So far, ebay has gotten away with running PayPal like a bank, but without having to meet the numerous and stringent restrictions and regulations that operating a banking institution demands (or even come close to them).
My hunch is that they haven't gotten the screws put to them yet because PayPal, so far, has been totally optional - there are other ways to pay.
The instant they force you to use PayPal, I'm betting the FDIC, SEC, maybe the IRS, possibly DHS (because of the money transfer service options), and hell, pretty much every federal financial agency, will come down on their head like a ton of bricks thrown from the fist of an angry God.
If they're smart, they'll abandon this and pretend they never thought of it.
My understanding is he has a degree in economics.
Can't remember the source, but I'm pretty sure I've read it in more than one place. He's not Hawking, but he's by no means stupid.
>>If anything the ATF could be expanded to include all age monitored sales and have that body >>in charge of enforcing the rules. I doubt it would be that simple though.
Trust me. You don't want that. The ATF is the most corrupt, jack-booted, and violent branch of our Department of Justice.
They'll show up at 3am, kickban your dog,/set +m on your phone, get root on all your doors and windows, then packet-flood your entire house and disable your login privledges.
Then they'll url-redirect you out onto your front lawn with your monitor turned off while a few of them scan your hard drives, they'll telefrag you, and then they'll install Zango on your house and tell tech support to stay back (with a few compelling waves of a submachine gun) while it crashes.
Don't ever ask the ATF to get involved with anything.
I sure wish MechWarrior 2, System Shock, and some of the other transitional games that were squeezing every last bit of power out of DOS would run decently in DOSbox. I get the distinct impression that the lack of back-compat and legacy support is a decision wholy driven by marketing (greed) rather than any kind of developmental decisions.
One thing I hate most about software rot--and the refusal of companies to try and counteract or negate it through backwards compatibility or releasing obsolete software publicly where it can be maintained and preserved--is that we're going to lose a good part of our computing and gaming heritage.
MechWarrior2 and X-wing, for example, are the two games that really made 3D widespread. You can try and argue Quake if you want, but Mech2 was just as widely distributed, earlier--and helped push 1st generation 3D chipsets as a promotional tool and a target-market gold standard. How many different 1st gen chipset-specific ports and remastered versions of Quake were written by id?.
You can barely run Mech2 on anything current now. No sound support, no linear frame buffer support, no back-compat for high performance interger-based engines, no joystick support... Even Mech2:Mercs, which came out a year later after Win95 had taken hold and 3dfx was in its heyday, is close to impossible to run decently.
What about Quake, or maybe Fallout, or Elder Scrolls Arena & Daggerfall, Warcraft, C&C:RA, the first Tomb Raider, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, or even Sim City 2000? Nobody who isn't computer-savvy and willing to spend hours tracking down and tweaking DOSbox or VDMSound can run any of those anymore, and those are just examples I can think of off the top of my head....I guess what I'm saying is I really wish I could play MechWarrior 2 again. I REALLY wish somebody would remaster it to modern standards (after they port the original poly-for-poly, anyway).
So yeah. I have a sneaking suspicion that Vista isn't going to make things better in that regard. Worse, far more likely.
F.e. I bet the horses in LOTR and 300 are all from the very same rig.
Completely off topic, but I'd take that bet and put some serious money behind it.
Movies are a completely different can of worms from games. With as many in-house tools that places like Weta Digital, Manex, Lucasfilm Digital Ltd, Mill Film, Digital Domain, and major post houses like those use, they would probably love to buy an off-the-shelf rig--but almost certainly can't, because there are no off-the-shelf content sources for their proprietary tools.
I seriously doubt Pixar or Weta can just drop a Character Studio "House Of Moves" rig into Marionette or Massive.
That's actually quite possible. Maybe even likely. When you're using a tool whose sole purpose is to be random, it doesn't usually occur to you that if you don't change the base seed, your 'random' result will look identical to everybody else's.
I know I almost never change the base seed for procedurals in 3ds Max from the default 12345. Sometimes that can be useful, too... and sometimes it can be a pain in the ass.
I'd let the STALKER team speak their piece before we banish them to the Chernobyl-Pripyat Exclusion Zone.
B) Seeing how Vista may be trying to get away from directX, he may have hard feelings, hence the harsh language towards vista. Therefor there may be some biases based upon this.
