Censorship that gets in the way of public discourse is blindingly obvious to see - interesting questions stop getting asked in the media.
Of course, part of the problem is that censorship is being seen from the US's point of view. There's a few things you have to understand about the Australian character as opposed to the US to know why censorship in Australia is not as much of a big deal:
* Australians don't see censorship as a slippery slope. As gamers know, censorship is alive and well in Australia, but it's also acknowledged - which means it can be monitored. It's censorship without accountability (like, say, Walmart's refusal to stock certain products if it conflicts with their corporate agenda) that's the real problem, and it's generally pointed out and ridiculed in Australia - indeed, it's a bit of a sport to show up the 'big end of town', and politicians are usually distrusted, and go down in the polls, if they don't have the ability to be open and honest - even if it means backpedalling, as has happened recently with one of the Opposition's policies here. In America, backpedalling is seen as a sign of weakness; in Australia, it's seen as a sign of learning. In America, dodging the question is seen as useful image control; in Australia, it's seen as condescending.
* Australians are individualists - we don't have a national identity, like most countries would understand it. This generally means that we're more sensitive to civil liberties being trampled. (But see next point.) We take mistrust of government, business and the elite to new heights. This can be problematic - we, for instance, demand our elite are also humble, something many intelligent people struggle with; it also tends to breed an anti-intellectual streak - but it's also healthy in that Australians don't need lobby groups to represent our interests, and it's hard to pull a slippery slope on Australians (efforts to introduce more and more censorship would be increasingly pushed back by more and more Australians - game censorship is an anomaly brought about by an extremist Attorney-General, and there's been calls to do something about him at some point, maybe, if we get around to it). (Australia's disdain for America is definitely tied up in this.)
* Australians live in the grey areas. I've seen America's black-and-white nature as a manifestation of the idea of America's manifest destiny - there is a moral code that must be followed, and we just have to work out what it is. The idea of enshrining particular liberties as inaliable is a bit strange to many Australians. There's always theoretically some time where free speech, for example, does more harm than good. On the upside, this also means that Australians abhor extremists - so some of the undesirable effects of free speech, the KKK and suchlike, get shouted down, without losing the value of the principle. This does, however, mean that we give up liberties other countries enjoy without making a fuss, because there's always a good reason for doing so, but we're also more willing to make a fuss when we want that liberty back. The national ID card scheme is a decent example.
I guess you could say that Australia is more chaotic, in the TSR alignment system sense, than America.
Yeah, not like Opera is the most used browser on the planet or anything. Your desktop-centric thinking is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Thanks, guys! I've just got an ad hominem, an assertive statement with no backup and a condescending rebuke in two posts! I'm going to win Slashdot Logical Fallacy Bingo for sure!
Which reminds me of the other problem I have with the whole 'Nintendo's success is bad for other developers' - EA totally has the resources to make excellent games. They don't because they can get away with it, but sometimes the developers get the resources that they need and put out something pretty good.
I can't help but think that if EA were required to step up, they would. (And they've said that they reckon they can become at least the #2 developer on Nintendo's platforms.)
What's scary is that they knew the strategy wouldn't work: they'd tried it before with the PSX, which was a PlayStation with media functionality. Consumers didn't take to it because they didn't want to spend a ton of money to get features they wouldn't use.
I let through Project Wonderful ads but that's about it. Considering they tell you how much the ads cost on the page, it's pretty much saying how much you need to pay if you'd like to wipe the page clean for a day.
They probably used ActiveX, and now have to either rewrite their entire site to get rid of it, or just shrug their shoulders and ask people to use IE.
It's clear that Movielink are aware of Firefox, so it's not ignorance, so it must then be (assuming good faith) that they literally cannot get it to work without rewriting significant portions of their site. (Again, assuming they're not relying on a CSS bug or something for which solutions exist.)
They said I couldn't have my mouse breeding program, but when my army of giant mutant attack mice with retractable spinny-razor blades and laser beams on their heads are complete, they'll be sorry!
What people never talk about is Internet censorship.
Sure, it's fashionable to talk about the government eroding your rights and the ever-increasing stupid lawsuits and how Christianity is wholly responsible for all the world's tragedies, but if you fill up the airwaves with misinformation, how long before it becomes impossible to get the real facts? You get shouted down if you're not willing to toe the party line as it is - how long before you get banned, or otherwise suppressed?
For instance: GTA3 being banned in Australia. Despite the fact that you can right now buy it in Australian retail stores. It was pulled from store shelves because you can pick up hookers, Take 2 responded by removing that portion of code, and it went back on sale a couple of weeks later.
