long as the money is coming to you from within the EEA or the operator is licensed within the EEA (like Gibraltar or Malta), you're good to go.
If you were to win the WSOP though, your winnings would have been earned outside the EEA and you'd have to pay taxes on them.
From the article: "And no, I don't play in the "real money" games. Because that is a felony according to both state and federal law, and I would never do such a thing, even though it's perfectly legal for me to go a few miles down the street, never leave my own residential neighborhood, and play poker for real money in an Indian casino."
No, no, no. Gambling (if you don't mind the word, since poker specifically *is* a game of skill) online is not a crime in the United States, at least according to federal law. Your state law may vary, but I don't think the law is that harsh in a majority of the states. The latest piece of legislation Congress crapped only dealt with the transfer of funds between gambling sites and financial institutes and did NOT criminalize the act of playing online itself.
The idea that actual play is illegal is a false concept that has probably been spread by the moralists and the brick and mortar lobby who pushed the law through in the first place under the guise of homeland security. The only problem you may face is with transferring money to and from the poker site itself. Another cause has been the fact that many online casinos have closed their doors to players in light of this law, but play remains perfectly legal (so far - I doubt they are done yet).
It's culture. Subtitles probably take a little adjusting to if you haven't seen tha many of them in your life so far. People from the English-speaking zone will have their cultural needs met spoken in their own language, because there's a wealth of English-speaking content being produced. And if something isn't spoken in English, there's a large enough market to warrant dubbing.
However, in small countries like those in Europe, you may have lingual groups of only a few million. The top countries like Germany with a pop of 80 mil dub their stuff too. (You haven't seen James Bond if you haven't seen him speaking German in a Bavarian accent.) And I doubt anyone would propose that Germany's level of education is as poor as that of the US.
These small countries have small markets and poor broadcasting companies, so they resort to subtitles. That's how I learned both to read Finnish and to understand English, by watching shows spoken in English subtitled in Finnish. That's also why my ears bleed when I watch anything dubbed beyond simplest of children's shows.
As a Finn, I have always taken pride in our country - even though we don't have things like the Bill of Rights, we have our fundamental rights, and our copyright legislation isn't at least as horrible as the DMCA. Well, that has now changed. Finland has enjoyed #1 position in international competitiveness ratings and has been considered a vanguard of the spearhead of information age societies, but this piece of legislation has now set us back years, nay, perhaps even decades.
What wrenches my gut is that despite Finland's top rating when it comes to low corruption, shenaniganry in creating and passing this piece of legislation has been plentiful. The law was prepared in the Ministries of Culture and Education in close rapport with people who work for the very organisations that lobby for stricter controls on what citizens can do with the things they have bought. When sixty-six expert statements were collected on the law, only one was from a consumer-oriented organisation, that being EFFI.
Its passing was surrounded by nothing but smoke and mirrors, with misleading statements based on intentionally erroneus interpretations of the already-muddy law by its supporters. And finally when a demonstration was arranged in front of the Parliamentary building on Tuesday, when the bill was discussed for the very last time, a representative of a musicians' organisation was put on the wires stating the demonstrators' cry for free speech was tarnishing the concept for free speech because the demonstrators just want to download songs in its name. This while behind him people were touting DeCSS signs and spreading out short DeCSS programmes on flyers with the text "distributing this flyer will become illegal".
Not to mention the EEA statute, which makes distributing works not published in the European Economic Area illegal in the EEA, unless they have been acquired for personal use. No more import manga from stores if the publisher overseas decides that the market in Finland is too small.
Well, now there's a galvanised group of a few hundred people who are just really pissed off. We're already setting up forums for "organised discussion" and thinking up ways to turn ourselves in en masse to swamp the system. The Parliament has made an initial decision to modify the law later on, but until then, we'll have to just suck it up.
And guess who used her authority to press the bill through no matter what? The Minister of Culture, a former Miss Finland, whose only merit in getting into Parliament was that she was Miss Finland, and whose only merit in getting into the Ministry was that she raked in so many votes. No, I didn't vote for her.
