The NYT reports that the WSJ reports today that the AP reports that some guy's blog reports that some anonymous guy told him that he heard from another guy that some stuff happened.
Journalists don't investigate anymore. They "news gather".
Freedom of the press only applies to the press that the government can directly or indirectly influence and control. If the domestic press is so valiant, why is it that Wikileaks is left to uncover and document this sort of thing? Simply, because the press is largely fed by the people and processes they cover, much like game reviewers are fed by the game developers and publishers that they cover. Abide by their rules or be squeezed out in favor of others who will. And few bother with their own reporting anymore, beyond parroting press-releases dressed as AP news wire.
I certainly don't take Wikileaks at face value, but they seem to be adhering closer to the true worth of a free press than anyone domestically.
What absolutely baffles me is how many months after the "Collateral Murder" tape was released, we're all still watching our sit-coms, sipping our lattes, and arguing about Arizona and immigration and having mild debates over whether or not Wikleaks should give the government a tug-job instead of calling them out with documented evidence.
I mean, if we as a nation aren't livid over watching a video of outright condoned and covered-up murder in our name and on our dime, then what are we ever going to be upset by? How much Lebron is going to earn on a basketball team and how much we love Twilight?
This is why I get so upset at other seemingly meaningless stories, like the whole "girl quits job on whiteboard hoax". Because small unquestioned stories like that are indicative of the lack of questioning and critical thinking that people in general exhibit toward more vital stories like *these*.
See, this is what I'm talking about. What fun and entertainment was there in a poor attempt at a lame and failed hoax? You're responding like this was some great piece of performance art that has merit or interest even when it fails. It's nothing of the sort. Sorry I didn't approach a lame attempt at a hoax with some sort of child-like wonder and glee.
And please do inform me as to what enlightened "meaning" I missed out on by not being reeled in by these lame-ass self-promoters?
Your comments seem very misplaced applied to such a shallow story as this one. You could almost apply them to that miserable "lonelygirl15" phenomenon from a few years ago, but certainly not to an afternoon-long flash in the pan like this.
Clearly, your mother selfishly deprived you of the beautiful story you could be sharing today about the time when you were six years old and your mother sent you to bed at 8:00pm like every other day of your childhood, rather than dragging you out to see some astronomical event. The important thing is that 30 years later, you not have a story to tell of skywatching at night with your parents who may by then be long passed, but to have a story of how you were in bed by 8:00pm each and every night. Right?:)
I'd call it about even. You know what a meteor shower looks like? It looks like the old Windows starfield screensaver, turned sideways and streaking across your field of vision. It's not particularly spectacular or amazing. I'd just as well watch morons losing their shit on Twitter over little white specs flashing across the sky every once in awhile than see the real thing.
I couldn't agree more. What an asinine attitude. How about letting your kid stay up late? It's not going to destroy their life for the next 70 years if you let them stay up late once to see something amazing. You must be an unbearably anal prick to stick so dogmatically to a bed time even in the case of really great experiences. I'm sure when your kid is remembering you at your funeral, he'd rather think back fondly of the time you made him go to sleep "early" rather than the time he stayed up at night with you to learn about and watch the meteor shower with his dad by his side.
It's too bad the kid was speeding, instead of driving drunk. You can seemingly get away with *that* countless times before anyone bothers to take away your "god given right" to be behind a speeding chunk of metal death in public.
The crowd is too stupid to even detect that a clearly staged professional photoshoot of a model holding a whiteboard quitting her job is a fake. You're going to trust the crowd to identify financial frauds?
And did someone photograph you doing that, using a high quality prosumer camera and professional lighting work in a clearly staged office environment? And do you look like a super model who spends her days going to auditions rather than answering phones and dealing with a douchey boss?
I am astonished at the number of people who fell for this. It just proves that people have no operational critical thinking skills and just take anything they're fed as the truth. This is just a small example of how they treat more vital things like news of current events. If the AP wrote it or the local news anchor parroted it from a teleprompter, or a government organization released a statement, then it must all be true and taken at face value.
