As long as you actually enter all calendar data on Google Calendar, this is a top-notch solution, thanks to Google's support for ICS. My iCal, Outlook, my Verizon phone (using Verizon Wireless Access by Intellisync), and Lightning* all check the Google homebase for calendar updates. Depending on the service, the clients go haywire when I try to update calendars from the non-Google application, but it's pretty amazing that my calendar gets pushed to a bunch of devices, such that any one of them can be my calendar, to say nothing of any internet-enabled terminal. Gotta love 2008!
Now, if we could just stop raping the planet, technology would be so super-rad!
Umm... This is way off topic, so we are probably going to get modded down, but I'm curious as to that last point. You say you would have driven him off? Am I crazy that I think you misplacing that wish?
If she is nurturing a relationship with someone else, it could certainly have been prevented as you say, but would you want to? Successful relationships are built on trust and verification, perhaps, but not trust and enforcement. I mean, what are the fundamental underpinnings of the people involved where spying is necessary? It seems to me that the moment you have something to drive off, you already have a problem.
Your ex's inclination to cheat was merely satisfied by this guy. It was hardly his responsbility to make sure you stayed with your girlfriend; that was HER call. SHE made the agreement with you at some point not to take up with other dudes. You say there were no issues in your situation, but if she is willing to violate her integrity with you, does that not count as an issue?
You do not speak for the group. I live in New York City, and while the transportation system has many flaws-- you're fucked if you live in an outer borough and the B, D, F, V, J, M, Z, or L break down, but for the most part, my morning commute from Queens is seamless.
"But how do they do this? Why doesn't someone stop them?"
See, the reason people keep pointing out net points versus gross points is that the studio's accounting for any given movie includes things like the electric bill at the office. New Line might say that the Lord of the Rings grossed a billion, sure, but during that time they had to pay people at the office, pay to keep the lights on in this or that office, pay for the rent for the parking structure (which is owned by New Line in this example). Since the infrastructure costs are infinite and privately held by the company, and the local courts pay obeisance to Hollywood, the cycle continues. All this while studios crow about how much money their movie made-- this is primarily for advertising; everyone ELSE went to see I am Legend, so it must be good, right?-- they turn around and say, "Gee whiz, it's really too bad we didn't see any of that cash. Sure would have been nice!"
The solution, as has been pointed out, is gross points. Joe Q. Director cannot ask for gross points. Joe Q. Director thanks his lucky stars that he is being given the chance to make a movie for more than $10,000 on a maxed out credit card, so he settles for net points because, hey, maybe they won't fuck him. Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise get gross points. And their production company funded the whole thing (i.e. bigger stars can ask for bigger chunks because stars are how the studios swear they make money). Peter Jackson, director of over-the-top horror films in New Zealand, is competent enough to execute the Lord of the Rings project, but he is not powerful enough to cover his ass during the negotiation process. I think this is where New Line didn't consider a human element: if the guy is nuts enough to make the Lord of the Ring movies-- 10 years of 24 hour development-- he's nuts enough to follow your ass all the way into Hell for his paycheck.
"While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites."
Hopefully this heralds a change in Blizzard's stance on distributing Warcraft III/Frozen Throne online. Currently, the only way to acquire them is to pay for hard copies. I have been reluctant to purchase ANOTHER Battle Chest after losing my first copies of TFT and WC3-- yes, I've purchased both games TWICE. A digital copy would help space cases like me endlessly.
I can remember many Saturdays playing D&D where mage characters would stand in the back twiddling their thumbs, where the unhidden rogue would be effectively worthless in combat (2nd ed). Every class was somewhat attractive to play in theory, but I always ended up playing a ranger for their utility in and out of fights.
The designers are using "Is it fun?" as their guiding principle. That works for me because Dungeons and Dragons is, finally, a game. If you are playing a game and not having fun, why aren't you just writing your fantasy novel? You reserved hours and hours of your Friday/Saturday. Why would you want to sit around and wait while your friends participate in the good stuff? So you can feel like a realistic participant in your fantasy world? Why? "A real wizard at that level really WOULDN'T have anything to do at that point!"
