You could have been thinking of NRA Gun Club or Country Varmit Hunter. Both of which, were in fact great bombs by all accounts.
On the other hand, one was a completely non-violent gun game and the other was hunting varmits, I don't think the level of accuracy in the modeling of the guns was the sole contributing factor to their lemon level. There are plenty of "OCD detail level oriented" games out there than have fan bases, but they 'make up' for it by having interesting games behind them.
Most people interesting in realistic target shooting are already going to have access to the real item.
Namely, one Mr Randall Hall, Information Technology Director. Who was it who said the more words in your job title, the more useless/power hungry you were?
After receiving Spencer's e-mail, Katherine Gross, biology professor at Michigan State, sent the mass e-mail to Information Technology Director Randall Hall asking him if Spencer had accessed a university listserv, Spencer said.
Hall wrote Spencer an e-mail on Sept. 16 telling her about the complaint and asking to discuss the matter. He filed a Disciplinary Allegation Form with the school's Judicial Affairs Office the next day.
In that form he alleged Spencer had refused to comply with school policies on sending bulk e-mail and said she would continue to do so. He charged her with violating three school policies on sending un-solicited e-mails.
Nutshell: Big bad IT manager gets whinged because student figures out how to send email to people without needing to go through the 'offical' listserv which would require someone's (probably his) approval. Tells student to stop emailing professors, and is told to take a hike. Decides to use the big stick.
Interestingly, it seems as a student government representative she was fulfilling her duties by attempting to negotiate change between students and faculty. Her email was well written, clear and concise.
I fail to see how the university can justify any reprisal.
Haven't worked much in the uni environment have you? Grumpy old men shouting "Get off my lawn" seem welcoming compared to the grizzly bear attitude of a tenured professor who feels their authority has been challenged.
Isn't Java run in an emulated fashion on all platforms? Isn't that part of the 'slow' image that it cultivated in it's early years, that it was too slow due to the emulation of the java 'virtual machine'?
Is the problem here that this could mean some machines won't be as slow as others or just that its x86?
What exactly is the difference, outside of one having a much larger code base to 'exploit' and the potential for a huge speedup on machines that can natively handle x86 code?
Currently they are in a state of cannibalism. Moose vs. man, man vs. wolf, wolf vs. baby strollers. Their leadership has abdicated to Keanu Reeves, having mistaken the recent remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" as a documentary. The moose (meeses?) have taken advantage of this power vacuum and having no natural predators outside of orcas, are wrecking havoc and destruction through out the great land of Quebec.
Don't know but I can imagine that zooming too quickly and too far in would give the impression of falling. Any movement of the field of vision being provided, for that matter, would have to be more carefully considered vs. a 2D broadcast given the closer to you are with fooling your head that you are actually watching a three dimensional object, the more vertigo related issues you have as your brain struggles with the "seeing motion but inner ear says I'm sitting still" cognitive dissonance.
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Complete transparency only seems impossible because right now only a small group of people are watching everyone. It would be orders of magnitude harder to hide constantly something from everyone than it is to hide something from just a small group.
The first two items you listed, I would qualify as being 'protection', reasonable things to keep under wraps because other people out there have hidden lives you don't know about. And why don't you know about them? ^_^
The second two however, are what I would qualify as 'shame'. Granted you may feel I'm stretching the definition, but I can come up with two reasons why you wouldn't want people knowing about your medical information.
1. You have 'something' and don't want others to know because it might be embarrassing or affect your insurance. 2. You don't live up to your ideal of what you should be and don't want others to know.
And the same goes for what you look up online.
1. You are looking up something 'naughty' (where naughty is defined as something you don't want others to know you are interested in because you don't think 'normal' people would be). 2. You are looking up something 'embarrassing' (where embarrassing is defined as something you don't want others to know about you because you don't think 'normal' people are the same).
My belief is, if you went down your list of hypothetical million items and evaluated why you didn't want others to know about them, they'd fall out into two categories: Items which you don't want others to know for protection because there are people out there who have their own secrets and things you don't want others to know because they may reveal that you aren't a perfect human.
The first category breaks down if privacy does. You would find it hard to be a serial rapist if the first time you struck everyone knew about it. You would find it hard to be a thief if everyone knew when you came home with stolen property.
The second category breaks down when you truly realize no one is a 'perfect' human and in truth the actual 'perfect' human is the fallible one full of foibles. That whole 'mask of society' everyone is forced to play under because no one wants to admit that it's not just the emperor that is naked is just that, another mask. We wear it to protect ourselves but only because everyone else is as well.