The same thing happened with San Andreas, and yet no-one says a word because it happened in America as well, and it doesn't fit with the narrative to point that out.
And yet, that's not the story the Internet wants to tell - no, in Australia GTA3 was BANNED those politicians are going to destroy everything!!1! Or with this story - Australians are openly antagonistic to their elected officials, and mere censorship is not going to be enough to contain them. The story is usually far more complex than people are willing to care about, and while it's still available, I wonder at what point it's going to get buried in the deep net, unread and unheeded. The only time I'm really worried about the future freedom of humanity is when I read people saying "too long; didn't read".
You're not debating with the fanatics who're producing the material. You're presenting your counter-claims and viewpoints to the OTHER people who might be listening to them.
Who, if they're going to be taking that stuff seriously, are probably also irrational and impossible to engage in a debate.
While censorship can easily be a slippery-slope, you have to remember that in Australia there are still checks and balances in place. While free speech is enshrined in America, it sometimes seems like that's the only thing defending it there.
In Australia, there's no enshrined free speech, government-owned television and radio and no separation of church and state - and yet, because of the Australian character, any perceived government interference people don't agree with gets pushed back HARD (there's been openly racist political parties, the government-owned media is constantly pulled up for anti-government bias, and church-state mixing is usually given the locking it richly deserves), and in an election year where the Government looks like it's in serious trouble, they're not going to antagonise the electorate by suppressing things that people feel they have a right to know.
(You might ask how people are going to know that things are suppressed. Most of the major papers have a Freedom of Information liaison writing a weekly column on what the bureaucrats are trying to suppress, and the television program Media Watch is famously loud-mouthed - even better, trying to get rid of anything that regularly reports on information suppression automatically paints you as a suppressor in the eyes of Australians, Australians being extra-skeptical about people in charge.)
There was a nice point someone made about the Xbox division at the launch of the 360 - if Microsoft personally gave every man, woman and child in America $10, they'd have lost less money than they have on the Xbox.
I'm not sure how true it is, but it's anti-Microsoft and on Slashdot, I doubt anyone will bother checking the facts.
Actually, showing movies in cinemas doesn't account for much of the movie industry's profits. The video game industry makes more money annually than ticket sales do. Most of their money comes from after-cinema sales, to home video and television networks.
(It's a good thing, too, because people are far less willing to go to movie theaters these days.)
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, wait, wait wait.
I may be working from faulty assumptions here, but they intend to block hardware access to the framebuffer, right?
Don't most blurring special effects in games, such as light bloom and trails and suchlike, use the framebuffer? Isn't this going to negatively impact the performance of those games? (I note that World of Warcraft has light bloom effects on by default.)
And isn't gaming the primary application of these cards?
I guess I am working off faulty assumptions here, because this scenario seems too impossibly bone-headed to come to fruition.
I understand it's impossible for independent developers to get a Wii devkit for much the same reason that it's impossible for people to get a Wii - more demand than Nintendo has had for years.
In this case, it's the massive development houses that have suddenly decided to start ramping up their Wii production. I think Nintendo's aware that getting independent developers is important to the ongoing success of their platform (the Fund Q back when Nintendo was irrelevant to the early DS library suggests that) but they simply don't have enough devkits to go around when EA's buying them all up.
Of course, not providing WiiConnect24 or Mii libraries is sheer bastardry, especially considering how compelling both pieces of content are, or have the potential to be, to players, and what third parties could do with them.
Once everyone got used to the Wii name just in time for E3, and after what happened with the Sony press conference, I probably should have bought some shares in Nintendo as well.
I think my biggest concern was that at the time, while the DS had taken the lead, third parties still weren't making a huge amount of money on the thing. I figured that third parties would find another excuse to avoid the Nintendo platform and stick with the Xbox.
Interestingly, it's clear this hasn't happened. I'd credit Ubisoft with the sea change if Ubisoft hadn't also supported the N64 and the Gamecube.
Just because idiots can do something badly doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
The example that convinced me it had value was using Hungarian to indicate web strings that had been filtered, to avoid XSS vulnerabilities. It can be very easy to forget to filter a string somewhere, and it's inflexible to require your website to filter every string as it comes out or when it goes out.
The lack of interest in Vista reflects stagnation, not satisfaction.
So what's the lack of average Joe interest in Linux reflect? "Microsoft marketing"?
Speaking as someone who has an interest in alternatives to Windows (ahh, Vista), I'm warded off Linux by its cheersquad. For serious, I don't care about the various flavours of Linux and whether one is better than another, I don't want to be targetted by sections of the community for doing things a particular way (I'm thinking of emacs vs vi here), and I don't want to belong to a secret club because of what operating system I run. It's just a computer, and I want it to be stable, to work first time and to get out of my way and do whatever I'm doing. (Tinkering with the operating system is usually not My Thing, although sometimes screwing with the registry is worthwhile.)
