I hope they cleared a few of those pesky rapists and murderers out of the prisons to make room for the awful, awful crime of INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT!
Unless my MetaSpace can be painted in green and magenta, be decorated with four hundred billion "sparkly" stickers and "hilarious" photos and video clips that "YOU JUST GOTTA SEE", and have horrendous low-quality looping emo-rock in the background, it doesn't belong on my MySpace page, dammiT!
If my Tivo records an episode of Heroes on NBC, and I fast-forward through all the commercials, how is this different from my downloading a torrent of the last episode of Heroes? Or if I watch a syndicated rerun of Stargate SG-1 on a broadcast station, again, how is this different from grabbing a torrent and watching it?
If they're already providing the show to me for free, it shouldn't matter if I'm getting it for free via some other source. Maybe they can pull some legal bullshit about it being a "derivative work" since the torrent will have the commercials edited out, but other than that, it's the same thing, for the same price.
Now if you're talking torrents of cable shows, then yeah, maybe there's an argument to be made. But otherwise you can just STFU about how grabbing a torrent of something that is already available for free is "stealing."
If the emails were obtained by hacking somebody's GMail account -- as seems to be the case given the comments on the torrent file -- then they were obtained illegally. The RIAA's lawyers would immediately cry "illegal search."
IANAL, so I'd like to hear from somebody with real law experience either confirming or denying this, but that's my gut feeling.
Re:I really wanted to like bioshock...
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 5, Funny
where you have a rocket launcher and yet you can't open a flimsy wooden door I agree. I believe the instant any stray shot hits a window, it should shatter, sending billions of gallons of water pouring in, crushing you, the enemies, and the entire city, instantly. Also, every game ever invented should implemented a complete physical model of the human body that allows you to perform every action you could in real life, and the game's environment should react with absolute perfect realism to every conceivable situation. Oh, and the designers should have designed and implemented a room for every single door in the game, instead of (get this) using unopenable doors to create the illusion of a larger world without being forced to create maps so large they push the game's release date back four years.
I mentioned all of these serious flaws to some game designers I know, and they informed me there's this "real life" thing that implements all these features, but I can't figure out where to download it.
Re:fun yes; groundbreaking no
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
Like if I were a plane crash survivor, discovering this underwater city, why would I just inject myself with a syringe I found on a table? This is addressed later in the game. After all, why would you climb into a mysterious bathysphere in the first place? Wouldn't you hang out at the lighthouse, figuring somebody will eventually find you because, heck, it's a lighthouse?
Nah, the reasons for those seemingly implausible actions make perfect sense once all the pieces fit together.
Re:Hyped too far?
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 4, Interesting
in order to take her "Adam", (which appears to mean basically drinking her blood) If you Harvest them, sure, it might mean that; we honestly don't know since they black out the screen for the sake of civility. But if you Rescue them, you essentially "lay hands on them" (not that way, you pervert) and release them from their hypnotic state.
You give me a situation where I appear to have a free choice on how I react to the events you put infront of me and then when I come to what appears to me to be the completely reasonable conclusion that screwing with "big daddy" is a lot of trouble for no recognizable value you tell me "no, you're not playing it right!". Give me a break! I also like playing RPGs keeping all of my characters at experience level 1 and equipped with tattered rags and a wooden sword. Experience points have no recognizable value.
Come on -- while it's true that the "you haven't rescued/harvested all the Little Sisters" dialog box is fourth-wall shattering and could've been done better, the game is essentially trying to remind you "hey, there's more XP to be earned on this level that you might have missed" (since the Big Daddy/Little Sister encounters are more or less random save for those first few). Now perhaps they could've done it with a radio announcement from Atlas, and perhaps they could've given you an option to shut off reminders, but I saw the popup as a helpful reminder when I hadn't hit START to check if I'd rescued all the Little Sisters.
If things that niggling jar you out of suspension of disbelief, I'd imagine you'd rather keep track of your remaining health in your head, or have to physically open your weapon to examine how much ammo is remaining, because having meters up there on the screen "break the fourth wall" too much.
I think the art direction was 95% of the reason why folks have been so blown away. Yeah, the game was straightforward from a mechanics sense, but weren't you affected by the atmosphere of the game at all? Rapture feels like a believable place to me, despite the fact that obviously a city at the bottom of the ocean using 1940's/50's technology is a rather crazy proposition. Yet they were able to pull off that suspension of disbelief, at least to me.
