Except that Firefly would have the support and effort of the entire original cast and possibly even Joss Whedon as well as some of the other writers and writers from other successful shows who have already promised they'd return if the show came back. It wouldn't just be "we own the rights, now we're going to try and make the old show with all new everything!".
They already have the distribution and billing method. If anyone had the infrastructure and resources to make this work, it'd be Netlix.
We don't even believe in supporting the REAL bill of rights (and most Americans can't even NAME them, much less the rest of the Constitutional Amendments). So why the fuck would I expect anything more from a lick and a promise over a "privacy" bill of rights?
Welcome to the club, Europeans. We don't know when our own government is spying on *us*, either. They've been ignoring disclosure and reporting laws for years about our own citizens.
I couldn't agree more. The increasing fad among geeks to self diagnose themselves as mildly autistic ever since some report came out a few years ago has really tended to turn my stomach. What the fuck is wrong with you that you go around wanting to have something be wrong with you? Or is it just a desperate clinging on to an explanation for a few awkward personality traits that can be blamed on something beyond your control?
Ten and fifteen years ago, everyone went around saying they had ADD and ADHD. Now they go around saying they have Aspergers. You don't have aspergers, you fucking drama queens.
I have a hard time with any educational or technical material which claims to be appropriate for everyone from beginners to advanced. If you cover that much material, your book is either several thousand pages long or you are probably not truly serving at least one of the ends of the spectrum.
That's nothing. Have you read some of the comments on "news" sites? I was reading an article on a paper's website about the US looking to provide some assistance to Japan and the comments tended to be something like "serves them right, we should let them die for WWII!".
Fortunately, they're allowed to breed and vote the same as everyone else. Uh . . . hurrah.:/
I would be shocked if less than 99% of people viewed copyright as a utility to protect your intangible (intellectual) property in the same way a car alarm and criminal laws protect your house, car, and person. People support eternal copyright, for example, because you own your house and have the right to give it to your wife when you pass and then to your children and then to your grand children and at no point does it simply become forfeit because the house has existed for a declared number of years.
I don't know how long it has been the case, but modern society certain views copyright as a protection against property that you explicitly own and should own forever. The underlying purposes of copyright and fine points of intellectual property are far too abstract for the majority of Americans to even begin to comprehend.
And now that we've fixed the economy, education, unemployment, political corruption, social security, health care, our world reputation, and ended the two military conflicts we've been engaged in for the past decade, we can finally focus on these vital issues like curing cancer and stopping boot legs of Golden Girls!
Batman was good enough to deserve a sequel, but the other two . . . no. Prototype wasn't a bad game. In fact, it was good. But I'd rather see new stuff than more of that game. Prey? Meh. I don't know anyone who gives a fuck about Prey. What a random fucking thing to turn into a franchise. I guess it was just easier than coming up with new assets.
I don't understand why they don't just throttle lower priority traffic. The same problem I have with ISPs. Look, I understand that if I'm a very high capacity user, I might be impacting others during my usage (MAYBE). But the rest of the time, what does it matter how much bandwidth I use, if the rest of the traffic is low? So rather than blocking or limiting sites or total transfer, just fucking set up some throttling rules so that during times when traffic is truly an issue (not based merely on time of day, but actual real current bandwidth consumption and availability), it trims me down.
At any rate, there doesn't seem to be anything questionable about this action. It's not like they're blocking access to information to keep people in the dark about anything. They're just carefully metering their bandwidth for urgent needs during an emergency.
My little sister played games when she was younger, with my brother. I wouldn't exactly call her a "gamer" in the way that it dominates the life of both my brother and myself. However, she did play a lot of games on consoles, growing up in the 90s and we like to share stories with people about how we'd bust our ass trying to beat something in a game and then our sister would just take the controller and somehow have absolutely no problem getting past it.
Anyway, her boyfriend recently bought her a PS3, so I sent her a few games (Heavy Rain, Enslaved, etc) and she went out and bought some on her own. The console came with Move and she'll use that to some degree . . . but the games she picked out on her own were Final Fantasy and Katamari and Dead Space. I was impressed. And it goes to show both your point as well as the point that there will always be a market for more involved content and more complete experiences. Even a certain subset of people who start out their gaming life on Facebook games or iPhone games will eventually grow to desire more and explore other types of games. They'll learn about RPGs and strategy games and adventure games. They'll ask around. They'll maybe even buy a console (I'm presuming an expensive gaming rig might be a step beyond that for many, but . . . a possibility?).
