You know, that sounds like just what pushed me towards programming.
For whatever other qualities my parents had, and much as they did give me some good education too, they had two problems:
1. Between them and grandma, I had exactly zero privacy.
It may sound like "wtf, he'll have privacy when he's on his own, not in _my_ house", but seriously, please don't do that to your kid. Even the most affectionate cat needs its moments when it's alone.
It's not even just that _they_ were with me all the time (I couldn't even just go to a freaking summer camp, one of them had to come there to keep keeping an eye on me), the worst was that they told everyone every single detail I ever did. It's a freaking nightmare to live with your whole life posted on a public billboard, so to speak. Virtually _noone_ is _that_ extroverted. It gives everyone in town control over your life: e.g., you can't tell your friends "sorry, can't come now, I haven't finished homework" when you know they already know, or will find out, exactly at which hour you were already done with your homework. Or not without quickly losing every single friend you ever had.
Or to give an example that's still traumatic to think about, I had a girlfriend at some point in high school (yes, I wasn't that nerdy) which pretty quickly got addicted to my computer. Well, fairy 'nuff, I'm not even opposed to sharing the computer, but let's at least try to do something else too. So I pull a "let's go out today, mom doesn't let me use the computer today." (Right, I'm losing all nerd credibility here;) Mom actually called her to tell her that's not true. That was one relationship that went down hill very fast thereafter.
2. Their approach to "rewarding" any personal initiative was, well, best illustrated by Mac Hall Comics. (It's just a comic and safe for work.) Just about everything I did was most likely to be met with, literally, "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do that?" or "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" It was as good as a slap in the face, let me tell you.
You get the idea.
Thing is, programming was something that side-stepped both issues and put _me_ in control. Finally. Bloody finally.
Now they're both programmers and perfectly capable of understanding what I did there, but:
A) Anyone they _could_ tell stuff like "our little Moraelin used a goto instead of a loop today" (and have any hope they'd understand that) was usually way outside the circle of people I was in. Which was as good as having some privacy for a change.
B) They were actually pretty easy to satisfy in that domain. I suppose that when a kid writes machine code and it works, it's pretty hard to pull a "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" (And I really mean machine code: the 1K RAM in a ZX-81 wasn't enough for an assembler, so I had to convert it to hex by hand.) If nothing else, it works.
Well, true, but that's why I was talking about getting to level 60, as opposed to "finishing" the game. The end-game grind in WoW is there more as a time-sink to prevent you from finishing the game, than anything else. Even if you have massive disposable time to sink into that, as far as I'm concerned, at that point the game is essentially over and the content is over. I have better things to do with my time than doing MC the 1000'th time.
That "content" is there just as an ellaborate scam. People have been educated that "winners never quit and quitters never win" and that they must 100% finish a game before their mom bought them the next one. And like any such notion, when you have a few million people educated that they _must_ be X (where X can be "patriot", "not a quitter", "real man", etc), you'll have someone using that to shaft them. Blizzard knows that a large percentage of the population _must_ "finish" the game (collect all equipment, kill Onyxia, etc) before they can cancel their subscription, so Blizzard knows how they can shaft those people into keeping paying long after the content is over and the game stopped being enjoyable.
So basically if someone doesn't have time for those, well, IMHO they haven't lost much. Whatever RL commitments or activities kept them from doing that, are probably more fun. Heck, watching paint dry is more fun.
At any rate, at that point, the _only_ use for that equipment is... so you can move on to even higher level instances to grind through repeatedly. I.e., if you can't make that kind of time investment for the first tier instances, then you don't have the time for the tier 2 or the new tier 3 raids either, so basically you haven't lost much. Buying equipment for RL cash at that point is pretty stupid if you don't have the time to actually _use_ that equipment.
Well, here's me satisfying your curiosity
on
Bang! Howdy Goes Beta
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Dunno about him, but I'm in my mid-30's, and, no, I'm not still in college, nor fresh out of it. So are my co-workers that play MMOs. Two even have kids. And, you know, they can still play a MMO and earn their levels and items the honest way.
"Time investment" is something you don't have to do in 16 hour bursts. Just because it takes, say, 200 hours to get to level 60 (just a number pulled out of the hat for example sake), it doesn't mean you're in a race to cross that 200 hours line in the least days. Some kid will do it in 12.5 days at 16 hours a day, but getting there in 200 days at an average of 1 hour per day is no shame either. You _can_ get the same number of hours out of the game, see the same content, and do the same quests either way. I.e., from the point of view of actually playing the game and not just willy-waving about the score, there's still the same number of game hours to play, and still the same quantity of content to enjoy. So what is the problem if that content lasts you for more days, at whatever number of minutes per day you can afford to spend there?
So basically, since that's where that discussion started, I still see no excuse for buying items and gold for real cash instead. I can understand the economics of why that trade forms, but it's still essentially cheating in a multiplayer game, I still despise those who do it. I couldn't care what someone does in their single player games, but cheating against other players is the mark of the low life.
Doubly so if they're insecure enough to pay real money to cheat. I mean, geesh, at least the idiots with wall-hacks and aim-bots in CS just downloaded one for free, but actually reaching for the credit card to buy an un-earned advantage against some kid... geesh, how insecure can one get.
BTW, don't take this as a personal attack or anything. You've already said you play RTS instead. I can certainly respect that. I'm talking about those who just use the "but I don't have as much time as a 13 year old!" just as a blanket excuse to cheat against those 13 year olds. That's what I find lame.
And I see no point in even trying a game any more, if even their own business model is selling game items to idiots for money. If from the start the "competition" (for those who view it that way) is just an excuse to sell advantages to some contestants, then what's the point of even competing? It certainly won't prove skill, knowledge, even time investment. It will just prove who's willing to blow more RL cash, and I certainly have no wish to take part in that kind of a self-destructive competition.
I already know, for example, that in a certain buggy web-based game someone blew over 20,000 USD on getting in-game advantages. Roll that sum around in your head a bit. Can I compete with that kind of a money-blower? Yes. Do I see any point in it? No. I can think of far better ways to use that money. And I certainly have better things to do with my time than being the non-paying fodder for paying gankers in that kind of a game, too.
Because that's what those games invariably degenerate into, if they didn't outright start that way. When your main income source are the idiots willing to pay real cash for a +20 Sword Of Ganking or for a Level 3 Mech in a Level 1 Battletech-like game, guess which group does the game catter to? When you have to make a choice between (A) losing a non-paying Random J Newbie that's been repeatedly ganked right in the newbie area and (B)losing Lord L33tN00bKi113r who's paying good cash for the special ammo to gank the newbies with, guess which of them the devs end up bending over backwards to keep?
No idea what _are_ you thinking about, but the more mundane reason is that the cat seemed to be very determined that it has to be dad. Very vocal about it too. Took her about two days to give up and go ahead with a member of her own species. To her defense, though, we had gotten her as a small kitten and had never seen another cat ever since. I can't know what really went through her fuzzy head, but I can only guess that she thought we're her species and the tomcats are some other kind of animal.
So you're willing to anthropomorphise a cat, a robot or a video game character. Thing is, it's not just a human trait.
When your dog accepts you as the pack leader, for example, he's doing the same: he's willing to consider you a big dog. You probably can't call it "anthropomorphising", since the "anthropos" part is the wrong one, but it's essentially the same act: they're willing to personify you as a member of his species.
Cats do the same, to various extents and with various effects. E.g., being animals that tend to learn from other cats, personifying humans as cats gets them to try to immitate some human stuff. E.g., when I was a child, grandma's cat tried bringing me mice just like she brought for her kittens. E.g., we even had a female cat which, when she first went in heat, seemed to want to have sex with dad. Eventually she had to settle for a tomcat from the neighbourhood, though.
Or both are perfectly capable of personifying a toy and playing with it like with another member of their species.
The same goes for a lot of other animals, including birds.
Well, I'll reserve judgment on whether it's economically viable yet. It's certainly possible, but the economic viability is mainly dictated by whether it's cheaper or not than to buy oil from the Middle East instead. As long as people can save a cent per gallon by tanking on gasoline from Iraq instead of on domestic ethanol, they'll continue to do so. When oil prices will rise high enough, we'll switch to whichever is cheaper than that. Still, yes, alternatives do exist, ethanol included.
E.g., we already know how to make synthetic gasoline out of coal. It's not cheap, which is why people still prefer to import oil from the Middle East instead. But it's certainly feasible. Most of Germany's tank warfare in WW2 happened on synthetic fuel.
E.g., it's possible to reform almost any organic waste (e.g., see the stories about using turkey guts or dead cats or whatnot) into usable petroleum. As long as it contains enough hydrogen and carbon, it can be reformed into something close enough to petroleum. There's no energy won there, but it can convert energy from an uranium reactor into something one can pour into a car's tank.
E.g., we're starting to genetically engineer algae which contain 50% lipids, and can be pretty efficiently processed into synthetic petroleum.
E.g., even the oil resources aren't as close to extinction as doomsday theorists would have us believe. There's for example still plenty of oil left in Siberia and even in the USA. The reason the USA doesn't bother extracting its own oil any more (although once was the world's main oil exporter) is that, basically, it's cheaper to import and refine the oil from the Middle East.
Plus, see the thing above about being able to reform most hydrocarbons into synthetic petroleum. There's a lot of tar and oil shale which is very possible to crack into lighter hydrocarbons. Not cheap, but possible.
So, yeah, we're not really short on options. Doomsday theorists may have a field day preaching doom-and-gloom "society will break down when oil runs out theories", but, yeah, humanity isn't even near bending over that easily. Or needing to.
Still, looking at it pragmatically, hydrogen is another option, and it's always good to have extra options. If plan B turns out to not really work that well, it's never bad to have a plan C, right?
It has a certain hype-able charm about it too. It sounds high-tech, environmentally friendly, etc. And, to a certain class of uneducated retards, it may even sound like it's free perpetual energy. (Hydrogen comes out of water, and water is free, right? There are gazillions of gazillions of tons of it in the oceans, right?) So since those can vote too, there's a certain political capital in promising a hydrogen economy.
But still, with or without that, it is nevertheless an extra option, and it's never a bad thing to explore possible options. _If_ it actually ever works the way it's hyped, and they overcome all the problems, then we can use it, and if not, noone forces anyone to. Heck, even if it doesn't work, some useful new technologies may come out of that.
Which of those options we'll use in the end (or maybe find a new one) will, in the end, be decided by the free market. Maybe it will be ethanol, maybe it will be synthetic gasoline, or maybe we'll finally have good enough batteries for electric cars. Regardless of what politicians may hype for political capital, people will in the end choose the one that gives them more milleage per dollar. That's why we're all importing oil from the Middle East, after all.
So basically I wouldn't really worry about it, or not yet.
Actually, a pet peeve of mine with games, although I a fan of story-drive RPGs, is that most game devs just have no fucking clue how to tell a story. Yes, we occasionally get games like KOTOR or even Oblivion, but they're the exceptions in a sea of sub-productions which just can't tell a story. (And if you look at what, say, Penny Arcade had to say about Grandia 2, and Tycho's resulting rant about japanese RPGs as a whole, you'll see that at least I'm not the only one who sees it that way.)
"Consider the reverse: John Carmack is a good game developer. Imagine him trying to make a movie."
Yet you'd cheerfully let a game programmer like Carmack write the story for a game, eh? Because that happens every day. Some guy who's been a talented programmer, or maybe an artist, gets promoted to "game designer" instead of to management, as would happen in the enterprise world. He's now a "veteran of the industry", has worked X thousands of hours on implementing other people's ideas in Y games, so he just _has_ to be just about ready to design one, right?
Actually, "Peter's Principle" says he probably isn't. Scripting other people's scenario doesn't make one good at writing an original story, any more than hauling bricks for a cathedral makes one an architect. He can maybe even know how to design a good monster or an encounter that can be scripted well, but telling a story is just not his forte. (Though translating one into C++ or Python might be.)
I remember reading a Clive Barker interview after Undying got released, and basically he mentions some of the uninspired stuff the original game design had. Like the coaxing he had to do to get the devs out of the idea that, basically, "scary horror game == a bigger end-level boss with predictable attacks." As Clive Barker said, that's actually the _least_ scary thing you can possibly put into a game.