You know why DX10 won't appear for XP, right?
Because then Vista would not sell.
Seeing how one of the huge selling points of Vista is that it is the only way to utilize DirectX10, I'd have to say that claiming 'Vista is trying to get away from DirectX' is pretty brain-damaged.
Microsoft knows Vista has serious issues standing on its own legs, which is why they haven't gone back and written DX10 for XP. The massive gaming demand for DX10, and cementing Vista and DX10 exclusively together, is one of their few hopes for getting it to break even.
I'll give you an easy out--perhaps you were thinking of some of the legacy functions that are being retired in DX10. We'll just say that, okay?
Oh great nation that stood against Napoleon, stood against the Kaiser, even stood alone against Hitler, who coined the phrase stiff upper lip, and gave us extra U's in lots of words, farewell. We hardly knew ye.
I've got a March '06 build of Flow. Besides really capturing the feeling of being a microorganic predator (if that's actually a feeling), the different thermoclines added lots of neat touches--'hunting' by dashing down one level and back up, retreating, lots of fun stuff. It was the simplicity and fluidity that really made it jump out at me, like the article mentioned. No manual, no UI... just jump in and immediately 'get it'.
The music also was very reminiscant of Homeworld.
I'd love to play a more in depth version. Is there a more recent build to toy with?
Considering that one of the main stated goals of TPB is defiance of copyright, a better analogy would be somebody who is running a do-it-yourself gunshop out of their garage that has plans and instructions for converting a legal (semi-auto) assault rifle into an (illegal) automatic weapon, and clearly (if implicitly) suggests people do so. Obviously the person that brought the WASR-10 in and converted it into an auto commited a crime, but the guy who provided the machine shop, instructions, supplies and encouragement can't really claim innocence either.
TPB may only index and distribute legal torrents, but they are vocally doing so for the purpose of violating and defying copyright law. Just look at their page of taunts and immaturity in response to takedown requests. Can you honestly say the copyright violations that occur are just abuse of an intended-to-be-legal service?
I work for a small web-based company that makes 3rd-party addon packages for MS Flight Sim. We don't have much overhead, profit margin, advertising, or a massive distribution network. You go to our website, you buy the plane, download the file and the key, and we hope you tell your friends if it's good.
For a while now, every time we release a new plane or addon, it's almost instantly up on that website. One of the recent ones, our G.55 Veltro, flopped completely. Why? Because nobody bothered paying us $20 when they could download it for free over there.
That $20 isn't going to some huge multi-million dollar publisher that has dozens of boxes on thousands of store shelves. It comes right back and pays our bills, buys our food and keeps the roof over our heads.
I don't have an issue with copyright and fair use reform. There's plenty of things that really do need fixes. This son of a bitch, though, didn't even try to differentiate between massive companies that milk and exploit the system and those that honestly depend on it to protect their rightful property and business. He was just out to get his rocks off by playing pirate, hiding behind the complexities of international law, and taunting people who told him to stop illegaly mass-distributing their property.
As far as I'm concerned, he and everybody else who ran that site can die in a jokulhlaup.
Oh noes, did they run out of megahertz? Were there not enough shots by Weta Digital? WERE THE POLYGONS DISAPPEARED?!
Jesus Christ, what are you expecting these days? A Jurassic Park-type revolution in CG with every new movie?
They looked just fine. I work in film CG and I was pleased with them. What exactly did you expect that wasn't dutifully appeased? "The visual Effects blow" is about as compelling an argument as "the American Godzilla movie rocked, 'cause check out that slick CG!".
I bet they forgot to buy more PixelShaders for their DirectXs. That's it.
I never had much admiration or respect for the ESRB to start with, but any respect I DID have is gone now.
The game, as it was sent to stores, did not have any sexually explicit content that was accessible to the player. That is the ONLY thing the ESRB should be rating: what the audience will see in the game, as it is out of the box.
It took an unauthorized alteration by an individual completely unassociated with Rockstar to make that content accessible.
Homeworld had texture and some data files for Ripley's lifeboat, the Narcissus; however, it was in no way accessible to a player without digging into the game files in ways Relic never intended. Should 20th Century Fox now have grounds to sue them for copyright infringement of the Alien movie?
