Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply so much of it.
The problem with Web 2.0 thinking is that they insist having lots of metadata allows for a suitable means of editing -- it does not.
Web 2.0's metadata does help accentuate the positive, but Johnny Mercer's formula for success asks us to eliminate the negative. Right now, all Web 2.0 allows us to do is de-emphasise it, which isn't halfway good enough.
CDs, and music in general, should be viewed as a loss-leader to get people in to see them perform.
Unfortunately, right now most musicians consider live gigs to be a loss-leader in order to get people to buy their CDs. How exactly are they to make money if the CDs are to be a loss-leader too? I'm not The Police, and I'll never be able to command those ticket prices.
Then make [computers] part of they're learning experience.
1. schoolkids
2. computers
3. ???
4. learning
So, if you'd like to share your unique insights on educational psychology, I'm certain the other experts in the field would love to learn how to do this.
I would say to think that humans are the only intelligent life form in the galaxy is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever.
What's ridiculous about it? To date, we're only aware of ourselves. We understand a lot about the genome, but we realise that life is complex and delicate. We have hard evidence for only spontaneous divergent evolutionary ecosystem -- so we have a sample set of one. How can we make any statistical estimate of the probability of such an ecosystem occuring elsewhere? We can't.
And here's the kicker: what does it matter anyway? It's not like it really makes any difference to my life whether there's some seven-tentacled hydrogen-breather playing 7-dimensional Tetris on the outer fringes of the Andromeda galaxy....
I think you've missed the point of "universal" and the comparison with DVDs and CDs.
Right now I have to now my processor type and speed; the amount of memory I have; the type of graphics card and its memory; how much spare hard-drive space I have; my sound setup; my controllers... my PC is not a universal platform.
What they want is a commodity platform. As a CD is a CD is a CD, they want a game to be a game to be a game which can just go in any "game machine".
It's an admiral goal, shame it's such an unfeasible idea. (See MSX and MPC for previous attempts at an open "universal" platform.
Besides, not all communication between minors and adults are wrong to begin with. Kids can be fans of bands. Kids can put up interesting content that adults want to ask questions about. I hate this presumption that any relationship between a child an adult must either be parental or abusive.
I didn't intend to imply any such thing. My point was that MySpace allows people to lie, cheat and misrepresent themselves in a way that is impossible in a face-to-face situation. 13 year olds chatting with 19 year olds is not necessarily a problem, but when the 19 year old is pretending to be a 13 year old, the 13 year old must have a way to verify this, and cannot do so idependently -- at the mall or a café, it'd be obvious.
I still contend that my analogy is stronger than yours. A mall is little more than a street, and is an improvement on said street in terms of security and convenience. The mall exists to allow people to go to shops -- any social function is a by-product over which the mall operators exercise very little control. MySpace's primary function is as a meeting place -- a club. As such, it should not be any less secure than what already exists to fulfill that function. The "virtualness" of the space makes it extremely difficult to i
However, to continue your analogy: if MySpace is a mall, there must be shops. The individual user pages must be the shops then, right? OK. The mall owner isn't responsible for what goes on in those shops, is he? Only to a point -- here we find "reasonable steps". The mall owner makes sure he knows who his tennants are, and he also makes reasonably sure that they aren't misrepresenting themselves or doing anything illegal. He doesn't just let any old shyster come in and set up a follow-the-queen stall!
I've got an even better comparison. Do we sue the city when someone is raped or molested in public? The technology exists to prevent it - just cover the streets with cops! Of course it would be horribly expensive,
The streets provide an essential function. The streets are ours. We balance of the cost and risk to ourselves and make a reasonable decision on those factors. MySpace can be useful, but it's not essential. And it's not our MySpace, it's MySpace.com's MySpace. MySpace.com is a corporation, and there service exists as a profit generator. Their profits are high because they keep costs low. They keep costs low by having minimal editorial control. Their minimal editorial control means that MySpace is riddled with imposters, liars and cheats. MySpace make the money, but shirk the responsibility.
Your looking at it the wrong way round: it is not the case that security would destroy MySpace, it is really that lack of security allows MySpace (as we know it) to exist.