And having played enough games to have enough info for an opinion there, I'll 100% side with Clive Barker on that one: there's no freaking way a giant boss battle can possibly invoke horror. It can cause an adrenaline rush, it can cause frustration, it can do lots of things, but fear is one thing it _won't_ invoke, no matter what you texture that boss like.
That's just the thing: they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and don't even realize when it doesn't fit the story or theme at all. People who worked on coding or painting a giant boss for the end-level since the Atari 2600 or NES, assume that telling a story is all about having a giant boss with predictable attacks at the end of the level. That's what they've learned, that's what they've played, that's what they've been asked to code over and over again. At some point it gets mistaken for the _only_ way (or at least the _right_ way) to tell a story in video game format.
So basically, you know, I'm not that scared of seeing someone from the movie business have another try, for a change. In fact, I'm really looking forward to it. At least some of those guys _do_ know how to tell a story. Not all, but enough do. Sure, they've done it in another medium before, but it still beats seeing someone stuck in a Super Mario Bros mentality trying to write a story.
Dude, trust me, I did read what the new system is all about, and I _am_ indeed addressing the problems of the _old_ system. If you read the whole chain back, you'll see it was all about such claims as, basically, "bah, all the dangers about hydrogen were just hype" or about the odorant, basically, "bah, the problem was already solved, see propane". And all I'm saying is, no, they weren't.
So, basically, you know, take your own advice and read before going on a rant.
1. stealthily put a general-purpose rootkit interface on your computer, that leaves it wide open for any script kiddie to hide their malware with,
2. utterly break your computer if you try to uninstall it, even after you no longer own the CD or are interested in listening to the music on it
3. have exploitable bugs in both the original rootkit and in the "solution" to the problem they created
then no, it didn't do exactly what it was supposed to do. Pushing DRM on the consumers is a worthy discussion in its own right, but this crap went beyond that.
If you just buy an iPod with Apple's "fair play" DRM on it, or a Creative Zen with MS's DRM on it, or when you download the latest Media Player or Real One, that's DRM-ed. When then discover it can limit what I do with my music... that's DRM. And it does just what it's supposed to do, and nothing more: it just applies those rights to the DRM'ed music you bought, if you load it on that device. Nothing more. And if you uninstall that player or sell that iPod, then that DRM goes with it.
But Sony's heavy-handed crap was more like breaking into your house when you're away, and bugging your VCR to be sure you don't play some copied tape. And in the process leaving your front door lock broken, making any thief's job easier. And, oh, if you un-bug your VCR, it'll weld your garrage door shut.
I do believe that that's no longer "just DRM", that's a whole new level of crap. In fact the kind of crap that should be outright considered criminal. DRM or no DRM, that doesn't give them a carte blanche to stealthily install a rootkit on someone's computer.
It's the kind of Wild West vigilante justice that's just not Sony's business to enforce in a republic ruled by the law. We're no longer in the days where you'd just get a posse and go kick the Joneses' door in to see if they're the ones who stole your branded cow. So Sony has no business doing the same to the Joneses' computer. Plain and simple.
"Many other fuel gases lack a perceptible smell, too. Trace amounts of an odorant chemical (ethyl mercaptan) are added to propane and to natural gas so that leaks can be detected. This is very much a solved problem."
What works for propane at room temperatures, doesn't work for hydrogen at 20 Kelvin. If you put ethyl mercaptan in it, it would _freeze_ at that temperature. And when some hydrogen boils off, the odorant probably won't boil off too, because it's not just below its boiling point, it's outright below its freezing point too.
In other words, congrats, you've just discovered distillation. Because that's exactly what's going to happen there. You'll just get the hydrogen distilled off the mixture and still as odourless as ever.
So basically wake me up if you can point me at some odorant that has a comparable boiling point to that of hydrogen. Only _then_ can you tell me that the problem is already solved. Otherwise just assuming that what worked for propane must work for hydrogen is... cute, but still stupid.
The problems with hydrogen are many, and handwaving some in, some out, just seems weird.
E.g., energy density is a real problem. While H2 does have 3 times more energy density than gasoline per weight unit, it's about 10 times lighter than gasoline even in liquefied form, and thus has worse energy density per _volume_. (And hideously less energy density if you use it as compressed gas.)
But transporting and storing it liquefied is harder than you'd think, because it boils at around -253 Celsius. That's cold enough to _freeze_ air on contact. It's also going to be a pain to keep it that cold, and even in the best insulated tanks it's going to constantly evaporate. In fact, a lot of it will evaporate every day.
And unlike natural gas, you can't just compress it until it stays liquid at room temperature. If you look at its phase diagram, a liquid phase just doesn't exist anywhere above -240 C. That's where its critical point lies. No matter how much you compress it, it just won't liquefy above that. So you _have_ to keep it that cold.
E.g., if you want to talk energy, there you go, there's even more energy spent cooling it to those temperatures, and a massive waste of energy when then it just evaporates in a car sitting in a garrage for a month.
E.g., energy density isn't really helped if you have to pack it in a massive tank, either to hold it under pressure or to keep it cold. If the tank itself adds an extra half a ton to your car, you haven't really won much. (Rememeber the lower energy density, so the tank will also have to be bigger to get the same mileage out of it.)
E.g., if you want to talk safety, you don't want to be the guy that gets splashed by liquid at -253C when the tank ruptures in an accident. Or yes, when a tanker ruptures on the highway. Yes, it will eventually just rise up, but in the meantime it will instantly kill anything it spills onto.
E.g., yes, a problem is that it leaks, so you'd have hydrogen constantly leaking in your garage. Whether your roof is sealed tight or not is a moot point when you have a couple percent of your tank's capacity evaporating daily in it. That's a _lot_ more vapour produced than gasoline produces. And you can't just seal the tak shut to keep the vapours in, since the resulting pressure will eventually be tremendous. So you don't want a garrage that's just not sealed shut, you'll want one that's ventilated constantly, even in winter. Otherwise it can jolly well blow up.
E.g., the problem is made worse by the fact that hydrogen has no colour or smell of its own, so you can't _know_ if you've walked into a room full of it or not. Gasoline, for all its other problems, does have a smell. Sure, it's _unlikely_ that you'd find the room just full of it, but do you actually want to take that risk? Plus, when you talk hundreds of millions of cars, some poor bugger may blow himself up every hour. (As they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you. Probabilities are funny like that when they involve large numbers.) Do you want to be the car manufacturer hit by the lawsuits and negative PR of that?
E.g., worse yet, it also _burns_ with an invisible flame, so you could walk into a jet of flame from a punctured hose or tanker that did ignite, and not even know it until you get burned by it. Again, you can handwave that as _unlikely_, but it's a very real problem and given hundreds of millions of cars, somewhere it will eventually happen.
And so on. And, yes, I'd be interested to know how these palladium balls address those problems. E.g., will it actually make the energy density worth it, or just dillute it some more?
And conversely, hand-waving the energy and carbon concerns as some global catastrophe is... uninformed, to say the least.
E.g., yes, we already knew that on the whole you don't get more energy from burning hydrogen than you put into splitting the water. That's obvious. The problem is that while we're damn good at producing electricity, and outstanding at making electrica
"Buying from Dell instead of Levono isn't creating any more jobs in the US, so you might as well go for whatever company gives you the best computer."
Actually, it does. At least Dell has their marketting and management staff in the USA. And after a bit of a fallout over outsourcing, they even moved some of the tech support back. So while, yes, it's impossible to keep all the money in the US, there's a difference between (A) letting the trailing curve of that keynesian multiplier go to China, and (B) just giving it all to the Chinese economy.
As for:
- "comparative advantage", that advantage would have to be pretty fucking huge for a _government_ to be better off doing that. See that keynesian multiplier again. Every 1$ invested in the USA, creates more than 1$ worth of jobs in the USA _and_ you get a large part of it back in taxes. (Income tax as applied nowadays didn't even exist in the 19'th century when the "comparative advantage" theory was developped.) So basically a dollar spent by the government on imports isn't quite the same thing as a dollar spent by Dell on imports. Just saving 1% on computers bought from Lenovo instead of getting more than 1% back in taxes, and that's not even factoring the effect on the US economy, is plain old stupid and short sighted.
Plus it's losing sight of what the defficit spending and generally government spending was supposed to solve to start with. Keynesian economics were _not_ supposed to give the government a carte blanche to spend as much as it wants to. Raising government spending was just supposed to (temporarily) create extra demand to fix an over-production crisis. If the US economy is in such great shape that it doesn't need the government's money, then the US government should just cut spending, pay the debt, and maybe lower taxes. Not create that extra economic growth in another country.
BTW, that's another factor in that multiplier effect: the higher the taxes, the lower the multiplier.
- "globalization", is good and fine, but any government's first concern should be their own economy. The kind of "globalization" where taxpayer money is used to subsidize another country's economy. Simply put, the US government is supposed to represent the US interests in that globalization. Not to be the good Samaritan helping the Chinese get to economic parity with the USA.
I know this is going to come across as chauvinistic or whatnot. Bear with me. I'm not an American, and don't really like the USA government, but in this case I can't blame them either. For a _government_ I find it normal to try to stimulate domestic economy and not the economy in China. In fact, I find it their duty to.
See, there was this thing called the Great Depression. And there was this guy called John Maynard Keynes who came up with a new economic theory. Best known as Keynesian economics Look it up someday. You might see that a lot of the political bullshit nowadays a la "elect us because the current government has inflation and unemployment" are actually not some national catastrophe, but just the way economy works. (E.g., that all else being equal, there's a curve with unemployment on one axis and inflation on the other one. You lower one, the other automatically rises. So the best _any_ government can do is pick a point on that curve.) But I digress.
At any rate, Keynes came up with the idea that in times of depression the government can help the economy by creating extra demand. This creates jobs and generally helps the economy. Not just jobs at the company receiving the government contract, but also jobs down the line. E.g., the people who get jobs making missiles, then go buy cars (or the company buys trucks), creating employment in that industry too. And so on. This creates a multiplicator effect in which each dollar spent by the government creates X dollars worth of jobs.
And to get back to the case at hand, the _whole_ idea of this exercise was to help the _national_ economy, not the economy of China. Any government using taxpayer money to create jobs in China instead of at home is completely retarded and needs to be voted out of office ASAP.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against China or the fine Chinese people. But it's the Chinese government that should fix that economy, not the USA one. The USA government has to invest in the USA economy, and the Chinese government needs to invest in the Chinese economy. Either one using its taxpayers' money to subsidize the other's economy is plain old stupid.
""From the (short) article: "The judge wrote that 'Antitrust laws are for 'the protection of competition, not competitors.'"
So what does that say about the Microsoft antitrust case brought up by the likes of Netscape and others?"
IANAL, but AFAIK, it doesn't say anything was wrong, really. They too had to prove in court that not only MS is hurting competition, but also that it hurts the consumer.
I.e., in a nutshell the gist of it is that you can't go and say "I can't compete with company X. Make them raise their prices, so I have a chance." What you have to prove is that first and foremost this has hurt the consumers (e.g., company X is in a position to shamelessly gouge its customers, or companies X and Y aggreed to fix their prices high, or it has some other effect that consumers obviously don't want) and in which way are they creating an artifficial barrier, i.e., other than for example price or brand name, that keeps others from competing.
So in that MS antitrust case, yes, they had to argue that:
A) MS's monopoly is hurting the consumers (e.g., that the cost of a MS OS has been steadily rising in the same time interval where the cost of the computer itself has been steadily dropping. And since at the time it was just short of impossible to buy a computer without Windows, that was an ever-increasing burden upon consumers as a whole.) and
B) that there is an artifficial barrier in the way of anyone trying to compete with MS. The keyword being "anyone", not "me". As was said, those laws are to protect competition, not one or two competitors. That's why for example MS was able to use Linux as an example of "but we still have competitors in the OS arena", although it wasn't the product of Netscape and the other.
You may notice that the same applies to this lawsuit too. See the other quote in the summary, about the GPL allowing people to get programs extremely cheaply. It's not part of the same "protecting the competition" reasoning, but addressing the other (more important) point: then it hasn't hurt the consumer. Without that, you don't really have an anti-trust case.
"Deleting a counterstrike character doesn't destroy thousands of US dollars in intellectual property licenses.