If they homogenize the world, yeah, that's too bad. I feel pretty certain everyone in a good group modifies the world to suit the story anyway. If the 4th edition changes make the game more consistent and fun for everyone playing, and they bring new players into the dying hobby of tabletop role-playing, isn't that better for everyone?
While I agree with the idea of a pure democracy in principle, having such a governing system in the modern social climate of the United States scares me. Many voters have a troubling habit of voting for the candidate whose personality they like the most.
A pure democracy is a wonderful idea until you, too, are visited by dreams of Ruben Studdard narrowly edging out Clay Aiken for the Democratic nomination. "Who do you think should be the next American President? Text your vote to..."
The education of the United States is broken in nearly every important area, especially those which would be relevant to a national election: economics, foreign policy, military spending, healthcare statistics, basic geography, etc. Let's move for a referendum toward a true democracy AFTER we spend a trillion dollars and twenty years repairing the education system, please.
While the costs of conventional movie-making are certainly prohibitive, you'd be surprised at possibilities available to a modern filmmaker.
Obviously, the major studios care a LOT about the theatrical box office. Even though the after-market (i.e. DVD, digital, HBO et alii, and on-demand ) has grown into a more powerful earner than the multiplex, the success of the former is conventionally seen as directly proportional to the latter. Every now and then a hiccup occurs like Stephen Soderbergh's Bubble, which was released on DVD and in theaters on the same day. But Bubble was a low-profile exception. Ocean's Thirteen would have been a far more interesting test. To date, no studio has released a tentpole project to market scrutiny across simultaneous media. Sub-studio production houses are even more scared to risk using the after-market as a primary market because they have less money to lose; Think Films risks more releasing Half-Nelson to DVD and theaters at the same time than Sony has to lose by offering Spider-Man 4 HD on the PS3 on the same day it's released in theaters. Studios are taking baby steps with adventures in digital/direct distribution-- cf. the recent Slashdot article about iTunes killing Netflix and Blockbuster as the studios obviate the middleman-- but in terms of initial releases, the studios are scared to try something novel with one of their otherwise sure things.
Why is all this? Because making movies is expensive. I recently worked on a student film shoot that cost a total of approximately $1000 in labor. It was shot on a Panavision Gold II with Super-35mm film. It looks gorgeous, but the producers and director got what they paid for: this 20 minute short cost $45,000. Had they paid for labor or had they not had academic insurance, that cost could have easily doubled or even tripled. For a 20 minute short. To be fair, they were shooting in New York, NY, which boosts every cost across the board.
But the newest iteration of technology boggles the mind. The cost of film and development can be swallowed by the new equipment. Consider, for example, the immediate availability of HD. While you would be hard-pressed to film a studio feature on the Panasonic HVX-200, the quality is still remarkable, and the tricks available to a clever cinematographer with a 35mm lens adapter such as the PS Teknik further extend the range of a filmmaker's visual options. The HVX uses proprietary "P2" cards which fit into any PCMCIA slot. Any movies made never need to see a conventional film format. The Panasonic HVX-200 can be purchased (not even rented!) on ebay for $5,000.
Go up another echelon. The much-ballyhooed Red. The body of the camera can be purchased for $17,000. While this seems like a lot, it's CONSIDERABLY cheaper than the conventional Super-35 route, and renting a Red can be reasonably expected to run cheaper than renting a Panavision Genesis. (The digital camera used to film, among others, Superman Returns.) The Red's capability to awe audiences with its visuals is yet to be seen, but Peter Jackson is very excited, and concerned parties will be watching Wanted--filmed with the Red-- very carefully.
So that's the camera. You pay union rates for teamsters, G&E, sound, etc. These drive up the cost. A lot. Still, if your overall budget is low enough, these costs are commensurately low. Micro-budget, ultra-low budget, and low-budget all command different rates from different unions.
Then you pay more for insurance. This also drives up the cost.
Locations are an x-factor. Depending on where you shoot, they can lower or raise the movie's price tag considerably, especially if you consider tax issues from state to state or country to country. Ditto grants and funds available for foreign investors with the same considerations. It's no accident that so many movies are shot in Sydney and Prague.
Art assets don't come cheaply at all. In the democratized film environment I'm describing, the biggest cutback will be the
I'll be modded offtopic, but as someone who went to Marine Corps boot camp, let's not go too far with our comparisons:
USMC DRILL INSTRUCTOR: "Put that left sock on right now! 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."
