I, too, am very interested in the moddability of the Civ IV AI. I do game AI research, and until now I have had to make do with my own game simulations, commercial CRPGs, and open source RTS games. I would be very interested in working on a turn-based strategy game, but as yet no such game exists that is moddable to the extent that I need. Now, Civ IV promises to be what I have been waiting for, and I am eager to get my hands on the first copy that appears in the shops. My question is to what extent the game is suitable for game AI research? For research purposes, I have several needs: (1) I need to be able to mod the AI (OK, that seems to be in the pipeline), (2) I need to be able to compare my new AI with existing AI (so, do I need to REPLACE the AI, or can I create a separate AI next to the existing AI)?, (3) I need to be able to let two AIs play against each other, without any input from me (so, is a human player required, or is autoplay possible?), and (4) I need to be able to speed up gameplay so that experiments run fast (for instance, by getting rid of graphics updates and having no hard-coded timings).
The GPL already seems scary enough to me already, being that if Stallman wants to change the GPL then the license for your program changes too...
No, it doesn't. You license your program under a certain version of the GPL. In the GPL it says that the user may use the supplied version of the GPL, or any later version, at the user's convenience. Probably most users that are affected by this clause will not use the later version.
Of course, you could release a new version of your software with a new GPL version. But the old version still exists, and is available under the old GPL. Even the author of the software is not allowed to change THAT particular fact.
But it seems like every small group has extra rights. The majority meanwhile is getting sued by these small pest groups.
Just to point out: a small group is not a pest group if it just wants the same rights as the majority. That is why discrimination is a crime. And some of the examples you list are purely people reacting to being discriminated against. They don't have extra rights, they lack the same rights as the majority. That's a good enough reason to sue, methinks.
And at the same time, any American who likes France is a traitor.
So you are an American who likes France, I assume? So you are not part of the majority? How utterly disgusting! Really, you should be more conforming.
What you say is provably wrong. We have more than one complete Biblical manuscript that predates the fall of the Roman Empire. Any alleged changes would have to have been introduced before then.
Nope. The links only tell us that there are fairly old, Greek copies of the New and parts of the Old Testament. This is (a) not the original bible, which wasn't Greek, and (b) no refutation of my statements, since the links don't tell us what's in the copies.
I have my information from a theologist, who told me that (a) the original old testament contained many more stories about women, but only Ruth survived until today, (b) Jesus had several brothers, but since the popes didn't like that, they turned those into nephews, and (c) that Mary was "just" absolved by God of original sin -- her being a virgin was added in bible translations to make the birth of Christ a miracle.
all you have to do is find a flaw in the poker bot and then exploit it, they always have one!
This is a pretty apt comment. I think professional poker players would love to play against a bot. It gives them a considerable advantage, because if they studied the bot they can predict what it will do.
There are, basically, two possibilities. Either the bot plays purely statistically. If that is the case, it may win against dumb players, but can break even at best against good players. Or, the bot tries to model its opponents and tries to take those models into account when playing. If that is the case, as soon as a good player recognises that a bot is playing, he can ensure that the bot will have the wrong model of him, and then exploit that.
And, of course, as the parent says, it is possible that the bot contains an exploitable flaw. The bot creator goes to sleep, someone on the net recognises the flaw and posts about it in a newsgroup, and by the time the bot creator awakes he is broke. I would not sleep soundly with a bot playing with my money.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 1
The IE dev teams blogs (nay, boasts!) about tabbed browsing in IE7 -- saying nothing of the fact that tabs are years old.
Yeah, but don't forget that MS probably already applied for a patent on tabbed browsing, which it will receive because the USPTO has no idea what Firefox is, so that in a few years MS will be known as the inventor of tabbed browsing.
Yes, check out the dead sea scrolls. The people who copy Torahs don't really mess around. Minimal variation for 1000's of years.
That's the Torah. The bible is a horse of a different color. To give an example, in the Middle Ages almost all the women have been written out of the bible, Jesus lost his brothers and sisters, and Mary became a virgin.
That is why nothing can beat a book. No matter what story is told, the book is printed, and it will NOT change... If you want to know what Lenin thought, you can find his words printed on paper.
That's true about Lenin. But what about his contemporary thinkers? Stalin destroyed the complete works of many scientists and philosophers. Their work is gone. Now, think of it: what if their works had been available on the Internet, even if only for a few days? That's right, they would have been copied everywhere, and would have been available for eternity.