To compare with the physical world: imagine a world-wide network of clubs, ClubGroup. Youth clubs, pool clubs, night clubs -- it doesn't matter which. Now imagine these were run from a single office in a place called Townsville. And imagine the people in Townsville booked all the rooms worldwide, and no-one from or hired by ClubGroup was present at any of the events -- just members of the public. Now imagine someone gets seriously assualted (sexually or otherwise). ClubGroup get taken to court and closed down. Would you be up in arms about the "death of the club world"? No. Other operators would continue, employing sensible membership, access and security precautions.
The cost to MySpace of deploying security/identity checks is a necessary business expense to ensure that the service is fit for purpose. The real crime is that they continue to get away with feeble claims to be a mere paper manufacturer when they are in truth a publisher.
On the internet, there is no way to make sure that the information which you collected accurately represents the person who is using your service. No way.
No way? I don't think that's true. What is true is that it is not feasible with the business model employed by current net services. Verifying identity involves human beings and a lot of time -- hence money.
You would need a physical location where people could have their passports/driving license/other proof of ID checked.
What would this do to the internet? I don't think it would kill the internet, but it would make it impossible to set up a massive operation like MySpace or YouTube. The setup costs of a site on that scale would be totally unfeasible. This gap would have to be filled with a number of small, geographically-diverse companies working in various degress of co-operation and competition (like in the old BBS days).
This would not be a bad thing, IMO. Not only would it encourage a diverse market in place of the current monopolistic "closed shop" services, but it would also help us start to deal with the whole thorny issue of legal jurisdictions. My part of the new inter-network of MySpace-like sites would be in the UK. I would only have to ensure that my material didn't infringe UK law, rather than now, where I have to know about UK and US law, and indeed the finer points of state law in MySpace's home state.
MySpace is not a phone. It does not present itself as a phone. It paints itself as a club, an environment, a trusted service. The phone does not introduce people -- MySpace does. The phone book doesn't list ages -- MySpace does. Kids trust MySpace because it's big, it's professional and because their physical experience of MySpace is the people they knew before going on. They like them -- they like MySpace. Like it or not, MySpace in its current form is dangerous. It needs serious legal controls.
If a musician cannot make a living playing music, then he can go do something else.
I couldn't make a living playing music, so I went into computing.
I'm pretty confident that we will have plenty of good music, with or without copyright.
After a hard day's graft at the office, I don't write anything. It's too much like work, and I'd rather unwind. Yes, I do still write from time to time, but it just seems unpolished, unpracticed and imperfect.
OK, so if I was good at it I probably would be making a living at it by now. However, I was involved in music because of personal passion and drive (and a desire to get girls), like any other musician. So any other musician forced into a hum-drum job like mine to pay the bills would become similarly jaded, and like me would end up writing dismal ditties about how boring life is.
Furthermore, if we look at traditional music, all the "classics" were written by paid musicians. Some were paid by Lords and other sponsors, others paid by publishers.
Getting involved in charities is something rich industrialists should NOT do until they retire from day to day operations, until then they are performing a far greater service to society by PRODUCING WEALTH.
I think you're confusing corporate and personal capital. Corporate capital goes into improving the business, which (hopefully) increases prosperity. Personal capital can be reinvested, but that means buying shares, not airliners.
Furthermore, responsible charity can also increase prosperity -- note that the major charities now all focus on setting up co-ops and providing training in trades and business skills.
Finally, you can't produce wealth without producing poverty. Don't believe me? I'm not rich in a national sense: I can't afford to buy much more than many of my local peers can. I'm rich in an international sense: I can afford to buy more than most of my global peers. Locally it appears as though wealth has been generated, as everyone in my country has more possessions than they did a generation ago. However, on the global scale, we can see people poisoning themselves in the factories that produce our cheap consumer goods for a pitiful bread-line wage of a few pennies per week, where 200 years ago their ancestors lived in productive, self-sufficient communities. We claim urbanisation is good and cite health-care and education as examples of why, yet people are no healthier, and their education isn't getting them out of the factories.
We have lots of non-morals-based laws that make sense on some level: [...] food safety,
Uuuummmm.... Are you saying it's not immoral to sell mouldy bread? Cooked meats contaminated with E-Coli? Gherkins pickled in Arsenic? I can see why you would argue that speed limits are not morals based, but personally I think it is immoral to knowingly endanger the lives of others unnecessarily. Just because the safe speed can't be determined by morals doesn't mean it's not a moral-based law.