I also don't appreciate all the Windows cracks. Yeah, Vista, but XP's treated me well from day one so it makes me think that if Linux users think there's something terribly wrong with Windows maybe I'm not the sort of user that should be using Linux.
Well, all that and command lines. That's what we have GUIs for.
I wonder if can get a Mac with a right-click? I'd probably be happy with that and Bootcamp.
Kidding aside, it's interesting to look at the conversations Jobs was having with Disney executives as head of Pixar (the book Disneywar has reproductions of these conversations) - he refused to deal with Disney until they got rid of Eisner as Jobs had recognised that Eisner was, essentially, a lying scumbag who couldn't be trusted. It's certainly possible to see it in terms of a business deal - Jobs surely thought he could get better money elsewhere as the group that saved Disney after Katzenburg left (who oversaw Disney's animated projects from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King), and he probably knew that Eisner didn't value Pixar - but I think it's more interesting that Jobs made an issue out of Eisner at all, not that Jobs was only willing to make a deal if Disney agreed to what they saw as ludicrous demands.
I don't think anyone is ignorant enough to forget that Jobs is a CEO of a public company, and thus will make moves that are in the best financial interests of the company. The contention is 'how much money will this make' is not the only thing Jobs will consider when making strategy decisions, and I think that's probably true.
Microsoft's a big company. It's not exactly hard to envisage that one team wants to be as open as possible so their technologies fit in nicely with the rest of the Web while other teams try to co-opt standards for their own ends, considering how often we find out that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at Microsoft.
"The real reason Dell won't offer Linux PCs is plainly that it's not a good deal for them."
The real reason Dell won't offer Linux PCs is because the people who use Linux would prefer to build their own computer. Why duplicate the infrastructure?
Slashdot Mirror
Censorship that gets in the way of public discourse is blindingly obvious to see - interesting questions stop getting asked in the media.
Of course, part of the problem is that censorship is being seen from the US's point of view. There's a few things you have to understand about the Australian character as opposed to the US to know why censorship in Australia is not as much of a big deal:
* Australians don't see censorship as a slippery slope. As gamers know, censorship is alive and well in Australia, but it's also acknowledged - which means it can be monitored. It's censorship without accountability (like, say, Walmart's refusal to stock certain products if it conflicts with their corporate agenda) that's the real problem, and it's generally pointed out and ridiculed in Australia - indeed, it's a bit of a sport to show up the 'big end of town', and politicians are usually distrusted, and go down in the polls, if they don't have the ability to be open and honest - even if it means backpedalling, as has happened recently with one of the Opposition's policies here. In America, backpedalling is seen as a sign of weakness; in Australia, it's seen as a sign of learning. In America, dodging the question is seen as useful image control; in Australia, it's seen as condescending.
* Australians are individualists - we don't have a national identity, like most countries would understand it. This generally means that we're more sensitive to civil liberties being trampled. (But see next point.) We take mistrust of government, business and the elite to new heights. This can be problematic - we, for instance, demand our elite are also humble, something many intelligent people struggle with; it also tends to breed an anti-intellectual streak - but it's also healthy in that Australians don't need lobby groups to represent our interests, and it's hard to pull a slippery slope on Australians (efforts to introduce more and more censorship would be increasingly pushed back by more and more Australians - game censorship is an anomaly brought about by an extremist Attorney-General, and there's been calls to do something about him at some point, maybe, if we get around to it). (Australia's disdain for America is definitely tied up in this.)
* Australians live in the grey areas. I've seen America's black-and-white nature as a manifestation of the idea of America's manifest destiny - there is a moral code that must be followed, and we just have to work out what it is. The idea of enshrining particular liberties as inaliable is a bit strange to many Australians. There's always theoretically some time where free speech, for example, does more harm than good. On the upside, this also means that Australians abhor extremists - so some of the undesirable effects of free speech, the KKK and suchlike, get shouted down, without losing the value of the principle. This does, however, mean that we give up liberties other countries enjoy without making a fuss, because there's always a good reason for doing so, but we're also more willing to make a fuss when we want that liberty back. The national ID card scheme is a decent example.
I guess you could say that Australia is more chaotic, in the TSR alignment system sense, than America.
Yeah, not like Opera is the most used browser on the planet or anything. Your desktop-centric thinking is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Thanks, guys! I've just got an ad hominem, an assertive statement with no backup and a condescending rebuke in two posts! I'm going to win Slashdot Logical Fallacy Bingo for sure!
