What world are you living in? The "industry" - various protection rackets, actually - are losing, and losing badly. Just why do you think they're resorting to such desperate measures?
I don't know, I wouldn't categorize anything that's come so far as all that desperate in the grand scheme of things.
Hypothetically, if a handful of the top game crackers somehow were sent to prison for it each year, do you think that would change anything? Certainly, games would still get cracked, but would it be every game, as reliably, as fast?
Along those same lines, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to consider the assorted industries protection rackets, or maybe it's a testament to how far the rule of law has come -- I feel reasonably confident that, say, a hundred years ago, someone would have disappeared or gruesomely executed the Pirate Bay principles. We're lucky to live in a time in which not all of these problems are solved by violence and intimidation.
1) Bioware doesn't need to practice what they preach, because they're in a position where they can make profitable high-budget games -- this is due to a combination of their expertise in developing these games, their reputation in the market (that is, anything they do at this point automatically draws a certain amount of interest simply because they're Bioware), and their reputation to owners/investors/management/etc. (it isn't hard to get people to essentially bet, financially, that Bioware can make another successful game.)
The point of the article, I think, is that some dev houses would like to make the kinds of games Bioware makes, but they haven't worked up to it yet and don't yet have those three big things going for them that Bioware does.
2) There's no accounting for taste, but I really like Mass Effect and consider it to be about as good of a story as has been told in a video game. That's not to say that I didn't play Chrono Trigger and Link to the Past in the SNES era and enjoy the hell out of them too; they're just each different kinds of games and I do appreciate each on their own merits. For example, I think it's fair to say that CT is much more linear than ME -- that's not a criticism, it's a design choice that has both upsides and downsides.
It'd be great to see another game with the imagination of a Chrono Trigger (and I don't really consider Chrono Cross as equal to that task) or a Link to the Past (still probably my favorite Zelda), but that doesn't mean I can't really enjoy a Mass Effect for what it is, too.
I don't know. It's still strange to me. Kinda like walking up to a bunch of kids playing ball on a playground and telling them "You know kids - statistically almost none of you are EVER going to make it to the NBA, so you really shouldn't even try.".
While the fact that very few will make it is undeniably true, if no one tries it, we never will get those rare breakthroughs like BioWare or Blizzard.
I didn't get that out of what he said -- to keep with your analogy, I felt like he was saying: you shouldn't try to get drafted into the NBA straight out of junior high. Maybe you want to play some high school or college ball first, get a little more experience, build a name for yourself.
Blizzard couldn't have made a WoW (I pick that because it's the biggest financial success, which is an objective and easy standard, rather than trying to haggle over the relative merits of their other games) for their first project -- they needed (as a company) experience first, and they needed the kind of reputation that would make getting the money to do it right/well without too much outside interference possible.
All that being true, it's still an interesting / instructive contrast.
If (as a result of piracy), games like Mafia Wars (or an MMO, another model that is essentially unpirateable -- sure there are pirate servers, but the vast majority of players for various reasons do not want to play on them) can provide a company with a much higher ROI than makers of 'traditional' games, then that is the way the market's going to go.
I don't see a good solution to the problem, but I wish someone would come up with one because I prefer to play (and buy) the kinds of games that ultimately are pirateable.
It certainly isn't any actual utility: violience is the least efficient and effective way of solving any problem.
There's a saying: violence is like XML. If it isn't solving your problem, you're not using enough of it!
(A more serious answer would be that at some point or in some cases, only more violence can beat violence. If I'm willing to solve my problems with violence and you aren't, at some point I'm always going to win. Passive resistance only works if I have a sense of shame.)
So, you better have a good workplace culture or else no one will work for long there.
It's still the case that a lot more people would like to be video game developers than the market will support, and it's still the case that most employers place a very high value on having shipped titles on your resume.
These things seriously distort the video game dev job market from what it might otherwise be; as long as those things are the case, it's going to be easy to replace any turnover for cheap, and there are going to be people willing to make Hello Kitty Island Adventure 14 even in terrible working conditions.