I will admit that I didn't play the second Half-Life, so I'm not qualified to comment there.
No multiplayer -- okay, I agree with you there. It might've made Security Beacon into a useful Plasmid. I'm not sure how you'd integrate the Plasmid/Tonic/ADAM system into it, though -- or, for that matter, how you'd handle hacking things since that essentially freezes the game while it's happening. Maybe you'd have the hacker and/or thing being hacked temporarily disappear from the playing field during the procedure.
Linear maps? Linear goals, sure, but you could backtrack and poke around wherever you wanted. Hell, when you're in Hephaestus you find a keycode to open a door back in the Farmer's Market.
No RPG elements -- how else would you define having to pick and choose exactly which Plasmids and Tonics to buy along the way? ADAM is your XP, EVE is your MP -- seems awfully RPG-like to me.
Limited enemy types -- I agree here too, but I'm not sure how many additional enemy types you could've added within the context of the storyline. I mean, you're either fighting security systems or psychotic Splicers.
As for a "piss-poor intro and buildup," did you actually play the game beyond the demo portion? When I started, I was like, "If you just survived a plane crash, would you really hop into a mysterious bathysphere to go somewhere you know nothing about? And then, upon getting there, plunge a hypodermic needle filled with an unknown mutagenic substance into your arm without a second thought?" But when you get to the end, it all makes sense, and yeah, maybe the plot twist was a little cliché, but damn was it revealed with dramatic flair.
BioShock was the first time I was playing a game and felt like I was playing a movie, and I think that's really why it has gotten such rave reviews.
Finally -- I'd be interested to see the difference in opinions between people playing the PC version, and those playing the 360 version. From an informal poll of my friends, generally those who played the game on a console, in a living room, with a large television and speakers, were more impressed by it than those playing it on a PC. Maybe the additional theatrical feel of playing on a home theater system has something to do with it.
The funny thing is, I never touched the PC version, only played the 360 version, so I never experienced the DRM issues; my comment was just a subtle joke. (And since you haven't played the game, you wouldn't get it, since I'm trying not to be spoiler-riffic.)
I'd bet if I'd just said "would you kindly continue to make Bioshock sequels?" instead of mentioning the DRM, the moderation on my comments would've been far different.
Oh, fine, I see Tennenbaum's been messin' in your egg salad, eh kid?
(Now I'm left to wonder if the moderators beat the game and are playing a meta-joke on me, or didn't and are watching references whoosh past their heads...)
Instead, "City on the Edge of Forever" is often lauded as the best episode ever. Why is this?"
For the same reason that the best Outer Limits episode is "Demon with the Glass Hand" and one of the best 80's Twilight Zone episodes is "Shatterday": because Harlan Ellison wrote it. Good sci-fi starts with good writers. Except that the final script for "City" bore almost resemblance to the original, so much so that Ellison asked to have his name removed from the production entirely. So perhaps good sci-fi starts with good edits to overrated writers.
Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. I'd like to add the following to the list: depressed employees. And by depressed, I mean clinically, not just feeling down every now and then. Seriously, being depressed leads to apathy and lack of motivation. This is why I fully believe that workplace insurance programs should always cover psychological and psychiatric treatment at an equal level as other medical concerns; in the end, employees who aren't depressed are more productive, and therefore more profitable to the employer.
My interpretation of the article is that a device manufacturer could use a hypervisor to isolate the entire "trusted path" from Linux completely, by running the application responsible for decrypting video data and outputting it in a separate VM. This application could be totally closed-source. Linux, running in its own VM, could communicate to this locked-down, non-GPLed application via a shared memory region.
Whether this is in violation of the GPLv3, I don't know; I haven't read it. But it seems like a really devious way to sleaze one's way around the anti-Tivoization provisions.
What I don't understand is why the GPLv3 didn't have a clause stating, unequivocally, that software released under it cannot implement (encode or decode) Digital Rights Management schemes in any way, shape, or form. If they're going to be against user-hostile software, why not take a stand?
How is this unrealistic? Space fleets of the future outfit their crews with situational aural feedback implants. These use a miniaturized tricorder to detect environmental cues and respond by overlaying predetermined noises, which, as everyone in the Federation surely knows, greatly increases human reflexes and situational awareness. You know, this is modded "Funny", but from a human interface perspective it makes total sense, for the same reason that clickable areas on a GUI are drawn to resemble physical "buttons", and important status monitors at places like nuclear facilities will use a radial graph display so the graph's shape becomes an emergent feature (making "situation normal" looks like a regular pentagon or hexagon or whatnot).