As for this particular incident, it was instantly obvious to everyone with a two digit IQ that it was fake (it didn't last long enough or fool enough people to properly call this an actual hoax).
What gave it away? Well, for one thing, are we supposed to believe that an HPOA like that was actually answering phones and doing some douchebag's dirty work in some great aspiration to be a stock broker? Hardly. In fact, I think my first sarcastic comment moments after this story first popped up in links from people I know was "Like a HPOA like that has to work as anything but a model".
The second give-away is the clearly fake office.
The third give-away is the quality of the photographs and the lighting.
The the second and third elements above, they combine to give you that very strong "reality porn shoot" vibe. You could tell people that these photos are actually from some new OfficeBangBus website and everyone would believe it, because it just has that "fake staged office, professional lighting, pro-sumer camera" look to it.
If the idiots behind this wanted the "hoax" to really succeed, they would have found a real office for her to stand in and snapped shots with a consumer point and click camera in whatever the real life office lighting was.
The most offensive part is that this wasn't even a successful internet hoax. Most people immediately called it out as a fake and it wasn't even more than a few hours before it was proven to be a fake. And yet, nobody gives a fuck and all sorts of media outlets are going to give it coverage. What is there to cover? It's a non-story, other than on a few websites like Slashdot where it actually has some minor relevance. How does this deserve any television play? And what will their angle be? "So, you were a chick that was hired to stand there and be photographed in a failed internet hoax... uh...". I mean, if you were going to talk to ANYONE about it, why would it be the person who was the least involved? It's not like that girl came up with the idea or executed it. She responded to an audition call and stood there holding a whiteboard for a couple hours.
I still believe this is far more than a mere "hoax" attempt. It seems clear to me that the guys behind it WANTED it to be known that it was a hoax as quickly as possible (if they had not admitted it so quickly, it would have dragged on a little longer). It sounds to me like they wanted to create a hoax AND get the attention for having created it all in one fell swoop. Either to get attention for themselves in some sort of "hey, we're a great media agency - hire us to promote your stuff!" attempt. . . . OR they were hired to do this by NBC or someone. Not as a "hoax" but as a "fake hoax" where the attempt wasn't to fool people, but to get everyone to pay attention to the girl so they could then announce that they're giving her a sit-com of her own and she's the star (which was already planned BEFORE the hoax was executed, surely).
It'd be a lot like saying "we're a helium company and to promote our product, we're going to manufacturer an event where a little kid gets stuck in his dad's blimp and floats across the country and is covered live on the news".
Considering Doom was recently released on XBOX Live Arcade, I suspect LOTS of people have recently played Doom (though it's significantly different on the console port, of course).
Gaming really isn't the same now that you have a choice between about four-hundred very similar FPS games at any one time. So much crap and so much fracturing of the gaming population even among the same genres. There was something great back then about Doom or Quake being THE only game in town and EVERYONE playing it.
Most of Kotaku's articles don't even seem to have much to do with videogames. They cover practically everything *else* in their constant spamming of my daily news feed, though. They seem to insist on posting at least 50 stories a day and there really aren't 50 gaming stories to post, so they resort to things like "Someone makes a Mario Bros mushroom cupcake!". I eventually had to drop them from my news feed, because I spent more time marking hundreds of their posts as "read" than I did actually reading anything of theirs.
They're certainly not the most pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing faux-high-brow of the sites, though. They're more middle of the road. No, you can count on sites like Brainy Gamer and Bitmob for endless circle-jerks.
Definitely. For the price of one PLEX he probably could have hired mercenaries to escort him safely. Although, from what I've read, it wasn't just a surprise jumpgate gank, but an all out faction war in a sector, so . . . maybe it would have been hopeless no matter what he did.
As someone else has pointed out, though, there is NO NEED to be transporting these things in the game. Anything you can do with them (including trading them) can be done from within a station.
I can't imagine why he was really out there in space driving around with a crap-ton of them in his cargo. Insane.