I know of plenty of games where there was likely VERY objectionable content left, locked away, on the disc.
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind had explicit text depictions of public elf-on-cat man sex left in the game files, but it took a mod to restore it to the corresponding book. Should it be AO for bestiality and hardcore erotica content? Nah. (that mod, "The Real Barenziah", is availible at www.rpgplanet.com/morrowind)
Sims and Sims 2 has nipples on the female textures (the only thing they omit in the default textures is genitlia and pubic hair) and a command line option that can disable the censor blur. Should it be AO for nudity? Should it be BANNED as pedophilia, since you can watch naked children voyueristicly? Of course not.
Max Payne 2 had a (truly beautiful) nude Mona Sax texture set that probably was used for when he walks in on her in the shower. Remedy framed the shot so that you only saw her from the shoulders up, but they painted the whole skin, and it's (relatively) easily accessible through the built in developer mode. Between that and the pretty steamy scene where Max nearly has her shirt off, should Max Payne be AO? Eh... maybe. Probably not.
The ESRB doesn't have any grounds or any responsibility for rating the game as it exists after a third party alters it in any way whatsoever. They've done more to hurt their credibility by caving to hardcore conservative bitching groups (I'm spitting in your direction, Parents Television Council and the rest of you foaming-at-the-mouth censor-happy fascist) than this media hissy-fit ever could have.
Paul Eibler really said it best in the article. "The ESRB's decision to re-rate a game based on an unauthorized third party modification presents a new challenge for parents, the interactive entertainment industry and anyone who distributes or consumes digital content."
As in, "How the fuck are we supposed to make any games at all now? Now we're accountable for any whackjob that comes along and screws with our game. We make a Barney game, some sick fuck makes a patch that moves the verticies on Barney's model to give him a giant cock, and we get sued?!"
Shame on you ESRB.
And the hypocrisy behind this makes my eye twitch. We're dominated by a patholigcally fucked up puritanical mindset.
Gang warfare, organized crime, prostitution, killing prostitutes, slaughtering bystanders, breaking traffic and weapons laws, killing police officers, and generally being a complete sociopath: OK.
A low-detail fascimile of human copulation, a normal part of human life which we all started from: BANNED.
I wouldn't be surprised if Joss filmed a different 'decoy' ending for the pre-release screenings to keep from giving the real finale away. He does have his philosophy about making the characters earn their happiness, but I don't think he would backstab such a dedicated audience that was so key to making the film even happen. Plus, I have a hunch the studios insisted that he tack on a fake ending for the screenings as part of the early screening deal.
A decoy ending definitely explains the lower production value--it was probably thrown together at the last minute.
I thought it was still in theaters in Japan, and hadn't even gotten here yet.
Of course it bombed if the only thing people have to watch is the awful subtitle bootleg that's over here right now.
'Bioriod' my ass...
But Morrowind was self contained. There's no multiplayer option, same as there was with Daggerfall, and most likely that's the way Oblivion will be as well.
Bethesda said as much that they believe the game is meant to be a single-player experience. Personally, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot--multiplayer Morrowind could have given EverQuest a run for its money, although I can understand their reluctance considering how open the game architecture was and how vulnerable that would make it to exploits.
That's an invalid analogy and you know it. Nothing has been 'stolen' from Blizzard. A lawful grant of license from Blizzard to person A took place, and person A used a unique key that came with the license to activate the licensed product. Then when person A invoked a clause in that license that let him hand off everything to person B in exchange for X amount of money, Blizzard is saying that person B may not use the product.
To hold person A accountable for *anything*, you would have to prove they knowingly and willingly transferred ownership WHILE AWARE OF THE FACT (either at that time or beforehand) that it would thereafter be unusable.
Slashdot Mirror
USE THEM TOGETHER.
USE THEM IN PEACE. /shakes his hands at the "no all caps" filter
So far, ebay has gotten away with running PayPal like a bank, but without having to meet the numerous and stringent restrictions and regulations that operating a banking institution demands (or even come close to them).
My hunch is that they haven't gotten the screws put to them yet because PayPal, so far, has been totally optional - there are other ways to pay.