USMC RECRUITS: "Done, sir, done!"
USMC DRILL INSTRUCTOR: "Put that right sock on right now! 10, 9, 5, 3, 2, 1!"
USMC RECRUITS: "Done, sir, done!"
I went to a strict parochial school, and they had NOTHING on the good ol' USMC.
More on topic, perhaps unfocused use of the internet is exactly why people don't get work done in the real world, necessarily. Yes, yes, they'll be fired, a good workplace monitors traffic and blocks non-productive sites, but to deny the tendency to take extemporaneous hour breaks in the modern workplace is to put Popcap out of business.
I don't know how you would implement a meaningful traffic control policy for K-12-- it seems like it would probably have to occur at the district level of IT mentioned above-- but in a world of PornTube, 2girls1cup, and a trillion other sites, maybe limiting kids' full access to the internet isn't totally evil. I know if I were capable of unfettered computer/internet access when I was in school, I would have visited all manner of unspeakable internet nonsense... and I did when my high school finally got broadband access!
I'm NOT saying the kid was up to no good here. He was probably stunned at how stupid his teacher was. But the general sentiment on Slashdot always seems to be, "Let all information run free all the time, as in beer and speech, no matter what!"
Gameplay is nice but the more games I play the more hollow my experience without either a.) a solid story grounding and motivating my actions or b.) a rock-solid opportunity for fun multiplayer competition. If a game's story doesn't make me a believer, it's rare that I will bother to chase through the mechanics for their own sake, mostly because I have a job and a social life. In fact, I'll muddle through middling game mechanics if I am motivated by the story (cf. The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights 2).
Conversely, even if I love a game's mechanics, I don't usually waste my energy playing if I can't see myself trying to one-up my friends. I've poured thousands of hours into the Soul Calibur games and damned near that into Guitar Hero, and I love tearing those games up with my friends. I enjoyed Katamari Damacy but never finished it because it didn't give me a reason to care.
Interestingly, I played with the wrench for as much of the game as I could. Between the strength augmentations, the ability to freeze enemies, and the stealth augmentation, it can be pretty lethal. Obviously I had to change it up for Big Daddies but for nearly everything else-- including at least one boss fight-- I used the wrench. I'm not being contrary for my own sake, just pointing out that the game gave ME an experience that was probably far different from yours through the extensibility of its system, meager though it was compared to System Shock 2.
A lot of these arguments seem to come from lack of experience and looking at tech specs. I own a PS3 and an XBox with the HD-DVD mod, and I regularly use my XBox Live account to watch HD movies. I hate doing this, but my local cable provider doesn't provide an on-demand HD option. (If anyone reading lives in Manhattan and can tell me I'm doing something wrong, I welcome the information.) You can SAY Blu-Ray is technologically superior because of the specs, but in terms of video and audio quality, there is no discernable difference. Moreover, the above poster talking about a 20 min stream is wrong. It's more like a one minute stream. The bigger problem and inconvenience of downloadable movies versus disc-in-hand is the expiration date. There is no option to OWN movies on XBox Live, only to rent. That ugly reality hobbles the service for me and for others, I suspect.
Point 1: Fallout 3 is being made by Bethesda "others holding the Fallout and Star Trek MMORPG rights, the [Elder Scrolls] is the only truly proven property in Bethesda's catalog."
This is just shoddy reporting. Bethesda is making Fallout 3. They have the rights. They are making the game. Why would you even say this?
Point 2: Grammar Nazism "Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus that the URL registration confirms the existence of an Elder Scrolls MMORPG."
Is this really the level of editorial craftsmanship I have to look forward to when I check Slashdot? Zonk, I thank you for taking on your thankless role. I think you get too much shit from a community here that doesn't bother to appreciate your performance of a task most here would just as soon skip. Nevertheless, considering the volume of your readership, I don't think it's unreasonable for me or anyone else to expect some degree of technical competence in the copy when I check the site.