EVE is brutal. I've seen it make grown men cry. One wrong move (or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time) can cost you many months worth of investment. There is no ghost race back to your grave to recover your items or item degradation. You could fly out of a station with everything you own in the world and get blown up by pirates camping a jumpgate and lose it all within seconds. Everything. All you get to keep is the stuff you weren't flying around with (ie, implants on yourself and your ship and modules on your ship and any upgrades).
That's almost exactly what it's like. It's akin to buying a gift card for real cash that you can then only sell to someone for in-game cash. In fact, they're referred to as "EVE TIME CARDS" and you can buy them in numerous places with a credit card (all authorized and facilitated by CCP, the developer).
As for consumer protections . . . CCP is headquarted in Iceland. Although . . . I seem to recall they were going to (or had) opened an office in the states.
They weren't always stored in game like this. Players bought a virtual "card" for $15 via CCP's website and then through the online site itself, they could transfer it to another player who bid (in in-game money) whatever the seller wanted for it. CCP then transferred the game time that was purchased to the buyer and the cash to the seller.
About a year and a half ago, CCP changed this and made them actual in-game items themselves that could be transferred and moved around. There was a bit of a fret in the forums by people who were concerned just this thing could happen. The sentiment was that "sure, if you lose it it is technically your fault, but when we're talking about real hard earned actual cash, it shouldn't be put at such risk". In fact, I thought they had initially done something to safe-guard against this sort f thing. I can only assume that in the last year or so, they made additional changes to the system that now allows them to be fully at risk.
When something costs $15 each and you lose 74 of them, it's pretty easy to calculate the value. It's 74*15. There's nothing ethereal or subjective about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how journalism rolls, dawg.
The NYT reports that the WSJ reports today that the AP reports that some guy's blog reports that some anonymous guy told him that he heard from another guy that some stuff happened.
Journalists don't investigate anymore. They "news gather".
Because our government has clearly established a record of extreme concern over protecting the safety of Afghan civilians, so far.
Bingo.
Freedom of the press only applies to the press that the government can directly or indirectly influence and control. If the domestic press is so valiant, why is it that Wikileaks is left to uncover and document this sort of thing? Simply, because the press is largely fed by the people and processes they cover, much like game reviewers are fed by the game developers and publishers that they cover. Abide by their rules or be squeezed out in favor of others who will. And few bother with their own reporting anymore, beyond parroting press-releases dressed as AP news wire.
I certainly don't take Wikileaks at face value, but they seem to be adhering closer to the true worth of a free press than anyone domestically.
What absolutely baffles me is how many months after the "Collateral Murder" tape was released, we're all still watching our sit-coms, sipping our lattes, and arguing about Arizona and immigration and having mild debates over whether or not Wikleaks should give the government a tug-job instead of calling them out with documented evidence.
I mean, if we as a nation aren't livid over watching a video of outright condoned and covered-up murder in our name and on our dime, then what are we ever going to be upset by? How much Lebron is going to earn on a basketball team and how much we love Twilight?
This is why I get so upset at other seemingly meaningless stories, like the whole "girl quits job on whiteboard hoax". Because small unquestioned stories like that are indicative of the lack of questioning and critical thinking that people in general exhibit toward more vital stories like *these*.
See, this is what I'm talking about. What fun and entertainment was there in a poor attempt at a lame and failed hoax? You're responding like this was some great piece of performance art that has merit or interest even when it fails. It's nothing of the sort. Sorry I didn't approach a lame attempt at a hoax with some sort of child-like wonder and glee.
And please do inform me as to what enlightened "meaning" I missed out on by not being reeled in by these lame-ass self-promoters?
Your comments seem very misplaced applied to such a shallow story as this one. You could almost apply them to that miserable "lonelygirl15" phenomenon from a few years ago, but certainly not to an afternoon-long flash in the pan like this.