The instant they force you to use PayPal, I'm betting the FDIC, SEC, maybe the IRS, possibly DHS (because of the money transfer service options), and hell, pretty much every federal financial agency, will come down on their head like a ton of bricks thrown from the fist of an angry God.
If they're smart, they'll abandon this and pretend they never thought of it.
That's not what I read. The note I saw stated it was, and I quote, a "huge success".
My understanding is he has a degree in economics. Can't remember the source, but I'm pretty sure I've read it in more than one place. He's not Hawking, but he's by no means stupid.
Let no joyful voice be heard! Let no man look up at the sky with hope! And let this day be cursed by we who ready to wake... the Kraken!
>>If anything the ATF could be expanded to include all age monitored sales and have that body
/set +m on your phone, get root on all your doors and windows, then packet-flood your entire house and disable your login privledges.
>>in charge of enforcing the rules. I doubt it would be that simple though.
Trust me. You don't want that. The ATF is the most corrupt, jack-booted, and violent branch of our Department of Justice.
They'll show up at 3am, kickban your dog,
Then they'll url-redirect you out onto your front lawn with your monitor turned off while a few of them scan your hard drives, they'll telefrag you, and then they'll install Zango on your house and tell tech support to stay back (with a few compelling waves of a submachine gun) while it crashes.
Don't ever ask the ATF to get involved with anything.
Legislation exists that's been written and shoved through by those who have no idea what they're legislating?
Unpossible!
It'll be ignored wholesale like other 'laws' similar to it.
I sure wish MechWarrior 2, System Shock, and some of the other transitional games that were squeezing every last bit of power out of DOS would run decently in DOSbox.
...I guess what I'm saying is I really wish I could play MechWarrior 2 again. I REALLY wish somebody would remaster it to modern standards (after they port the original poly-for-poly, anyway).
I get the distinct impression that the lack of back-compat and legacy support is a decision wholy driven by marketing (greed) rather than any kind of developmental decisions.
One thing I hate most about software rot--and the refusal of companies to try and counteract or negate it through backwards compatibility or releasing obsolete software publicly where it can be maintained and preserved--is that we're going to lose a good part of our computing and gaming heritage.
MechWarrior2 and X-wing, for example, are the two games that really made 3D widespread. You can try and argue Quake if you want, but Mech2 was just as widely distributed, earlier--and helped push 1st generation 3D chipsets as a promotional tool and a target-market gold standard. How many different 1st gen chipset-specific ports and remastered versions of Quake were written by id?.
You can barely run Mech2 on anything current now. No sound support, no linear frame buffer support, no back-compat for high performance interger-based engines, no joystick support... Even Mech2:Mercs, which came out a year later after Win95 had taken hold and 3dfx was in its heyday, is close to impossible to run decently.
What about Quake, or maybe Fallout, or Elder Scrolls Arena & Daggerfall, Warcraft, C&C:RA, the first Tomb Raider, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, or even Sim City 2000? Nobody who isn't computer-savvy and willing to spend hours tracking down and tweaking DOSbox or VDMSound can run any of those anymore, and those are just examples I can think of off the top of my head.
So yeah. I have a sneaking suspicion that Vista isn't going to make things better in that regard. Worse, far more likely.
F.e. I bet the horses in LOTR and 300 are all from the very same rig.
Completely off topic, but I'd take that bet and put some serious money behind it.
Movies are a completely different can of worms from games. With as many in-house tools that places like Weta Digital, Manex, Lucasfilm Digital Ltd, Mill Film, Digital Domain, and major post houses like those use, they would probably love to buy an off-the-shelf rig--but almost certainly can't, because there are no off-the-shelf content sources for their proprietary tools.
I seriously doubt Pixar or Weta can just drop a Character Studio "House Of Moves" rig into Marionette or Massive.
That's actually quite possible. Maybe even likely. When you're using a tool whose sole purpose is to be random, it doesn't usually occur to you that if you don't change the base seed, your 'random' result will look identical to everybody else's.
I know I almost never change the base seed for procedurals in 3ds Max from the default 12345. Sometimes that can be useful, too... and sometimes it can be a pain in the ass.
I'd let the STALKER team speak their piece before we banish them to the Chernobyl-Pripyat Exclusion Zone.
B) Seeing how Vista may be trying to get away from directX, he may have hard feelings, hence the harsh language towards vista. Therefor there may be some biases based upon this.