Anyway, I don't think things are as dire as we may often perceive them. Especially this early in the game.
No, as the sentence clearly states, I was referring to "PC gaming" as well as console gaming. The two platforms where traditional gaming dominates (though consoles are seeing a flood of content and marketing toward the waggle and Bejeweled crowd, in the past eighteen months).
The market will cater to demand. A lot of people get rich in this world by finding a niche that isn't being satisfied and then fulfilling it. Of course, the problem here is that we're talking about consumable entertainment content. Things that need a steady stream of deep and wide content; not just one thing a year. So that means a number of places have to continue to find enough demand to make it financially viable to them.
I think that the reason we will not see a world that is nothing but 3D games, motion control games, Facebook games, and iPhone games is that people will evolve. Yeah, there is an enormous crowd who have played World of Warcraft since 2004 and will play it for another ten years and see no reason to ever have anything else. There is also a crowd that evolves over time. One type of game gets them in the door. Then they branch out. They want more experiences. They want something more complex. As long as there is this transitional market, it will feed into the more "traditional" gaming world.
I think we see less risk of one market eating the other than opportunity for new markets to be catered to *in addition* to existing ones.
Of course, I'm being optimistic right now. Catch me on a bad day and I'll probably be talking about how gaming is doomed, because there's no reason to spend $50-100 million dollars and four years of development to produce a block buster game that becomes beloved by gamers for years when you can spend a hundred grand to create an iPhone and Facebook version of a flashgame from ten years ago or a PC game from thirty years ago and make a couple hundred million dollars from it.
The only difference is that you are flung from a slingshot instead of a tank or other device and there are obstacles in the way other than terrain. Not really that innovative, if you ask me.
I keep referring to Scorched Earth, from 1991, as it's probably the most widely recognized and played game from the "artillery" genre and a great demonstration of how Angry Birds is any fucking thing except innovative.
To be more specific, however, Scorched Earth and Gorillas came out in 1991. Other games since then that you might recognize as pre-dating Angry Birds by a very long time is Gorillas 2 (also in the early 90s) and Scorched3D just awhile back. Pretty much everyone is also familiar with the Worms series, of which there have been tons over the last fifteen or twenty years. Before any of these, was a game called Tank Wars (1990).
The earliest that I know of is also mentioned in the Artillery genre page on wikipedia and is called (shock) Artillery. It came out on the Apple II in 1980. Of course, that was also graphical. As the article itself mentions, there were text versions published even before that (apparently only written up and distributed in Creative Computing magazine). So it would appear that the first graphical version of an Angry Birds style game came out in 1980 and the first version *at all* was in the 70s.
Hard to call yourself "innovative" when all you've done is rip off a game that has been around for a minimum of 32 years.
You're both off. They're both very much based on Scorched Earth, from 1991. A game that probably 95% of us have played at some point (especially in the 90s). I'm pretty sure Scorched Earth wasn't the original, either, but it was sure as fuck a site earlier than the supposedly "innovative" Angry Birds (and all the flash games that were around long before Angry Birds that were essentially the same thing, too).
The success of Angry Birds is kind of like the band that is beloved for decades and never receives the commercial or critical success and acclaim. Decades after, another band comes along and essentially rips off their entire personal and style and sound and maybe even directly cops some of their music and it's at just the right time that everyone in the world hears it and digs it and THEY receive acclaim and success for being geniuses, when all they really did was cop from the real geniuses. Your mom and your little sister have no idea about video games and as far as they're concerned, Angry Birds is the most original, entertaining, and incredible thing ever invented and well worth their $20. Why the rest of the world isn't calling it for what it really is, I have no fucking clue.
Well, everyone knows that the tens of millions of real gamers out there are about to throw out their high resolution beefy PC gaming and 65" 1080p gaming to play rip-offs of 30 year old Scorched Earth / Tanks / Etc games and very minimal and lacking versions of sim and god games on a 320x200 flash/html5 interface on a social network web page!