4chan'ers harass anonymously, do you think they would be still as willing to do so if you knew who they were? If EVERYONE knew who they were? How many people have you met who are complete dicks when they are under public scrutiny?
The "government" is not an entity, it's a group of people. People who themselves would be aware of the fact that they themselves are just as vunerable 'informationwise' as you are.
Information is only power when only one side has it. Once you realize that tagging someone with your 'power' not only puts you in their sights as a target for revenge with an equal opportunity to strike back with your own information, you become less eager to strike first. (Think MAD- Mutually Assured Destruction).
Granted, there will always be people willing to 'die' to take 'you' out. But are they any better off 'now'? I would say no. Before they could dig up your information and you'd have nothing on them to 'retaliate' with. Now, you both have access to all the information, at least now you can fight back.
But think for a moment why those items are annoyances.
You don't want to be heard saying certain keywords because the government has adopted the ineffective method of attempting to track terrorists by looking for these words. If they were forced to track EVERYONE, the government would quickly realize the folly of this course of action when it became apparent that not only did most terrorist already have ways around this, but the incidence of 'innocent' usage of these keywords was high enough that tracking them would be pointless.
You don't want companies complaining because you've purchased their competitor's products, but you don't realize that if everyone is buying their competitor's products (and knows it) then the company would either quickly go under or refine their marketing/product to the point where you'd be willing to buy it.
You don't want people having your SSN because too many places erroneously treat it as a universal ID number, but if everyone's SSN was available, no one would use it as a basis for ID'ing someone. Similarly, your license plate, phone number, and address are not useful to a 'black hatter' in any large extent if everyone's was public. It's only because those items are protected by people that makes them valuable.
That being said, I agree with your last paragraph. My response was to the GP's appearent desire to defend privacy for privacy's sake rather than a condemnation or defense of Amazon's actions.
The less privacy we have, the less we have to worry about our privacy. That sounds flip, and along the lines of "if you have nothing to hide..." but it isn't.
We want privacy primarly due to shame.
We have shame because we wear masks almost 100% of the time.
We wear masks don't want people to realize who we 'really are' either mentally or phyically.
We don't want people to really know us because we have been convinced to hold ourselves to standards that no one actually meets.
We hold ourselves to these standards because everyone else is wearing masks and while we can tell ourselves that 'they are just like us', it's hard to grasp that cognatively without actual proof.
If there were no privacy, no one could wear a mask. If no one were wearing a mask, we would realize that the standards we hold ourselves to are unrealistic. If we realize the standards we hold ourselves to are unrealisitic, we are freed from shame. If we are freed from shame, we no longer find privacy necessary.
DRM, regardless of the claims otherwise, is pretty much about one thing and one thing only:
Killing the 'used' game market, both the "I bought this game three years ago and want to play it again" and the "I'd like to trade this game for another at GameTard" kind.
As you mentioned, it doesn't stop piracy. Anyone who is going to pirate a game can do so with almost absurd ease, without DRM being any real impediment.
I am sure that there are developers out there that actually buy the "stop piracy" line, but if you read between the lines of what 90% of the developers out there say about the used game market, you realize that regardless of what they say DRM is for, the primary and as of yet sole utility of DRM for them is killing used games.
Sadly, for the most part there are few companies who are willing to act as if removing your right to resell your possesions is anything other than their birth given right and this is why things like limited installs and one use only activation codes exist.
This is also why I actually support Valve's Steam. It's not that they are any different with the purpose of their DRM, you certainly will find it pretty much impossible to resell a game you've purchased through Steam. But at least they are providing added value to the proposition in 'compensation' for this. I consider it a fair trade. In exchange for games tied to their system, I get an effectively perpetual online 'backup' for each game and built-in community apps for them.
Maybe someday Valve will turn around and 'betray' the trust people have given them in this regard. Perhaps they'll not provide an unlock method for their games if the ever take Steam down. But then again, perhaps they will. Valve isn't Microsoft or Apple. They don't have a long record of screwing folk over as a matter of practice or policy rather than mistake. I prefer to give companies that have a history of behaving well the benefit of the doubt when possible and revise it as events make necessary.
The basis of your argument for why complaints won't mean diddly ("the company doesn't care") is the exact reason why this would blow up in their face.
Because the company isn't going to care enough too selectively whitelist services or even differentiate between 'well behaved' and 'ill mannered'. You know they aren't going to, because they aren't right now.