Deleting a Second Life character generally does. I know I have at least $2000 USD in assets, and my account is only a few months old."
I have no problems with arguing it like that. Sure, if you want to talk about money lost by the actual human, we can do that. That's not what I was arguing.
I'm not even opposed to attaching a monetary value to the character itself, on top of any money invested in virtual property. After all, level 60 WoW or EQ2 characters are sold on ebay every day, so they must be worth some money to the buyer.
All I do find stupid was presenting it as the grievous moral "wrong" of executing a virtual character and not giving it a virtual trial with due process and all. I mean, wtf, I didn't know that a non-sentient collection of bits, polygons and textures was even alive or sentient. Even if one takes virtual entities as "property" or whatnot, that character is barely an item, a puppet controlled by the player, not a living creature with rights an feelings. So any moral "right" or "wrong" based on executing the poor character feel as stupid as when talking about executing a Barbie doll.
Again, I'm not opposed to even attaching a monetary value to that virtual Barbie doll. But implying that it had the same rights as a living being (e.g., the right to a fair trial in the game world, or the right to live implied by getting outraged at that "execution") is patently absurd.
"Besides, how many of you can pull yourselves from your computers long enough to play on a console?"
*raises hand*
If I'm going to play a game anyway, why would I care that much if I sit on this chair in front of the computer or on that sofa in front of the TV? No, seriously. I'm there for the game, regardless of whether it's a computer, console, or a magic Ouija board with a LCD screen.
Seems to me that some people get so focused on the means, that they lose sight of the goal. The computer is not the goal, and the console isn't the goal either. They're just _means_. Playing a good game is the goal.
That's it. That's what being a "gamer" is all about: games. Nothing else. Everything else is in some other category. And let me recap it, for those who still don't get it:
- E.g., those just wanting to brag about how many more 3DMark points their new 7900 GTX scores than my PS2, those aren't really looking for the "gamer" category. I don't play 3DMark, I play games. For that kinda discussion, that's over there, through the door labelled "willy wavers".
- E.g., contrary to popular belief, stupid fanboy wars about Nintendo vs Sony vs Microsoft aren't "gamer" stuff either. The brand name isn't a goal, and anyone who has serving Nintendo or Sony or MS as a goal really needs to take a break and a critical look at their life. Again, playing a good game is the goal. Owning a Nintendo or a Sony or a MS console or a PC is merely a means to playing the game you want to play, nothing more.
- E.g., no, as a gamer I don't give a flying fuck about the controller being with/without vibration, banana shaped, nunchaku shaped, mouse+keyboard, or whatever, either. That's just means too. Will there be a great game that requires that controller? In some cases, I seriously doubt it, but the final judgment will be actually seeing that game on the shelves, or not. Then I'll go and buy the right controller for it too. (I had no problems buying lightguns for lightgun games, or a Dreamcast keyboard for chatting in PSO, after all. But again, those were the means, not the end. The purpose was the game, not the lightgun.)
Will I buy a PS3 or a Wii or an XBox 360? Hell if I know. Maybe all three, maybe neither, maybe something in between. Depends on whether any of them will have enough games I really want to play. If they have the games, sure, sign me up. If not, not. It's all about the games, in the end, everything else is just means.
And again, if a game I want to play is only on a console, I'll have no problem getting up from the computer and moving over to the console. Why wouldn't I? Doubly so if the whole genre doesn't even exist on the PC. (When was the last time there was a fighting game for the PC, for example?)
"Do you think this bill would have passed unanimously if we were talking about violent books? What about violent paintings?"
Sad thing is, it already happened. Games are only the latest scapegoat. Before that it was (in no particular order) comics, music, board games, etc.
E.g., since you mention books or paintings, how about comic books? Seems to me like it fits both categories outstandingly. Well, long before computer games even existed, Congress was savaging comic books and presenting them as the great Satan that turns innocent children into mass murderers and rapists. And probably turning them into homosexuals (e.g., Batman and Robin were used as a prime example of that), BDSM deviants (e.g., Wonder Woman), and God knows what other kinds of monsters.
(Mind you, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being gay or into BDSM from _my_ point of view. I couldn't care less what other people do between like-minded consenting adults. But I am saying that the anti-comics campaign _did_ present those as dangerous deviant behaviour that comics supposedly brainwash children into immitating. I'm guessing they counted on enough puritan voters for which those did count as an abhomination and danger to society.)
They didn't get deterred by such facts as that some of those comics were bloody _obviously_ not for children, _and_ that any parent was jolly well able to see that they're buying a horror comic featuring a chainsaw murder right on the cover for little Billy. They didn't even get deterred by the fact that, in spite of the endless hype, polls showed that the vast majority of people still didn't buy it that comics cause juvenile deliquency.
I.e., there's not even that much to speculate about that question. It already happened. It being art never stopped the sharks from using it as political capital.
Where it sorta differred, is that the comics industry didn't as much get executed by the legislators as allowed to honourably commit seppuku (a.k.a., harakiri, i.e., suicide). The industry bent over backwards to aggree to censor itself, just to be left alone already, and in the process turned from a major industry (at least as number of customers went) into a niche.
IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), but my bet would have been on the Chandrasekhar limit there, which puts the limit at a little under 1.5 solar masses. (Admittedly, that does change with the chemical composition, so no idea how that works for heavy enough elements associated with "rocks".) Since we're talking a planet, not a star, I'll assume there was never nuclear fusion in the centre to generate extra pressure, so the limit would be purely and only the limit at which degenerate electron pressure is no longer enough.
Also, rocks (solids, metals, whatever) may be happy to sit in high gravity, but not _that_ high, or not without remaining the same kind of thing one calls a "rock" in casual conversations. A mass supported by electron degeneracy pressure isn't quite the same as the mostly crystalline structure you'd have in mind for a "normal" rocky planet.
I'm also not sure if it would form mountains or trenches (even 3 to 4 mm high) at that point, since the whole thing is held together by the quantum pressure of a "gas" made of electrons. It's, so to speak, some atoms "floating" in that electron gas. What keeps it from collapsing at that point isn't a crystalline structure that can be re-shaped to form a mountain or a trench, but just the fact that getting any denser would force the electrons to occupy even higher energy states, thus increasing the pressure, thus pushing it back into shape. So at a wild guess, that thing couldn't form any long lived mountains any more than you can get mountains on Jupiter.
I'm also not sure if you can get just a little neutronium in the centre, while leaving the surface intact. The way I understood it (but again, IANAP) once it does start to collapse into neutronium, then it goes all the way. (Maybe also blowing a part of itself into space, supernova style. The fast collapse will produce enough energy for that.) If the pressure is enough for the centre to collapse, this will just produce an avalanche reaction where the collapse both increases the gravity (less R --> more g) _and_ takes out some of the electron gas that supported the star to start with. So basically it's like puncturing an inflated balloon: it won't stop at losing just a little gas.
That's why we talk about the Chandrasekhar limit as a hard limit. In fact, hard enough to use Type Ia supernovae as a standard candle for really long range astronomy. You can know pretty exactly at what mass the star went *BOOM* and exactly how bright that explosion was. Because it happened as soon as the star went even a just a tiny little bit above that limit. When that happened, it didn't just get a little neutronium in the core, but started the final countdown.
But again, IANAP, so I'd be curious to hear about it from a real physicist.
We can discuss that too, but the TFA accusation was that WoW is outright racist and that it outright presents Tauren and Trolls as evil. Hence, somehow the Native Americans and Jamaicans too, by association.
That said, people stereotype each other every day, even if they were all Caucasian race.
For starters, by country. E.g., see how every other movie or game that has either italians or mafia, associates one with the other. E.g., see how germans are still pigeonholed by Hollywood as some variant of mad scientists (complete with a bogus accent no real german has), warmongers (all civ games and clones slapped that on Germany as an inherent characteristic), or outright nazis. E.g., see the stereotypes about the French, which got dug out and waved around like a banner by every single redneck (now that's another stereotype) because France didn't support the war in Iraq. Etc.
Then by region inside the same country. You could fill a dozen tomes just with what northern americans think about southerners, and viceversa, what northern germans think about southern germans, and viceversa, what the English think about the Scotts, or viceversa, etc.
Or other distinctions such as whether you live in a city versus living in a village. (In Karl Marx's manifesto, for example, he's willing to credit the burgeoisie he otherwise despises with saving people from the "idiocy" of rural life. No, seriously, it really says "idiocy". Check out the text on the Gutenberg Project.) Or inner city versus fashionably living in the suburbs. Or whatever.
Then there are the ever popular gender stereotypes. "Women can't drive or park." (Never mind that the statistics of insurance companies, the ones who get to pay for those accidents, say that women cause half the number of accidents at the same number of miles driven.) "Women can't use computers." Etc. Throw in the hair colour too, and you have some people who can't even stop from inventing or memorizing one more joke of a proof that blondes are born stupid.
And to be fair I'm sure there are enough stereotypes for men among women too.
Then by profession, hobby, age, whatever. "You're a nerd, therefore you have nothing better to do than do overtime on a Sunday." Or "You're a nerd, therefore you should be happy I let you come over and fix my computer." Or if you read Dilbert, it makes a good living out of preaching that any kind of management are inherently clueless idiots.
Heck, even buying a new car or getting a new hobby can get one pigeonholed in some category like "guy at mid-life crisis, probably insecure about his penis size."
Basically there _are_ plenty of stereotypes being thrown around among white people too. Certainly not worse than the racist stereotypes about other races, but then again, worse than just having your accent used in a video game.
In fact, caucasian race accents get used in games too every day. E.g., IIRC KOTOR sported Australian accents on the Mandalorians. E.g., fake German accents on mad scientists, villains and the like. Etc. And if you bought some games translated in, say, German, you'd find they use Germany's various regional accents or dialects for the ethnic or cultural groups in the game.
And here's the thing: you don't see anyone getting up in arms about it. You don't see the Australians, for example, revolting that KOTOR associated them with the warmongering Mandalorians. Everyone can understand that the game just needed some outlandish accent, and maybe get a chuckle out of seeing what theirs was used for. So I'm sure the fine people of Jamaica can live too with having theirs used.
"Executing" a virtual character might sound emotional and all, but it happens every day in all games. E.g., join a CounterStrike game and you'll see more people "executed" per minute than in any dystopian SF setting. Or seeing the UT statistics, it had more kills in a week than the whole WW2, and I dare say it probably topped the whole Star Wars, including destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star over its life span.
So what? I'll go and say someone would have to be utterly clueless -- in fact Jack Thompson kinda clueless -- to really treat "executing" a virtual character the same as if someone executed a real human.
I thought I've heard it all in my brief days as a coder on a MUD. You could hear cheaters, griefers and other fucktards invoking the most idiotic rationalizations as to why they should be allowed to do that. Including
- "freedom of speech" (no, the constitution does not give any such rights other than in relation to the government), or
- "I can't properly role-play my evil concept character if I can't exploit that bug" (then get some imagination and find another concept), or
- "I was only intensively testing the bug (for 3 weeks, 8 hours a day) before I report it"
- "If it was technically possible, then I'm within my rights to do that." (guess we should remove the chat channels and "say" command too, or he's within his rights to verbally assault newbies. Plus, nice psychopathic attitude where caring about the other players doesn't even enter the equation.)
Etc. But going "waah, they executed a virtual character" tops any of those as bullshit goes. In fact, it pegs my bullshit meter. Even if they had given that character a virtual crucifixion, like in some other MMO I was reading about, so fucking what? It's just a bunch of bits, bytes and triangles that was never alive or sentient to start with. It's like getting upset about executing a Barbie doll.
What next, then? Forbid people from cancelling a MMO account too, because that's like executing their virtual characters? Forbid them from deleting older characters to make a new one? (After all, just because they're their own characters doesn't give one any more right to execute them, than it gives a mother to execute her own children, right? That was sarcasm, btw.)
As for legal proceedings and due process, that's a _means_ not an _end_ IRL. The fact is, IRL you're never sure that someone really did it. You found a corpse or a broken lock and built some shoddy deduction saying that "X looks like he'd have motive to do that". But you could be wrong. _That_ is why we have all those legal safeguards, not as a purpose in itself.