What I take away from the article is that Bioware can make games like that because they have a proven track record of making games like that financial successes, but that a development team with a less powerful resume probably couldn't get it done. Not because the team wouldn't be up to it creatively or technically, but because in the current market, management/investors wouldn't have enough faith in an unproven team to let them take the time to do it right.
Eh. It's too reductive to call Paine a socialist, but certainly he advocated for a number of ideas commonly associated with socialism.
For example, a government-provided pension for old people.
If you want to argue that Social Security isn't a socialist kind of policy, that's fine, but then you can't really call anything in American politics socialist either.
It's possible, but because many states lean heavily towards one political party or the other, winning the electoral college is in practice a higher bar for a third-party candidate than even a popular vote win. This may not be true forever, but it was in '92.
Sorry, I don't know anybody who believes that a woman's body is the property of the Federal Government. However, I do know a lot of people who believe that you shouldn't be able to kill someone just because they can't speak for themselves and are inconvenient for you unlike most Democrats.
It's a little more complicated of an issue than that, whether you'd like it to be or not.
Unless I'm entitled to have the government take any of your blood or organs I need to live, even if it will kill you. And if I am, is it really your body or the government's?
The ONLY thing gun laws do is take guns out of the hands of those who obey the law, and those people you didn't have anything to fear from to begin with.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one -- I'm not in favor of gun control but I genuinely cannot fathom how any honest person can believe what you're saying is actually true.
1) Punishment never deters everyone, but it sure as hell deters someone. Otherwise, why have law enforcement at all? To try and reduce the issue to a black and white "You can't deter everyone, so deterrents are completely useless" is to simplify a complex issue to the point of unreality.
2) Your position completely falls apart unless you assume that a criminal is only ever caught with an illegal gun once they've already killed someone or otherwise broken a major law with it. I submit to you that this is not the case -- what you're arguing is tantamount to saying that laws against drunk driving are useless because we only ever find out someone was driving drunk until after they've already run over a cheerleader.
Ross Perot showed us that. (He could have won the election, given that about 20% of the voters said that they didn't vote for him, but would have if they would have thought that he had a chance, giving him about 40% of the vote and leaving Clinton and Bush with about 30% each.)
No, Republicans believe that a fetus qualifies for personhood, and thus should be afford the rights of all people (life, liberty, and property).
Except it's clearly more than that, because the idea is that the fetus' rights significantly trump the rights of the would-be mother.
I have the rights of personhood, but no one would argue that my rights of personhood entitle me to seize your kidney against your will, even if I will die without it. (And frankly, kidnapping you and stealing your kidney is less of an imposition than 9 months of pregnancy.) Conversely, some abortion opponents do oppose it even in the case that the mother will die without it.
I don't see how this statement can be logically defended:
There is absolutely no way you will ever, ever, EVER keep a criminal who wants one from obtaining a gun. You might as well attempt to regular the air in the hope that they'll suffocate.
Let's illustrate with an extreme example. Certainly, if a government were to decide (and be able to enforce without a revolution, which is true in some countries but probably not others) that anyone caught with a gun in their possession was going to be publically tortured to death immediately, the number of criminals with guns would drop drastically. Make it something even more outrageously draconian (maybe you also seize all their property and kill their immediate family) and the number of criminals with guns will drop further.
I don't think these are good ideas; I'm not even actually for gun control. But it's very obviously untrue to say that there's nothing that could possibly be done. Along the same lines, I generally view the random gun violence deaths that do occur a price we pay for the freedom to bear arms, and I think that's a price worth paying -- but it's disingenuous to try to claim that either there is no such cost or that nothing can be done about it.
I know you mean well, but you are deeply misguided.
You have mistaken me for someone advocating for gun control, rather than someone attempting to explain the divide on an issue. I've never indicated either of the positions I was attempting to explain were correct, rather that I believe they represent what a lot of people in those situations feel.
But for the sake of argument, do you believe that once-legal guns being lost/stolen/sold and ultimately ending up in criminal hands is a statistically insignificant phenomena?