It is perfectly logical, and even beneficial, to assume that spacecraft of the future would gather sensor data about their environment, and then translate that data into visual and aural stimuli that would be very easy for the human crew to respond to. Obviously, the real reason explosions go "BOOM" on Star Trek is to heighten dramatic tension, but why not have the computer create a "soundtrack" for what's going on around the ship?
RMS and ESR sure seem to think so, judging by their writings. I certainly don't equate the two, but I fully believe there are plenty of zealots out there who do.
Is this really so hard to understand? As a parallel, consider the following statement: "Why do we praise countries that ease up on censorship a little bit, but damn countries that impose a little bit more censorship on its citizens?"
Many people in the Open Source community believe that open source is the natural and correct state of software -- indeed, that it is equivalent to free speech -- and that closing it is comparable to throwing political dissidents in jail. Naturally, every move toward it will be lauded, and every move against it will be demonized.
Slashdot Mirror
So, that would be right down the street from 742 Evergreen Terrace, then.
Real release date? Tomorrow. "Oh man, I can't believe we spaced on the date!"
I hope they cleared a few of those pesky rapists and murderers out of the prisons to make room for the awful, awful crime of INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT!
According to TFA, the videos will "degrade" after seven days.
I'm assuming this means that your download of 30 Rock will slowly morph into an episode of Studio 60, and eventually, Saturday Night Live itself.
Argh, MetaPlace. See, they're already merging in my mind.
Unless my MetaSpace can be painted in green and magenta, be decorated with four hundred billion "sparkly" stickers and "hilarious" photos and video clips that "YOU JUST GOTTA SEE", and have horrendous low-quality looping emo-rock in the background, it doesn't belong on my MySpace page, dammiT!
If my Tivo records an episode of Heroes on NBC, and I fast-forward through all the commercials, how is this different from my downloading a torrent of the last episode of Heroes? Or if I watch a syndicated rerun of Stargate SG-1 on a broadcast station, again, how is this different from grabbing a torrent and watching it?
If they're already providing the show to me for free, it shouldn't matter if I'm getting it for free via some other source. Maybe they can pull some legal bullshit about it being a "derivative work" since the torrent will have the commercials edited out, but other than that, it's the same thing, for the same price.
Now if you're talking torrents of cable shows, then yeah, maybe there's an argument to be made. But otherwise you can just STFU about how grabbing a torrent of something that is already available for free is "stealing."
If the emails were obtained by hacking somebody's GMail account -- as seems to be the case given the comments on the torrent file -- then they were obtained illegally. The RIAA's lawyers would immediately cry "illegal search."
IANAL, so I'd like to hear from somebody with real law experience either confirming or denying this, but that's my gut feeling.
I mentioned all of these serious flaws to some game designers I know, and they informed me there's this "real life" thing that implements all these features, but I can't figure out where to download it.
Nah, the reasons for those seemingly implausible actions make perfect sense once all the pieces fit together.
Come on -- while it's true that the "you haven't rescued/harvested all the Little Sisters" dialog box is fourth-wall shattering and could've been done better, the game is essentially trying to remind you "hey, there's more XP to be earned on this level that you might have missed" (since the Big Daddy/Little Sister encounters are more or less random save for those first few). Now perhaps they could've done it with a radio announcement from Atlas, and perhaps they could've given you an option to shut off reminders, but I saw the popup as a helpful reminder when I hadn't hit START to check if I'd rescued all the Little Sisters.
If things that niggling jar you out of suspension of disbelief, I'd imagine you'd rather keep track of your remaining health in your head, or have to physically open your weapon to examine how much ammo is remaining, because having meters up there on the screen "break the fourth wall" too much.
"That was so bad I think it gave me cancer!"
I think the art direction was 95% of the reason why folks have been so blown away. Yeah, the game was straightforward from a mechanics sense, but weren't you affected by the atmosphere of the game at all? Rapture feels like a believable place to me, despite the fact that obviously a city at the bottom of the ocean using 1940's/50's technology is a rather crazy proposition. Yet they were able to pull off that suspension of disbelief, at least to me.
I will admit that I didn't play the second Half-Life, so I'm not qualified to comment there.
No multiplayer -- okay, I agree with you there. It might've made Security Beacon into a useful Plasmid. I'm not sure how you'd integrate the Plasmid/Tonic/ADAM system into it, though -- or, for that matter, how you'd handle hacking things since that essentially freezes the game while it's happening. Maybe you'd have the hacker and/or thing being hacked temporarily disappear from the playing field during the procedure.