And even IRL the keywords are "beyond reasonable doubt". That's the point that all those legal safeguards are supposed to get you to: first prove your accusation beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, that's also the point where you can stop. If you've already proven something beyond reasonable doubt, that's it, you can take a break and let justice take its course.
On the other hand, in such a case there are plenty of logs saying he did it, and even he doesn't deny it, so wtf purpose would it serve. You can _know_ he did it. What idiotic purpose would it serve to put up a whole mockery of a justice courth there, when you already have the server logs saying he did it? We already _know_, beyond reasonable doubt, that he did it.
I'd have no need for the whole RL legal circus either if RL had logs proving that the buttler did it, in the dining room, with the poker. Then we could just execute the buttler, and rest assured that we won't be haunted later by discovering that it was someone else and we executed an innocent.
Again, here we already _know_ an innocent wasn't executed.
And again, that all is because IRL we're executing _real_ persons. "Executing" someone's virtual character was never covered by the constitution or whatever. That pixelated avatar never had any rights to start with.
Frankly, that's what scares me the most. If ads become common place, how do you think publishers are going to respect that? I'll tell you how: by stopping publishing medieval games completely. Give them a choice between:
A) an interesting game set in a refreshingly new medieval setup, like Jade Empire, _but_ you can't put Coca Cola and McDonalds ads in it, or not without massively losing more sales than it's worth in the resulting player outrage (even if EB Games won't give you your money back for that, you _can_ warn other potential buyers that the game is nigh impossible to suspend disbelief in. People tell their friends whether a game or a movie was good or bad all the time.)
B) Yet another cheap CS clone set in the modern day. Probably won't be a bestseller as such, but you can recoup at least half the development costs out of ads alone.
Which do you think the average publisher will choose? It's not even speculation, it's a rehash of what's already happened. You can already _know_ what the publisher will choose, because they all have already made a similar choice in a similar situation.
See, there was this dark age in the second half of the 90's, and first years of the new millenium, when everyone produced yet another FPS and most were just unimaginative "me too" clones. On the other hand, genres like adventures skirted with extinction. And the funny part is that it wasn't because gamer tastes had changed. The adventure games market was actually not only alive, but _growing_, yet everyone abandoned it.
You know why that happened? Because FPS were cheaper to produce. You only needed to license any cheap 3D engine, throw together a couple of levels and skins, and call it a game. You didn't need to spend money on scripting a story or complex animations for the interactions or anything. You could make a FPS on _much_ less money than an adventure, so you'd make a profit even if you sold a lot less copies.
So we already know what the publishers chose: the game that was cheaper to produce. Now throw ads in that equation and it's the same situation all over again. I can just see every single game being simply whatever kind or setting promises to rake in the most ad money. And whole genres like medieval RPG disappearing just because they're not that good a place for ads, and they cost more to produce without ads.
And if you're not scared yet, consider this: there was an exit out of that "me too" FPS age, in the form that eventually FPS too needed scripting and animations, so the cost gap narrowed over time. On the other hand, if we do enter a dark age of in-game ads, there may never be a way out. Once publishers start choosing games based on how suited they are for ads, there's no obvious exit from _that_. Whole genres may not just temporarily skirt extinction, but may go extinct and _stay_ extinct for ever.
Well, maybe _you_ realize the value of being subtle and respecting the (potential) customer, but, well, look at internet advertising. (Which in all fairness you do mention.) There the fucktards won the game, so to speak.
It started decent enough there too. Most sites had one small banner on the first page. Nothing in-your face, nothing insisting to stay on top of the text you're trying to read, no fake UIs, etc. Where that ended, well, you know that already.
Maybe _you_ realize what's wrong with that, but there are plenty of psychopaths which basically don't care. They don't even care if it actually helps their paying client sell more products, as long as at the end of the day they have their smoke-and-mirrors "we produced X thousand clicks" statistics.
And belief in "they'll realize the customers won't stand for that" is, no offense, wishful thinking at best. We used to think that about Internet ads too. If you took anyone from the early 90's and told them that 10-15 years later ads would be full-screen animated layers in front of the actual content, extra pages with FMV ads each time you click on a link to an article, etc, they would have said the same. "What? The users will never stand for that kind of thing, and the ad providers know it!! People would stop going to that web site!!" It didn't quite work that way, did it?
Yeah, I'm bitter, but I prefer to think of it as "grapefruit flavoured";)
And if you still think games are immune to that, I have an example where it did already happen. At one point I decided to give Planetside another try. Guess what I was treated to, after it downloaded all the patches? A whole fscking FMV ad for their other planned expansion packs, and I wasn't allowed to skip it either. I found it outraging. Not only it wasted my time with the huge ad itself, but it wasted my time to download it as part of a "patch". But I guess the marketroid that came up with that couldn't care less.
So at least at one company (Sony), the marketting guys/girls were already able to impose that kind of a heavy-handed slap in the paying customer's face.
And here's what else I can see coming and I'm definitely not looking forward to:
- heavy-handed blatantly-in-your-face advertising that breaks any suspension of disbelief. (E.g., I can live with having Coca Cola machines and bars selling Coca Cola all over the place, but if they go and make Coca Cola be the mana potions and work some blatant advertisment quests into the main line... well, there goes suspension of disbelief right there. Sorry, there's _no_ way I could take such a universe seriously. Maybe as a parody, but not seriously. E.g., I can live with Yahoo! ads on billboards, but don't freaking go and change my PSO Mag into a floating ad banner for Yahoo! like Sega did. That was one subscription cancelled right there and then.)
- ad providers insisting that all ads are non-cacheable and loaded directly off their servers, so they can personally count the number of hits. See web pages everywhere which would load in 1 second otherwise, but end up taking 10 seconds to load because of the ads. I'm _not_ looking forward to seeing the same effect on games' level load times.
- publishers starting to accept or reject games and settings not based on their merits, but on how suited they are for in-game advertising. E.g., rejecting a great game like Jade Empire just because Coca Cola ads would look out of place in it.
While I'm not denying the insightful anthropology observations, methinks you view WoW a bit one-sided. WoW actually lets you play both sides.
Sure, you can play Alliance and view the Horde as a bunch of primitive superstitious savages with their witch-doctors (shamen) and carved totems, just waiting to be civilized by the White Man.
But the gist is, you can also choose to play one of those tribesmen and try to see the world through their eyes. And I mean not just play an orc for the knock-down protection and axe specialization, or a Tauren for the herbalism bonus and couple of extra hit points. Try to really understand their story, their philosophy (as little of it as the game gives you). Try to really see the world through a Tauren's eyes: their lands poisoned and destroyed by that goblin cartel, their sacred burial places dug up by dwarves who couldn't care less about someone else's traditions or beliefs, etc.
Try to imagine your shaman not just as TEH L33T PVP CL4SS, but really as the keeper of the tribe's lore, customs, identity. The one people come to when they want to honour their ancestors, or need spiritual guidance in their lives. Try to imagine yourself picking up the mace and shield not for xp and gold coins, but really to defend your tribe's very existence and identity against a world bent on wiping it out completely.
Try to understand that when a tribe would end that desperate as to send its shamen on the front line, that tribe is risking its very identity and history, because those were the guys who kept that. Those guys were not just priests of some barbaric spirits, but the living archive and history book of the tribe, plus civil authority figures. If your shamen died, that was the end of the road: from there on you had no history, no lore, no identity. The Romans for example understood this and tried to wipe out druids to erase the gauls' national identity. Made them easier to rule.
Try to follow their quest arcs and understand where they came from, what they want, what they believe in, and that they didn't as much lack Alliance technology, as _rejected_ it.
And if then you can still tell me that the Alliance are the good guys and the Horde as a bunch of primitive savages and stereotypical evil to boot... well, I'm guessing you won't, if you have a degree in anthropology.
"I mean, if someone at Blizzard observed Jamacians (well, actually Rastafarians, as not all Jamacians are as their stereotype makes them out to be) and then said to themselves, 'well I'll make a character out of that'...then I'd say that's racism."
No, not really. You forget one essential ingredient: for anything to be racism it also has to carry some kind of negative connotation. If it just presents or borrows from some race, but does _not_ pass any kind of judgment of it being "evil" or "inferior", then it's simply not racism.
E.g., Star Wars borrows heavily from the Japanese, but noone would call it racist for that. E.g., Jade Empire isn't just borrowing from ancient China, but is outright set in an exaggerated fantasy version of China. Yet noone would call it a racist game.
And the Horde are just a different bunch of cultures. (You can't even say it's one different culture, because each of its tribal components has a different culture of its own.) They're neither good, nor evil per se, and in many aspects they're not even that different from the Alliance cultures.
E.g., they still live by the same honour rules. They lose honour for attacking civilians, just like the Alliance does, and they gain nothing from attacking weaker opponents, again just like their Alliance counterpart. I.e., it doesn't look "evil" to me in that aspect. There's nothing in there that says "you're great if you go slaughter their women and children and gank their newbies", and which thus could be judged as "evil".
And Blizzard certainly passes no judgment there. You're not asked to choose a "good" or "evil" side, like in EQ2 or COH/COV, you're simply asked to choose Alliance or Horde. Each one thinks they're the good ones and the others are the enemy, and each one is just as guilty of crimes against the other. E.g., it's damn hard to say "Dwarves are good, Tauren are evil" with a straight face, when the dwarves are the ones desecrating the taurens' cemeteries and such in the name of archaeology.
Basically if you can view one of those cultures as "evil" or "inferior" just because they're different from the RL western culture, then you've just discovered your own bias. Not Blizzard's.
Sad to break this to you but Open Source doesn't mean "look but don't touch", nor "it's open only as long as it doesn't interfere with my business plans", or it would have made MS the champion of OS. (Stuff like MFC always came with sources. You just were forbidden to use them for anything that intereferes with MS's world domination, such as porting them to another OS.)
Open Source means you can take my code, port it to whatever you damn wish, fork it into whatever other purpose you damn wish, install it on competing hardware or on robotic sharks with lasers on their heads, pack it on your own distro CD and try to undercut the price of mine, etc. You may have to abide by some minimal restrictions, such as "but you can't turn my OSS into your closed source" (GPL) or "ffs, have some decency and do acknowledge the original authors" (BSD), but none really tells you on what hardware can you run it or with whom you can't compete.
Is it that great for Apple or any other corporation trying to build a monopoly out of interlocking pieces, to raise entry barriers? Well, no, in fact it's pretty bad to that end, because it lowers everyone's entry barriers. (E.g., if I wanted to compete with IBM's P5 computers, if they run Linux, it lowers my entry barriers because I can just recompile Linux for mine too. It just saved me from writing a whole OS. It's one less interlocking piece standing in my way.)
But as they say, if you can't stand the heat, then get the fuck out of the kitchen. It's that simple. If Apple can't stand OSS kind of competition, then it can stop pretending it's some great champion of OSS. It's that simple.
If it's just incomplete pieces you're supposed to look at and never use for anything competing with Apple's business plans, and which can be pulled out without notice if anyone ever actually figures out such a way to use them, just isn't OSS. It's just some corporate PR smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, trying to look all open without actually taking the risks associated with actually being open. What Apple tried to have there is neither "free as in speech" nor "free as in beer", but just a weird "free as in some meaningless buzzword that our PR drones can hype."
Hand-waving it as "bah, the normal users won't notice" is:
A) Irrelevant. I don't personally go through the Linux kernel or OpenOffice sources daily either, but the fact remains that I'm _free_ to. That's the crux of the whole issue. _If_ I ever actually need to hack some kernel driver to read my files off an old medium (I've actually had to, back in 2000), there's no corporate boss to decide for me "nah, you don't need to see those."
B) An incredible case of tunnel view. Just because users X and Y can't or won't read kernel sources, doesn't mean they can't benefit from the work of user Z who does. Even if I were Joe Average with zero programming knowledge, and unable to personally modify the kernel driver I've mentioned, then maybe someone else could do it for me. Maybe if I'm overly rich or some company or government agency, I can just hire someone who knows his/her way around that stuff. Maybe someone else had the same ancient drive and controller and had done that work already, so I just need to download it.
And, don't get me wrong, I'm not even telling you that you should choose OSS over closed, or whatever. If for you it's irrelevant because you personally haven't edited a kernel, sure, go ahead and make your own choices. But let's stop pretending that it's the apex of openness and transparency, because it ain't.