Even under the most liberal rules of English construction, I think it's fair to say that a colon following a question mark serves no point, is lazy, and its use will jar the reader. I am not harping on formal English. e.e. cummings and Cormac McCarthy got mad skillz, yo. I'm saying that for clarity of expression and the successful conveyance of ideas, this is an instance where adherence to traditional rules of punctuation would make sense. In the future, just use a question mark. You asked a question. The next sentence answers that question. No colon is required. Yay!
I'd like to take a stab at the bizarre non-sentence following your punctuational orgy, but the above paragraph made me tired. I'll be brief: a sentence consists of a subject and a verb. Again, this is not so that you can pay fealty to some draconian grammar overlord. It is for clarity of expression.
This is China we're talking about. It's not hard to find information about their almost total disacknowledgment of international copyright laws. Let's start with a Google search.
Software piracy is the norm. You can acquire scandalously cheap, perfect-looking copies of everything from Office to Everquest for dirt cheap, i.e. cents, not dollars. The Chinese government has been remarkably slow in taking action to support the authority of nations seeking the enforcement of copyright laws, and while I doubt this action will have any real effect, if it's the sign of a larger commitment to action-- and it well could be, what with China's footprint in the global economy increasing every day-- this could well be a major sign of things to come.
Will Wright is a special case. As is TheSims. The Sims generates over a billion dollars a year for EA. This is why it's a separate division with its own name. EA's track record in this department is not great. Bullfrog. Origin. Westwood. This is worthy of fear.
It's that hyper-orbital velocity bit that seems to really make wandering aliens unlikely. I am at best an armchair astrophysicist, so I invite any of you geniuses to correct my wayward thinking. But we think we found liquid water and a oxygen-filled environment on a distant (so-called "earthlike") planet because we saw some colors show up in a spectroscope, right? We know that our best current speeds would still take a VERY long time to get there, what with it being 20 light years away. Relativity says we can't travel faster than the speed of light, so as the above poster said, the species would need hyper-orbital velocities or warp drive or the subspace ship thing from The Authority or some such sci-fi equivalent that is not just going really, really fast.
I don't mean to presume, but what intelligent species is just going to leapfrog around, warping through the universe, hoping to find something interesting? Am I wrong to assume that they would be checking out spectroscopes before they discovered warp, so they would know and understand their destination and hopefully be prepared for something resembling us?
So were the pilots of the craft the first scientists or astronauts to ever try their warp drive out? Did they leave a kind of scientific return address? Wouldn't they have some sort of radio frequency going back home? I mean, I don't think we'd send anything out without some sort of radio beacon saying, "Yes, we're doing fine." Is there some annoyed alien NASA who thought they sent out their first manned hyperspace probe to a planet like their own, but the signal apruptly died and the craft never got there, so they're scrapping the designs and trying again?
As a side note, this kind of thing has always made me uncomfortable with Superman's origin story. Jor-El puts his son in a small capsule capable of hyperspace flight blasts him out toward earth. Maybe the craft put young Kal-El into deep sleep and Jor-El got lucky and hit earth, where everyone looks like Kryptonians. But it's far more likely he was AIMING for earth, an earth filled with people like Kryptonians-- and thus in our evolutionary time frame-- he would have needed hyperspace travel. And on this planet, where hyperspace travel is available at the last minute for baby-sized craft, how come a hundred other Kryptonians didn't do the same damned thing? Sorry. Tangent over.
My point is that it seems normal to assume that when you start warping around, you start caring a lot about where you're going to pop up when the warp is over. As such, it seems like you're going to make some basic assumptions and test flights and computer simulations before you warp in and out, and certainly before you risk first contact with species on another planet.
So yeah... I call bullshit. This guy wants to mess with us, someone else told him to mess with us, etc. There are just too many wide, wide assumptions that forego the myriad demands of spaceflight as I understand them. Please correct me, though. IANAA
Actually, Millar has been done for a while. On both Ultimates and Civil War, it's the respective artists who have been the source of delay behind the titles. Joe Quesada or Tom Brevoort said in a Wizard interview they were going to be patient with Steve McNiven's artistic delays because the ripples of this crossover would be felt for so long that they wanted to make sure the books that composed the main line were of sterling artistic quality.
