It will be interesting to see if Bethesda decides to pull the current version from the shelves and release a toned-down version to match the original rating, or if they're content with the Mature rating.
It will also be interesting to see how retailers respond; whether they'll pull "mis-rated" copes from the shelves. This isn't like GTA where the game went from M to AO, which most retailers won't carry.
I think the 2nd Amendment used to be much more important than it is now. True, if everyone had guns and everyone wanted to stand up to the government it would be pretty daunting for tyranny. But let's face it, no matter how corrupt the government gets, most people won't own guns and most people won't agree that it's bad, or won't agree that it's as bad as all that. So now you've got the government facing down a small armed minority of the population. That itself would have still been pretty daunting even around the beginning of the 20th century, but post-military-industrial-complex and standing army, it's almost useless.
There's not a whole lot a few hobbyist shotguns or rifles can do against a large body of trained soldiers with US Military hardware. If you're lucky, you'll end up with the sympathy of the populace on your side after you're dead, but assuming the tyrannical government is spinning propaganda, that's not even assured. (You'll probably be labelled terrorists, cultists, or at best misguided militia crazies).
So, while I think the idea behind the 2nd amendment was a good one, it's no longer a viable defense of liberty in this day and age. Ideally, we would have reigned in the expansion of the military post-WWII, so that our government was still our own and owning guns could still be a defense of liberty, but we didn't. Now we're stuck with the consequences - a vastly more difficult to overcome entrenched power base.
You touched on this briefly, but I think one big problem Nintendo has with this name is that it's hard to pluralize, mentally. Obviously the correct pluralization is "Wiis" (just like "PlayStations" or "GameCubes"), but it's hard to say that, for some reason. It just sounds wrong. And it's hard to look at it and parse it correctly. And don't even get me started on the legions of people who will insist on "Wii's" because the other one looks weird, thus contributing further to the decline of the English language.
But if Nintendo were in the headlines because they named their console "The Nintendo Pedophile" it wouldn't be good publicity. They'd certainly be in the headlines, though.
Now, granted, this name change isn't as bad as that, and it's even beginning to grow on me (I'll never *like* it, but I've come to accept it), but who knows whether it's a good thing or not? A lot of the articles I saw about the name change mentioned the puerile jokes being made on game sites. Now maybe that won't affect anyone's opinion, but I don't think it's obvious that it's a good thing. Society sometimes looks to early adopters and the enthusiasts to make their decisions, and if that crowd is too busy making fun of the name, it could scare some people off the product.
I took hope from a Joystiq column where they asked non-gamers about the name - only one of them associated it with anything like urine, and that was obliquely (she thought it sounded like the name of a chic toilet). So either gamers are collectively less mature, more willing to speak their mind, or good at taking memes and running with them until every last shred of humor has been drained (in Soviet Russia, jokes drain *you* of humor).
Anyway, of course I'm still looking forward to the console, I still plan on buying one, but I hope that Nintendo knows what the hell they're doing.
People have been "converting virtual goods into real greenbacks" for a long time, though. Selling your uber-character on eBay is a form of that. Gold farmers selling in-game money for cash is another one (and should concern the IRS more, since that's companies making a profit off of it, not one-off attempts to recoup years of effort). This is just a little more official.
Whenever it's learned on here that someone wants to actually get paid for what they do, they're immediately branded as the spawn of Satan.
It's not that they want to make money for what they do. In this case, they're switching to an advertising model. Advertising, by its nature, will make this a worse platform for its users - not just because of annoying banner ads or whatever, but because it twists the relationship. No longer is this about software selling a service to users, it's now about software selling users to advertisers. So the important thing is no longer the software, it's the userbase. A decision that would improve the usability of the platform but hurt the advertising won't happen, and the users suffer.
John Stuart Mill talked about freedom of speech extensively. He even discussed the case of allowing people to freely say things which are known to be wrong. One of his arguments was that the only way to make sure people still know that it is wrong is to keep the matter in constant discussion. Something that everyone agrees is "wrong", such as neo-nazi or NAMBLA speech, can only be refuted if it's discussed. Otherwise you have the danger of the next generation hearing that idea subversively. Never having learned why it is wrong, or been exposed to any debate about the subject, they may enthusiastically embrace the ideas.