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You know, that sounds like just what pushed me towards programming.
For whatever other qualities my parents had, and much as they did give me some good education too, they had two problems:
1. Between them and grandma, I had exactly zero privacy.
It may sound like "wtf, he'll have privacy when he's on his own, not in _my_ house", but seriously, please don't do that to your kid. Even the most affectionate cat needs its moments when it's alone.
It's not even just that _they_ were with me all the time (I couldn't even just go to a freaking summer camp, one of them had to come there to keep keeping an eye on me), the worst was that they told everyone every single detail I ever did. It's a freaking nightmare to live with your whole life posted on a public billboard, so to speak. Virtually _noone_ is _that_ extroverted. It gives everyone in town control over your life: e.g., you can't tell your friends "sorry, can't come now, I haven't finished homework" when you know they already know, or will find out, exactly at which hour you were already done with your homework. Or not without quickly losing every single friend you ever had.
Or to give an example that's still traumatic to think about, I had a girlfriend at some point in high school (yes, I wasn't that nerdy) which pretty quickly got addicted to my computer. Well, fairy 'nuff, I'm not even opposed to sharing the computer, but let's at least try to do something else too. So I pull a "let's go out today, mom doesn't let me use the computer today." (Right, I'm losing all nerd credibility here;) Mom actually called her to tell her that's not true. That was one relationship that went down hill very fast thereafter.
2. Their approach to "rewarding" any personal initiative was, well, best illustrated by Mac Hall Comics. (It's just a comic and safe for work.) Just about everything I did was most likely to be met with, literally, "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do that?" or "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" It was as good as a slap in the face, let me tell you.
You get the idea.
Thing is, programming was something that side-stepped both issues and put _me_ in control. Finally. Bloody finally.
Now they're both programmers and perfectly capable of understanding what I did there, but:
A) Anyone they _could_ tell stuff like "our little Moraelin used a goto instead of a loop today" (and have any hope they'd understand that) was usually way outside the circle of people I was in. Which was as good as having some privacy for a change.
B) They were actually pretty easy to satisfy in that domain. I suppose that when a kid writes machine code and it works, it's pretty hard to pull a "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" (And I really mean machine code: the 1K RAM in a ZX-81 wasn't enough for an assembler, so I had to convert it to hex by hand.) If nothing else, it works.
Well, true, but that's why I was talking about getting to level 60, as opposed to "finishing" the game. The end-game grind in WoW is there more as a time-sink to prevent you from finishing the game, than anything else. Even if you have massive disposable time to sink into that, as far as I'm concerned, at that point the game is essentially over and the content is over. I have better things to do with my time than doing MC the 1000'th time.
That "content" is there just as an ellaborate scam. People have been educated that "winners never quit and quitters never win" and that they must 100% finish a game before their mom bought them the next one. And like any such notion, when you have a few million people educated that they _must_ be X (where X can be "patriot", "not a quitter", "real man", etc), you'll have someone using that to shaft them. Blizzard knows that a large percentage of the population _must_ "finish" the game (collect all equipment, kill Onyxia, etc) before they can cancel their subscription, so Blizzard knows how they can shaft those people into keeping paying long after the content is over and the game stopped being enjoyable.
So basically if someone doesn't have time for those, well, IMHO they haven't lost much. Whatever RL commitments or activities kept them from doing that, are probably more fun. Heck, watching paint dry is more fun.
At any rate, at that point, the _only_ use for that equipment is... so you can move on to even higher level instances to grind through repeatedly. I.e., if you can't make that kind of time investment for the first tier instances, then you don't have the time for the tier 2 or the new tier 3 raids either, so basically you haven't lost much. Buying equipment for RL cash at that point is pretty stupid if you don't have the time to actually _use_ that equipment.
Dunno about him, but I'm in my mid-30's, and, no, I'm not still in college, nor fresh out of it. So are my co-workers that play MMOs. Two even have kids. And, you know, they can still play a MMO and earn their levels and items the honest way.
"Time investment" is something you don't have to do in 16 hour bursts. Just because it takes, say, 200 hours to get to level 60 (just a number pulled out of the hat for example sake), it doesn't mean you're in a race to cross that 200 hours line in the least days. Some kid will do it in 12.5 days at 16 hours a day, but getting there in 200 days at an average of 1 hour per day is no shame either. You _can_ get the same number of hours out of the game, see the same content, and do the same quests either way. I.e., from the point of view of actually playing the game and not just willy-waving about the score, there's still the same number of game hours to play, and still the same quantity of content to enjoy. So what is the problem if that content lasts you for more days, at whatever number of minutes per day you can afford to spend there?
So basically, since that's where that discussion started, I still see no excuse for buying items and gold for real cash instead. I can understand the economics of why that trade forms, but it's still essentially cheating in a multiplayer game, I still despise those who do it. I couldn't care what someone does in their single player games, but cheating against other players is the mark of the low life.
Doubly so if they're insecure enough to pay real money to cheat. I mean, geesh, at least the idiots with wall-hacks and aim-bots in CS just downloaded one for free, but actually reaching for the credit card to buy an un-earned advantage against some kid... geesh, how insecure can one get.
BTW, don't take this as a personal attack or anything. You've already said you play RTS instead. I can certainly respect that. I'm talking about those who just use the "but I don't have as much time as a 13 year old!" just as a blanket excuse to cheat against those 13 year olds. That's what I find lame.
And I see no point in even trying a game any more, if even their own business model is selling game items to idiots for money. If from the start the "competition" (for those who view it that way) is just an excuse to sell advantages to some contestants, then what's the point of even competing? It certainly won't prove skill, knowledge, even time investment. It will just prove who's willing to blow more RL cash, and I certainly have no wish to take part in that kind of a self-destructive competition.
I already know, for example, that in a certain buggy web-based game someone blew over 20,000 USD on getting in-game advantages. Roll that sum around in your head a bit. Can I compete with that kind of a money-blower? Yes. Do I see any point in it? No. I can think of far better ways to use that money. And I certainly have better things to do with my time than being the non-paying fodder for paying gankers in that kind of a game, too.
Because that's what those games invariably degenerate into, if they didn't outright start that way. When your main income source are the idiots willing to pay real cash for a +20 Sword Of Ganking or for a Level 3 Mech in a Level 1 Battletech-like game, guess which group does the game catter to? When you have to make a choice between (A) losing a non-paying Random J Newbie that's been repeatedly ganked right in the newbie area and (B)losing Lord L33tN00bKi113r who's paying good cash for the special ammo to gank the newbies with, guess which of them the devs end up bending over backwards to keep?
No idea what _are_ you thinking about, but the more mundane reason is that the cat seemed to be very determined that it has to be dad. Very vocal about it too. Took her about two days to give up and go ahead with a member of her own species. To her defense, though, we had gotten her as a small kitten and had never seen another cat ever since. I can't know what really went through her fuzzy head, but I can only guess that she thought we're her species and the tomcats are some other kind of animal.
;)
That or we had a zoophile cat
So you're willing to anthropomorphise a cat, a robot or a video game character. Thing is, it's not just a human trait.
When your dog accepts you as the pack leader, for example, he's doing the same: he's willing to consider you a big dog. You probably can't call it "anthropomorphising", since the "anthropos" part is the wrong one, but it's essentially the same act: they're willing to personify you as a member of his species.
Cats do the same, to various extents and with various effects. E.g., being animals that tend to learn from other cats, personifying humans as cats gets them to try to immitate some human stuff. E.g., when I was a child, grandma's cat tried bringing me mice just like she brought for her kittens. E.g., we even had a female cat which, when she first went in heat, seemed to want to have sex with dad. Eventually she had to settle for a tomcat from the neighbourhood, though.
Or both are perfectly capable of personifying a toy and playing with it like with another member of their species.
The same goes for a lot of other animals, including birds.
Well, I'll reserve judgment on whether it's economically viable yet. It's certainly possible, but the economic viability is mainly dictated by whether it's cheaper or not than to buy oil from the Middle East instead. As long as people can save a cent per gallon by tanking on gasoline from Iraq instead of on domestic ethanol, they'll continue to do so. When oil prices will rise high enough, we'll switch to whichever is cheaper than that. Still, yes, alternatives do exist, ethanol included.
E.g., we already know how to make synthetic gasoline out of coal. It's not cheap, which is why people still prefer to import oil from the Middle East instead. But it's certainly feasible. Most of Germany's tank warfare in WW2 happened on synthetic fuel.
E.g., it's possible to reform almost any organic waste (e.g., see the stories about using turkey guts or dead cats or whatnot) into usable petroleum. As long as it contains enough hydrogen and carbon, it can be reformed into something close enough to petroleum. There's no energy won there, but it can convert energy from an uranium reactor into something one can pour into a car's tank.
E.g., we're starting to genetically engineer algae which contain 50% lipids, and can be pretty efficiently processed into synthetic petroleum.
E.g., even the oil resources aren't as close to extinction as doomsday theorists would have us believe. There's for example still plenty of oil left in Siberia and even in the USA. The reason the USA doesn't bother extracting its own oil any more (although once was the world's main oil exporter) is that, basically, it's cheaper to import and refine the oil from the Middle East.
Plus, see the thing above about being able to reform most hydrocarbons into synthetic petroleum. There's a lot of tar and oil shale which is very possible to crack into lighter hydrocarbons. Not cheap, but possible.
So, yeah, we're not really short on options. Doomsday theorists may have a field day preaching doom-and-gloom "society will break down when oil runs out theories", but, yeah, humanity isn't even near bending over that easily. Or needing to.
Still, looking at it pragmatically, hydrogen is another option, and it's always good to have extra options. If plan B turns out to not really work that well, it's never bad to have a plan C, right?
It has a certain hype-able charm about it too. It sounds high-tech, environmentally friendly, etc. And, to a certain class of uneducated retards, it may even sound like it's free perpetual energy. (Hydrogen comes out of water, and water is free, right? There are gazillions of gazillions of tons of it in the oceans, right?) So since those can vote too, there's a certain political capital in promising a hydrogen economy.
But still, with or without that, it is nevertheless an extra option, and it's never a bad thing to explore possible options. _If_ it actually ever works the way it's hyped, and they overcome all the problems, then we can use it, and if not, noone forces anyone to. Heck, even if it doesn't work, some useful new technologies may come out of that.
Which of those options we'll use in the end (or maybe find a new one) will, in the end, be decided by the free market. Maybe it will be ethanol, maybe it will be synthetic gasoline, or maybe we'll finally have good enough batteries for electric cars. Regardless of what politicians may hype for political capital, people will in the end choose the one that gives them more milleage per dollar. That's why we're all importing oil from the Middle East, after all.
So basically I wouldn't really worry about it, or not yet.
Actually, a pet peeve of mine with games, although I a fan of story-drive RPGs, is that most game devs just have no fucking clue how to tell a story. Yes, we occasionally get games like KOTOR or even Oblivion, but they're the exceptions in a sea of sub-productions which just can't tell a story. (And if you look at what, say, Penny Arcade had to say about Grandia 2, and Tycho's resulting rant about japanese RPGs as a whole, you'll see that at least I'm not the only one who sees it that way.)
"Consider the reverse: John Carmack is a good game developer. Imagine him trying to make a movie."
Yet you'd cheerfully let a game programmer like Carmack write the story for a game, eh? Because that happens every day. Some guy who's been a talented programmer, or maybe an artist, gets promoted to "game designer" instead of to management, as would happen in the enterprise world. He's now a "veteran of the industry", has worked X thousands of hours on implementing other people's ideas in Y games, so he just _has_ to be just about ready to design one, right?
Actually, "Peter's Principle" says he probably isn't. Scripting other people's scenario doesn't make one good at writing an original story, any more than hauling bricks for a cathedral makes one an architect. He can maybe even know how to design a good monster or an encounter that can be scripted well, but telling a story is just not his forte. (Though translating one into C++ or Python might be.)
I remember reading a Clive Barker interview after Undying got released, and basically he mentions some of the uninspired stuff the original game design had. Like the coaxing he had to do to get the devs out of the idea that, basically, "scary horror game == a bigger end-level boss with predictable attacks." As Clive Barker said, that's actually the _least_ scary thing you can possibly put into a game.