You can fire bloggers now?
Which reminds me of the other problem I have with the whole 'Nintendo's success is bad for other developers' - EA totally has the resources to make excellent games. They don't because they can get away with it, but sometimes the developers get the resources that they need and put out something pretty good.
I can't help but think that if EA were required to step up, they would. (And they've said that they reckon they can become at least the #2 developer on Nintendo's platforms.)
Well, he's technically right - WoW players DO have a term for what he's doing. It's just that it didn't come from WoW.
What's scary is that they knew the strategy wouldn't work: they'd tried it before with the PSX, which was a PlayStation with media functionality. Consumers didn't take to it because they didn't want to spend a ton of money to get features they wouldn't use.
I let through Project Wonderful ads but that's about it. Considering they tell you how much the ads cost on the page, it's pretty much saying how much you need to pay if you'd like to wipe the page clean for a day.
They probably used ActiveX, and now have to either rewrite their entire site to get rid of it, or just shrug their shoulders and ask people to use IE. It's clear that Movielink are aware of Firefox, so it's not ignorance, so it must then be (assuming good faith) that they literally cannot get it to work without rewriting significant portions of their site. (Again, assuming they're not relying on a CSS bug or something for which solutions exist.)
They said I couldn't have my mouse breeding program, but when my army of giant mutant attack mice with retractable spinny-razor blades and laser beams on their heads are complete, they'll be sorry!
They'll all be sorry!
Uweeehehehehehehe!
What people never talk about is Internet censorship.
Sure, it's fashionable to talk about the government eroding your rights and the ever-increasing stupid lawsuits and how Christianity is wholly responsible for all the world's tragedies, but if you fill up the airwaves with misinformation, how long before it becomes impossible to get the real facts? You get shouted down if you're not willing to toe the party line as it is - how long before you get banned, or otherwise suppressed?
For instance: GTA3 being banned in Australia. Despite the fact that you can right now buy it in Australian retail stores. It was pulled from store shelves because you can pick up hookers, Take 2 responded by removing that portion of code, and it went back on sale a couple of weeks later.
The same thing happened with San Andreas, and yet no-one says a word because it happened in America as well, and it doesn't fit with the narrative to point that out.
And yet, that's not the story the Internet wants to tell - no, in Australia GTA3 was BANNED those politicians are going to destroy everything!!1! Or with this story - Australians are openly antagonistic to their elected officials, and mere censorship is not going to be enough to contain them. The story is usually far more complex than people are willing to care about, and while it's still available, I wonder at what point it's going to get buried in the deep net, unread and unheeded. The only time I'm really worried about the future freedom of humanity is when I read people saying "too long; didn't read".
You're not debating with the fanatics who're producing the material. You're presenting your counter-claims and viewpoints to the OTHER people who might be listening to them.
Who, if they're going to be taking that stuff seriously, are probably also irrational and impossible to engage in a debate.
While censorship can easily be a slippery-slope, you have to remember that in Australia there are still checks and balances in place. While free speech is enshrined in America, it sometimes seems like that's the only thing defending it there.
In Australia, there's no enshrined free speech, government-owned television and radio and no separation of church and state - and yet, because of the Australian character, any perceived government interference people don't agree with gets pushed back HARD (there's been openly racist political parties, the government-owned media is constantly pulled up for anti-government bias, and church-state mixing is usually given the locking it richly deserves), and in an election year where the Government looks like it's in serious trouble, they're not going to antagonise the electorate by suppressing things that people feel they have a right to know.
(You might ask how people are going to know that things are suppressed. Most of the major papers have a Freedom of Information liaison writing a weekly column on what the bureaucrats are trying to suppress, and the television program Media Watch is famously loud-mouthed - even better, trying to get rid of anything that regularly reports on information suppression automatically paints you as a suppressor in the eyes of Australians, Australians being extra-skeptical about people in charge.)
There was a nice point someone made about the Xbox division at the launch of the 360 - if Microsoft personally gave every man, woman and child in America $10, they'd have lost less money than they have on the Xbox.
I'm not sure how true it is, but it's anti-Microsoft and on Slashdot, I doubt anyone will bother checking the facts.
This is nitpicking, but:
The DVD sales are just extra cream on top
Actually, showing movies in cinemas doesn't account for much of the movie industry's profits. The video game industry makes more money annually than ticket sales do. Most of their money comes from after-cinema sales, to home video and television networks.
(It's a good thing, too, because people are far less willing to go to movie theaters these days.)
Okay, wait, wait wait.