Now, is it likely that there will be more of these casual/social gamers who spend all of their time playing these idiotic "recruit your friends to improve in the game!" pyramid schemes on very rudimentary and simple games than there are who play "real" video games? Absolutely. The same way there are more people that listen to Britney Spears than will ever listen to, say, Tom Wait. But that doesn't mean that one market is dumped and ignored in favor of the other. There will be a huge market for free or cheap casual games that you can play on the bus on your way to your job answering phones at the dentist's office or while you're waiting for your kids to finish soccer practice. And there will be a big market for involved, innovative, complex, competitive "traditional" gaming that the rest of us enjoy.
Hardly. If you prefer to store music in FLAC, when possible, there's hundreds of megabytes per album. If you prefer to store your movies in high quality 1080p, you can be looking at 30gb per movie. That doesn't even consider other content you might archive. Photo albums, home videos, audio books, podcasts. Then triple the amount of storage, so you can have a local backup and a remote backup. Hell, I have a 1tb drive that is for nothing but my installed Steam games and it's almost full (and I only have about 85% of my Steam games installed).
The supply of hard disk space and bandwidth just means that we can start to utilize higher quality materials rather than pruning everything down like we did for the past twenty years. Drive space is likely to remain just as much a commodity as ever before, though.
I hope their 3tb drives suck less than their 2tb drives. I've bought a number of them both before and after a rumored "bad batch" and in total, almost half of them won't format on any OS (it's not an issue with the 4k sectors as the problem occurs in systems which support 4k sectors out of the box). OSX, Linux, Windows 7. Often, BIOS sees the drive, but the OS and disk management utils don't see it, so they can't even be initialized. Of the remaining drives, I've had several crap out on me within six months. Everything was find with the 1.5tb drives. But after that . . . major problems.
No, they want to be able to sift through more information to steal domain's from people who index torrents or point to links to links to links of stuff so they can steal their property and libel them without any actual legal intervention or conviction, too!
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Firefly would have the support and effort of the entire original cast and possibly even Joss Whedon as well as some of the other writers and writers from other successful shows who have already promised they'd return if the show came back. It wouldn't just be "we own the rights, now we're going to try and make the old show with all new everything!".
They already have the distribution and billing method. If anyone had the infrastructure and resources to make this work, it'd be Netlix.
We don't even believe in supporting the REAL bill of rights (and most Americans can't even NAME them, much less the rest of the Constitutional Amendments). So why the fuck would I expect anything more from a lick and a promise over a "privacy" bill of rights?
Slashdot is the new Engadget, Mashables, and BoingBoing.
Welcome to the club, Europeans. We don't know when our own government is spying on *us*, either. They've been ignoring disclosure and reporting laws for years about our own citizens.
Buy the rights to firefly and pump that shit out!
I couldn't agree more. The increasing fad among geeks to self diagnose themselves as mildly autistic ever since some report came out a few years ago has really tended to turn my stomach. What the fuck is wrong with you that you go around wanting to have something be wrong with you? Or is it just a desperate clinging on to an explanation for a few awkward personality traits that can be blamed on something beyond your control?
Ten and fifteen years ago, everyone went around saying they had ADD and ADHD. Now they go around saying they have Aspergers. You don't have aspergers, you fucking drama queens.
I have a hard time with any educational or technical material which claims to be appropriate for everyone from beginners to advanced. If you cover that much material, your book is either several thousand pages long or you are probably not truly serving at least one of the ends of the spectrum.
That's nothing. Have you read some of the comments on "news" sites? I was reading an article on a paper's website about the US looking to provide some assistance to Japan and the comments tended to be something like "serves them right, we should let them die for WWII!".
Fortunately, they're allowed to breed and vote the same as everyone else. Uh . . . hurrah. :/
And the telcos who surely need tens of billions of dollars in government aid to repair the cables, surely!
Then Google and every other search engine is every bit as liable for the same behavior.
I would be shocked if less than 99% of people viewed copyright as a utility to protect your intangible (intellectual) property in the same way a car alarm and criminal laws protect your house, car, and person. People support eternal copyright, for example, because you own your house and have the right to give it to your wife when you pass and then to your children and then to your grand children and at no point does it simply become forfeit because the house has existed for a declared number of years.