It's hard to blame them though. They feel that this issue is very important, and that the Democrats' stance on this basic right is merely a sign of a deeper disregard for personal rights in general
I've always felt that gun control was more a rural/urban divide than anything else.
If you live in the country, guns are how you hunt and keep the occasional mountain lion from eating your children. (And probably, in the event that someone does break into your house, having a gun is the only way to stop them in any kind of reasonable time -- the police station is probably not less than a mile away.)
If you live in the city, guns are how people in your neighborhood get killed. (And, sure, if somehow guns magically go away people would be killed by knives etc. instead, but try doing a drive-by and accidentally getting the wrong person with a knife.)
Speaking in broad terms that clearly don't account for every person in either situation, rural people don't want to give up an important tool, and urban people want the freedom to not be shot more than they want the freedom to own a gun.
I'm not the author of the post you're responding to, and I have no dog in this fight, but I think you've decided it says something it doesn't.
He doesn't ascribe diabolical motives to Ron Paul, only says he'll never be more than a sideshow as long as he remains in the Republican Party -- and I think even his most ardent supporters have to admit the truth of that. He'd never be allowed to be, for example, the GOP nom for president. Whether or not he is what you or I or anyone want, he is not what the Republican Party wants.
Let's keep it simple: anyone who wants to increase government power is a progressive.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with your thesis: do you realize (and would you agree) that this would make GW Bush a very, very progressive president when you consider the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act?
By any reasonable standard, he's pretty "centrist" -- if anything, I'd say his politics have more in common with Reagan than any other president in my lifetime. At least, judging by what both did more than by what both said.
(I also don't pronounce judgment here on whether that's a good thing or not.)
Probably a lot of people would disagree with that, but I think that says more about remembering the parts of Reagan's politics that they would now agree with and disregarding the parts that they don't.
Except our constitutionally guaranteed right to remain armed. The Democrats, as it were, just can't help but shoot themselves in the foot with the gun control issue. There are a LOT of people in rural areas and in the Southern states who will literally base their vote on that one issue.
I'm a little convinced there will always be that "one issue" for a lot of people. Witness gay marriage and the 2004 election.
I think your post is seriously mismodded; I disagree with some of it, but it's definitely not a troll post.
That being said...
In my world: You buy a product. It's crap. You get a refund and don't buy again from the company.
App lock-in to a small degree and phone contracts (at least, in the American market -- I've heard some countries are different) put some snags in this philosophy in this particular situation.
If I've got an iPhone 3 and have bought a bunch of apps for it, and I get rid of / sell it to get an iPhone 4 (along with a new 2 year contract), it's non-trivial for me to get a refund and switch to a different phone without either:
A) Buying an earlier model iPhone, again, getting another 2 year contract or
B) Buying a different brand entirely and giving up on my phone apps.
I think B is the lesser of two evils if I feel really burned by the new iPhone, but I can understand why some people wouldn't want to go that route, either.
A better analogy would be that the Lexus didn't come with a cup-holder, but you can purchase an after-market one for $30. It's not a show stopper because there is a workaround. If the iPhone antenna did not improve reception by adding a case, then it would be a show stopper.
With all due respect, no, that is not a better analogy.
The primary function of a phone is to make phone calls.
The primary function of a car is not to hold my Mountain Dew.
CR did mention work-arounds, but there's a lot of phones on the market (i.e., basically all of them including earlier iPhones) that don't need one to perform their most basic function.
I think it's fair to call that a sticking point -- if they thought the new Lexus was the greatest car ever but sometimes the brakes didn't work unless you slapped some duct tape on it, I'd expect them to withhold recommending that, too.
Generally, yeah, stuff that runs on an iPhone could equally run on an iPod Touch, but because an iPhone can always have internet without needing to tether and is likely to always be with its owners (probably unlike a less portable/pocketable iPad), something you loved on the phone may not be something you really want on another iThing.
For example, maybe you've got a navigation or calendaring app you really like for the iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
What world are you living in? The "industry" - various protection rackets, actually - are losing, and losing badly. Just why do you think they're resorting to such desperate measures?