I may be working from faulty assumptions here, but they intend to block hardware access to the framebuffer, right?
Don't most blurring special effects in games, such as light bloom and trails and suchlike, use the framebuffer? Isn't this going to negatively impact the performance of those games? (I note that World of Warcraft has light bloom effects on by default.)
And isn't gaming the primary application of these cards?
I guess I am working off faulty assumptions here, because this scenario seems too impossibly bone-headed to come to fruition.
Man, I used to beat someone like you up in high school.
I feel old. (Still have no patience for evangelists, I must be new here, etc. etc.)
I understand it's impossible for independent developers to get a Wii devkit for much the same reason that it's impossible for people to get a Wii - more demand than Nintendo has had for years.
In this case, it's the massive development houses that have suddenly decided to start ramping up their Wii production. I think Nintendo's aware that getting independent developers is important to the ongoing success of their platform (the Fund Q back when Nintendo was irrelevant to the early DS library suggests that) but they simply don't have enough devkits to go around when EA's buying them all up.
Of course, not providing WiiConnect24 or Mii libraries is sheer bastardry, especially considering how compelling both pieces of content are, or have the potential to be, to players, and what third parties could do with them.
Once everyone got used to the Wii name just in time for E3, and after what happened with the Sony press conference, I probably should have bought some shares in Nintendo as well.
I think my biggest concern was that at the time, while the DS had taken the lead, third parties still weren't making a huge amount of money on the thing. I figured that third parties would find another excuse to avoid the Nintendo platform and stick with the Xbox.
Interestingly, it's clear this hasn't happened. I'd credit Ubisoft with the sea change if Ubisoft hadn't also supported the N64 and the Gamecube.
Just because idiots can do something badly doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
The example that convinced me it had value was using Hungarian to indicate web strings that had been filtered, to avoid XSS vulnerabilities. It can be very easy to forget to filter a string somewhere, and it's inflexible to require your website to filter every string as it comes out or when it goes out.
The lack of interest in Vista reflects stagnation, not satisfaction. So what's the lack of average Joe interest in Linux reflect? "Microsoft marketing"?
I love how Diebold's argument is that their competitor's machine isn't accessible enough, like Diebold's are.
We all know how easy it is to access a Diebold machine!
Speaking as someone who has an interest in alternatives to Windows (ahh, Vista), I'm warded off Linux by its cheersquad. For serious, I don't care about the various flavours of Linux and whether one is better than another, I don't want to be targetted by sections of the community for doing things a particular way (I'm thinking of emacs vs vi here), and I don't want to belong to a secret club because of what operating system I run. It's just a computer, and I want it to be stable, to work first time and to get out of my way and do whatever I'm doing. (Tinkering with the operating system is usually not My Thing, although sometimes screwing with the registry is worthwhile.)
I also don't appreciate all the Windows cracks. Yeah, Vista, but XP's treated me well from day one so it makes me think that if Linux users think there's something terribly wrong with Windows maybe I'm not the sort of user that should be using Linux.
Well, all that and command lines. That's what we have GUIs for.
I wonder if can get a Mac with a right-click? I'd probably be happy with that and Bootcamp.
The way he isn't quite rooted in reality.
Kidding aside, it's interesting to look at the conversations Jobs was having with Disney executives as head of Pixar (the book Disneywar has reproductions of these conversations) - he refused to deal with Disney until they got rid of Eisner as Jobs had recognised that Eisner was, essentially, a lying scumbag who couldn't be trusted. It's certainly possible to see it in terms of a business deal - Jobs surely thought he could get better money elsewhere as the group that saved Disney after Katzenburg left (who oversaw Disney's animated projects from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King), and he probably knew that Eisner didn't value Pixar - but I think it's more interesting that Jobs made an issue out of Eisner at all, not that Jobs was only willing to make a deal if Disney agreed to what they saw as ludicrous demands.
I don't think anyone is ignorant enough to forget that Jobs is a CEO of a public company, and thus will make moves that are in the best financial interests of the company. The contention is 'how much money will this make' is not the only thing Jobs will consider when making strategy decisions, and I think that's probably true.
Microsoft's a big company. It's not exactly hard to envisage that one team wants to be as open as possible so their technologies fit in nicely with the rest of the Web while other teams try to co-opt standards for their own ends, considering how often we find out that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at Microsoft.
"The real reason Dell won't offer Linux PCs is plainly that it's not a good deal for them."
The real reason Dell won't offer Linux PCs is because the people who use Linux would prefer to build their own computer. Why duplicate the infrastructure?
I've got this sudden idea for a room painted in this stuff with a step.