And having played enough games to have enough info for an opinion there, I'll 100% side with Clive Barker on that one: there's no freaking way a giant boss battle can possibly invoke horror. It can cause an adrenaline rush, it can cause frustration, it can do lots of things, but fear is one thing it _won't_ invoke, no matter what you texture that boss like.
That's just the thing: they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and don't even realize when it doesn't fit the story or theme at all. People who worked on coding or painting a giant boss for the end-level since the Atari 2600 or NES, assume that telling a story is all about having a giant boss with predictable attacks at the end of the level. That's what they've learned, that's what they've played, that's what they've been asked to code over and over again. At some point it gets mistaken for the _only_ way (or at least the _right_ way) to tell a story in video game format.
So basically, you know, I'm not that scared of seeing someone from the movie business have another try, for a change. In fact, I'm really looking forward to it. At least some of those guys _do_ know how to tell a story. Not all, but enough do. Sure, they've done it in another medium before, but it still beats seeing someone stuck in a Super Mario Bros mentality trying to write a story.
Dude, trust me, I did read what the new system is all about, and I _am_ indeed addressing the problems of the _old_ system. If you read the whole chain back, you'll see it was all about such claims as, basically, "bah, all the dangers about hydrogen were just hype" or about the odorant, basically, "bah, the problem was already solved, see propane". And all I'm saying is, no, they weren't.
So, basically, you know, take your own advice and read before going on a rant.
Unless you mean that Sony actually wanted to:
1. stealthily put a general-purpose rootkit interface on your computer, that leaves it wide open for any script kiddie to hide their malware with,
2. utterly break your computer if you try to uninstall it, even after you no longer own the CD or are interested in listening to the music on it
3. have exploitable bugs in both the original rootkit and in the "solution" to the problem they created
then no, it didn't do exactly what it was supposed to do. Pushing DRM on the consumers is a worthy discussion in its own right, but this crap went beyond that.
If you just buy an iPod with Apple's "fair play" DRM on it, or a Creative Zen with MS's DRM on it, or when you download the latest Media Player or Real One, that's DRM-ed. When then discover it can limit what I do with my music... that's DRM. And it does just what it's supposed to do, and nothing more: it just applies those rights to the DRM'ed music you bought, if you load it on that device. Nothing more. And if you uninstall that player or sell that iPod, then that DRM goes with it.
But Sony's heavy-handed crap was more like breaking into your house when you're away, and bugging your VCR to be sure you don't play some copied tape. And in the process leaving your front door lock broken, making any thief's job easier. And, oh, if you un-bug your VCR, it'll weld your garrage door shut.
I do believe that that's no longer "just DRM", that's a whole new level of crap. In fact the kind of crap that should be outright considered criminal. DRM or no DRM, that doesn't give them a carte blanche to stealthily install a rootkit on someone's computer.
It's the kind of Wild West vigilante justice that's just not Sony's business to enforce in a republic ruled by the law. We're no longer in the days where you'd just get a posse and go kick the Joneses' door in to see if they're the ones who stole your branded cow. So Sony has no business doing the same to the Joneses' computer. Plain and simple.
"Many other fuel gases lack a perceptible smell, too. Trace amounts of an odorant chemical (ethyl mercaptan) are added to propane and to natural gas so that leaks can be detected. This is very much a solved problem."
What works for propane at room temperatures, doesn't work for hydrogen at 20 Kelvin. If you put ethyl mercaptan in it, it would _freeze_ at that temperature. And when some hydrogen boils off, the odorant probably won't boil off too, because it's not just below its boiling point, it's outright below its freezing point too.
In other words, congrats, you've just discovered distillation. Because that's exactly what's going to happen there. You'll just get the hydrogen distilled off the mixture and still as odourless as ever.
So basically wake me up if you can point me at some odorant that has a comparable boiling point to that of hydrogen. Only _then_ can you tell me that the problem is already solved. Otherwise just assuming that what worked for propane must work for hydrogen is... cute, but still stupid.
The problems with hydrogen are many, and handwaving some in, some out, just seems weird.
E.g., energy density is a real problem. While H2 does have 3 times more energy density than gasoline per weight unit, it's about 10 times lighter than gasoline even in liquefied form, and thus has worse energy density per _volume_. (And hideously less energy density if you use it as compressed gas.)
But transporting and storing it liquefied is harder than you'd think, because it boils at around -253 Celsius. That's cold enough to _freeze_ air on contact. It's also going to be a pain to keep it that cold, and even in the best insulated tanks it's going to constantly evaporate. In fact, a lot of it will evaporate every day.
And unlike natural gas, you can't just compress it until it stays liquid at room temperature. If you look at its phase diagram, a liquid phase just doesn't exist anywhere above -240 C. That's where its critical point lies. No matter how much you compress it, it just won't liquefy above that. So you _have_ to keep it that cold.
E.g., if you want to talk energy, there you go, there's even more energy spent cooling it to those temperatures, and a massive waste of energy when then it just evaporates in a car sitting in a garrage for a month.
E.g., energy density isn't really helped if you have to pack it in a massive tank, either to hold it under pressure or to keep it cold. If the tank itself adds an extra half a ton to your car, you haven't really won much. (Rememeber the lower energy density, so the tank will also have to be bigger to get the same mileage out of it.)
E.g., if you want to talk safety, you don't want to be the guy that gets splashed by liquid at -253C when the tank ruptures in an accident. Or yes, when a tanker ruptures on the highway. Yes, it will eventually just rise up, but in the meantime it will instantly kill anything it spills onto.
E.g., yes, a problem is that it leaks, so you'd have hydrogen constantly leaking in your garage. Whether your roof is sealed tight or not is a moot point when you have a couple percent of your tank's capacity evaporating daily in it. That's a _lot_ more vapour produced than gasoline produces. And you can't just seal the tak shut to keep the vapours in, since the resulting pressure will eventually be tremendous. So you don't want a garrage that's just not sealed shut, you'll want one that's ventilated constantly, even in winter. Otherwise it can jolly well blow up.
E.g., the problem is made worse by the fact that hydrogen has no colour or smell of its own, so you can't _know_ if you've walked into a room full of it or not. Gasoline, for all its other problems, does have a smell. Sure, it's _unlikely_ that you'd find the room just full of it, but do you actually want to take that risk? Plus, when you talk hundreds of millions of cars, some poor bugger may blow himself up every hour. (As they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you. Probabilities are funny like that when they involve large numbers.) Do you want to be the car manufacturer hit by the lawsuits and negative PR of that?
E.g., worse yet, it also _burns_ with an invisible flame, so you could walk into a jet of flame from a punctured hose or tanker that did ignite, and not even know it until you get burned by it. Again, you can handwave that as _unlikely_, but it's a very real problem and given hundreds of millions of cars, somewhere it will eventually happen.
And so on. And, yes, I'd be interested to know how these palladium balls address those problems. E.g., will it actually make the energy density worth it, or just dillute it some more?
And conversely, hand-waving the energy and carbon concerns as some global catastrophe is... uninformed, to say the least.
E.g., yes, we already knew that on the whole you don't get more energy from burning hydrogen than you put into splitting the water. That's obvious. The problem is that while we're damn good at producing electricity, and outstanding at making electrica
"Buying from Dell instead of Levono isn't creating any more jobs in the US, so you might as well go for whatever company gives you the best computer."
Actually, it does. At least Dell has their marketting and management staff in the USA. And after a bit of a fallout over outsourcing, they even moved some of the tech support back. So while, yes, it's impossible to keep all the money in the US, there's a difference between (A) letting the trailing curve of that keynesian multiplier go to China, and (B) just giving it all to the Chinese economy.
As for:
- "comparative advantage", that advantage would have to be pretty fucking huge for a _government_ to be better off doing that. See that keynesian multiplier again. Every 1$ invested in the USA, creates more than 1$ worth of jobs in the USA _and_ you get a large part of it back in taxes. (Income tax as applied nowadays didn't even exist in the 19'th century when the "comparative advantage" theory was developped.) So basically a dollar spent by the government on imports isn't quite the same thing as a dollar spent by Dell on imports. Just saving 1% on computers bought from Lenovo instead of getting more than 1% back in taxes, and that's not even factoring the effect on the US economy, is plain old stupid and short sighted.
Plus it's losing sight of what the defficit spending and generally government spending was supposed to solve to start with. Keynesian economics were _not_ supposed to give the government a carte blanche to spend as much as it wants to. Raising government spending was just supposed to (temporarily) create extra demand to fix an over-production crisis. If the US economy is in such great shape that it doesn't need the government's money, then the US government should just cut spending, pay the debt, and maybe lower taxes. Not create that extra economic growth in another country.
BTW, that's another factor in that multiplier effect: the higher the taxes, the lower the multiplier.
- "globalization", is good and fine, but any government's first concern should be their own economy. The kind of "globalization" where taxpayer money is used to subsidize another country's economy. Simply put, the US government is supposed to represent the US interests in that globalization. Not to be the good Samaritan helping the Chinese get to economic parity with the USA.
I know this is going to come across as chauvinistic or whatnot. Bear with me. I'm not an American, and don't really like the USA government, but in this case I can't blame them either. For a _government_ I find it normal to try to stimulate domestic economy and not the economy in China. In fact, I find it their duty to.
See, there was this thing called the Great Depression. And there was this guy called John Maynard Keynes who came up with a new economic theory. Best known as Keynesian economics Look it up someday. You might see that a lot of the political bullshit nowadays a la "elect us because the current government has inflation and unemployment" are actually not some national catastrophe, but just the way economy works. (E.g., that all else being equal, there's a curve with unemployment on one axis and inflation on the other one. You lower one, the other automatically rises. So the best _any_ government can do is pick a point on that curve.) But I digress.
At any rate, Keynes came up with the idea that in times of depression the government can help the economy by creating extra demand. This creates jobs and generally helps the economy. Not just jobs at the company receiving the government contract, but also jobs down the line. E.g., the people who get jobs making missiles, then go buy cars (or the company buys trucks), creating employment in that industry too. And so on. This creates a multiplicator effect in which each dollar spent by the government creates X dollars worth of jobs.
And to get back to the case at hand, the _whole_ idea of this exercise was to help the _national_ economy, not the economy of China. Any government using taxpayer money to create jobs in China instead of at home is completely retarded and needs to be voted out of office ASAP.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against China or the fine Chinese people. But it's the Chinese government that should fix that economy, not the USA one. The USA government has to invest in the USA economy, and the Chinese government needs to invest in the Chinese economy. Either one using its taxpayers' money to subsidize the other's economy is plain old stupid.
""From the (short) article: "The judge wrote that 'Antitrust laws are for 'the protection of competition, not competitors.'"
So what does that say about the Microsoft antitrust case brought up by the likes of Netscape and others?"
IANAL, but AFAIK, it doesn't say anything was wrong, really. They too had to prove in court that not only MS is hurting competition, but also that it hurts the consumer.
I.e., in a nutshell the gist of it is that you can't go and say "I can't compete with company X. Make them raise their prices, so I have a chance." What you have to prove is that first and foremost this has hurt the consumers (e.g., company X is in a position to shamelessly gouge its customers, or companies X and Y aggreed to fix their prices high, or it has some other effect that consumers obviously don't want) and in which way are they creating an artifficial barrier, i.e., other than for example price or brand name, that keeps others from competing.
So in that MS antitrust case, yes, they had to argue that:
A) MS's monopoly is hurting the consumers (e.g., that the cost of a MS OS has been steadily rising in the same time interval where the cost of the computer itself has been steadily dropping. And since at the time it was just short of impossible to buy a computer without Windows, that was an ever-increasing burden upon consumers as a whole.) and
B) that there is an artifficial barrier in the way of anyone trying to compete with MS. The keyword being "anyone", not "me". As was said, those laws are to protect competition, not one or two competitors. That's why for example MS was able to use Linux as an example of "but we still have competitors in the OS arena", although it wasn't the product of Netscape and the other.
You may notice that the same applies to this lawsuit too. See the other quote in the summary, about the GPL allowing people to get programs extremely cheaply. It's not part of the same "protecting the competition" reasoning, but addressing the other (more important) point: then it hasn't hurt the consumer. Without that, you don't really have an anti-trust case.
"Deleting a counterstrike character doesn't destroy thousands of US dollars in intellectual property licenses.