You know why DX10 won't appear for XP, right?
Because then Vista would not sell.
Seeing how one of the huge selling points of Vista is that it is the only way to utilize DirectX10, I'd have to say that claiming 'Vista is trying to get away from DirectX' is pretty brain-damaged.
Microsoft knows Vista has serious issues standing on its own legs, which is why they haven't gone back and written DX10 for XP. The massive gaming demand for DX10, and cementing Vista and DX10 exclusively together, is one of their few hopes for getting it to break even.
I'll give you an easy out--perhaps you were thinking of some of the legacy functions that are being retired in DX10. We'll just say that, okay?
SHODAN versus Amazon.
"Y-y-you wannnnnnntttttt my A-a-a-a-VVVatarrr? I-I-i-i-i-IIII am am-mu-mu-muMUUUzed-d-DDD."
For the love of God, please, listen to him.
DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS - you might catch it too.
Oh great nation that stood against Napoleon, stood against the Kaiser, even stood alone against Hitler, who coined the phrase stiff upper lip, and gave us extra U's in lots of words, farewell. We hardly knew ye.
I've got a March '06 build of Flow. Besides really capturing the feeling of being a microorganic predator (if that's actually a feeling), the different thermoclines added lots of neat touches--'hunting' by dashing down one level and back up, retreating, lots of fun stuff. It was the simplicity and fluidity that really made it jump out at me, like the article mentioned. No manual, no UI... just jump in and immediately 'get it'.
The music also was very reminiscant of Homeworld.
I'd love to play a more in depth version. Is there a more recent build to toy with?
Considering that one of the main stated goals of TPB is defiance of copyright, a better analogy would be somebody who is running a do-it-yourself gunshop out of their garage that has plans and instructions for converting a legal (semi-auto) assault rifle into an (illegal) automatic weapon, and clearly (if implicitly) suggests people do so. Obviously the person that brought the WASR-10 in and converted it into an auto commited a crime, but the guy who provided the machine shop, instructions, supplies and encouragement can't really claim innocence either.
TPB may only index and distribute legal torrents, but they are vocally doing so for the purpose of violating and defying copyright law. Just look at their page of taunts and immaturity in response to takedown requests. Can you honestly say the copyright violations that occur are just abuse of an intended-to-be-legal service?
I work for a small web-based company that makes 3rd-party addon packages for MS Flight Sim. We don't have much overhead, profit margin, advertising, or a massive distribution network. You go to our website, you buy the plane, download the file and the key, and we hope you tell your friends if it's good.
For a while now, every time we release a new plane or addon, it's almost instantly up on that website. One of the recent ones, our G.55 Veltro, flopped completely. Why? Because nobody bothered paying us $20 when they could download it for free over there.
That $20 isn't going to some huge multi-million dollar publisher that has dozens of boxes on thousands of store shelves. It comes right back and pays our bills, buys our food and keeps the roof over our heads.
I don't have an issue with copyright and fair use reform. There's plenty of things that really do need fixes. This son of a bitch, though, didn't even try to differentiate between massive companies that milk and exploit the system and those that honestly depend on it to protect their rightful property and business. He was just out to get his rocks off by playing pirate, hiding behind the complexities of international law, and taunting people who told him to stop illegaly mass-distributing their property.
As far as I'm concerned, he and everybody else who ran that site can die in a jokulhlaup.
Oh noes, did they run out of megahertz? Were there not enough shots by Weta Digital? WERE THE POLYGONS DISAPPEARED?!
Jesus Christ, what are you expecting these days? A Jurassic Park-type revolution in CG with every new movie?
They looked just fine. I work in film CG and I was pleased with them. What exactly did you expect that wasn't dutifully appeased? "The visual Effects blow" is about as compelling an argument as "the American Godzilla movie rocked, 'cause check out that slick CG!".
I bet they forgot to buy more PixelShaders for their DirectXs. That's it.
I never had much admiration or respect for the ESRB to start with, but any respect I DID have is gone now.
The game, as it was sent to stores, did not have any sexually explicit content that was accessible to the player. That is the ONLY thing the ESRB should be rating: what the audience will see in the game, as it is out of the box.
It took an unauthorized alteration by an individual completely unassociated with Rockstar to make that content accessible.