The moral basis for IP law is debatable, but I'd argue it falls squarely under the title of "exploitation of labour". Any valid IP requires some time to create, and taking someone's time for free is what's known in the trade as slavery.
Now I don't support the death penalty, but why is it a man who drives dangerously (drunk, over the speed-limit, in an unsafe car etc) receives a lesser sentence if he doesn't hit someone than if he hits and kills someone? There is definitely no difference in his intent. Surely the difference between killing someone and not killing someone while driving dangerously is purely random -- whether there's someone to kill or not. As such, there isn't even any difference in action on the part of the driver. How can we convict someone for something so clearly random?
But back to the topic:
But you don't really think that copyright infringement and mugging share a common moral space, do you?
I don't think anyone would really equate the two, but what would be a suitable comparison? To be entirely fair, it'd have to be something that is as argued over as intellectual property so there'd be no point in the comparison as it wouldn't progress the debate at all.
Now, most (sane) people prefer non-violent crime to violent crime. Is that to say that violent crime is "more wrong" than non-violent, or simply "more undesirable"?
That's not to say I really care about the finer points of definition of DWL, but I'm baffled by the author's purpose in discussing this.
The article suggests that a dead-weight-loss is bad, because it's money for labour which is in theoretical terms valueless. Fine -- I understand this. However, a non-dead-weight-loss is not a bad thing in the author's eyes. But if that non-DWL is pure profit (as with the hosting in his example), how is it any better?
At the risk of sounding socialist, the financial costs incurred by unnecessary labour are generally distributed to a team of workers, whereas profits are concentrated on a much smaller set of shareholders.
I bet you that no country would tolerate it if you handed out leaflets calling for a Coup d'Etat.
I bet you it would.
"And, if any man should advocate the dissolution of this union, let him stand free and unmolested as an example of how even the most egregious error of reason can be tolerated in a free society." (Thomas Jefferson)
It's just as well your country is currently run by this Mr Jefferson. I hate to think what'll happen when he stands down and is replaced by an ultra-conservative religious-fundamentalist Texan gets the presidency....
Does the mouse action detract from the puzzle solving? Why should Wiimote action be any different. What I'm talking about hear is immersive interactivity -- being more involved and relating more to the lead character. Should a point-and-click character be a mere pawn, or your avatar? Ideally, where control systems support, I'd say the latter, personally.
The whole point of the Wiimote is that it enhances the action experience, not acting as a mouse...
But then wasn't the main problem with point-and-clicks that the mouse made you feel removed from the action? The whole point of the Wiimote is to try and replace unintuitive control systems with something more natural. Note that the control-pad is only one unintuitive control system, and the mouse is quite clearly another.
Why should be write "fewer and fewer"? Fewer and fewer people are saying "fewer and fewer" -- more and more are saying "less and less". Less and less people subscribe to the preposterous notion that there is a "correct" way to speak/write -- rather we should speak/write like the majority.
Are you sure internet cafés are uncool? Why? Because you can sit next to and actually talk to a real friend in flesh and blood?
The point of a computing-environment-on-a-stick is so that you're not tied to that computer in your bedroom next to your smelly linen basket. It's a bit like network computing, but without the network. (And of course network computing only failed because it relied on a network.)
I think this may be the way to turn the public on to free software -- the freedom the advocates talk about is realised in a very tangible, understandable way.
Unless someone gets a Personal Server style project running, but that I doubt.
HAL.
Re:Still only so many paths
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 1
We've strayed onto Level Design from Game Plot writing.
I disagree. Problems and solutions are narrative devices, hence part of the plot. To try to state that this is level design, not plot, is to suggest that the plot only exists in the cutscenes between levels.
Half of me wishes the gaming industry was capable of attracting better writing talent, but the key is to attract writers who are aware of the purpose of writing for a game.
I think the problem the games industry has with attracting writers is basically down to price.
Novels can be very lucrative -- ask J.K. Rowling. So can TV and cinema.
Why? They have a large market. Gaming is still very much a fringe pursuit. To compete with moving pictures and books on writers' take-home-pay, they'd have to allocate a very large share of profits to the writers.