I'm surprised by the overall comic book ignorance of the Slashdot audience. I'm not saying it's a bad thing; every second I read Amazing Spider-Man is a second I'm not reading a piece of literature without pictures to accompany it, and I know it. But I guess I expected more, um, nerdiness here at the site which posts news for nerds. The complicated issues with the Marvel Civil War, the war on terror in the real world, the relevance to a post 9/11 world, the Japanese internment camps of World War II... all this stuff is addressed at several angles in the Civil War cross-over books. I agree that demanding readers shell out so much for "spillover" material is corporate greed and editorial excess, but I'm surprised people really seem to be unaware of the comparative renaissance superhero comic books are seeing in terms of writing these days.
Certainly, Western mainstream comic books are male power fantasies by their very nature, but that's not such an awful thing. I mean... So is the Iliad in a lot of ways. Many of the most popular writers in comic books right now have backgrounds in indie comics, and they bring that sensibility to their mainstream work. Sure, some writers still employ the ham-fisted prose of older comics-- Brubaker, Byrne, and Claremont spring to mind-- but in a wildly unsubtle medium, there is a lot of strikingly nuanced work pouring out of the minds of Bendis, Stracynzki, Millar, Morrison, Ennis, Ellis, Loeb, Vaughn, Whedon, and Johns.[1] (To say nothing of Gaiman, Moore, and Miller.)
I started collecting comics in the early 90's. Like a lot of you, I quit around the the collectible cards, foil covers, seventeenth print runs, and Image struck. I discovered Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Alan Moore's Watchmen, and it occurred to me that perhaps some comics could be taken seriously. (I was against the idea with steely intensity for a long time because, "I read Kant. I read Tom Wolfe. I read the Aeneid in Latin. I don't read fucking comic books." Man, was I a prick.) It really is a different landscape because it seems there are far more writers helming the stories these days. If you can overcome the considerable hurdles innate to this slice of the medium-- i.e. the male power fantasy thing, the lack of permanence, the melomelomelodramatic stakes, etc.-- I think you'll find the writing is a lot stronger than most of the people posting are giving credit.
[1] On the off-chance I sparked a narrow crevice in a narrow Slashdot mind, I'll give some reading recommendations. With any luck, the flames I receive for leaving people out or endorsing certain books will result in a wider array of recommended reading!
Bendis - Almost anything. He lapses occasionally in Ultimate Spider-Man, but his writing is never, ever as poor as Ed Brubaker (of Uncanny X-Men and, yes, Captain America fame.)
Stracynzki - Supreme Power #1-18. He's dreadfully uneven, but Supreme Power demands attention.
Millar - Superman: Red Son, Ultimates, The Authority... almost anything, really.
Morrison - He's weird. But he's a good writer. Sometimes. The Xorn thing in X-Men, the whole thing with Magneto being addicted to drugs, the whole Age of Apocalypse thing... meh... he reaches pretty far, and it's not always good. Check out his work on JLA, Animal Man, The Authority, and, say, the first 25 issues of New X-Men.But it often is. He's sort of like Tom Robbins or Cormic McCarthy. Sure, I think they're nuts, and I'd
I was reading the preview through the RSS feed on my Google homepage, and when I found out the OS was from MS, I IMMEDIATELY clicked the link, anticipating a smörgåsbord of snarky comments directed toward Microsoft. And as usual, Slashdot did not disappoint.
/. "Predictable entertainment for anyone who dislikes Microsoft."
So we can use our minds to control computers. And we can use computers to control the motor functions-- and utilize certain sensory faculties-- of certain animals. Both articles explain that even though these are both very exciting projects, they are also rather distant from any kind of supremely complex operation that would prove worrisome.
So I understand a really creepy sci-fi movie is many, many decades away from happening. But I'm also sure I'm not the only one who finds a marriage of the two ideas connoted by the developments simultaneously exciting and scary.
Would someone who knows more about the science behind these projects explain why we're oh-so-far from someone putting a nanocomputer in my head and playing me like a video game to patrol the streets of New York City remotely?
romance options for male characters are much richer and better developed then for female.