I don't know, I wouldn't categorize anything that's come so far as all that desperate in the grand scheme of things.
Hypothetically, if a handful of the top game crackers somehow were sent to prison for it each year, do you think that would change anything? Certainly, games would still get cracked, but would it be every game, as reliably, as fast?
Along those same lines, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to consider the assorted industries protection rackets, or maybe it's a testament to how far the rule of law has come -- I feel reasonably confident that, say, a hundred years ago, someone would have disappeared or gruesomely executed the Pirate Bay principles. We're lucky to live in a time in which not all of these problems are solved by violence and intimidation.
Well, two points:
1) Bioware doesn't need to practice what they preach, because they're in a position where they can make profitable high-budget games -- this is due to a combination of their expertise in developing these games, their reputation in the market (that is, anything they do at this point automatically draws a certain amount of interest simply because they're Bioware), and their reputation to owners/investors/management/etc. (it isn't hard to get people to essentially bet, financially, that Bioware can make another successful game.)
The point of the article, I think, is that some dev houses would like to make the kinds of games Bioware makes, but they haven't worked up to it yet and don't yet have those three big things going for them that Bioware does.
2) There's no accounting for taste, but I really like Mass Effect and consider it to be about as good of a story as has been told in a video game. That's not to say that I didn't play Chrono Trigger and Link to the Past in the SNES era and enjoy the hell out of them too; they're just each different kinds of games and I do appreciate each on their own merits. For example, I think it's fair to say that CT is much more linear than ME -- that's not a criticism, it's a design choice that has both upsides and downsides.
It'd be great to see another game with the imagination of a Chrono Trigger (and I don't really consider Chrono Cross as equal to that task) or a Link to the Past (still probably my favorite Zelda), but that doesn't mean I can't really enjoy a Mass Effect for what it is, too.
I don't know. It's still strange to me. Kinda like walking up to a bunch of kids playing ball on a playground and telling them "You know kids - statistically almost none of you are EVER going to make it to the NBA, so you really shouldn't even try.".
While the fact that very few will make it is undeniably true, if no one tries it, we never will get those rare breakthroughs like BioWare or Blizzard.
I didn't get that out of what he said -- to keep with your analogy, I felt like he was saying: you shouldn't try to get drafted into the NBA straight out of junior high. Maybe you want to play some high school or college ball first, get a little more experience, build a name for yourself.
Blizzard couldn't have made a WoW (I pick that because it's the biggest financial success, which is an objective and easy standard, rather than trying to haggle over the relative merits of their other games) for their first project -- they needed (as a company) experience first, and they needed the kind of reputation that would make getting the money to do it right/well without too much outside interference possible.
All that being true, it's still an interesting / instructive contrast.
If (as a result of piracy), games like Mafia Wars (or an MMO, another model that is essentially unpirateable -- sure there are pirate servers, but the vast majority of players for various reasons do not want to play on them) can provide a company with a much higher ROI than makers of 'traditional' games, then that is the way the market's going to go.
I don't see a good solution to the problem, but I wish someone would come up with one because I prefer to play (and buy) the kinds of games that ultimately are pirateable.
It certainly isn't any actual utility: violience is the least efficient and effective way of solving any problem.
There's a saying: violence is like XML. If it isn't solving your problem, you're not using enough of it!
(A more serious answer would be that at some point or in some cases, only more violence can beat violence. If I'm willing to solve my problems with violence and you aren't, at some point I'm always going to win. Passive resistance only works if I have a sense of shame.)
So, you better have a good workplace culture or else no one will work for long there.
It's still the case that a lot more people would like to be video game developers than the market will support, and it's still the case that most employers place a very high value on having shipped titles on your resume.
These things seriously distort the video game dev job market from what it might otherwise be; as long as those things are the case, it's going to be easy to replace any turnover for cheap, and there are going to be people willing to make Hello Kitty Island Adventure 14 even in terrible working conditions.