Finally, what comes to the EU directive garbage, it was just an attempt to deflect blame by the Government. There is only an alleged record of a single EU official stating how tightly the EUCD should be implemented. Finland now has the strictest EUCD implementation in existence. Greece implemented it with most of the stupid parts axed out; a French court has now declared that copy protection (more like "use restriction") has no protection of law. DVD area codes are illegal in Belgium. The only thing the EU directive argument served was the populist and anti-EU True Finns party.
Oh FFS. I think I'll just move to Canada. Bonjour Monsieur, ca va bien, eh?
No wonder, Eric Nylund is listed as a writer of the texts. He's the one responsible for the novels based on Halo. "The Master Chief runs down a corridor, then the Spartan kills a Grunt dead, and so the supersoldier saves the lives of his team."
The Half-Life game and x-packs have had a rather neat naming scheme going on for them: Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift. But now they seem to be intent on throwing that out with "Aftermath". That doesn't sound like a science term to me, at least. "Aftermath" is such a cliché, I was hoping for a bit more imagination.
In all fairness, the comparison between illegally spreading files and speeding is stupid. Every extra km/h increases the distance your car makes when you react to something and when the brakes finally kick in. Every inch of extra distance may mean death - to a pedestrian, to you and the passengers of your car, to the passengers of another car.
Speeding endangers lives, uploading certainly doesn't. In effect, people making the comparison are belittling the dangers of speeding (or exaggerating those of file sharing), which is very unsettling.
The major media are only waking up. Aamulehti, which you yourself mentioned, ran a story this morning right on page five, and MTV3's website has the story now as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see a mention in the ten o'clock news tonight on the 15th.
The HS website incident is probably a fluke or an incomprehensible editing decision in their end, which probably has had nothing to do with the authorities.
More like twenty. Things went to hell in a handbasket when TNG started to spawn all these spinoffs. In a better world, TNG would have ended with season 7, and after that a long wait, until in say 2005 we'll be salivating over the prospect of a new ST series carrying on from there, perhaps concentrating on Timefleet.
Maybe they have a shred of intellectual integrity and don't want to add to the on-going myth used to ostracize civilian servicemen that the civilian service is the easy way out for the ones "who can't take it". Civilian service is for ideological reasons, period. If a person is mentally or physically unfit for the army, they should not serve at all.
Besides, civilian service means seven extra months not studying properly, and having to endure the social stigma.
Almost anything by Vangelis. His film soundtracks, 1492: Conquest of Paradise for instance, are split into tracks only because no record company'd publish a cd with a single, 1½ hour long track.
Another example from Square RPGs can be found from Final Fantasy VI (or III for the American players out there). There's a puzzle in a tomb where an airship is being stored (IIRC), and you need to form a phrase out of groups of letters.
The phrase turns out to be: THE WORLD IS SQUARE. Makes sense when you look at the typical world map of an FF game, never mind the connotation of megalomania on the developers' part.:)
Perhaps this holds true for the US version of Metal Gear Solid, but the PAL version for the PlayStation I played in the day had a multitude of VR missions. There was a game packet with a mission disk released later (perhaps this Integral version) but the initial release in Europe had copious amounts of VR training to practice with.
49 euros a month for DSL at 512/512 kbps, ~120 to open it in the first place. That's about average in Finland. I'm actually pretty lucky, as it's higher in areas where the only broadband provider is the local telephone company.
The differences areally in Finland can be big. In a small town you might get 256/256 for 69 euros a month, if you'll get any DSL at all. On the other hand, a student in Oulu can get a nice 8M/8M VDSL pipe for less than 40 euros.
Local telcos are what are keeping prices up in the first place. For the last few miles they own the lines and have a de facto monopoly, and they can charge an arm and a leg for it. No other ISP will want to offer me broadband, although I should feel lucky for having it in a town of 7000 - pretty small even by Finnish standards - in the first place. The situation in big cities is much better with multiple ISPs, but you might get in trouble in your flat if you'd have to pull wires there and the apartment council consists of mostly elderly people... One solution would be WLAN of course, but it hasn't really caught on.