Clearly, your mother selfishly deprived you of the beautiful story you could be sharing today about the time when you were six years old and your mother sent you to bed at 8:00pm like every other day of your childhood, rather than dragging you out to see some astronomical event. The important thing is that 30 years later, you not have a story to tell of skywatching at night with your parents who may by then be long passed, but to have a story of how you were in bed by 8:00pm each and every night. Right? :)
I'd call it about even. You know what a meteor shower looks like? It looks like the old Windows starfield screensaver, turned sideways and streaking across your field of vision. It's not particularly spectacular or amazing. I'd just as well watch morons losing their shit on Twitter over little white specs flashing across the sky every once in awhile than see the real thing.
I couldn't agree more. What an asinine attitude. How about letting your kid stay up late? It's not going to destroy their life for the next 70 years if you let them stay up late once to see something amazing. You must be an unbearably anal prick to stick so dogmatically to a bed time even in the case of really great experiences. I'm sure when your kid is remembering you at your funeral, he'd rather think back fondly of the time you made him go to sleep "early" rather than the time he stayed up at night with you to learn about and watch the meteor shower with his dad by his side.
It's too bad the kid was speeding, instead of driving drunk. You can seemingly get away with *that* countless times before anyone bothers to take away your "god given right" to be behind a speeding chunk of metal death in public.
Like with most things, 54% of Americans are extremely concerned about the safety of their data, but maybe 1% actually bother to do something about it.
The crowd is too stupid to even detect that a clearly staged professional photoshoot of a model holding a whiteboard quitting her job is a fake. You're going to trust the crowd to identify financial frauds?
And did someone photograph you doing that, using a high quality prosumer camera and professional lighting work in a clearly staged office environment? And do you look like a super model who spends her days going to auditions rather than answering phones and dealing with a douchey boss?
I am astonished at the number of people who fell for this. It just proves that people have no operational critical thinking skills and just take anything they're fed as the truth. This is just a small example of how they treat more vital things like news of current events. If the AP wrote it or the local news anchor parroted it from a teleprompter, or a government organization released a statement, then it must all be true and taken at face value.
As for this particular incident, it was instantly obvious to everyone with a two digit IQ that it was fake (it didn't last long enough or fool enough people to properly call this an actual hoax).
What gave it away? Well, for one thing, are we supposed to believe that an HPOA like that was actually answering phones and doing some douchebag's dirty work in some great aspiration to be a stock broker? Hardly. In fact, I think my first sarcastic comment moments after this story first popped up in links from people I know was "Like a HPOA like that has to work as anything but a model".
The second give-away is the clearly fake office.
The third give-away is the quality of the photographs and the lighting.
The the second and third elements above, they combine to give you that very strong "reality porn shoot" vibe. You could tell people that these photos are actually from some new OfficeBangBus website and everyone would believe it, because it just has that "fake staged office, professional lighting, pro-sumer camera" look to it.
If the idiots behind this wanted the "hoax" to really succeed, they would have found a real office for her to stand in and snapped shots with a consumer point and click camera in whatever the real life office lighting was.
The most offensive part is that this wasn't even a successful internet hoax. Most people immediately called it out as a fake and it wasn't even more than a few hours before it was proven to be a fake. And yet, nobody gives a fuck and all sorts of media outlets are going to give it coverage. What is there to cover? It's a non-story, other than on a few websites like Slashdot where it actually has some minor relevance. How does this deserve any television play? And what will their angle be? "So, you were a chick that was hired to stand there and be photographed in a failed internet hoax... uh...". I mean, if you were going to talk to ANYONE about it, why would it be the person who was the least involved? It's not like that girl came up with the idea or executed it. She responded to an audition call and stood there holding a whiteboard for a couple hours.