Another argument is that we don't really know what is right and what is wrong, and these things often emerge only after long public discussion.
"But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
Much, much, much more in "On Liberty", the defining document on freedoms of many sorts.;-)
Wow, I'm surprised. Here's a group of people working on an open-source project that has been very successful, hacking in features for electronics that the original manufacturers didn't see fit to include. It sounds like something Slashdot should be all over, right?
But no... Because they think that some improvements can be made to an Apple product, they're suddenly demonized. People are falling over themselves to say just how *utterly fantastic* the stock firmware and iTunes are, and how horrible Rockbox is for even attempting to change it.
iPods aren't perfect. Perhaps they're good enough, but there are some major features that they lack in regards to other forms of playing music (like, say, CDs or even LPs), a big one being gapless playback. Rockbox is trying to fix that. And not specifically for the iPod, in fact the iPod isn't even their main target. They started out improving the iRiver players, and now they're porting it to many platforms.
As has been noted elsewhere, it's not done yet. It's a very early port (a few months old) and the official release milestone target for iPod support is sometime in November.
I don't run Rockbox currently, because I have a Rio Karma which is already perfect.;-) But I at least applaud them for taking their free time and trying to make DAPs better for everyone.
Creationism is a completely valid viewpoint, and so is evolution. They're both *possible*
So is Flying Spaghetti Monster-ism, right? So is the theory that the world was actually created a split second ago, with all your memories of previous experiences intact. They're all equally *possible*. But not equally *likely*.
That said, the problem - since the beginning - with Evolution is that fanatics have tried to use it as evidence that there is no God. ID is a social manifestation of Newton's Third Law, where the fanatics on the other side are trying to prove there is.
I don't think this is the case. Very few people seriously try to use evolution as evidence that God does not exist.
There is something related, though - evolution disproves one of the classical proofs for the existence of God. That may be where the confusion comes from. Prior to Darwin, complexity was seen as a hard-to-refute argument that there must be *some* form of intelligence at the helm. It was difficult to conceive of a way that something as complex as life could arise without intelligent design. However, Darwin came up with a way, and the teleological argument no longer had a leg to stand on.
The teleological argument was also the strongest and easiest to understand of three classic arguments, and so its loss was a large blow to those who sought a reasoned approach to religion. The cosmological argument has other problems, and the ontological argument sounds like philosophical wankery even to believers(*).
* I once got a low grade on a paper in Philosophy of Religion for dismissing the ontological argument too readily... I wonder why?
I don't know 3 other meatspace people who use Freenet, much less Freenet 0.7. I can't imagine that trading noderefs with some random person on IRC is any more secure than maintaining a node on 0.5.
This is my problem, too. I'm a current Freenet user, but I don't know (or trust) anyone enough to exchange noderefs, and I don't see a benefit for people living under oppressive governments, either. One of the great things about the current Freenet implementation is that even if you're an Outer Party member harboring resentment against Big Brother, you can find others without the risk of revealing yourself as a thoughtcriminal.
I understand that it's currently only for testing purposes, and eventually people won't be encouraged to join an IRC network and ask for noderefs. But I'm still not sure that a darknet is the best way to promote free speech.
I'm now working on 14 years in the tax software industry...:-( I'm sorry! But thanks for sharing your story with us, so we know how to avoid your fate.
GDC doesn't really start till tomorrow...
on
GDC 06 So Far
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· Score: 1
Well, I might be wrong, since I've never gone on Monday or Tuesday. But the Expo starts Wednesday, and that's when the mainstream conference starts (Monday and Tuesday are Mobile and Serious gaming, not mainstream console/PC games).
Also, as Zonk noted, that's when the keynotes start, which are the interesting part for journalists.
Hmm, I disagree about Half-Life. The original was an excellent game - a first-person shooter with a good story and most of all, excellent atmosphere. I have never felt so immersed in a game before.
Half-Life 2 was fun, but not nearly as good as the first one. I think it mostly rode on the predecessor's tails.
I've heard that your ID when you get a reward card isn't that important, actually, because the supermarket systems simply tie together the reward card and the credit cards you use to purchase groceries to create a "family ID". They're not too worried about having your exact identity, what they want is just to make sure they know about your shopping habits as a data point. But in any case, they get your name when you use a credit card to buy stuff.