The government has been trying to get it in control, with the aim being getting cable for 36 euros a month, but the only real solution I can see is the government subsidising cablework like has been done in Sweden and owning the infrastructure. But instead we're throwing money at digital television, which could be done through a fat pipe anyway.
A significant plus is that in Finland there aren't any transfer costs at all, just a monthly fee.
Dubbing does have its sides, if it's done right. If you're from a culture where dubbing is the standard (say, Germany), subtitles would be horrible. Sometimes the dub even gets better than the original Japanese audio, but that's usually if the series doesn't take place in Japan per se (example: Cowboy Bebop).
If you're from a smaller lingual area of influence, say, Finland, it's far more likely that you've grown up watching foreign TV series subtitled. Therefore it feels much more jarring to see people who are supposed to be Japanese speaking any other language than Japanese. Of course, Finland is still in the stage where animation is considered a medium for pre-teens only, and children films are often dubbed here, so things can get complicated. The local DVD release of Spirited Away has Japanese sound and Finnish subtitles, fortunately.
As far as I know dubbing outside animation is somewhat popular in the US, plus people's literacy can be weaker, which is completely understandable as English for English-speaking people is more difficult to grok than Finnish for Finnish-speaking people. Then again, it might be because Finns grow up reading a lot even when just watching the telly...
Anyway, dubbing shouldn't be dismissed off-hand. Anime has been a niche market, so dubbing work has been quite poor, resulting in some prejudice. I'd never watch dubbed anime if I'd a choice though.
IANJ (I am not Japanese), but what I've learned, consoles are the mainstay of gaming in Japan. If you say you play computer games, people will, variably of course, think that you play hentai games or dating sims, which are for the true _Japanese_ otaku, a really sorry bunch even compared to a standard nolifer in the west.
PC games we all know and love aren't that popular, that's why the XBox never caught on there, because people associated it with PC gaming thanks to Microsoft being the manufacturer.
So, all in all, they're mostly for the social outcasts of society, not _that_ publicly accepted. I suppose in some sense Japanese culture isn't that far off from ours.
I'm seventeen. I wouldn't mind paying for stuff if its good, but there's always one thing I run into that I can't do anything about. I'm underaged, so I can't get a credit card. Internet payments would be its only use, so getting one to the family wouldn't be meaningful either. And when I become a poor student, no bank in their right mind will want to give me one either. Nor am I sure I want to even get one, with the trail it leaves behind.
Add to that that I'm not from the United States, and it all amounts to just too much trouble to go through for the possible benefits and warm-and-fuzzy-feeling. What I'd like to see are some sort of bitpass cards that anyone can buy from a store. Before that happens, micropayments won't work on that meaningfully. Internet users under eighteen aren't that far and inbetween, although I admit that most just play CS and no little else.:)
The music in an FF has always been what's drawn me in, if all else fails. FF VIII for instance had some rock solid tracks which more than offset my slight dislike of the characters.
Nonetheless, I have listened to the FFX-2 soundtrack, and let me tell you, it's total rubbish. Full of dull, boring techno-esque rhymes and melodies that are but a shadow of what the former games used to have.
Granted, the fact that Nobuo Uematsu is retiring from composing means that quality is certain to change (FF IX already abused a single melody to the point of agony, FFX and FFXI have been tolerable), but I wasn't expecting for it to plummet like this.
FFX-2 will have to have some serious redeeming qualities for me, for it will have the first FF soundtrack ever to make me hit the mute button on my remote, should I venture to buy a PS2 and the game.
The RIAA could publicly plan to sue churches and daycares for singing songs without proper royalty payments. The Finnish equivalent, Teosto, already proposed that, and faced a PR nightmare.
A new game on average costs 50 euros where I live. If the SP-only game costs 40 euros or below, and the MP-enabled one costs 50 euros, all is good and well. Also, I'd like the ability to upgrade my SP version to MP and mod-enabled version for 10 - 15 euros; I'd rather not pay the price of an entirely new MP version just to play multiplayer.