Deleting a Second Life character generally does. I know I have at least $2000 USD in assets, and my account is only a few months old."
I have no problems with arguing it like that. Sure, if you want to talk about money lost by the actual human, we can do that. That's not what I was arguing.
I'm not even opposed to attaching a monetary value to the character itself, on top of any money invested in virtual property. After all, level 60 WoW or EQ2 characters are sold on ebay every day, so they must be worth some money to the buyer.
All I do find stupid was presenting it as the grievous moral "wrong" of executing a virtual character and not giving it a virtual trial with due process and all. I mean, wtf, I didn't know that a non-sentient collection of bits, polygons and textures was even alive or sentient. Even if one takes virtual entities as "property" or whatnot, that character is barely an item, a puppet controlled by the player, not a living creature with rights an feelings. So any moral "right" or "wrong" based on executing the poor character feel as stupid as when talking about executing a Barbie doll.
Again, I'm not opposed to even attaching a monetary value to that virtual Barbie doll. But implying that it had the same rights as a living being (e.g., the right to a fair trial in the game world, or the right to live implied by getting outraged at that "execution") is patently absurd.
"Besides, how many of you can pull yourselves from your computers long enough to play on a console?"
*raises hand*
If I'm going to play a game anyway, why would I care that much if I sit on this chair in front of the computer or on that sofa in front of the TV? No, seriously. I'm there for the game, regardless of whether it's a computer, console, or a magic Ouija board with a LCD screen.
Seems to me that some people get so focused on the means, that they lose sight of the goal. The computer is not the goal, and the console isn't the goal either. They're just _means_. Playing a good game is the goal.
That's it. That's what being a "gamer" is all about: games. Nothing else. Everything else is in some other category. And let me recap it, for those who still don't get it:
- E.g., those just wanting to brag about how many more 3DMark points their new 7900 GTX scores than my PS2, those aren't really looking for the "gamer" category. I don't play 3DMark, I play games. For that kinda discussion, that's over there, through the door labelled "willy wavers".
- E.g., contrary to popular belief, stupid fanboy wars about Nintendo vs Sony vs Microsoft aren't "gamer" stuff either. The brand name isn't a goal, and anyone who has serving Nintendo or Sony or MS as a goal really needs to take a break and a critical look at their life. Again, playing a good game is the goal. Owning a Nintendo or a Sony or a MS console or a PC is merely a means to playing the game you want to play, nothing more.
- E.g., no, as a gamer I don't give a flying fuck about the controller being with/without vibration, banana shaped, nunchaku shaped, mouse+keyboard, or whatever, either. That's just means too. Will there be a great game that requires that controller? In some cases, I seriously doubt it, but the final judgment will be actually seeing that game on the shelves, or not. Then I'll go and buy the right controller for it too. (I had no problems buying lightguns for lightgun games, or a Dreamcast keyboard for chatting in PSO, after all. But again, those were the means, not the end. The purpose was the game, not the lightgun.)
Will I buy a PS3 or a Wii or an XBox 360? Hell if I know. Maybe all three, maybe neither, maybe something in between. Depends on whether any of them will have enough games I really want to play. If they have the games, sure, sign me up. If not, not. It's all about the games, in the end, everything else is just means.
And again, if a game I want to play is only on a console, I'll have no problem getting up from the computer and moving over to the console. Why wouldn't I? Doubly so if the whole genre doesn't even exist on the PC. (When was the last time there was a fighting game for the PC, for example?)
"Do you think this bill would have passed unanimously if we were talking about violent books? What about violent paintings?"
Sad thing is, it already happened. Games are only the latest scapegoat. Before that it was (in no particular order) comics, music, board games, etc.
E.g., since you mention books or paintings, how about comic books? Seems to me like it fits both categories outstandingly. Well, long before computer games even existed, Congress was savaging comic books and presenting them as the great Satan that turns innocent children into mass murderers and rapists. And probably turning them into homosexuals (e.g., Batman and Robin were used as a prime example of that), BDSM deviants (e.g., Wonder Woman), and God knows what other kinds of monsters.
(Mind you, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being gay or into BDSM from _my_ point of view. I couldn't care less what other people do between like-minded consenting adults. But I am saying that the anti-comics campaign _did_ present those as dangerous deviant behaviour that comics supposedly brainwash children into immitating. I'm guessing they counted on enough puritan voters for which those did count as an abhomination and danger to society.)
They didn't get deterred by such facts as that some of those comics were bloody _obviously_ not for children, _and_ that any parent was jolly well able to see that they're buying a horror comic featuring a chainsaw murder right on the cover for little Billy. They didn't even get deterred by the fact that, in spite of the endless hype, polls showed that the vast majority of people still didn't buy it that comics cause juvenile deliquency.
I.e., there's not even that much to speculate about that question. It already happened. It being art never stopped the sharks from using it as political capital.
Where it sorta differred, is that the comics industry didn't as much get executed by the legislators as allowed to honourably commit seppuku (a.k.a., harakiri, i.e., suicide). The industry bent over backwards to aggree to censor itself, just to be left alone already, and in the process turned from a major industry (at least as number of customers went) into a niche.
IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), but my bet would have been on the Chandrasekhar limit there, which puts the limit at a little under 1.5 solar masses. (Admittedly, that does change with the chemical composition, so no idea how that works for heavy enough elements associated with "rocks".) Since we're talking a planet, not a star, I'll assume there was never nuclear fusion in the centre to generate extra pressure, so the limit would be purely and only the limit at which degenerate electron pressure is no longer enough.
Also, rocks (solids, metals, whatever) may be happy to sit in high gravity, but not _that_ high, or not without remaining the same kind of thing one calls a "rock" in casual conversations. A mass supported by electron degeneracy pressure isn't quite the same as the mostly crystalline structure you'd have in mind for a "normal" rocky planet.
I'm also not sure if it would form mountains or trenches (even 3 to 4 mm high) at that point, since the whole thing is held together by the quantum pressure of a "gas" made of electrons. It's, so to speak, some atoms "floating" in that electron gas. What keeps it from collapsing at that point isn't a crystalline structure that can be re-shaped to form a mountain or a trench, but just the fact that getting any denser would force the electrons to occupy even higher energy states, thus increasing the pressure, thus pushing it back into shape. So at a wild guess, that thing couldn't form any long lived mountains any more than you can get mountains on Jupiter.
I'm also not sure if you can get just a little neutronium in the centre, while leaving the surface intact. The way I understood it (but again, IANAP) once it does start to collapse into neutronium, then it goes all the way. (Maybe also blowing a part of itself into space, supernova style. The fast collapse will produce enough energy for that.) If the pressure is enough for the centre to collapse, this will just produce an avalanche reaction where the collapse both increases the gravity (less R --> more g) _and_ takes out some of the electron gas that supported the star to start with. So basically it's like puncturing an inflated balloon: it won't stop at losing just a little gas.
That's why we talk about the Chandrasekhar limit as a hard limit. In fact, hard enough to use Type Ia supernovae as a standard candle for really long range astronomy. You can know pretty exactly at what mass the star went *BOOM* and exactly how bright that explosion was. Because it happened as soon as the star went even a just a tiny little bit above that limit. When that happened, it didn't just get a little neutronium in the core, but started the final countdown.
But again, IANAP, so I'd be curious to hear about it from a real physicist.
We can discuss that too, but the TFA accusation was that WoW is outright racist and that it outright presents Tauren and Trolls as evil. Hence, somehow the Native Americans and Jamaicans too, by association.
That said, people stereotype each other every day, even if they were all Caucasian race.
For starters, by country. E.g., see how every other movie or game that has either italians or mafia, associates one with the other. E.g., see how germans are still pigeonholed by Hollywood as some variant of mad scientists (complete with a bogus accent no real german has), warmongers (all civ games and clones slapped that on Germany as an inherent characteristic), or outright nazis. E.g., see the stereotypes about the French, which got dug out and waved around like a banner by every single redneck (now that's another stereotype) because France didn't support the war in Iraq. Etc.
Then by region inside the same country. You could fill a dozen tomes just with what northern americans think about southerners, and viceversa, what northern germans think about southern germans, and viceversa, what the English think about the Scotts, or viceversa, etc.
Or other distinctions such as whether you live in a city versus living in a village. (In Karl Marx's manifesto, for example, he's willing to credit the burgeoisie he otherwise despises with saving people from the "idiocy" of rural life. No, seriously, it really says "idiocy". Check out the text on the Gutenberg Project.) Or inner city versus fashionably living in the suburbs. Or whatever.
Then there are the ever popular gender stereotypes. "Women can't drive or park." (Never mind that the statistics of insurance companies, the ones who get to pay for those accidents, say that women cause half the number of accidents at the same number of miles driven.) "Women can't use computers." Etc. Throw in the hair colour too, and you have some people who can't even stop from inventing or memorizing one more joke of a proof that blondes are born stupid.
And to be fair I'm sure there are enough stereotypes for men among women too.
Then by profession, hobby, age, whatever. "You're a nerd, therefore you have nothing better to do than do overtime on a Sunday." Or "You're a nerd, therefore you should be happy I let you come over and fix my computer." Or if you read Dilbert, it makes a good living out of preaching that any kind of management are inherently clueless idiots.
Heck, even buying a new car or getting a new hobby can get one pigeonholed in some category like "guy at mid-life crisis, probably insecure about his penis size."
Basically there _are_ plenty of stereotypes being thrown around among white people too. Certainly not worse than the racist stereotypes about other races, but then again, worse than just having your accent used in a video game.
In fact, caucasian race accents get used in games too every day. E.g., IIRC KOTOR sported Australian accents on the Mandalorians. E.g., fake German accents on mad scientists, villains and the like. Etc. And if you bought some games translated in, say, German, you'd find they use Germany's various regional accents or dialects for the ethnic or cultural groups in the game.
And here's the thing: you don't see anyone getting up in arms about it. You don't see the Australians, for example, revolting that KOTOR associated them with the warmongering Mandalorians. Everyone can understand that the game just needed some outlandish accent, and maybe get a chuckle out of seeing what theirs was used for. So I'm sure the fine people of Jamaica can live too with having theirs used.
"Executing" a virtual character might sound emotional and all, but it happens every day in all games. E.g., join a CounterStrike game and you'll see more people "executed" per minute than in any dystopian SF setting. Or seeing the UT statistics, it had more kills in a week than the whole WW2, and I dare say it probably topped the whole Star Wars, including destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star over its life span.
So what? I'll go and say someone would have to be utterly clueless -- in fact Jack Thompson kinda clueless -- to really treat "executing" a virtual character the same as if someone executed a real human.
I thought I've heard it all in my brief days as a coder on a MUD. You could hear cheaters, griefers and other fucktards invoking the most idiotic rationalizations as to why they should be allowed to do that. Including
- "freedom of speech" (no, the constitution does not give any such rights other than in relation to the government), or
- "I can't properly role-play my evil concept character if I can't exploit that bug" (then get some imagination and find another concept), or
- "I was only intensively testing the bug (for 3 weeks, 8 hours a day) before I report it"
- "If it was technically possible, then I'm within my rights to do that." (guess we should remove the chat channels and "say" command too, or he's within his rights to verbally assault newbies. Plus, nice psychopathic attitude where caring about the other players doesn't even enter the equation.)
Etc. But going "waah, they executed a virtual character" tops any of those as bullshit goes. In fact, it pegs my bullshit meter. Even if they had given that character a virtual crucifixion, like in some other MMO I was reading about, so fucking what? It's just a bunch of bits, bytes and triangles that was never alive or sentient to start with. It's like getting upset about executing a Barbie doll.
What next, then? Forbid people from cancelling a MMO account too, because that's like executing their virtual characters? Forbid them from deleting older characters to make a new one? (After all, just because they're their own characters doesn't give one any more right to execute them, than it gives a mother to execute her own children, right? That was sarcasm, btw.)
As for legal proceedings and due process, that's a _means_ not an _end_ IRL. The fact is, IRL you're never sure that someone really did it. You found a corpse or a broken lock and built some shoddy deduction saying that "X looks like he'd have motive to do that". But you could be wrong. _That_ is why we have all those legal safeguards, not as a purpose in itself.