But thanks to them, you didn't have to watch what was probably a tedious hour of television! They thoughtfully found the very best bits and put them up. That's why I love the PTC.;-)
This is just like time-shifting, it's just awesomeness-shifting.
I posted this in another thread, here's the clip in question, thoughtfully brought to you by the Parents' Television Council! Let's hear a round of applause for their diligence in bringing teenage orgy footage online.
As far as your request goes, the Parents' Television Council has thoughtfully provided a clip of the scene in question! (A teenage orgy). How nice of them;-)
I'm sure they'll get around to developing a stealthy aircraft one of these days. And when they do, it'll be able to land on a dirt strip w/gear up not destroy itself.
They already have one! You can fly it with only your thoughts. Unfortunately, you have to think in Russian...
Your plan might work, had the "free market" not rewarded companies with sole access to most places. Sure, there's a little competition between cable and DSL, but not much. There's no competition at all between different cable internet providers or DSL providers in most places.
There's a reason we're behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband. A federal mandate along the lines of the rural telephone initiatives could only help. I don't know about the government becoming an ISP, or subsidizing basic service, but infrastructure installation is one thing they're good at.
Well, that's the point the ESA is trying to make. They don't need the money, they want people to realize that trying to pass unconstitutional anti-game legislation is a *bad idea*: it only costs the state money. They're doing this to raise awareness of that fact among voters, in the hopes that the next person to propose something like this gets shouted down by his constituents.
"The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal." Thanks, Raph. Memo to Capcom and Sony: Resident Evil 4 and God of War - incidentally the two most critically acclaimed titles of 2005 -- are apparently unnatural and abnormal.
Raph was making a very valid point here, though, if you read the quote in context. He was saying that throughout human history, we've played games with each other. From throwing rocks at Ogg and Ug to Snakes and Ladders, there hasn't really been a "single player" game before. Games are all about playing with others. It's only computer games that are single-player. (And solitare, I guess...)
His point may not mean much, but it's a lot better thought out and more thought-provoking than the article gave him credit for.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to see if Bethesda decides to pull the current version from the shelves and release a toned-down version to match the original rating, or if they're content with the Mature rating.
It will also be interesting to see how retailers respond; whether they'll pull "mis-rated" copes from the shelves. This isn't like GTA where the game went from M to AO, which most retailers won't carry.
I think the 2nd Amendment used to be much more important than it is now. True, if everyone had guns and everyone wanted to stand up to the government it would be pretty daunting for tyranny. But let's face it, no matter how corrupt the government gets, most people won't own guns and most people won't agree that it's bad, or won't agree that it's as bad as all that. So now you've got the government facing down a small armed minority of the population. That itself would have still been pretty daunting even around the beginning of the 20th century, but post-military-industrial-complex and standing army, it's almost useless.
There's not a whole lot a few hobbyist shotguns or rifles can do against a large body of trained soldiers with US Military hardware. If you're lucky, you'll end up with the sympathy of the populace on your side after you're dead, but assuming the tyrannical government is spinning propaganda, that's not even assured. (You'll probably be labelled terrorists, cultists, or at best misguided militia crazies).
So, while I think the idea behind the 2nd amendment was a good one, it's no longer a viable defense of liberty in this day and age. Ideally, we would have reigned in the expansion of the military post-WWII, so that our government was still our own and owning guns could still be a defense of liberty, but we didn't. Now we're stuck with the consequences - a vastly more difficult to overcome entrenched power base.
You touched on this briefly, but I think one big problem Nintendo has with this name is that it's hard to pluralize, mentally. Obviously the correct pluralization is "Wiis" (just like "PlayStations" or "GameCubes"), but it's hard to say that, for some reason. It just sounds wrong. And it's hard to look at it and parse it correctly. And don't even get me started on the legions of people who will insist on "Wii's" because the other one looks weird, thus contributing further to the decline of the English language.
But if Nintendo were in the headlines because they named their console "The Nintendo Pedophile" it wouldn't be good publicity. They'd certainly be in the headlines, though.
Now, granted, this name change isn't as bad as that, and it's even beginning to grow on me (I'll never *like* it, but I've come to accept it), but who knows whether it's a good thing or not? A lot of the articles I saw about the name change mentioned the puerile jokes being made on game sites. Now maybe that won't affect anyone's opinion, but I don't think it's obvious that it's a good thing. Society sometimes looks to early adopters and the enthusiasts to make their decisions, and if that crowd is too busy making fun of the name, it could scare some people off the product.