But yes, it's a different style of writing -- and a very intellictually challenging one at that. The cost of learning is high -- there're so many variables to take into account.
Long-term learning, poor rewards? No thanks -- much easier just to write novel, publish and be damned.
you should throw all your money at the stock market, because if you have any brains whatsoever you can get rich. You should certainly be able to predict better than those stupid crowds whether the stock will go up or down.
Hmmm.... Am I to take it that you believe that the crowds "predict" the stock market?
That's a fallacy, and is akin to saying that voters predict the outcome of elections. Just as the voters determine the winner of an election, the crowd -- the market -- steer the value of stocks.
Every minor change is a derivative work, and if a malicious third party downloads a +0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1b change from sourceforge for any given project and registers it, the project's in deep doo-doo, so the project has to reregister every single time a source change becomes available.
Even if every FLOSS project could afford $5 for every single incremental change, can you image how soon the copyright registry would collapse if Sourceforge automatically submitted every upload for registration? "Sourceforging" would knock "Slashdotting" out of the dictionary.
If someone with more motivation turns around and actually CREATES something for public consumption
But if you look at my example, the person registering it has CREATED nothing, just released someone else's creation.
Now what if someone wants to create something for public consumption, but doesn't want paid for it -- eg an Apache developer? (Slashdot runs on Apache, doesn't it?) Why should he have to pay to ensure that it gets protected by the GPL and prevent unscrupulous software vendors rebranding it as their own product for unfair profit?
Your system fails because it is motivated by money, not the freedom of the creator. A creator with freedom is more creative.
If you want your post to be free, you are more than welcome to add a note as such in your sig.
If I write a short story for a creative writing class, I may not see it as of commercial use, so I hand it in without registering. So should my teacher or any of my classmates be entitled to rip off my plot, just because he/she was the one who identified a market? It was still me that wrote it -- it's still my work.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply so much of it.
The problem with Web 2.0 thinking is that they insist having lots of metadata allows for a suitable means of editing -- it does not.
Web 2.0's metadata does help accentuate the positive, but Johnny Mercer's formula for success asks us to eliminate the negative. Right now, all Web 2.0 allows us to do is de-emphasise it, which isn't halfway good enough.
HAL.
CDs, and music in general, should be viewed as a loss-leader to get people in to see them perform.
Unfortunately, right now most musicians consider live gigs to be a loss-leader in order to get people to buy their CDs. How exactly are they to make money if the CDs are to be a loss-leader too? I'm not The Police, and I'll never be able to command those ticket prices.
HAL.
Then make [computers] part of they're learning experience.
1. schoolkids2. computers
3. ???
4. learning
So, if you'd like to share your unique insights on educational psychology, I'm certain the other experts in the field would love to learn how to do this.
HAL.
Game Development Conditions Could Drive Devs East... ...Nintendo fuels speculation by investing in fleet of yachts.
I would say to think that humans are the only intelligent life form in the galaxy is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever.
What's ridiculous about it? To date, we're only aware of ourselves. We understand a lot about the genome, but we realise that life is complex and delicate. We have hard evidence for only spontaneous divergent evolutionary ecosystem -- so we have a sample set of one. How can we make any statistical estimate of the probability of such an ecosystem occuring elsewhere? We can't.
And here's the kicker: what does it matter anyway? It's not like it really makes any difference to my life whether there's some seven-tentacled hydrogen-breather playing 7-dimensional Tetris on the outer fringes of the Andromeda galaxy....
HAL.
I think you've missed the point of "universal" and the comparison with DVDs and CDs.
Right now I have to now my processor type and speed; the amount of memory I have; the type of graphics card and its memory; how much spare hard-drive space I have; my sound setup; my controllers... my PC is not a universal platform.
What they want is a commodity platform. As a CD is a CD is a CD, they want a game to be a game to be a game which can just go in any "game machine".
It's an admiral goal, shame it's such an unfeasible idea. (See MSX and MPC for previous attempts at an open "universal" platform.
HAL.
Besides, not all communication between minors and adults are wrong to begin with. Kids can be fans of bands. Kids can put up interesting content that adults want to ask questions about. I hate this presumption that any relationship between a child an adult must either be parental or abusive.