I don't know how long it has been the case, but modern society certain views copyright as a protection against property that you explicitly own and should own forever. The underlying purposes of copyright and fine points of intellectual property are far too abstract for the majority of Americans to even begin to comprehend.
And now that we've fixed the economy, education, unemployment, political corruption, social security, health care, our world reputation, and ended the two military conflicts we've been engaged in for the past decade, we can finally focus on these vital issues like curing cancer and stopping boot legs of Golden Girls!
Batman was good enough to deserve a sequel, but the other two . . . no. Prototype wasn't a bad game. In fact, it was good. But I'd rather see new stuff than more of that game. Prey? Meh. I don't know anyone who gives a fuck about Prey. What a random fucking thing to turn into a franchise. I guess it was just easier than coming up with new assets.
I don't understand why they don't just throttle lower priority traffic. The same problem I have with ISPs. Look, I understand that if I'm a very high capacity user, I might be impacting others during my usage (MAYBE). But the rest of the time, what does it matter how much bandwidth I use, if the rest of the traffic is low? So rather than blocking or limiting sites or total transfer, just fucking set up some throttling rules so that during times when traffic is truly an issue (not based merely on time of day, but actual real current bandwidth consumption and availability), it trims me down.
At any rate, there doesn't seem to be anything questionable about this action. It's not like they're blocking access to information to keep people in the dark about anything. They're just carefully metering their bandwidth for urgent needs during an emergency.
My little sister played games when she was younger, with my brother. I wouldn't exactly call her a "gamer" in the way that it dominates the life of both my brother and myself. However, she did play a lot of games on consoles, growing up in the 90s and we like to share stories with people about how we'd bust our ass trying to beat something in a game and then our sister would just take the controller and somehow have absolutely no problem getting past it.
Anyway, her boyfriend recently bought her a PS3, so I sent her a few games (Heavy Rain, Enslaved, etc) and she went out and bought some on her own. The console came with Move and she'll use that to some degree . . . but the games she picked out on her own were Final Fantasy and Katamari and Dead Space. I was impressed. And it goes to show both your point as well as the point that there will always be a market for more involved content and more complete experiences. Even a certain subset of people who start out their gaming life on Facebook games or iPhone games will eventually grow to desire more and explore other types of games. They'll learn about RPGs and strategy games and adventure games. They'll ask around. They'll maybe even buy a console (I'm presuming an expensive gaming rig might be a step beyond that for many, but . . . a possibility?).
Anyway, I don't think things are as dire as we may often perceive them. Especially this early in the game.
No, as the sentence clearly states, I was referring to "PC gaming" as well as console gaming. The two platforms where traditional gaming dominates (though consoles are seeing a flood of content and marketing toward the waggle and Bejeweled crowd, in the past eighteen months).
The market will cater to demand. A lot of people get rich in this world by finding a niche that isn't being satisfied and then fulfilling it. Of course, the problem here is that we're talking about consumable entertainment content. Things that need a steady stream of deep and wide content; not just one thing a year. So that means a number of places have to continue to find enough demand to make it financially viable to them.
I think that the reason we will not see a world that is nothing but 3D games, motion control games, Facebook games, and iPhone games is that people will evolve. Yeah, there is an enormous crowd who have played World of Warcraft since 2004 and will play it for another ten years and see no reason to ever have anything else. There is also a crowd that evolves over time. One type of game gets them in the door. Then they branch out. They want more experiences. They want something more complex. As long as there is this transitional market, it will feed into the more "traditional" gaming world.
I think we see less risk of one market eating the other than opportunity for new markets to be catered to *in addition* to existing ones.
Of course, I'm being optimistic right now. Catch me on a bad day and I'll probably be talking about how gaming is doomed, because there's no reason to spend $50-100 million dollars and four years of development to produce a block buster game that becomes beloved by gamers for years when you can spend a hundred grand to create an iPhone and Facebook version of a flashgame from ten years ago or a PC game from thirty years ago and make a couple hundred million dollars from it.
The only difference is that you are flung from a slingshot instead of a tank or other device and there are obstacles in the way other than terrain. Not really that innovative, if you ask me.