The forty euro option would be excellent for gamers who don't really bother with multiplayer and usually don't have time to try out the multitude of mods (like me, for instance). However, there should be the option of upgrading inexpensively.
If they implement it this way, here's one sale for one SP only version.
The Steam subscription version could be useful for gamers who usually play through a game in a month or so and then move on to other games. If you play it through once a month you could play it for X dollars in October and then another X dollars next July on your holidays to see how well Duke Nukem Forever's graphics match up with HL2's.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay so IANAL but I do work for the Finnish government and I have to deal with the Police Board every once in a while.
The police in Finland are a national organization (cities or provinces don't have their own police, they are all under the same organization) and they have jurisdiction over a lot of permit and license matters, like residence permits, raffles and lotteries, and in this case the raising of funds. This side of the police administration is taken care of by the Police Board instead of any local police department. They answer directly to the Ministry of the Interior. They do not investigate crimes or prosecute people, the Board is a purely administrative organ. In other words Wikipedia is not under criminal investigation, though the Board could refer this to a police department in Finland to see what they make of this, since the police departments are responsible for actual investigation. Requesting a statement from an entity that may be raising funds is a pretty regular bureaucratic procedure, in a sense.
The problem here is not that the police board have "too much spare time" (my personal experience is the exact opposite, and reading the request, it would have been written within an hour or two by a junior official), or that they are petty power-hungry tyrants out to suppress the freedom of information, it's that their job is to interpret Finnish law and the Finnish law when it comes to fundraising is terrible and about two decades out of date. Hopefully this will get enough media attention in Finland to start a political discussion that leads to a proper reform of the law.
I doubt they expect the police will be able to initiate anything against Wikipedia, but they would be negligent in their duty as public officers to not do anything about the issue once it came to their attention.
I find it unlikely that Kyösti Kallio declared war on Russia after Barbarossa began, since Kallio left office in 1940 and Barbarossa began in June 1941. However, my credentials aren't quite as good: my granduncle Akseli Anttila was merely a General of the Red Army who had left to Russia during the Civil War. He was also the Defence Minister of Kuusinen's puppet government.
Churchill certainly sang Finland's praises during the Winter War, but the planned military aid operation via Norway never materialized, only some volunteers from Sweden and a few Allied countries, primarily the UK. This goodwill disappeared after a Finland lead by President Risto Ryti accepted German trade and soldiers into the country during the so-called interwar period, which culminated in German airplanes using Finland as a landing area in the early phases of Barbarossa in late June 1941. By this time, Northern Finland was housing German soldiers, who had the frontlines in the Petsamo/Murmansk direction during Barbarossa. This obvious pact lead to the Soviet Union doing the logical thing and bombing Finnish cities and installations, which lead to declarations of war.
But you can certainly say Finland was screwed both ways several times, what with first having to deal with the Soviet Union enabled by German consent, then the Soviet Union while working with the Germans, and then finally having to deal with the stragglers of the German forces after signing a peace deal with the Soviets - a deal that was struck in the nick of time, when the Finnish forces presented just enough resistance so that the Soviets couldn't bother and preferred to focus on Central Europe instead of Finland.
"One thing that seperates Australia from the rest of the world is we don't pay income tax on gambling earnings. The only main cavert is as long as the winnings weren't gained as a professional gambler."
This is also the case in the European Economic Area if the winnings originate from within the area - they're tax free. All casino games including poker, even if it's a game of skill, are included, and it doesn't matter if you're a professional or not. I'm not certain of the details but as long as the money is coming to you from within the EEA or the operator is licensed within the EEA (like Gibraltar or Malta), you're good to go.
If you were to win the WSOP though, your winnings would have been earned outside the EEA and you'd have to pay taxes on them.
From the article: "And no, I don't play in the "real money" games. Because that is a felony according to both state and federal law, and I would never do such a thing, even though it's perfectly legal for me to go a few miles down the street, never leave my own residential neighborhood, and play poker for real money in an Indian casino."