Another example: the bible. Do you really think it contains any of the original texts? Or that the original texts are still available somewhere?
If something is on electronic format, how long until there are hacks, and patches, and confusion, and chaos?
Yeah, to some of the copies. Others would still be intact. Unless, of course, we go down the road where the publisher controls the content of all documents it distributes even after they have been sold (which is where we are going right now). Indeed, at that point, one click can change written history. Unless the hackers do their job...
My bet is it increases memory stamp of Excel by some 3 megabytes.
True, and that was at a time that an 80Mb HD was still state-of-the-art. I was pretty annoyed with Microsoft (once again) for having the nerve to fill up my precious HD space with crap I had no use for (no, not talking about Windows).
I certainly sympathize, but you do realize that all (legal) DVD players already have this property...
Again, ONLY in the US. And region-encoding itself is not instituted by law. It is NOT illegal, NOWHERE in the world, to play a region-A DVD in a region-B zone, or even to own or sell a region-code-free DVD player.
It is only illegal to reverse-engineer region-encoding to break it. And that is only because of the DMCA, which currently is a US idiocy.
However, while region-encoding is not enforced legally, it is enforced economically, by the content-producers. And the fact that no-one finds that strange, is one of the clearest signs that the US is no longer a democracy, but a plutocracy.
I agree that America has been, and will continue to export less and less goods. But America's Intellectual Property is where the real money is. Over the long term, that's where the $ is. And if you want to play in the global game, you'll have to honor (ie pay) on that IP.
The problem is that IP is no more than a legal construction. And if a country hasn't got the same laws, and doesn't care that its citizens break arbitrary laws which another country tries to impose (which neatly sums up the Asian attitude towards the US, and to a lesser extent, towards Europe), IP is worth diddly-squat.
You would be hard pressed to find a piece of free software that doesn't violate someone else's software patent one way or another.
I would change "a piece of free software" to "any piece of software."
There are many approaches to correcting the system, but one of the most obvious would be to raise the bar for what qualifies as innovative enough to deserve a patent.
The bar is already pretty high, because of prior art, because of the limitation that pure mathematical constructs cannot be patented, and because of the non-obviousness requirement. The problem is that the USPTO whose job it is to guard that bar before patents are awarded, does not do a good job of it. The reason is probably because it has no personnel qualified to judge non-obviousness. A second, economical reason might be that the USPTO gets its funding by the number of patents that get granted, so that they are sorely tempted to forget about the non-mathematical requirement.
"Here's an economic model that will allow for unlimited, payment-free distribution of content whilst still allowing musicians/movie producers/authors/programmers to make money - potentially, lots of money".
OK, how about this.
Currently, the university I work for pays several major publishers an enormous amount of money so that we can access electronic versions of the journals they publish. None of that money goes to the authors of the articles in those journals, all of it goes to the publishers. Basically, that is the case for all scientific publications: the author writes for free, the referees review for free, the editor edits for free, and often the universities have to PAY to get the papers published. The only way for a scientist to make any money of his writings is by writing a textbook, and even that doesn't bring in much.
Now, what if authors published their works through a central website? The website would not be free, but universities would pay a substantial amount of money for a license to get access to everything that is on the website. Mind you, that is exactly what they do now. The articles on the website would be reviewed as they are now, only with the slight difference that the referees would get paid some for their work. After deduction of expenses, profits would be divided amongst the authors of the articles on the website (probably with some biasing according to references). The website would also publish textbooks.
I think that for the authors, this scheme would bring in much more money than before, while the reviewing process would be the same, thus quality would not be worse than today. The only people screwed over here are the current publishers, but their work would have become unnecessary anyway.
And who would care if students copy each others' books? The university would have a license anyway. And what if a university would use the texts but not pay a licensee fee? Well, that would probably be discovered very quickly, wouldn't it, if all students are using those textbooks? So I doubt if they would risk it.
A March study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day -- almost 30 minutes more than white youths. And Hispanics play about 10 minutes more per day than whites.
My first reaction when reading this is, "Well, if they would spend more time on their studies and less on playing games, perhaps they would be qualified to become game developers."
I mean, listening to a lot of music does not make one a musician, reading a lot does not make one a writer, and watching a lot of movies does not make one a film director. Education is the key to a job, interest is only second.