And even IRL the keywords are "beyond reasonable doubt". That's the point that all those legal safeguards are supposed to get you to: first prove your accusation beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, that's also the point where you can stop. If you've already proven something beyond reasonable doubt, that's it, you can take a break and let justice take its course.
On the other hand, in such a case there are plenty of logs saying he did it, and even he doesn't deny it, so wtf purpose would it serve. You can _know_ he did it. What idiotic purpose would it serve to put up a whole mockery of a justice courth there, when you already have the server logs saying he did it? We already _know_, beyond reasonable doubt, that he did it.
I'd have no need for the whole RL legal circus either if RL had logs proving that the buttler did it, in the dining room, with the poker. Then we could just execute the buttler, and rest assured that we won't be haunted later by discovering that it was someone else and we executed an innocent.
Again, here we already _know_ an innocent wasn't executed.
And again, that all is because IRL we're executing _real_ persons. "Executing" someone's virtual character was never covered by the constitution or whatever. That pixelated avatar never had any rights to start with.
Frankly, that's what scares me the most. If ads become common place, how do you think publishers are going to respect that? I'll tell you how: by stopping publishing medieval games completely. Give them a choice between:
A) an interesting game set in a refreshingly new medieval setup, like Jade Empire, _but_ you can't put Coca Cola and McDonalds ads in it, or not without massively losing more sales than it's worth in the resulting player outrage (even if EB Games won't give you your money back for that, you _can_ warn other potential buyers that the game is nigh impossible to suspend disbelief in. People tell their friends whether a game or a movie was good or bad all the time.)
B) Yet another cheap CS clone set in the modern day. Probably won't be a bestseller as such, but you can recoup at least half the development costs out of ads alone.
Which do you think the average publisher will choose? It's not even speculation, it's a rehash of what's already happened. You can already _know_ what the publisher will choose, because they all have already made a similar choice in a similar situation.
See, there was this dark age in the second half of the 90's, and first years of the new millenium, when everyone produced yet another FPS and most were just unimaginative "me too" clones. On the other hand, genres like adventures skirted with extinction. And the funny part is that it wasn't because gamer tastes had changed. The adventure games market was actually not only alive, but _growing_, yet everyone abandoned it.
You know why that happened? Because FPS were cheaper to produce. You only needed to license any cheap 3D engine, throw together a couple of levels and skins, and call it a game. You didn't need to spend money on scripting a story or complex animations for the interactions or anything. You could make a FPS on _much_ less money than an adventure, so you'd make a profit even if you sold a lot less copies.
So we already know what the publishers chose: the game that was cheaper to produce. Now throw ads in that equation and it's the same situation all over again. I can just see every single game being simply whatever kind or setting promises to rake in the most ad money. And whole genres like medieval RPG disappearing just because they're not that good a place for ads, and they cost more to produce without ads.
And if you're not scared yet, consider this: there was an exit out of that "me too" FPS age, in the form that eventually FPS too needed scripting and animations, so the cost gap narrowed over time. On the other hand, if we do enter a dark age of in-game ads, there may never be a way out. Once publishers start choosing games based on how suited they are for ads, there's no obvious exit from _that_. Whole genres may not just temporarily skirt extinction, but may go extinct and _stay_ extinct for ever.
Well, maybe _you_ realize the value of being subtle and respecting the (potential) customer, but, well, look at internet advertising. (Which in all fairness you do mention.) There the fucktards won the game, so to speak.
;)
It started decent enough there too. Most sites had one small banner on the first page. Nothing in-your face, nothing insisting to stay on top of the text you're trying to read, no fake UIs, etc. Where that ended, well, you know that already.
Maybe _you_ realize what's wrong with that, but there are plenty of psychopaths which basically don't care. They don't even care if it actually helps their paying client sell more products, as long as at the end of the day they have their smoke-and-mirrors "we produced X thousand clicks" statistics.
And belief in "they'll realize the customers won't stand for that" is, no offense, wishful thinking at best. We used to think that about Internet ads too. If you took anyone from the early 90's and told them that 10-15 years later ads would be full-screen animated layers in front of the actual content, extra pages with FMV ads each time you click on a link to an article, etc, they would have said the same. "What? The users will never stand for that kind of thing, and the ad providers know it!! People would stop going to that web site!!" It didn't quite work that way, did it?
Yeah, I'm bitter, but I prefer to think of it as "grapefruit flavoured"
And if you still think games are immune to that, I have an example where it did already happen. At one point I decided to give Planetside another try. Guess what I was treated to, after it downloaded all the patches? A whole fscking FMV ad for their other planned expansion packs, and I wasn't allowed to skip it either. I found it outraging. Not only it wasted my time with the huge ad itself, but it wasted my time to download it as part of a "patch". But I guess the marketroid that came up with that couldn't care less.
So at least at one company (Sony), the marketting guys/girls were already able to impose that kind of a heavy-handed slap in the paying customer's face.
And here's what else I can see coming and I'm definitely not looking forward to:
- heavy-handed blatantly-in-your-face advertising that breaks any suspension of disbelief. (E.g., I can live with having Coca Cola machines and bars selling Coca Cola all over the place, but if they go and make Coca Cola be the mana potions and work some blatant advertisment quests into the main line... well, there goes suspension of disbelief right there. Sorry, there's _no_ way I could take such a universe seriously. Maybe as a parody, but not seriously. E.g., I can live with Yahoo! ads on billboards, but don't freaking go and change my PSO Mag into a floating ad banner for Yahoo! like Sega did. That was one subscription cancelled right there and then.)
- ad providers insisting that all ads are non-cacheable and loaded directly off their servers, so they can personally count the number of hits. See web pages everywhere which would load in 1 second otherwise, but end up taking 10 seconds to load because of the ads. I'm _not_ looking forward to seeing the same effect on games' level load times.
- publishers starting to accept or reject games and settings not based on their merits, but on how suited they are for in-game advertising. E.g., rejecting a great game like Jade Empire just because Coca Cola ads would look out of place in it.
While I'm not denying the insightful anthropology observations, methinks you view WoW a bit one-sided. WoW actually lets you play both sides.
Sure, you can play Alliance and view the Horde as a bunch of primitive superstitious savages with their witch-doctors (shamen) and carved totems, just waiting to be civilized by the White Man.
But the gist is, you can also choose to play one of those tribesmen and try to see the world through their eyes. And I mean not just play an orc for the knock-down protection and axe specialization, or a Tauren for the herbalism bonus and couple of extra hit points. Try to really understand their story, their philosophy (as little of it as the game gives you). Try to really see the world through a Tauren's eyes: their lands poisoned and destroyed by that goblin cartel, their sacred burial places dug up by dwarves who couldn't care less about someone else's traditions or beliefs, etc.
Try to imagine your shaman not just as TEH L33T PVP CL4SS, but really as the keeper of the tribe's lore, customs, identity. The one people come to when they want to honour their ancestors, or need spiritual guidance in their lives. Try to imagine yourself picking up the mace and shield not for xp and gold coins, but really to defend your tribe's very existence and identity against a world bent on wiping it out completely.
Try to understand that when a tribe would end that desperate as to send its shamen on the front line, that tribe is risking its very identity and history, because those were the guys who kept that. Those guys were not just priests of some barbaric spirits, but the living archive and history book of the tribe, plus civil authority figures. If your shamen died, that was the end of the road: from there on you had no history, no lore, no identity. The Romans for example understood this and tried to wipe out druids to erase the gauls' national identity. Made them easier to rule.
Try to follow their quest arcs and understand where they came from, what they want, what they believe in, and that they didn't as much lack Alliance technology, as _rejected_ it.
And if then you can still tell me that the Alliance are the good guys and the Horde as a bunch of primitive savages and stereotypical evil to boot... well, I'm guessing you won't, if you have a degree in anthropology.
"I mean, if someone at Blizzard observed Jamacians (well, actually Rastafarians, as not all Jamacians are as their stereotype makes them out to be) and then said to themselves, 'well I'll make a character out of that' ...then I'd say that's racism."
No, not really. You forget one essential ingredient: for anything to be racism it also has to carry some kind of negative connotation. If it just presents or borrows from some race, but does _not_ pass any kind of judgment of it being "evil" or "inferior", then it's simply not racism.
E.g., Star Wars borrows heavily from the Japanese, but noone would call it racist for that. E.g., Jade Empire isn't just borrowing from ancient China, but is outright set in an exaggerated fantasy version of China. Yet noone would call it a racist game.
And the Horde are just a different bunch of cultures. (You can't even say it's one different culture, because each of its tribal components has a different culture of its own.) They're neither good, nor evil per se, and in many aspects they're not even that different from the Alliance cultures.
E.g., they still live by the same honour rules. They lose honour for attacking civilians, just like the Alliance does, and they gain nothing from attacking weaker opponents, again just like their Alliance counterpart. I.e., it doesn't look "evil" to me in that aspect. There's nothing in there that says "you're great if you go slaughter their women and children and gank their newbies", and which thus could be judged as "evil".
And Blizzard certainly passes no judgment there. You're not asked to choose a "good" or "evil" side, like in EQ2 or COH/COV, you're simply asked to choose Alliance or Horde. Each one thinks they're the good ones and the others are the enemy, and each one is just as guilty of crimes against the other. E.g., it's damn hard to say "Dwarves are good, Tauren are evil" with a straight face, when the dwarves are the ones desecrating the taurens' cemeteries and such in the name of archaeology.
Basically if you can view one of those cultures as "evil" or "inferior" just because they're different from the RL western culture, then you've just discovered your own bias. Not Blizzard's.
Sad to break this to you but Open Source doesn't mean "look but don't touch", nor "it's open only as long as it doesn't interfere with my business plans", or it would have made MS the champion of OS. (Stuff like MFC always came with sources. You just were forbidden to use them for anything that intereferes with MS's world domination, such as porting them to another OS.)
Open Source means you can take my code, port it to whatever you damn wish, fork it into whatever other purpose you damn wish, install it on competing hardware or on robotic sharks with lasers on their heads, pack it on your own distro CD and try to undercut the price of mine, etc. You may have to abide by some minimal restrictions, such as "but you can't turn my OSS into your closed source" (GPL) or "ffs, have some decency and do acknowledge the original authors" (BSD), but none really tells you on what hardware can you run it or with whom you can't compete.
Is it that great for Apple or any other corporation trying to build a monopoly out of interlocking pieces, to raise entry barriers? Well, no, in fact it's pretty bad to that end, because it lowers everyone's entry barriers. (E.g., if I wanted to compete with IBM's P5 computers, if they run Linux, it lowers my entry barriers because I can just recompile Linux for mine too. It just saved me from writing a whole OS. It's one less interlocking piece standing in my way.)
But as they say, if you can't stand the heat, then get the fuck out of the kitchen. It's that simple. If Apple can't stand OSS kind of competition, then it can stop pretending it's some great champion of OSS. It's that simple.
If it's just incomplete pieces you're supposed to look at and never use for anything competing with Apple's business plans, and which can be pulled out without notice if anyone ever actually figures out such a way to use them, just isn't OSS. It's just some corporate PR smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, trying to look all open without actually taking the risks associated with actually being open. What Apple tried to have there is neither "free as in speech" nor "free as in beer", but just a weird "free as in some meaningless buzzword that our PR drones can hype."
Hand-waving it as "bah, the normal users won't notice" is:
A) Irrelevant. I don't personally go through the Linux kernel or OpenOffice sources daily either, but the fact remains that I'm _free_ to. That's the crux of the whole issue. _If_ I ever actually need to hack some kernel driver to read my files off an old medium (I've actually had to, back in 2000), there's no corporate boss to decide for me "nah, you don't need to see those."
B) An incredible case of tunnel view. Just because users X and Y can't or won't read kernel sources, doesn't mean they can't benefit from the work of user Z who does. Even if I were Joe Average with zero programming knowledge, and unable to personally modify the kernel driver I've mentioned, then maybe someone else could do it for me. Maybe if I'm overly rich or some company or government agency, I can just hire someone who knows his/her way around that stuff. Maybe someone else had the same ancient drive and controller and had done that work already, so I just need to download it.
And, don't get me wrong, I'm not even telling you that you should choose OSS over closed, or whatever. If for you it's irrelevant because you personally haven't edited a kernel, sure, go ahead and make your own choices. But let's stop pretending that it's the apex of openness and transparency, because it ain't.