I took hope from a Joystiq column where they asked non-gamers about the name - only one of them associated it with anything like urine, and that was obliquely (she thought it sounded like the name of a chic toilet). So either gamers are collectively less mature, more willing to speak their mind, or good at taking memes and running with them until every last shred of humor has been drained (in Soviet Russia, jokes drain *you* of humor).
Anyway, of course I'm still looking forward to the console, I still plan on buying one, but I hope that Nintendo knows what the hell they're doing.
People have been "converting virtual goods into real greenbacks" for a long time, though. Selling your uber-character on eBay is a form of that. Gold farmers selling in-game money for cash is another one (and should concern the IRS more, since that's companies making a profit off of it, not one-off attempts to recoup years of effort). This is just a little more official.
Whenever it's learned on here that someone wants to actually get paid for what they do, they're immediately branded as the spawn of Satan.
It's not that they want to make money for what they do. In this case, they're switching to an advertising model. Advertising, by its nature, will make this a worse platform for its users - not just because of annoying banner ads or whatever, but because it twists the relationship. No longer is this about software selling a service to users, it's now about software selling users to advertisers. So the important thing is no longer the software, it's the userbase. A decision that would improve the usability of the platform but hurt the advertising won't happen, and the users suffer.
This is just part of Nintendo's new "Yellow Ocean" strategy.
John Stuart Mill talked about freedom of speech extensively. He even discussed the case of allowing people to freely say things which are known to be wrong. One of his arguments was that the only way to make sure people still know that it is wrong is to keep the matter in constant discussion. Something that everyone agrees is "wrong", such as neo-nazi or NAMBLA speech, can only be refuted if it's discussed. Otherwise you have the danger of the next generation hearing that idea subversively. Never having learned why it is wrong, or been exposed to any debate about the subject, they may enthusiastically embrace the ideas.
;-)
Another argument is that we don't really know what is right and what is wrong, and these things often emerge only after long public discussion.
"But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
Much, much, much more in "On Liberty", the defining document on freedoms of many sorts.
Wow, I'm surprised. Here's a group of people working on an open-source project that has been very successful, hacking in features for electronics that the original manufacturers didn't see fit to include. It sounds like something Slashdot should be all over, right?
;-) But I at least applaud them for taking their free time and trying to make DAPs better for everyone.
But no... Because they think that some improvements can be made to an Apple product, they're suddenly demonized. People are falling over themselves to say just how *utterly fantastic* the stock firmware and iTunes are, and how horrible Rockbox is for even attempting to change it.
iPods aren't perfect. Perhaps they're good enough, but there are some major features that they lack in regards to other forms of playing music (like, say, CDs or even LPs), a big one being gapless playback. Rockbox is trying to fix that. And not specifically for the iPod, in fact the iPod isn't even their main target. They started out improving the iRiver players, and now they're porting it to many platforms.
As has been noted elsewhere, it's not done yet. It's a very early port (a few months old) and the official release milestone target for iPod support is sometime in November.
I don't run Rockbox currently, because I have a Rio Karma which is already perfect.
Creationism is a completely valid viewpoint, and so is evolution. They're both *possible*
So is Flying Spaghetti Monster-ism, right? So is the theory that the world was actually created a split second ago, with all your memories of previous experiences intact. They're all equally *possible*. But not equally *likely*.
That said, the problem - since the beginning - with Evolution is that fanatics have tried to use it as evidence that there is no God. ID is a social manifestation of Newton's Third Law, where the fanatics on the other side are trying to prove there is.
I don't think this is the case. Very few people seriously try to use evolution as evidence that God does not exist.
There is something related, though - evolution disproves one of the classical proofs for the existence of God. That may be where the confusion comes from. Prior to Darwin, complexity was seen as a hard-to-refute argument that there must be *some* form of intelligence at the helm. It was difficult to conceive of a way that something as complex as life could arise without intelligent design. However, Darwin came up with a way, and the teleological argument no longer had a leg to stand on.
The teleological argument was also the strongest and easiest to understand of three classic arguments, and so its loss was a large blow to those who sought a reasoned approach to religion. The cosmological argument has other problems, and the ontological argument sounds like philosophical wankery even to believers(*).