What I take away from the article is that Bioware can make games like that because they have a proven track record of making games like that financial successes, but that a development team with a less powerful resume probably couldn't get it done. Not because the team wouldn't be up to it creatively or technically, but because in the current market, management/investors wouldn't have enough faith in an unproven team to let them take the time to do it right.
Eh. It's too reductive to call Paine a socialist, but certainly he advocated for a number of ideas commonly associated with socialism.
For example, a government-provided pension for old people.
If you want to argue that Social Security isn't a socialist kind of policy, that's fine, but then you can't really call anything in American politics socialist either.
It's possible, but because many states lean heavily towards one political party or the other, winning the electoral college is in practice a higher bar for a third-party candidate than even a popular vote win. This may not be true forever, but it was in '92.
Sorry, I don't know anybody who believes that a woman's body is the property of the Federal Government. However, I do know a lot of people who believe that you shouldn't be able to kill someone just because they can't speak for themselves and are inconvenient for you unlike most Democrats.
It's a little more complicated of an issue than that, whether you'd like it to be or not.
Unless I'm entitled to have the government take any of your blood or organs I need to live, even if it will kill you. And if I am, is it really your body or the government's?
The ONLY thing gun laws do is take guns out of the hands of those who obey the law, and those people you didn't have anything to fear from to begin with.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one -- I'm not in favor of gun control but I genuinely cannot fathom how any honest person can believe what you're saying is actually true.
1) Punishment never deters everyone, but it sure as hell deters someone. Otherwise, why have law enforcement at all? To try and reduce the issue to a black and white "You can't deter everyone, so deterrents are completely useless" is to simplify a complex issue to the point of unreality.
2) Your position completely falls apart unless you assume that a criminal is only ever caught with an illegal gun once they've already killed someone or otherwise broken a major law with it. I submit to you that this is not the case -- what you're arguing is tantamount to saying that laws against drunk driving are useless because we only ever find out someone was driving drunk until after they've already run over a cheerleader.
Ross Perot showed us that. (He could have won the election, given that about 20% of the voters said that they didn't vote for him, but would have if they would have thought that he had a chance, giving him about 40% of the vote and leaving Clinton and Bush with about 30% each.)
Except, electoral college.
No, Republicans believe that a fetus qualifies for personhood, and thus should be afford the rights of all people (life, liberty, and property).
Except it's clearly more than that, because the idea is that the fetus' rights significantly trump the rights of the would-be mother.
I have the rights of personhood, but no one would argue that my rights of personhood entitle me to seize your kidney against your will, even if I will die without it. (And frankly, kidnapping you and stealing your kidney is less of an imposition than 9 months of pregnancy.) Conversely, some abortion opponents do oppose it even in the case that the mother will die without it.
I don't see how this statement can be logically defended:
There is absolutely no way you will ever, ever, EVER keep a criminal who wants one from obtaining a gun. You might as well attempt to regular the air in the hope that they'll suffocate.
Let's illustrate with an extreme example. Certainly, if a government were to decide (and be able to enforce without a revolution, which is true in some countries but probably not others) that anyone caught with a gun in their possession was going to be publically tortured to death immediately, the number of criminals with guns would drop drastically. Make it something even more outrageously draconian (maybe you also seize all their property and kill their immediate family) and the number of criminals with guns will drop further.
I don't think these are good ideas; I'm not even actually for gun control. But it's very obviously untrue to say that there's nothing that could possibly be done. Along the same lines, I generally view the random gun violence deaths that do occur a price we pay for the freedom to bear arms, and I think that's a price worth paying -- but it's disingenuous to try to claim that either there is no such cost or that nothing can be done about it.
I know you mean well, but you are deeply misguided.
You have mistaken me for someone advocating for gun control, rather than someone attempting to explain the divide on an issue. I've never indicated either of the positions I was attempting to explain were correct, rather that I believe they represent what a lot of people in those situations feel.
But for the sake of argument, do you believe that once-legal guns being lost/stolen/sold and ultimately ending up in criminal hands is a statistically insignificant phenomena?
So right now, the federal government IS telling you what you can do with your body... thanks to RvW.