Homeworld had texture and some data files for Ripley's lifeboat, the Narcissus; however, it was in no way accessible to a player without digging into the game files in ways Relic never intended. Should 20th Century Fox now have grounds to sue them for copyright infringement of the Alien movie?
I know of plenty of games where there was likely VERY objectionable content left, locked away, on the disc.
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind had explicit text depictions of public elf-on-cat man sex left in the game files, but it took a mod to restore it to the corresponding book. Should it be AO for bestiality and hardcore erotica content? Nah. (that mod, "The Real Barenziah", is availible at www.rpgplanet.com/morrowind)
Sims and Sims 2 has nipples on the female textures (the only thing they omit in the default textures is genitlia and pubic hair) and a command line option that can disable the censor blur. Should it be AO for nudity? Should it be BANNED as pedophilia, since you can watch naked children voyueristicly? Of course not.
Max Payne 2 had a (truly beautiful) nude Mona Sax texture set that probably was used for when he walks in on her in the shower. Remedy framed the shot so that you only saw her from the shoulders up, but they painted the whole skin, and it's (relatively) easily accessible through the built in developer mode. Between that and the pretty steamy scene where Max nearly has her shirt off, should Max Payne be AO? Eh... maybe. Probably not.
The ESRB doesn't have any grounds or any responsibility for rating the game as it exists after a third party alters it in any way whatsoever. They've done more to hurt their credibility by caving to hardcore conservative bitching groups (I'm spitting in your direction, Parents Television Council and the rest of you foaming-at-the-mouth censor-happy fascist) than this media hissy-fit ever could have.
Paul Eibler really said it best in the article. "The ESRB's decision to re-rate a game based on an unauthorized third party modification presents a new challenge for parents, the interactive entertainment industry and anyone who distributes or consumes digital content."
As in, "How the fuck are we supposed to make any games at all now? Now we're accountable for any whackjob that comes along and screws with our game. We make a Barney game, some sick fuck makes a patch that moves the verticies on Barney's model to give him a giant cock, and we get sued?!"
Shame on you ESRB.
And the hypocrisy behind this makes my eye twitch. We're dominated by a patholigcally fucked up puritanical mindset.
Gang warfare, organized crime, prostitution, killing prostitutes, slaughtering bystanders, breaking traffic and weapons laws, killing police officers, and generally being a complete sociopath: OK.
A low-detail fascimile of human copulation, a normal part of human life which we all started from: BANNED.
I wouldn't be surprised if Joss filmed a different 'decoy' ending for the pre-release screenings to keep from giving the real finale away. He does have his philosophy about making the characters earn their happiness, but I don't think he would backstab such a dedicated audience that was so key to making the film even happen. Plus, I have a hunch the studios insisted that he tack on a fake ending for the screenings as part of the early screening deal.
A decoy ending definitely explains the lower production value--it was probably thrown together at the last minute.
That's what *I'd* do, anyway.
No splicing at all, according to multiple articles and interviews with the people who worked on the set. It took 606 takes to get everything to work.
I thought it was still in theaters in Japan, and hadn't even gotten here yet. Of course it bombed if the only thing people have to watch is the awful subtitle bootleg that's over here right now. 'Bioriod' my ass...
I have no idea what SHA-1 is or why the heck it being cracked has made headlines twice now. Somebody want to explain this?
But Morrowind was self contained. There's no multiplayer option, same as there was with Daggerfall, and most likely that's the way Oblivion will be as well. Bethesda said as much that they believe the game is meant to be a single-player experience. Personally, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot--multiplayer Morrowind could have given EverQuest a run for its money, although I can understand their reluctance considering how open the game architecture was and how vulnerable that would make it to exploits.
That's an invalid analogy and you know it. Nothing has been 'stolen' from Blizzard. A lawful grant of license from Blizzard to person A took place, and person A used a unique key that came with the license to activate the licensed product. Then when person A invoked a clause in that license that let him hand off everything to person B in exchange for X amount of money, Blizzard is saying that person B may not use the product.
To hold person A accountable for *anything*, you would have to prove they knowingly and willingly transferred ownership WHILE AWARE OF THE FACT (either at that time or beforehand) that it would thereafter be unusable.