* I once got a low grade on a paper in Philosophy of Religion for dismissing the ontological argument too readily... I wonder why?
I don't know 3 other meatspace people who use Freenet, much less Freenet 0.7. I can't imagine that trading noderefs with some random person on IRC is any more secure than maintaining a node on 0.5.
This is my problem, too. I'm a current Freenet user, but I don't know (or trust) anyone enough to exchange noderefs, and I don't see a benefit for people living under oppressive governments, either. One of the great things about the current Freenet implementation is that even if you're an Outer Party member harboring resentment against Big Brother, you can find others without the risk of revealing yourself as a thoughtcriminal.
I understand that it's currently only for testing purposes, and eventually people won't be encouraged to join an IRC network and ask for noderefs. But I'm still not sure that a darknet is the best way to promote free speech.
I'm now working on 14 years in the tax software industry... :-( I'm sorry! But thanks for sharing your story with us, so we know how to avoid your fate.
WHAT?
Well, I might be wrong, since I've never gone on Monday or Tuesday. But the Expo starts Wednesday, and that's when the mainstream conference starts (Monday and Tuesday are Mobile and Serious gaming, not mainstream console/PC games).
Also, as Zonk noted, that's when the keynotes start, which are the interesting part for journalists.
I'll be there tomorrow!
Hmm, I disagree about Half-Life. The original was an excellent game - a first-person shooter with a good story and most of all, excellent atmosphere. I have never felt so immersed in a game before.
Half-Life 2 was fun, but not nearly as good as the first one. I think it mostly rode on the predecessor's tails.
Wow, I just watched an episode of DS9 last night that had that quote in it :-)
I've heard that your ID when you get a reward card isn't that important, actually, because the supermarket systems simply tie together the reward card and the credit cards you use to purchase groceries to create a "family ID". They're not too worried about having your exact identity, what they want is just to make sure they know about your shopping habits as a data point. But in any case, they get your name when you use a credit card to buy stuff.
But thanks to them, you didn't have to watch what was probably a tedious hour of television! They thoughtfully found the very best bits and put them up. That's why I love the PTC. ;-)
This is just like time-shifting, it's just awesomeness-shifting.
I posted this in another thread, here's the clip in question, thoughtfully brought to you by the Parents' Television Council! Let's hear a round of applause for their diligence in bringing teenage orgy footage online.
/ content.htm
http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/withoutatrace
As far as your request goes, the Parents' Television Council has thoughtfully provided a clip of the scene in question! (A teenage orgy). How nice of them ;-)
/ content.htm
http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/withoutatrace
I haven't watched it, since I'm at work, so I don't know how long it is or if it's censored. Enjoy!
Ummm... the Ruskies?
I'm sure they'll get around to developing a stealthy aircraft one of these days. And when they do, it'll be able to land on a dirt strip w/gear up not destroy itself.
They already have one! You can fly it with only your thoughts. Unfortunately, you have to think in Russian...
Your plan might work, had the "free market" not rewarded companies with sole access to most places. Sure, there's a little competition between cable and DSL, but not much. There's no competition at all between different cable internet providers or DSL providers in most places.
There's a reason we're behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband. A federal mandate along the lines of the rural telephone initiatives could only help. I don't know about the government becoming an ISP, or subsidizing basic service, but infrastructure installation is one thing they're good at.
Well, that's the point the ESA is trying to make. They don't need the money, they want people to realize that trying to pass unconstitutional anti-game legislation is a *bad idea*: it only costs the state money. They're doing this to raise awareness of that fact among voters, in the hopes that the next person to propose something like this gets shouted down by his constituents.
I don't think IGN gets it. FTA:
"The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal." Thanks, Raph. Memo to Capcom and Sony: Resident Evil 4 and God of War - incidentally the two most critically acclaimed titles of 2005 -- are apparently unnatural and abnormal.
Raph was making a very valid point here, though, if you read the quote in context. He was saying that throughout human history, we've played games with each other. From throwing rocks at Ogg and Ug to Snakes and Ladders, there hasn't really been a "single player" game before. Games are all about playing with others. It's only computer games that are single-player. (And solitare, I guess...)
His point may not mean much, but it's a lot better thought out and more thought-provoking than the article gave him credit for.