No, no, no. Gambling (if you don't mind the word, since poker specifically *is* a game of skill) online is not a crime in the United States, at least according to federal law. Your state law may vary, but I don't think the law is that harsh in a majority of the states. The latest piece of legislation Congress crapped only dealt with the transfer of funds between gambling sites and financial institutes and did NOT criminalize the act of playing online itself.
The idea that actual play is illegal is a false concept that has probably been spread by the moralists and the brick and mortar lobby who pushed the law through in the first place under the guise of homeland security. The only problem you may face is with transferring money to and from the poker site itself. Another cause has been the fact that many online casinos have closed their doors to players in light of this law, but play remains perfectly legal (so far - I doubt they are done yet).
It's culture. Subtitles probably take a little adjusting to if you haven't seen tha many of them in your life so far. People from the English-speaking zone will have their cultural needs met spoken in their own language, because there's a wealth of English-speaking content being produced. And if something isn't spoken in English, there's a large enough market to warrant dubbing.
However, in small countries like those in Europe, you may have lingual groups of only a few million. The top countries like Germany with a pop of 80 mil dub their stuff too. (You haven't seen James Bond if you haven't seen him speaking German in a Bavarian accent.) And I doubt anyone would propose that Germany's level of education is as poor as that of the US.
These small countries have small markets and poor broadcasting companies, so they resort to subtitles. That's how I learned both to read Finnish and to understand English, by watching shows spoken in English subtitled in Finnish. That's also why my ears bleed when I watch anything dubbed beyond simplest of children's shows.
As a Finn, I have always taken pride in our country - even though we don't have things like the Bill of Rights, we have our fundamental rights, and our copyright legislation isn't at least as horrible as the DMCA. Well, that has now changed. Finland has enjoyed #1 position in international competitiveness ratings and has been considered a vanguard of the spearhead of information age societies, but this piece of legislation has now set us back years, nay, perhaps even decades.
What wrenches my gut is that despite Finland's top rating when it comes to low corruption, shenaniganry in creating and passing this piece of legislation has been plentiful. The law was prepared in the Ministries of Culture and Education in close rapport with people who work for the very organisations that lobby for stricter controls on what citizens can do with the things they have bought. When sixty-six expert statements were collected on the law, only one was from a consumer-oriented organisation, that being EFFI.
Its passing was surrounded by nothing but smoke and mirrors, with misleading statements based on intentionally erroneus interpretations of the already-muddy law by its supporters. And finally when a demonstration was arranged in front of the Parliamentary building on Tuesday, when the bill was discussed for the very last time, a representative of a musicians' organisation was put on the wires stating the demonstrators' cry for free speech was tarnishing the concept for free speech because the demonstrators just want to download songs in its name. This while behind him people were touting DeCSS signs and spreading out short DeCSS programmes on flyers with the text "distributing this flyer will become illegal".
Not to mention the EEA statute, which makes distributing works not published in the European Economic Area illegal in the EEA, unless they have been acquired for personal use. No more import manga from stores if the publisher overseas decides that the market in Finland is too small.
Well, now there's a galvanised group of a few hundred people who are just really pissed off. We're already setting up forums for "organised discussion" and thinking up ways to turn ourselves in en masse to swamp the system. The Parliament has made an initial decision to modify the law later on, but until then, we'll have to just suck it up.
And guess who used her authority to press the bill through no matter what? The Minister of Culture, a former Miss Finland, whose only merit in getting into Parliament was that she was Miss Finland, and whose only merit in getting into the Ministry was that she raked in so many votes. No, I didn't vote for her.
Finally, what comes to the EU directive garbage, it was just an attempt to deflect blame by the Government. There is only an alleged record of a single EU official stating how tightly the EUCD should be implemented. Finland now has the strictest EUCD implementation in existence. Greece implemented it with most of the stupid parts axed out; a French court has now declared that copy protection (more like "use restriction") has no protection of law. DVD area codes are illegal in Belgium. The only thing the EU directive argument served was the populist and anti-EU True Finns party.
Oh FFS. I think I'll just move to Canada. Bonjour Monsieur, ca va bien, eh?