Because it forces abortions on you whether you want one or not?
Sorry, that statement is logically indefensible.
It's hard to blame them though. They feel that this issue is very important, and that the Democrats' stance on this basic right is merely a sign of a deeper disregard for personal rights in general
I've always felt that gun control was more a rural/urban divide than anything else.
If you live in the country, guns are how you hunt and keep the occasional mountain lion from eating your children. (And probably, in the event that someone does break into your house, having a gun is the only way to stop them in any kind of reasonable time -- the police station is probably not less than a mile away.)
If you live in the city, guns are how people in your neighborhood get killed. (And, sure, if somehow guns magically go away people would be killed by knives etc. instead, but try doing a drive-by and accidentally getting the wrong person with a knife.)
Speaking in broad terms that clearly don't account for every person in either situation, rural people don't want to give up an important tool, and urban people want the freedom to not be shot more than they want the freedom to own a gun.
I'm not the author of the post you're responding to, and I have no dog in this fight, but I think you've decided it says something it doesn't.
He doesn't ascribe diabolical motives to Ron Paul, only says he'll never be more than a sideshow as long as he remains in the Republican Party -- and I think even his most ardent supporters have to admit the truth of that. He'd never be allowed to be, for example, the GOP nom for president. Whether or not he is what you or I or anyone want, he is not what the Republican Party wants.
Let's keep it simple: anyone who wants to increase government power is a progressive.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with your thesis: do you realize (and would you agree) that this would make GW Bush a very, very progressive president when you consider the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act?
By any reasonable standard, he's pretty "centrist" -- if anything, I'd say his politics have more in common with Reagan than any other president in my lifetime. At least, judging by what both did more than by what both said.
(I also don't pronounce judgment here on whether that's a good thing or not.)
Probably a lot of people would disagree with that, but I think that says more about remembering the parts of Reagan's politics that they would now agree with and disregarding the parts that they don't.
Except our constitutionally guaranteed right to remain armed. The Democrats, as it were, just can't help but shoot themselves in the foot with the gun control issue. There are a LOT of people in rural areas and in the Southern states who will literally base their vote on that one issue.
I'm a little convinced there will always be that "one issue" for a lot of people. Witness gay marriage and the 2004 election.
I think your post is seriously mismodded; I disagree with some of it, but it's definitely not a troll post.
That being said...
In my world: You buy a product. It's crap. You get a refund and don't buy again from the company.
App lock-in to a small degree and phone contracts (at least, in the American market -- I've heard some countries are different) put some snags in this philosophy in this particular situation.
If I've got an iPhone 3 and have bought a bunch of apps for it, and I get rid of / sell it to get an iPhone 4 (along with a new 2 year contract), it's non-trivial for me to get a refund and switch to a different phone without either:
A) Buying an earlier model iPhone, again, getting another 2 year contract or
B) Buying a different brand entirely and giving up on my phone apps.
I think B is the lesser of two evils if I feel really burned by the new iPhone, but I can understand why some people wouldn't want to go that route, either.
A better analogy would be that the Lexus didn't come with a cup-holder, but you can purchase an after-market one for $30. It's not a show stopper because there is a workaround. If the iPhone antenna did not improve reception by adding a case, then it would be a show stopper.
With all due respect, no, that is not a better analogy.
The primary function of a phone is to make phone calls.
The primary function of a car is not to hold my Mountain Dew.
CR did mention work-arounds, but there's a lot of phones on the market (i.e., basically all of them including earlier iPhones) that don't need one to perform their most basic function.
I think it's fair to call that a sticking point -- if they thought the new Lexus was the greatest car ever but sometimes the brakes didn't work unless you slapped some duct tape on it, I'd expect them to withhold recommending that, too.
Generally, yeah, stuff that runs on an iPhone could equally run on an iPod Touch, but because an iPhone can always have internet without needing to tether and is likely to always be with its owners (probably unlike a less portable/pocketable iPad), something you loved on the phone may not be something you really want on another iThing.
For example, maybe you've got a navigation or calendaring app you really like for the iPhone.