Sequels have a bad name because movie sequels generally suck. Game sequels do not necessarily suck, and actually are often an improvement on the original game.
The reason that that is the case, is that the state of the art in games progresses at a much faster rate than the state of the art in movies. You could even remake a game within three years after its original release, and it would be a quite different game, and probably of much higher quality.
Basically, there are two reasons why game sequels may suck: (1) when the creators think they can "improve" the original concept (e.g., the simplification of Deus Ex 2, the MOO3 overhaul); and (2) when a publisher gives the developers not enough time to develop a real sequel, because it has to go to market quickly (e.g., Knights of the Old Republic 2 without a proper endgame).
However, if a sequel is just like the original game, except with better graphics, better AI, and better sound, it may give players the same good playing experience but modernized. And there is no reason why its quality has to be lower than the quality of the original game.
In the same was as it opens up the possibility of modifying the bacteria to code Linux kernel patches.
This certainly is cool biotech, but slapping this wild prediction on to the end of the article doesn't make it more so.
Indeed. It seems to me that you have a better chance to let these bacteria poop the complete works of Shakespeare than to let them poop computer chips.
Creating the poop is not the problem. Organising the poop is. A lion tamer is better equipped to tackle that problem than a poop scientist.
Enter the evil that is capitalism and human greed. Using real world cash, people are able to abuse the game system and give themselves an unfair advantage. These people now have access to supplies they didn't earn and don't deserve.
Make whatever argument you will about how said people function and make money in the real world, but the game world is not the real world. They don't belong together, and their economies are not supposed to be connected in any way other than the basic game fees one pays as a client.
What a load of hogwash. Who are you to decide what is fair and unfair? Who are you to decide what does and does not belong together?
You make an arbritary division between "the real world" and "the game world", where only time invested in "the real world" should translate into progression in "the virtual world", and not money invested in "the real world".
Fact is, games are played by real-world entities, so there is an inevitable mixup between these two world. There simply is not a strict division between the two. The people who decide what the game world is about, are the game developers. They decide what is and is not possible within their world, and between worlds. And believe it or not, they are well aware of the issues of investing time and money, and make conscious decisions on how to handle them.
For the player, the only choice is what game they are going to play. And if it is a game that allows the investment of real-world money for virtual-world progression, than that is simply the way it is. If you don't like it, then play a different game.
Personally, I am annoyed by the fact that people who have lots of time to play have an "unfair" advantage to those of us who have only a few hours per week to play. But you don't hear me complaining, do you?
MS continues to do its absolute best (or does it?) to prevent their products from being hacked to bits (no pun intended), and they have no choice.
They have no choice? Of course they have a choice. They can forego all this nonsense and simply accept the fact that 35% of Windows copies in the world are pirated. Who cares? That means that still 65% of the copies of Windows are legit. Do you realize what an enormous amount of sales that is?
Yes, they can try to reduce piracy. They will reduce it a bit, probably, but at the same time they will annoy many of their legit customers. Is that smart? Especially considering who these people with pirated versions of Windows are. Home users, that's who. People who can't really afford a legit copy of Windows because it is so damn expensive. And they like to use Windows, because that is what they have at work.
And what will happen if these home users get alienated from Windows? They will look around, see if there is something available that they like. And then, when they have started using a Mac, or Linux, or Linspire, or whatever is their fancy, and they find they like it, they are gonna ask their boss if they can get it at work too. And why wouldn't they: it's only Word Processing they do. And some of these bosses will agree.
You can see where this is going.
Yes, Microsoft has a strong monopoly, but a monopoly can fall if you endanger it. And that is what Microsoft has been doing the last year or so.
That depends. Suppose Windowsupdate checks your copy and decides that it isn't legal, and screws you over. You can't do anything about it. But in that case you have a pirated version of Windows, you say? What if you have a completely legal version of Windows? Windowsupdate wouldn't go off, then? The chance of that happening is only zero when software works correctly -- and I have never in my whole career as a software engineer encountered software that works correctly in all possible circumstances. Especially not from Microsoft. So if Microsoft decides to make their software check my computer regularly, and to start doing things to it when THEY think I have done something illegal, I am NOT happy. And yes, I run a legit version of XP.
To simply say all Europeans accept all sexuality openly, and all Americans repress it, is absurd.