No wonder, Eric Nylund is listed as a writer of the texts. He's the one responsible for the novels based on Halo. "The Master Chief runs down a corridor, then the Spartan kills a Grunt dead, and so the supersoldier saves the lives of his team."
The Half-Life game and x-packs have had a rather neat naming scheme going on for them: Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift. But now they seem to be intent on throwing that out with "Aftermath". That doesn't sound like a science term to me, at least. "Aftermath" is such a cliché, I was hoping for a bit more imagination.
In all fairness, the comparison between illegally spreading files and speeding is stupid. Every extra km/h increases the distance your car makes when you react to something and when the brakes finally kick in. Every inch of extra distance may mean death - to a pedestrian, to you and the passengers of your car, to the passengers of another car.
Speeding endangers lives, uploading certainly doesn't. In effect, people making the comparison are belittling the dangers of speeding (or exaggerating those of file sharing), which is very unsettling.
The HS website incident is probably a fluke or an incomprehensible editing decision in their end, which probably has had nothing to do with the authorities.
More like twenty. Things went to hell in a handbasket when TNG started to spawn all these spinoffs. In a better world, TNG would have ended with season 7, and after that a long wait, until in say 2005 we'll be salivating over the prospect of a new ST series carrying on from there, perhaps concentrating on Timefleet.
Maybe they have a shred of intellectual integrity and don't want to add to the on-going myth used to ostracize civilian servicemen that the civilian service is the easy way out for the ones "who can't take it". Civilian service is for ideological reasons, period. If a person is mentally or physically unfit for the army, they should not serve at all.
Besides, civilian service means seven extra months not studying properly, and having to endure the social stigma.
"- Note that intel will be running 65nm chips at 5+ Ghz in the same timeframe (2005)."
But certainly at a price that'll be more than anyone will be willing to pay just for a game console? And that's just the central processing unit.
Almost anything by Vangelis. His film soundtracks, 1492: Conquest of Paradise for instance, are split into tracks only because no record company'd publish a cd with a single, 1½ hour long track.
Another example from Square RPGs can be found from Final Fantasy VI (or III for the American players out there). There's a puzzle in a tomb where an airship is being stored (IIRC), and you need to form a phrase out of groups of letters.
The phrase turns out to be: THE WORLD IS SQUARE. Makes sense when you look at the typical world map of an FF game, never mind the connotation of megalomania on the developers' part. :)
Perhaps this holds true for the US version of Metal Gear Solid, but the PAL version for the PlayStation I played in the day had a multitude of VR missions. There was a game packet with a mission disk released later (perhaps this Integral version) but the initial release in Europe had copious amounts of VR training to practice with.
49 euros a month for DSL at 512/512 kbps, ~120 to open it in the first place. That's about average in Finland. I'm actually pretty lucky, as it's higher in areas where the only broadband provider is the local telephone company.
The differences areally in Finland can be big. In a small town you might get 256/256 for 69 euros a month, if you'll get any DSL at all. On the other hand, a student in Oulu can get a nice 8M/8M VDSL pipe for less than 40 euros.
Local telcos are what are keeping prices up in the first place. For the last few miles they own the lines and have a de facto monopoly, and they can charge an arm and a leg for it. No other ISP will want to offer me broadband, although I should feel lucky for having it in a town of 7000 - pretty small even by Finnish standards - in the first place. The situation in big cities is much better with multiple ISPs, but you might get in trouble in your flat if you'd have to pull wires there and the apartment council consists of mostly elderly people... One solution would be WLAN of course, but it hasn't really caught on.
The government has been trying to get it in control, with the aim being getting cable for 36 euros a month, but the only real solution I can see is the government subsidising cablework like has been done in Sweden and owning the infrastructure. But instead we're throwing money at digital television, which could be done through a fat pipe anyway.
A significant plus is that in Finland there aren't any transfer costs at all, just a monthly fee.
More probably, though, the 'manga'(comic) they should be talking about is The Invisibles, the unsung forebearer of "Matrix aesthetics".
Dubbing does have its sides, if it's done right. If you're from a culture where dubbing is the standard (say, Germany), subtitles would be horrible. Sometimes the dub even gets better than the original Japanese audio, but that's usually if the series doesn't take place in Japan per se (example: Cowboy Bebop).