Linear maps? Linear goals, sure, but you could backtrack and poke around wherever you wanted. Hell, when you're in Hephaestus you find a keycode to open a door back in the Farmer's Market.
No RPG elements -- how else would you define having to pick and choose exactly which Plasmids and Tonics to buy along the way? ADAM is your XP, EVE is your MP -- seems awfully RPG-like to me.
Limited enemy types -- I agree here too, but I'm not sure how many additional enemy types you could've added within the context of the storyline. I mean, you're either fighting security systems or psychotic Splicers.
As for a "piss-poor intro and buildup," did you actually play the game beyond the demo portion? When I started, I was like, "If you just survived a plane crash, would you really hop into a mysterious bathysphere to go somewhere you know nothing about? And then, upon getting there, plunge a hypodermic needle filled with an unknown mutagenic substance into your arm without a second thought?" But when you get to the end, it all makes sense, and yeah, maybe the plot twist was a little cliché, but damn was it revealed with dramatic flair.
BioShock was the first time I was playing a game and felt like I was playing a movie, and I think that's really why it has gotten such rave reviews.
Finally -- I'd be interested to see the difference in opinions between people playing the PC version, and those playing the 360 version. From an informal poll of my friends, generally those who played the game on a console, in a living room, with a large television and speakers, were more impressed by it than those playing it on a PC. Maybe the additional theatrical feel of playing on a home theater system has something to do with it.
Heh. From the looks of my comments now, it went way over a lot of folks' heads. Oh well... I have karma to burn.
The funny thing is, I never touched the PC version, only played the 360 version, so I never experienced the DRM issues; my comment was just a subtle joke. (And since you haven't played the game, you wouldn't get it, since I'm trying not to be spoiler-riffic.)
I'd bet if I'd just said "would you kindly continue to make Bioshock sequels?" instead of mentioning the DRM, the moderation on my comments would've been far different.
Oh, fine, I see Tennenbaum's been messin' in your egg salad, eh kid?
(Now I'm left to wonder if the moderators beat the game and are playing a meta-joke on me, or didn't and are watching references whoosh past their heads...)
Hey, would you kindly not mod my previous comment "Troll"?
CODE YELLOW.
2K Games, would you kindly leave out the DRM on any sequels to BioShock you happen to make?
For the same reason that the best Outer Limits episode is "Demon with the Glass Hand" and one of the best 80's Twilight Zone episodes is "Shatterday": because Harlan Ellison wrote it. Good sci-fi starts with good writers. Except that the final script for "City" bore almost resemblance to the original, so much so that Ellison asked to have his name removed from the production entirely. So perhaps good sci-fi starts with good edits to overrated writers.
My interpretation of the article is that a device manufacturer could use a hypervisor to isolate the entire "trusted path" from Linux completely, by running the application responsible for decrypting video data and outputting it in a separate VM. This application could be totally closed-source. Linux, running in its own VM, could communicate to this locked-down, non-GPLed application via a shared memory region.
Whether this is in violation of the GPLv3, I don't know; I haven't read it. But it seems like a really devious way to sleaze one's way around the anti-Tivoization provisions.
What I don't understand is why the GPLv3 didn't have a clause stating, unequivocally, that software released under it cannot implement (encode or decode) Digital Rights Management schemes in any way, shape, or form. If they're going to be against user-hostile software, why not take a stand?
It is perfectly logical, and even beneficial, to assume that spacecraft of the future would gather sensor data about their environment, and then translate that data into visual and aural stimuli that would be very easy for the human crew to respond to. Obviously, the real reason explosions go "BOOM" on Star Trek is to heighten dramatic tension, but why not have the computer create a "soundtrack" for what's going on around the ship?
RMS and ESR sure seem to think so, judging by their writings. I certainly don't equate the two, but I fully believe there are plenty of zealots out there who do.
Is this really so hard to understand? As a parallel, consider the following statement: "Why do we praise countries that ease up on censorship a little bit, but damn countries that impose a little bit more censorship on its citizens?"
Many people in the Open Source community believe that open source is the natural and correct state of software -- indeed, that it is equivalent to free speech -- and that closing it is comparable to throwing political dissidents in jail. Naturally, every move toward it will be lauded, and every move against it will be demonized.
Oh... wait... I thought it read "discouraging students from taking meth."
My mistake.