True, but there is a difference in what is meant by "sexuality" between Europe and the US. In most countries in Europe, sexuality refers to sexual intercourse, not to nudity. In the US, nudity equals sexuality.
Over time, this country has learned that some of those values (sexism, racism, etc.) are immoral, and American society has largely discarded them.
You don't say it, but you suggest that this is not the case in Europe. And that is false.
But the truth is, the ratings exist to help the public decide if the content in question falls within their personal levels of tolerance. And it is the same in Europe, and Australia, and Asia, and so on. Any country that prides itself on freedom allows it's people to choose for themselves.
Yes, that's the ratings system. But the system itself is not what it's about. It's about people who misuse ratings and rally people, just to profit from it.
Clearly a great number of Americans are comfortable with the content of R rated movies and M rated games - they just aren't making much noise about it.
True, but don't underestimate the power of the masses that get rallied easily. The problem is never the people who can and do think for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, am very interested in the moddability of the Civ IV AI. I do game AI research, and until now I have had to make do with my own game simulations, commercial CRPGs, and open source RTS games. I would be very interested in working on a turn-based strategy game, but as yet no such game exists that is moddable to the extent that I need. Now, Civ IV promises to be what I have been waiting for, and I am eager to get my hands on the first copy that appears in the shops. My question is to what extent the game is suitable for game AI research? For research purposes, I have several needs: (1) I need to be able to mod the AI (OK, that seems to be in the pipeline), (2) I need to be able to compare my new AI with existing AI (so, do I need to REPLACE the AI, or can I create a separate AI next to the existing AI)?, (3) I need to be able to let two AIs play against each other, without any input from me (so, is a human player required, or is autoplay possible?), and (4) I need to be able to speed up gameplay so that experiments run fast (for instance, by getting rid of graphics updates and having no hard-coded timings).
No, it doesn't. You license your program under a certain version of the GPL. In the GPL it says that the user may use the supplied version of the GPL, or any later version, at the user's convenience. Probably most users that are affected by this clause will not use the later version.
Of course, you could release a new version of your software with a new GPL version. But the old version still exists, and is available under the old GPL. Even the author of the software is not allowed to change THAT particular fact.
Just to point out: a small group is not a pest group if it just wants the same rights as the majority. That is why discrimination is a crime. And some of the examples you list are purely people reacting to being discriminated against. They don't have extra rights, they lack the same rights as the majority. That's a good enough reason to sue, methinks.
And at the same time, any American who likes France is a traitor.
So you are an American who likes France, I assume? So you are not part of the majority? How utterly disgusting! Really, you should be more conforming.
If it is growth we're interested in, why not call it "Viagrux"?
Nope. The links only tell us that there are fairly old, Greek copies of the New and parts of the Old Testament. This is (a) not the original bible, which wasn't Greek, and (b) no refutation of my statements, since the links don't tell us what's in the copies.
I have my information from a theologist, who told me that (a) the original old testament contained many more stories about women, but only Ruth survived until today, (b) Jesus had several brothers, but since the popes didn't like that, they turned those into nephews, and (c) that Mary was "just" absolved by God of original sin -- her being a virgin was added in bible translations to make the birth of Christ a miracle.
This is a pretty apt comment. I think professional poker players would love to play against a bot. It gives them a considerable advantage, because if they studied the bot they can predict what it will do.
There are, basically, two possibilities. Either the bot plays purely statistically. If that is the case, it may win against dumb players, but can break even at best against good players. Or, the bot tries to model its opponents and tries to take those models into account when playing. If that is the case, as soon as a good player recognises that a bot is playing, he can ensure that the bot will have the wrong model of him, and then exploit that.
And, of course, as the parent says, it is possible that the bot contains an exploitable flaw. The bot creator goes to sleep, someone on the net recognises the flaw and posts about it in a newsgroup, and by the time the bot creator awakes he is broke. I would not sleep soundly with a bot playing with my money.
Yeah, but don't forget that MS probably already applied for a patent on tabbed browsing, which it will receive because the USPTO has no idea what Firefox is, so that in a few years MS will be known as the inventor of tabbed browsing.
That's the Torah. The bible is a horse of a different color. To give an example, in the Middle Ages almost all the women have been written out of the bible, Jesus lost his brothers and sisters, and Mary became a virgin.