I still believe this is far more than a mere "hoax" attempt. It seems clear to me that the guys behind it WANTED it to be known that it was a hoax as quickly as possible (if they had not admitted it so quickly, it would have dragged on a little longer). It sounds to me like they wanted to create a hoax AND get the attention for having created it all in one fell swoop. Either to get attention for themselves in some sort of "hey, we're a great media agency - hire us to promote your stuff!" attempt. . . . OR they were hired to do this by NBC or someone. Not as a "hoax" but as a "fake hoax" where the attempt wasn't to fool people, but to get everyone to pay attention to the girl so they could then announce that they're giving her a sit-com of her own and she's the star (which was already planned BEFORE the hoax was executed, surely).
It'd be a lot like saying "we're a helium company and to promote our product, we're going to manufacturer an event where a little kid gets stuck in his dad's blimp and floats across the country and is covered live on the news".
Considering Doom was recently released on XBOX Live Arcade, I suspect LOTS of people have recently played Doom (though it's significantly different on the console port, of course).
iddqd
Gaming really isn't the same now that you have a choice between about four-hundred very similar FPS games at any one time. So much crap and so much fracturing of the gaming population even among the same genres. There was something great back then about Doom or Quake being THE only game in town and EVERYONE playing it.
Most of Kotaku's articles don't even seem to have much to do with videogames. They cover practically everything *else* in their constant spamming of my daily news feed, though. They seem to insist on posting at least 50 stories a day and there really aren't 50 gaming stories to post, so they resort to things like "Someone makes a Mario Bros mushroom cupcake!". I eventually had to drop them from my news feed, because I spent more time marking hundreds of their posts as "read" than I did actually reading anything of theirs.
They're certainly not the most pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing faux-high-brow of the sites, though. They're more middle of the road. No, you can count on sites like Brainy Gamer and Bitmob for endless circle-jerks.
Definitely. For the price of one PLEX he probably could have hired mercenaries to escort him safely. Although, from what I've read, it wasn't just a surprise jumpgate gank, but an all out faction war in a sector, so . . . maybe it would have been hopeless no matter what he did.
As someone else has pointed out, though, there is NO NEED to be transporting these things in the game. Anything you can do with them (including trading them) can be done from within a station.
I can't imagine why he was really out there in space driving around with a crap-ton of them in his cargo. Insane.
...priceless? :)
Pardon me, while I sit my girlfriend down in front of the entire first season of the HBO series "Hung".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hung_(TV_series)
Last time I was selling ETCs, I was getting about 600-million ISK, each. That might have been almost two years ago, though.
The monster isn't something CCP created. The monster, in this case, is another player - just like you.
EVE is brutal. I've seen it make grown men cry. One wrong move (or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time) can cost you many months worth of investment. There is no ghost race back to your grave to recover your items or item degradation. You could fly out of a station with everything you own in the world and get blown up by pirates camping a jumpgate and lose it all within seconds. Everything. All you get to keep is the stuff you weren't flying around with (ie, implants on yourself and your ship and modules on your ship and any upgrades).
That's almost exactly what it's like. It's akin to buying a gift card for real cash that you can then only sell to someone for in-game cash. In fact, they're referred to as "EVE TIME CARDS" and you can buy them in numerous places with a credit card (all authorized and facilitated by CCP, the developer).
As for consumer protections . . . CCP is headquarted in Iceland. Although . . . I seem to recall they were going to (or had) opened an office in the states.
They weren't always stored in game like this. Players bought a virtual "card" for $15 via CCP's website and then through the online site itself, they could transfer it to another player who bid (in in-game money) whatever the seller wanted for it. CCP then transferred the game time that was purchased to the buyer and the cash to the seller.
About a year and a half ago, CCP changed this and made them actual in-game items themselves that could be transferred and moved around. There was a bit of a fret in the forums by people who were concerned just this thing could happen. The sentiment was that "sure, if you lose it it is technically your fault, but when we're talking about real hard earned actual cash, it shouldn't be put at such risk". In fact, I thought they had initially done something to safe-guard against this sort f thing. I can only assume that in the last year or so, they made additional changes to the system that now allows them to be fully at risk.
When something costs $15 each and you lose 74 of them, it's pretty easy to calculate the value. It's 74*15. There's nothing ethereal or subjective about it.