I keep referring to Scorched Earth, from 1991, as it's probably the most widely recognized and played game from the "artillery" genre and a great demonstration of how Angry Birds is any fucking thing except innovative.
To be more specific, however, Scorched Earth and Gorillas came out in 1991. Other games since then that you might recognize as pre-dating Angry Birds by a very long time is Gorillas 2 (also in the early 90s) and Scorched3D just awhile back. Pretty much everyone is also familiar with the Worms series, of which there have been tons over the last fifteen or twenty years. Before any of these, was a game called Tank Wars (1990).
The earliest that I know of is also mentioned in the Artillery genre page on wikipedia and is called (shock) Artillery. It came out on the Apple II in 1980. Of course, that was also graphical. As the article itself mentions, there were text versions published even before that (apparently only written up and distributed in Creative Computing magazine). So it would appear that the first graphical version of an Angry Birds style game came out in 1980 and the first version *at all* was in the 70s.
Hard to call yourself "innovative" when all you've done is rip off a game that has been around for a minimum of 32 years.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
Oh, and since I forgot the link (oops!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_%28video_game%29
You're both off. They're both very much based on Scorched Earth, from 1991. A game that probably 95% of us have played at some point (especially in the 90s). I'm pretty sure Scorched Earth wasn't the original, either, but it was sure as fuck a site earlier than the supposedly "innovative" Angry Birds (and all the flash games that were around long before Angry Birds that were essentially the same thing, too).
The success of Angry Birds is kind of like the band that is beloved for decades and never receives the commercial or critical success and acclaim. Decades after, another band comes along and essentially rips off their entire personal and style and sound and maybe even directly cops some of their music and it's at just the right time that everyone in the world hears it and digs it and THEY receive acclaim and success for being geniuses, when all they really did was cop from the real geniuses. Your mom and your little sister have no idea about video games and as far as they're concerned, Angry Birds is the most original, entertaining, and incredible thing ever invented and well worth their $20. Why the rest of the world isn't calling it for what it really is, I have no fucking clue.
Well, everyone knows that the tens of millions of real gamers out there are about to throw out their high resolution beefy PC gaming and 65" 1080p gaming to play rip-offs of 30 year old Scorched Earth / Tanks / Etc games and very minimal and lacking versions of sim and god games on a 320x200 flash/html5 interface on a social network web page!
Now, is it likely that there will be more of these casual/social gamers who spend all of their time playing these idiotic "recruit your friends to improve in the game!" pyramid schemes on very rudimentary and simple games than there are who play "real" video games? Absolutely. The same way there are more people that listen to Britney Spears than will ever listen to, say, Tom Wait. But that doesn't mean that one market is dumped and ignored in favor of the other. There will be a huge market for free or cheap casual games that you can play on the bus on your way to your job answering phones at the dentist's office or while you're waiting for your kids to finish soccer practice. And there will be a big market for involved, innovative, complex, competitive "traditional" gaming that the rest of us enjoy.
Hardly. If you prefer to store music in FLAC, when possible, there's hundreds of megabytes per album. If you prefer to store your movies in high quality 1080p, you can be looking at 30gb per movie. That doesn't even consider other content you might archive. Photo albums, home videos, audio books, podcasts. Then triple the amount of storage, so you can have a local backup and a remote backup. Hell, I have a 1tb drive that is for nothing but my installed Steam games and it's almost full (and I only have about 85% of my Steam games installed).
The supply of hard disk space and bandwidth just means that we can start to utilize higher quality materials rather than pruning everything down like we did for the past twenty years. Drive space is likely to remain just as much a commodity as ever before, though.
I hope their 3tb drives suck less than their 2tb drives. I've bought a number of them both before and after a rumored "bad batch" and in total, almost half of them won't format on any OS (it's not an issue with the 4k sectors as the problem occurs in systems which support 4k sectors out of the box). OSX, Linux, Windows 7. Often, BIOS sees the drive, but the OS and disk management utils don't see it, so they can't even be initialized. Of the remaining drives, I've had several crap out on me within six months. Everything was find with the 1.5tb drives. But after that . . . major problems.
No, they want to be able to sift through more information to steal domain's from people who index torrents or point to links to links to links of stuff so they can steal their property and libel them without any actual legal intervention or conviction, too!