That's true about Lenin. But what about his contemporary thinkers? Stalin destroyed the complete works of many scientists and philosophers. Their work is gone. Now, think of it: what if their works had been available on the Internet, even if only for a few days? That's right, they would have been copied everywhere, and would have been available for eternity.
Another example: the bible. Do you really think it contains any of the original texts? Or that the original texts are still available somewhere?
If something is on electronic format, how long until there are hacks, and patches, and confusion, and chaos?
Yeah, to some of the copies. Others would still be intact. Unless, of course, we go down the road where the publisher controls the content of all documents it distributes even after they have been sold (which is where we are going right now). Indeed, at that point, one click can change written history. Unless the hackers do their job...
True, and that was at a time that an 80Mb HD was still state-of-the-art. I was pretty annoyed with Microsoft (once again) for having the nerve to fill up my precious HD space with crap I had no use for (no, not talking about Windows).
Again, ONLY in the US. And region-encoding itself is not instituted by law. It is NOT illegal, NOWHERE in the world, to play a region-A DVD in a region-B zone, or even to own or sell a region-code-free DVD player.
It is only illegal to reverse-engineer region-encoding to break it. And that is only because of the DMCA, which currently is a US idiocy.
However, while region-encoding is not enforced legally, it is enforced economically, by the content-producers. And the fact that no-one finds that strange, is one of the clearest signs that the US is no longer a democracy, but a plutocracy.
The problem is that IP is no more than a legal construction. And if a country hasn't got the same laws, and doesn't care that its citizens break arbitrary laws which another country tries to impose (which neatly sums up the Asian attitude towards the US, and to a lesser extent, towards Europe), IP is worth diddly-squat.
Or was your comment meant sarcastically?
(I can't believe I just wrote that).
You would be hard pressed to find a piece of free software that doesn't violate someone else's software patent one way or another.
I would change "a piece of free software" to "any piece of software."
There are many approaches to correcting the system, but one of the most obvious would be to raise the bar for what qualifies as innovative enough to deserve a patent.
The bar is already pretty high, because of prior art, because of the limitation that pure mathematical constructs cannot be patented, and because of the non-obviousness requirement. The problem is that the USPTO whose job it is to guard that bar before patents are awarded, does not do a good job of it. The reason is probably because it has no personnel qualified to judge non-obviousness. A second, economical reason might be that the USPTO gets its funding by the number of patents that get granted, so that they are sorely tempted to forget about the non-mathematical requirement.
"Female Orgasms Should Be Like Games."
OK, how about this.
Currently, the university I work for pays several major publishers an enormous amount of money so that we can access electronic versions of the journals they publish. None of that money goes to the authors of the articles in those journals, all of it goes to the publishers. Basically, that is the case for all scientific publications: the author writes for free, the referees review for free, the editor edits for free, and often the universities have to PAY to get the papers published. The only way for a scientist to make any money of his writings is by writing a textbook, and even that doesn't bring in much.
Now, what if authors published their works through a central website? The website would not be free, but universities would pay a substantial amount of money for a license to get access to everything that is on the website. Mind you, that is exactly what they do now. The articles on the website would be reviewed as they are now, only with the slight difference that the referees would get paid some for their work. After deduction of expenses, profits would be divided amongst the authors of the articles on the website (probably with some biasing according to references). The website would also publish textbooks.
I think that for the authors, this scheme would bring in much more money than before, while the reviewing process would be the same, thus quality would not be worse than today. The only people screwed over here are the current publishers, but their work would have become unnecessary anyway.
And who would care if students copy each others' books? The university would have a license anyway. And what if a university would use the texts but not pay a licensee fee? Well, that would probably be discovered very quickly, wouldn't it, if all students are using those textbooks? So I doubt if they would risk it.
IMHO, for science this is the way to proceed.
My first reaction when reading this is, "Well, if they would spend more time on their studies and less on playing games, perhaps they would be qualified to become game developers."
I mean, listening to a lot of music does not make one a musician, reading a lot does not make one a writer, and watching a lot of movies does not make one a film director. Education is the key to a job, interest is only second.
The reason that that is the case, is that the state of the art in games progresses at a much faster rate than the state of the art in movies. You could even remake a game within three years after its original release, and it would be a quite different game, and probably of much higher quality.
Basically, there are two reasons why game sequels may suck: (1) when the creators think they can "improve" the original concept (e.g., the simplification of Deus Ex 2, the MOO3 overhaul); and (2) when a publisher gives the developers not enough time to develop a real sequel, because it has to go to market quickly (e.g., Knights of the Old Republic 2 without a proper endgame).