I didn't intend to imply any such thing. My point was that MySpace allows people to lie, cheat and misrepresent themselves in a way that is impossible in a face-to-face situation. 13 year olds chatting with 19 year olds is not necessarily a problem, but when the 19 year old is pretending to be a 13 year old, the 13 year old must have a way to verify this, and cannot do so idependently -- at the mall or a café, it'd be obvious.
I still contend that my analogy is stronger than yours. A mall is little more than a street, and is an improvement on said street in terms of security and convenience. The mall exists to allow people to go to shops -- any social function is a by-product over which the mall operators exercise very little control. MySpace's primary function is as a meeting place -- a club. As such, it should not be any less secure than what already exists to fulfill that function. The "virtualness" of the space makes it extremely difficult to i
However, to continue your analogy: if MySpace is a mall, there must be shops. The individual user pages must be the shops then, right? OK. The mall owner isn't responsible for what goes on in those shops, is he? Only to a point -- here we find "reasonable steps". The mall owner makes sure he knows who his tennants are, and he also makes reasonably sure that they aren't misrepresenting themselves or doing anything illegal. He doesn't just let any old shyster come in and set up a follow-the-queen stall!
HAL.
I've got an even better comparison. Do we sue the city when someone is raped or molested in public? The technology exists to prevent it - just cover the streets with cops! Of course it would be horribly expensive,
The streets provide an essential function. The streets are ours. We balance of the cost and risk to ourselves and make a reasonable decision on those factors. MySpace can be useful, but it's not essential. And it's not our MySpace, it's MySpace.com's MySpace. MySpace.com is a corporation, and there service exists as a profit generator. Their profits are high because they keep costs low. They keep costs low by having minimal editorial control. Their minimal editorial control means that MySpace is riddled with imposters, liars and cheats. MySpace make the money, but shirk the responsibility.
Your looking at it the wrong way round: it is not the case that security would destroy MySpace, it is really that lack of security allows MySpace (as we know it) to exist.
To compare with the physical world: imagine a world-wide network of clubs, ClubGroup. Youth clubs, pool clubs, night clubs -- it doesn't matter which. Now imagine these were run from a single office in a place called Townsville. And imagine the people in Townsville booked all the rooms worldwide, and no-one from or hired by ClubGroup was present at any of the events -- just members of the public. Now imagine someone gets seriously assualted (sexually or otherwise). ClubGroup get taken to court and closed down. Would you be up in arms about the "death of the club world"? No. Other operators would continue, employing sensible membership, access and security precautions.
The cost to MySpace of deploying security/identity checks is a necessary business expense to ensure that the service is fit for purpose. The real crime is that they continue to get away with feeble claims to be a mere paper manufacturer when they are in truth a publisher.
HAL.
On the internet, there is no way to make sure that the information which you collected accurately represents the person who is using your service. No way.
No way? I don't think that's true. What is true is that it is not feasible with the business model employed by current net services. Verifying identity involves human beings and a lot of time -- hence money.
You would need a physical location where people could have their passports/driving license/other proof of ID checked.
What would this do to the internet? I don't think it would kill the internet, but it would make it impossible to set up a massive operation like MySpace or YouTube. The setup costs of a site on that scale would be totally unfeasible. This gap would have to be filled with a number of small, geographically-diverse companies working in various degress of co-operation and competition (like in the old BBS days).
This would not be a bad thing, IMO. Not only would it encourage a diverse market in place of the current monopolistic "closed shop" services, but it would also help us start to deal with the whole thorny issue of legal jurisdictions. My part of the new inter-network of MySpace-like sites would be in the UK. I would only have to ensure that my material didn't infringe UK law, rather than now, where I have to know about UK and US law, and indeed the finer points of state law in MySpace's home state.
MySpace is not a phone. It does not present itself as a phone. It paints itself as a club, an environment, a trusted service. The phone does not introduce people -- MySpace does. The phone book doesn't list ages -- MySpace does. Kids trust MySpace because it's big, it's professional and because their physical experience of MySpace is the people they knew before going on. They like them -- they like MySpace. Like it or not, MySpace in its current form is dangerous. It needs serious legal controls.
HAL.
If a musician cannot make a living playing music, then he can go do something else.
I couldn't make a living playing music, so I went into computing.