This is going to sound crass, but shouldn't there be more girl-on-girl action in video games? I'm not being a troll. We all know the demographics for most gamers, excepting peculiar markets like MMOs and The Sims. From college to work to life in general, guys make up the lion's share of gamers. I agree with the sentiment expressed above as to why I play girls in video games: I like to look at a cute female more than I like to imagine myself as some great hero; this is especially true if I have to look at the avatar all the time. With that in mind, I know I never pursued the options available to me for romance when playing my female characters in Baldur's Gate 2 or Jade Empire. (I might have at least considered it if Anomen hadn't been such a ridiculously worthless character, though.) Now, had I been able to pursue some steamy paladin-on-drow lesbian action, I probably would have been more interested. I don't think I'm alone.
I suppose such a design decision would pander to the most salacious traits of the male gaming demographic, and that might cause an uproar, particularly in post-Hot Coffee America, but it's not like the modern video game market appeals to the noblest instincts of humans anyway. If I can pound a control pad to hammer my wicked chained spikes into a minotaur's throat in God of War, I really don't see why I shouldn't be able to reenact a scene from Lez Be Asians 2 (or 3) in Jade Empire.
Re:Yes, been there done that (PS:T just now)
on
Can Games Make You Cry?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I was JUST going to say Planescape: Torment.
(I agree: Best Game Ever. I actually have 12 legit copies expressly to give to avid gamers who missed it for whatever reason.)
Depending on how you played through the game and what choices you made at the end, P:T could be deeply, deeply affecting. I always liked video games, but it was P:T that convinced me that my pretty graphics could be just as involving and compelling as a book or movie or even a television commercial.
I cried while playing Final Fantasy VI, VII, VIII, and X, but over time, I've grown agitated from the lack of any real role-playing. Really, how is the story resolution mechanic different in Metal Gear Solid versus the last four or five Final Fantasy titles? What makes a role-playing game? I think it's short-sighted to say numbers and turn-based combat and mechanical character development, so how exactly is the Metal Gear series that different from the Final Fantasy series? After years of playing hand-crafted, dice-rolled characters with pencil/paper RPGs, eventually it stopped sitting well with me to call a somewhat interactive movie a "role-playing" game. (Even though I love the Final Fantasy games, to be sure. I only feel that the nomenclature is disingenuous.)
Indeed, the only parts where a player interacts with the game in the Final Fantasy series has little to do with the story. At no point do you make any choices that change how the story resolves itself. In Planescape, subtle choices throughout the game can impact your condition when you meet the Transcendant One as well as the options available to you when/if you choose to defeat/fight/negotiate. Moreover, the game explains the linear track far better than any other because your character faces the juggernaut of time's inexorable flow and the pain of potentially losing his identity yet again; it really is like TNO doesn't have a choice, and if THIS TNO didn't perform the acts in the game, a TNO somewhere down the line WOULD.
Crazy brilliant game, and it damned sure made me cry.
"Isn't repeating the same adjective multiple times also pretty hackneyed?"
Most people would probably think twice about taking language-related criticism from someone who was ostensibly unable to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb. Moreover, if you are unable to make the distinction between crude internet shorthand (e.g. "LOL") and poor writing (e.g. overuse of intensifying adverbs like "very," "quite," and "rather"), then I would submit to you that you are a particularly poor source of such judgment.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you actually enter all calendar data on Google Calendar, this is a top-notch solution, thanks to Google's support for ICS. My iCal, Outlook, my Verizon phone (using Verizon Wireless Access by Intellisync), and Lightning* all check the Google homebase for calendar updates. Depending on the service, the clients go haywire when I try to update calendars from the non-Google application, but it's pretty amazing that my calendar gets pushed to a bunch of devices, such that any one of them can be my calendar, to say nothing of any internet-enabled terminal. Gotta love 2008!
Now, if we could just stop raping the planet, technology would be so super-rad!
Umm... This is way off topic, so we are probably going to get modded down, but I'm curious as to that last point. You say you would have driven him off? Am I crazy that I think you misplacing that wish?
If she is nurturing a relationship with someone else, it could certainly have been prevented as you say, but would you want to? Successful relationships are built on trust and verification, perhaps, but not trust and enforcement. I mean, what are the fundamental underpinnings of the people involved where spying is necessary? It seems to me that the moment you have something to drive off, you already have a problem.