However, if a sequel is just like the original game, except with better graphics, better AI, and better sound, it may give players the same good playing experience but modernized. And there is no reason why its quality has to be lower than the quality of the original game.
Yeah, but if you can do that, why not paint the wiring directly?
Indeed. It seems to me that you have a better chance to let these bacteria poop the complete works of Shakespeare than to let them poop computer chips.
Creating the poop is not the problem. Organising the poop is. A lion tamer is better equipped to tackle that problem than a poop scientist.
Make whatever argument you will about how said people function and make money in the real world, but the game world is not the real world. They don't belong together, and their economies are not supposed to be connected in any way other than the basic game fees one pays as a client.
What a load of hogwash. Who are you to decide what is fair and unfair? Who are you to decide what does and does not belong together?
You make an arbritary division between "the real world" and "the game world", where only time invested in "the real world" should translate into progression in "the virtual world", and not money invested in "the real world".
Fact is, games are played by real-world entities, so there is an inevitable mixup between these two world. There simply is not a strict division between the two. The people who decide what the game world is about, are the game developers. They decide what is and is not possible within their world, and between worlds. And believe it or not, they are well aware of the issues of investing time and money, and make conscious decisions on how to handle them.
For the player, the only choice is what game they are going to play. And if it is a game that allows the investment of real-world money for virtual-world progression, than that is simply the way it is. If you don't like it, then play a different game.
Personally, I am annoyed by the fact that people who have lots of time to play have an "unfair" advantage to those of us who have only a few hours per week to play. But you don't hear me complaining, do you?
They have no choice? Of course they have a choice. They can forego all this nonsense and simply accept the fact that 35% of Windows copies in the world are pirated. Who cares? That means that still 65% of the copies of Windows are legit. Do you realize what an enormous amount of sales that is?
Yes, they can try to reduce piracy. They will reduce it a bit, probably, but at the same time they will annoy many of their legit customers. Is that smart? Especially considering who these people with pirated versions of Windows are. Home users, that's who. People who can't really afford a legit copy of Windows because it is so damn expensive. And they like to use Windows, because that is what they have at work.
And what will happen if these home users get alienated from Windows? They will look around, see if there is something available that they like. And then, when they have started using a Mac, or Linux, or Linspire, or whatever is their fancy, and they find they like it, they are gonna ask their boss if they can get it at work too. And why wouldn't they: it's only Word Processing they do. And some of these bosses will agree.
You can see where this is going.
Yes, Microsoft has a strong monopoly, but a monopoly can fall if you endanger it. And that is what Microsoft has been doing the last year or so.
But we should be happy about that, right?
Sure, if you can say anything about Peter Molyneux it is that with every game he releases he makes completely NEW mistakes.
Which is probably a good thing...
That depends. Suppose Windowsupdate checks your copy and decides that it isn't legal, and screws you over. You can't do anything about it. But in that case you have a pirated version of Windows, you say? What if you have a completely legal version of Windows? Windowsupdate wouldn't go off, then? The chance of that happening is only zero when software works correctly -- and I have never in my whole career as a software engineer encountered software that works correctly in all possible circumstances. Especially not from Microsoft. So if Microsoft decides to make their software check my computer regularly, and to start doing things to it when THEY think I have done something illegal, I am NOT happy. And yes, I run a legit version of XP.
True, but there is a difference in what is meant by "sexuality" between Europe and the US. In most countries in Europe, sexuality refers to sexual intercourse, not to nudity. In the US, nudity equals sexuality.
Over time, this country has learned that some of those values (sexism, racism, etc.) are immoral, and American society has largely discarded them.
You don't say it, but you suggest that this is not the case in Europe. And that is false.
But the truth is, the ratings exist to help the public decide if the content in question falls within their personal levels of tolerance. And it is the same in Europe, and Australia, and Asia, and so on. Any country that prides itself on freedom allows it's people to choose for themselves.
Yes, that's the ratings system. But the system itself is not what it's about. It's about people who misuse ratings and rally people, just to profit from it.
Clearly a great number of Americans are comfortable with the content of R rated movies and M rated games - they just aren't making much noise about it.
True, but don't underestimate the power of the masses that get rallied easily. The problem is never the people who can and do think for themselves.