And because they aren't differentiating, they will catch enough people in their dragnets that they will manage to piss off the wrong people and pay for it.
Have you noticed lately how badly cable companies are getting their lunches eaten by the satellite companies or the phone companies having their lunches eaten by VOIP and cable providers? These are groups that used to have a monopoly in their area and are now fighting off fairly strong competition because they got complacent and arrogant enough to not care what the customer thought of them.
No, I'm not saying that they are quaking in their boots right now, but the one thing I am certain of is that the genie is already out of the bottle. People are ramping up their internet usage and they aren't going to be willing to settle for less rather than more. If the current providers can't provide service, someone else will. Maybe that'll be a direct competitor or maybe it'll be something completely different. But it will be something, because as powerful as the telco and cable companies are, they aren't powerful enough to shut out everyone.
And that would have worked for them back in the 90's when the average customer "only used web and email".
But in case you haven't noticed, that's not been true for a while. Guess who has a lower tolerance for BS? Sterotypical Little Red Riding Hood's "Grandma" who only uses email and web, and doesn't have any real expectations on how fast it should be, or Sterotypical power mom "Lynette" whose children are screaming at her because their Wbox 3 is 'broken'?
One thing to remember though, Japan is the 10th largest nation population-wise, jammed in an area smaller than California.
As of 2003, Tokyo alone had 32 million people shoved into 8,000 sq km, where New York New York had a paltry 20 million in a spacious 18,000 sq km.
Those sorts of living conditions resemble Asimov's "Caves of Steel", which, if you remember, posited almost the exact cultural mores that the Japanese display today RE: privacy, conformity, and overcrowding.
I have a feeling that there is a bit of a breaking point regarding such things, where as you are on one side of the line, people become more and more aggressive as they attempt to defend what they perceive as their slowly diminishing 'personal space' until something eventually snaps and everyone just gives up.
However, given the original engine is actually Quake I with heavy modifications, even though a version of the Quake engine has been opened, it might not be their call on opening it.
And a confidence game is a scam that involves gaining someone's confidence and then using it to defraud them, which is exactly what every one of the examples above are.
Thanks for the unecessary condescendation though. Look! Another con word.
Slashdot Mirror
You could have been thinking of NRA Gun Club or Country Varmit Hunter. Both of which, were in fact great bombs by all accounts.
On the other hand, one was a completely non-violent gun game and the other was hunting varmits, I don't think the level of accuracy in the modeling of the guns was the sole contributing factor to their lemon level. There are plenty of "OCD detail level oriented" games out there than have fan bases, but they 'make up' for it by having interesting games behind them.
Most people interesting in realistic target shooting are already going to have access to the real item.
Namely, one Mr Randall Hall, Information Technology Director. Who was it who said the more words in your job title, the more useless/power hungry you were?
Nutshell: Big bad IT manager gets whinged because student figures out how to send email to people without needing to go through the 'offical' listserv which would require someone's (probably his) approval. Tells student to stop emailing professors, and is told to take a hike. Decides to use the big stick.
Haven't worked much in the uni environment have you? Grumpy old men shouting "Get off my lawn" seem welcoming compared to the grizzly bear attitude of a tenured professor who feels their authority has been challenged.
Isn't Java run in an emulated fashion on all platforms? Isn't that part of the 'slow' image that it cultivated in it's early years, that it was too slow due to the emulation of the java 'virtual machine'?
Is the problem here that this could mean some machines won't be as slow as others or just that its x86?
What exactly is the difference, outside of one having a much larger code base to 'exploit' and the potential for a huge speedup on machines that can natively handle x86 code?
Currently they are in a state of cannibalism. Moose vs. man, man vs. wolf, wolf vs. baby strollers. Their leadership has abdicated to Keanu Reeves, having mistaken the recent remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" as a documentary. The moose (meeses?) have taken advantage of this power vacuum and having no natural predators outside of orcas, are wrecking havoc and destruction through out the great land of Quebec.
According to this site. They are apparently some sort of order founded around the worship of dolphins.
Or, possibly they are just a bunch of special interest groups similar to the RIAA in the US.
I'm trending to the Sancta Orca theory myself.
Don't know but I can imagine that zooming too quickly and too far in would give the impression of falling. Any movement of the field of vision being provided, for that matter, would have to be more carefully considered vs. a 2D broadcast given the closer to you are with fooling your head that you are actually watching a three dimensional object, the more vertigo related issues you have as your brain struggles with the "seeing motion but inner ear says I'm sitting still" cognitive dissonance.