If you're from a smaller lingual area of influence, say, Finland, it's far more likely that you've grown up watching foreign TV series subtitled. Therefore it feels much more jarring to see people who are supposed to be Japanese speaking any other language than Japanese. Of course, Finland is still in the stage where animation is considered a medium for pre-teens only, and children films are often dubbed here, so things can get complicated. The local DVD release of Spirited Away has Japanese sound and Finnish subtitles, fortunately.
As far as I know dubbing outside animation is somewhat popular in the US, plus people's literacy can be weaker, which is completely understandable as English for English-speaking people is more difficult to grok than Finnish for Finnish-speaking people. Then again, it might be because Finns grow up reading a lot even when just watching the telly...
Anyway, dubbing shouldn't be dismissed off-hand. Anime has been a niche market, so dubbing work has been quite poor, resulting in some prejudice. I'd never watch dubbed anime if I'd a choice though.
IANJ (I am not Japanese), but what I've learned, consoles are the mainstay of gaming in Japan. If you say you play computer games, people will, variably of course, think that you play hentai games or dating sims, which are for the true _Japanese_ otaku, a really sorry bunch even compared to a standard nolifer in the west.
PC games we all know and love aren't that popular, that's why the XBox never caught on there, because people associated it with PC gaming thanks to Microsoft being the manufacturer.
So, all in all, they're mostly for the social outcasts of society, not _that_ publicly accepted. I suppose in some sense Japanese culture isn't that far off from ours.
I'm seventeen. I wouldn't mind paying for stuff if its good, but there's always one thing I run into that I can't do anything about. I'm underaged, so I can't get a credit card. Internet payments would be its only use, so getting one to the family wouldn't be meaningful either. And when I become a poor student, no bank in their right mind will want to give me one either. Nor am I sure I want to even get one, with the trail it leaves behind.
Add to that that I'm not from the United States, and it all amounts to just too much trouble to go through for the possible benefits and warm-and-fuzzy-feeling. What I'd like to see are some sort of bitpass cards that anyone can buy from a store. Before that happens, micropayments won't work on that meaningfully. Internet users under eighteen aren't that far and inbetween, although I admit that most just play CS and no little else. :)
The music in an FF has always been what's drawn me in, if all else fails. FF VIII for instance had some rock solid tracks which more than offset my slight dislike of the characters. Nonetheless, I have listened to the FFX-2 soundtrack, and let me tell you, it's total rubbish. Full of dull, boring techno-esque rhymes and melodies that are but a shadow of what the former games used to have. Granted, the fact that Nobuo Uematsu is retiring from composing means that quality is certain to change (FF IX already abused a single melody to the point of agony, FFX and FFXI have been tolerable), but I wasn't expecting for it to plummet like this. FFX-2 will have to have some serious redeeming qualities for me, for it will have the first FF soundtrack ever to make me hit the mute button on my remote, should I venture to buy a PS2 and the game.
"Men are not meant to fly."
The RIAA could publicly plan to sue churches and daycares for singing songs without proper royalty payments. The Finnish equivalent, Teosto, already proposed that, and faced a PR nightmare.
... if they price it the way I hope they will.
A new game on average costs 50 euros where I live. If the SP-only game costs 40 euros or below, and the MP-enabled one costs 50 euros, all is good and well. Also, I'd like the ability to upgrade my SP version to MP and mod-enabled version for 10 - 15 euros; I'd rather not pay the price of an entirely new MP version just to play multiplayer.
The forty euro option would be excellent for gamers who don't really bother with multiplayer and usually don't have time to try out the multitude of mods (like me, for instance). However, there should be the option of upgrading inexpensively.
If they implement it this way, here's one sale for one SP only version.
The Steam subscription version could be useful for gamers who usually play through a game in a month or so and then move on to other games. If you play it through once a month you could play it for X dollars in October and then another X dollars next July on your holidays to see how well Duke Nukem Forever's graphics match up with HL2's.