I'm pretty confident that we will have plenty of good music, with or without copyright.
After a hard day's graft at the office, I don't write anything. It's too much like work, and I'd rather unwind. Yes, I do still write from time to time, but it just seems unpolished, unpracticed and imperfect.
OK, so if I was good at it I probably would be making a living at it by now. However, I was involved in music because of personal passion and drive (and a desire to get girls), like any other musician. So any other musician forced into a hum-drum job like mine to pay the bills would become similarly jaded, and like me would end up writing dismal ditties about how boring life is.
Furthermore, if we look at traditional music, all the "classics" were written by paid musicians. Some were paid by Lords and other sponsors, others paid by publishers.
Work requires reward -- that much is for certain.
HAL.
Getting involved in charities is something rich industrialists should NOT do until they retire from day to day operations, until then they are performing a far greater service to society by PRODUCING WEALTH.
I think you're confusing corporate and personal capital. Corporate capital goes into improving the business, which (hopefully) increases prosperity. Personal capital can be reinvested, but that means buying shares, not airliners.
Furthermore, responsible charity can also increase prosperity -- note that the major charities now all focus on setting up co-ops and providing training in trades and business skills.
Finally, you can't produce wealth without producing poverty. Don't believe me? I'm not rich in a national sense: I can't afford to buy much more than many of my local peers can. I'm rich in an international sense: I can afford to buy more than most of my global peers. Locally it appears as though wealth has been generated, as everyone in my country has more possessions than they did a generation ago. However, on the global scale, we can see people poisoning themselves in the factories that produce our cheap consumer goods for a pitiful bread-line wage of a few pennies per week, where 200 years ago their ancestors lived in productive, self-sufficient communities. We claim urbanisation is good and cite health-care and education as examples of why, yet people are no healthier, and their education isn't getting them out of the factories.
HAL.
We have lots of non-morals-based laws that make sense on some level: [...] food safety,
Uuuummmm.... Are you saying it's not immoral to sell mouldy bread? Cooked meats contaminated with E-Coli? Gherkins pickled in Arsenic? I can see why you would argue that speed limits are not morals based, but personally I think it is immoral to knowingly endanger the lives of others unnecessarily. Just because the safe speed can't be determined by morals doesn't mean it's not a moral-based law.
The moral basis for IP law is debatable, but I'd argue it falls squarely under the title of "exploitation of labour". Any valid IP requires some time to create, and taking someone's time for free is what's known in the trade as slavery.
HAL.
Death penalty for speeders while we're at it?
Now I don't support the death penalty, but why is it a man who drives dangerously (drunk, over the speed-limit, in an unsafe car etc) receives a lesser sentence if he doesn't hit someone than if he hits and kills someone? There is definitely no difference in his intent. Surely the difference between killing someone and not killing someone while driving dangerously is purely random -- whether there's someone to kill or not. As such, there isn't even any difference in action on the part of the driver. How can we convict someone for something so clearly random?
But back to the topic:
But you don't really think that copyright infringement and mugging share a common moral space, do you?
I don't think anyone would really equate the two, but what would be a suitable comparison? To be entirely fair, it'd have to be something that is as argued over as intellectual property so there'd be no point in the comparison as it wouldn't progress the debate at all.
Now, most (sane) people prefer non-violent crime to violent crime. Is that to say that violent crime is "more wrong" than non-violent, or simply "more undesirable"?
NT.
I'm kind of with you on this.
That's not to say I really care about the finer points of definition of DWL, but I'm baffled by the author's purpose in discussing this.
The article suggests that a dead-weight-loss is bad, because it's money for labour which is in theoretical terms valueless. Fine -- I understand this. However, a non-dead-weight-loss is not a bad thing in the author's eyes. But if that non-DWL is pure profit (as with the hosting in his example), how is it any better?
At the risk of sounding socialist, the financial costs incurred by unnecessary labour are generally distributed to a team of workers, whereas profits are concentrated on a much smaller set of shareholders.
HAL.
I bet you that no country would tolerate it if you handed out leaflets calling for a Coup d'Etat.
I bet you it would.