To repurpose an Abe Lincoln quote:
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Complete transparency only seems impossible because right now only a small group of people are watching everyone. It would be orders of magnitude harder to hide constantly something from everyone than it is to hide something from just a small group.
The first two items you listed, I would qualify as being 'protection', reasonable things to keep under wraps because other people out there have hidden lives you don't know about. And why don't you know about them? ^_^
The second two however, are what I would qualify as 'shame'. Granted you may feel I'm stretching the definition, but I can come up with two reasons why you wouldn't want people knowing about your medical information.
1. You have 'something' and don't want others to know because it might be embarrassing or affect your insurance.
2. You don't live up to your ideal of what you should be and don't want others to know.
And the same goes for what you look up online.
1. You are looking up something 'naughty' (where naughty is defined as something you don't want others to know you are interested in because you don't think 'normal' people would be).
2. You are looking up something 'embarrassing' (where embarrassing is defined as something you don't want others to know about you because you don't think 'normal' people are the same).
My belief is, if you went down your list of hypothetical million items and evaluated why you didn't want others to know about them, they'd fall out into two categories: Items which you don't want others to know for protection because there are people out there who have their own secrets and things you don't want others to know because they may reveal that you aren't a perfect human.
The first category breaks down if privacy does. You would find it hard to be a serial rapist if the first time you struck everyone knew about it. You would find it hard to be a thief if everyone knew when you came home with stolen property.
The second category breaks down when you truly realize no one is a 'perfect' human and in truth the actual 'perfect' human is the fallible one full of foibles. That whole 'mask of society' everyone is forced to play under because no one wants to admit that it's not just the emperor that is naked is just that, another mask. We wear it to protect ourselves but only because everyone else is as well.
4chan'ers harass anonymously, do you think they would be still as willing to do so if you knew who they were? If EVERYONE knew who they were? How many people have you met who are complete dicks when they are under public scrutiny?
The "government" is not an entity, it's a group of people. People who themselves would be aware of the fact that they themselves are just as vunerable 'informationwise' as you are.
Information is only power when only one side has it. Once you realize that tagging someone with your 'power' not only puts you in their sights as a target for revenge with an equal opportunity to strike back with your own information, you become less eager to strike first. (Think MAD- Mutually Assured Destruction).
Granted, there will always be people willing to 'die' to take 'you' out. But are they any better off 'now'? I would say no. Before they could dig up your information and you'd have nothing on them to 'retaliate' with. Now, you both have access to all the information, at least now you can fight back.
But think for a moment why those items are annoyances.
You don't want to be heard saying certain keywords because the government has adopted the ineffective method of attempting to track terrorists by looking for these words. If they were forced to track EVERYONE, the government would quickly realize the folly of this course of action when it became apparent that not only did most terrorist already have ways around this, but the incidence of 'innocent' usage of these keywords was high enough that tracking them would be pointless.
You don't want companies complaining because you've purchased their competitor's products, but you don't realize that if everyone is buying their competitor's products (and knows it) then the company would either quickly go under or refine their marketing/product to the point where you'd be willing to buy it.
You don't want people having your SSN because too many places erroneously treat it as a universal ID number, but if everyone's SSN was available, no one would use it as a basis for ID'ing someone. Similarly, your license plate, phone number, and address are not useful to a 'black hatter' in any large extent if everyone's was public. It's only because those items are protected by people that makes them valuable.
That being said, I agree with your last paragraph. My response was to the GP's appearent desire to defend privacy for privacy's sake rather than a condemnation or defense of Amazon's actions.
The less privacy we have, the less we have to worry about our privacy. That sounds flip, and along the lines of "if you have nothing to hide..." but it isn't.
We want privacy primarly due to shame.
We have shame because we wear masks almost 100% of the time.
We wear masks don't want people to realize who we 'really are' either mentally or phyically.
We don't want people to really know us because we have been convinced to hold ourselves to standards that no one actually meets.
We hold ourselves to these standards because everyone else is wearing masks and while we can tell ourselves that 'they are just like us', it's hard to grasp that cognatively without actual proof.
If there were no privacy, no one could wear a mask. If no one were wearing a mask, we would realize that the standards we hold ourselves to are unrealistic. If we realize the standards we hold ourselves to are unrealisitic, we are freed from shame. If we are freed from shame, we no longer find privacy necessary.