"And, if any man should advocate the dissolution of this union, let him stand free and unmolested as an example of how even the most egregious error of reason can be tolerated in a free society." (Thomas Jefferson)
It's just as well your country is currently run by this Mr Jefferson. I hate to think what'll happen when he stands down and is replaced by an ultra-conservative religious-fundamentalist Texan gets the presidency....
HAL.
but the action detracts from puzzle solving...
Does the mouse action detract from the puzzle solving? Why should Wiimote action be any different. What I'm talking about hear is immersive interactivity -- being more involved and relating more to the lead character. Should a point-and-click character be a mere pawn, or your avatar? Ideally, where control systems support, I'd say the latter, personally.
HAL.
The whole point of the Wiimote is that it enhances the action experience, not acting as a mouse...
But then wasn't the main problem with point-and-clicks that the mouse made you feel removed from the action? The whole point of the Wiimote is to try and replace unintuitive control systems with something more natural. Note that the control-pad is only one unintuitive control system, and the mouse is quite clearly another.
HAL.
Why should be write "fewer and fewer"? Fewer and fewer people are saying "fewer and fewer" -- more and more are saying "less and less". Less and less people subscribe to the preposterous notion that there is a "correct" way to speak/write -- rather we should speak/write like the majority.
HAL - English language graduate.
Are you sure internet cafés are uncool? Why? Because you can sit next to and actually talk to a real friend in flesh and blood?
The point of a computing-environment-on-a-stick is so that you're not tied to that computer in your bedroom next to your smelly linen basket. It's a bit like network computing, but without the network. (And of course network computing only failed because it relied on a network.)
I think this may be the way to turn the public on to free software -- the freedom the advocates talk about is realised in a very tangible, understandable way.
Unless someone gets a Personal Server style project running, but that I doubt.
HAL.
We've strayed onto Level Design from Game Plot writing.
I disagree. Problems and solutions are narrative devices, hence part of the plot. To try to state that this is level design, not plot, is to suggest that the plot only exists in the cutscenes between levels.
HAL.
Half of me wishes the gaming industry was capable of attracting better writing talent, but the key is to attract writers who are aware of the purpose of writing for a game.
I think the problem the games industry has with attracting writers is basically down to price.
Novels can be very lucrative -- ask J.K. Rowling. So can TV and cinema.
Why? They have a large market. Gaming is still very much a fringe pursuit. To compete with moving pictures and books on writers' take-home-pay, they'd have to allocate a very large share of profits to the writers.
But yes, it's a different style of writing -- and a very intellictually challenging one at that. The cost of learning is high -- there're so many variables to take into account.
Long-term learning, poor rewards? No thanks -- much easier just to write novel, publish and be damned.
HAL.
you should throw all your money at the stock market, because if you have any brains whatsoever you can get rich. You should certainly be able to predict better than those stupid crowds whether the stock will go up or down.
Hmmm.... Am I to take it that you believe that the crowds "predict" the stock market?
That's a fallacy, and is akin to saying that voters predict the outcome of elections. Just as the voters determine the winner of an election, the crowd -- the market -- steer the value of stocks.
HAL.
Every minor change is a derivative work, and if a malicious third party downloads a +0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1b change from sourceforge for any given project and registers it, the project's in deep doo-doo, so the project has to reregister every single time a source change becomes available.
Even if every FLOSS project could afford $5 for every single incremental change, can you image how soon the copyright registry would collapse if Sourceforge automatically submitted every upload for registration? "Sourceforging" would knock "Slashdotting" out of the dictionary.
HAL.
If someone with more motivation turns around and actually CREATES something for public consumption
But if you look at my example, the person registering it has CREATED nothing, just released someone else's creation.
Now what if someone wants to create something for public consumption, but doesn't want paid for it -- eg an Apache developer? (Slashdot runs on Apache, doesn't it?) Why should he have to pay to ensure that it gets protected by the GPL and prevent unscrupulous software vendors rebranding it as their own product for unfair profit?
Your system fails because it is motivated by money, not the freedom of the creator. A creator with freedom is more creative.
HAL.
If you want your post to be free, you are more than welcome to add a note as such in your sig.
If I write a short story for a creative writing class, I may not see it as of commercial use, so I hand it in without registering. So should my teacher or any of my classmates be entitled to rip off my plot, just because he/she was the one who identified a market? It was still me that wrote it -- it's still my work.
HAL.