DRM, regardless of the claims otherwise, is pretty much about one thing and one thing only:
Killing the 'used' game market, both the "I bought this game three years ago and want to play it again" and the "I'd like to trade this game for another at GameTard" kind.
As you mentioned, it doesn't stop piracy. Anyone who is going to pirate a game can do so with almost absurd ease, without DRM being any real impediment.
I am sure that there are developers out there that actually buy the "stop piracy" line, but if you read between the lines of what 90% of the developers out there say about the used game market, you realize that regardless of what they say DRM is for, the primary and as of yet sole utility of DRM for them is killing used games.
Sadly, for the most part there are few companies who are willing to act as if removing your right to resell your possesions is anything other than their birth given right and this is why things like limited installs and one use only activation codes exist.
This is also why I actually support Valve's Steam. It's not that they are any different with the purpose of their DRM, you certainly will find it pretty much impossible to resell a game you've purchased through Steam. But at least they are providing added value to the proposition in 'compensation' for this. I consider it a fair trade. In exchange for games tied to their system, I get an effectively perpetual online 'backup' for each game and built-in community apps for them.
Maybe someday Valve will turn around and 'betray' the trust people have given them in this regard. Perhaps they'll not provide an unlock method for their games if the ever take Steam down. But then again, perhaps they will. Valve isn't Microsoft or Apple. They don't have a long record of screwing folk over as a matter of practice or policy rather than mistake. I prefer to give companies that have a history of behaving well the benefit of the doubt when possible and revise it as events make necessary.
The basis of your argument for why complaints won't mean diddly ("the company doesn't care") is the exact reason why this would blow up in their face.
Because the company isn't going to care enough too selectively whitelist services or even differentiate between 'well behaved' and 'ill mannered'. You know they aren't going to, because they aren't right now.
And because they aren't differentiating, they will catch enough people in their dragnets that they will manage to piss off the wrong people and pay for it.
Have you noticed lately how badly cable companies are getting their lunches eaten by the satellite companies or the phone companies having their lunches eaten by VOIP and cable providers? These are groups that used to have a monopoly in their area and are now fighting off fairly strong competition because they got complacent and arrogant enough to not care what the customer thought of them.
No, I'm not saying that they are quaking in their boots right now, but the one thing I am certain of is that the genie is already out of the bottle. People are ramping up their internet usage and they aren't going to be willing to settle for less rather than more. If the current providers can't provide service, someone else will. Maybe that'll be a direct competitor or maybe it'll be something completely different. But it will be something, because as powerful as the telco and cable companies are, they aren't powerful enough to shut out everyone.
You may wish to consider reading the article right below this one and consider it's implications with open source software projects.
And that would have worked for them back in the 90's when the average customer "only used web and email".
But in case you haven't noticed, that's not been true for a while. Guess who has a lower tolerance for BS? Sterotypical Little Red Riding Hood's "Grandma" who only uses email and web, and doesn't have any real expectations on how fast it should be, or Sterotypical power mom "Lynette" whose children are screaming at her because their Wbox 3 is 'broken'?
One thing to remember though, Japan is the 10th largest nation population-wise, jammed in an area smaller than California.
As of 2003, Tokyo alone had 32 million people shoved into 8,000 sq km, where New York New York had a paltry 20 million in a spacious 18,000 sq km.
Those sorts of living conditions resemble Asimov's "Caves of Steel", which, if you remember, posited almost the exact cultural mores that the Japanese display today RE: privacy, conformity, and overcrowding.
I have a feeling that there is a bit of a breaking point regarding such things, where as you are on one side of the line, people become more and more aggressive as they attempt to defend what they perceive as their slowly diminishing 'personal space' until something eventually snaps and everyone just gives up.
Executive Privilege and a reminder that you can't sue a soveregn entity unless it allows you?
Luckly, others agree and have modded you appropriately...
Oh, wait...
Not to be snarky, but the ETA on that seems to be just after DNF is released.
However, given the original engine is actually Quake I with heavy modifications, even though a version of the Quake engine has been opened, it might not be their call on opening it.
No, I meant condensation, he was drooling.
It's still a "con" word!!!
Cheese.
Or a card with "How do you trick a jaded pessimist, turn me over to find out" printed on both sides. They fall for that every time.
And a confidence game is a scam that involves gaining someone's confidence and then using it to defraud them, which is exactly what every one of the examples above are.
Thanks for the unecessary condescendation though. Look! Another con word.