Your ex's inclination to cheat was merely satisfied by this guy. It was hardly his responsbility to make sure you stayed with your girlfriend; that was HER call. SHE made the agreement with you at some point not to take up with other dudes. You say there were no issues in your situation, but if she is willing to violate her integrity with you, does that not count as an issue?
You do not speak for the group. I live in New York City, and while the transportation system has many flaws-- you're fucked if you live in an outer borough and the B, D, F, V, J, M, Z, or L break down, but for the most part, my morning commute from Queens is seamless.
See, the reason people keep pointing out net points versus gross points is that the studio's accounting for any given movie includes things like the electric bill at the office. New Line might say that the Lord of the Rings grossed a billion, sure, but during that time they had to pay people at the office, pay to keep the lights on in this or that office, pay for the rent for the parking structure (which is owned by New Line in this example). Since the infrastructure costs are infinite and privately held by the company, and the local courts pay obeisance to Hollywood, the cycle continues. All this while studios crow about how much money their movie made-- this is primarily for advertising; everyone ELSE went to see I am Legend, so it must be good, right?-- they turn around and say, "Gee whiz, it's really too bad we didn't see any of that cash. Sure would have been nice!"
The solution, as has been pointed out, is gross points. Joe Q. Director cannot ask for gross points. Joe Q. Director thanks his lucky stars that he is being given the chance to make a movie for more than $10,000 on a maxed out credit card, so he settles for net points because, hey, maybe they won't fuck him. Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise get gross points. And their production company funded the whole thing (i.e. bigger stars can ask for bigger chunks because stars are how the studios swear they make money). Peter Jackson, director of over-the-top horror films in New Zealand, is competent enough to execute the Lord of the Rings project, but he is not powerful enough to cover his ass during the negotiation process. I think this is where New Line didn't consider a human element: if the guy is nuts enough to make the Lord of the Ring movies-- 10 years of 24 hour development-- he's nuts enough to follow your ass all the way into Hell for his paycheck.
Someone get this man a mod point!
Hopefully this heralds a change in Blizzard's stance on distributing Warcraft III/Frozen Throne online. Currently, the only way to acquire them is to pay for hard copies. I have been reluctant to purchase ANOTHER Battle Chest after losing my first copies of TFT and WC3-- yes, I've purchased both games TWICE. A digital copy would help space cases like me endlessly.
The designers are using "Is it fun?" as their guiding principle. That works for me because Dungeons and Dragons is, finally, a game. If you are playing a game and not having fun, why aren't you just writing your fantasy novel? You reserved hours and hours of your Friday/Saturday. Why would you want to sit around and wait while your friends participate in the good stuff? So you can feel like a realistic participant in your fantasy world? Why? "A real wizard at that level really WOULDN'T have anything to do at that point!"
If they homogenize the world, yeah, that's too bad. I feel pretty certain everyone in a good group modifies the world to suit the story anyway. If the 4th edition changes make the game more consistent and fun for everyone playing, and they bring new players into the dying hobby of tabletop role-playing, isn't that better for everyone?
A pure democracy is a wonderful idea until you, too, are visited by dreams of Ruben Studdard narrowly edging out Clay Aiken for the Democratic nomination. "Who do you think should be the next American President? Text your vote to..."
The education of the United States is broken in nearly every important area, especially those which would be relevant to a national election: economics, foreign policy, military spending, healthcare statistics, basic geography, etc. Let's move for a referendum toward a true democracy AFTER we spend a trillion dollars and twenty years repairing the education system, please.
Obviously, the major studios care a LOT about the theatrical box office. Even though the after-market (i.e. DVD, digital, HBO et alii, and on-demand ) has grown into a more powerful earner than the multiplex, the success of the former is conventionally seen as directly proportional to the latter. Every now and then a hiccup occurs like Stephen Soderbergh's Bubble, which was released on DVD and in theaters on the same day. But Bubble was a low-profile exception. Ocean's Thirteen would have been a far more interesting test. To date, no studio has released a tentpole project to market scrutiny across simultaneous media. Sub-studio production houses are even more scared to risk using the after-market as a primary market because they have less money to lose; Think Films risks more releasing Half-Nelson to DVD and theaters at the same time than Sony has to lose by offering Spider-Man 4 HD on the PS3 on the same day it's released in theaters. Studios are taking baby steps with adventures in digital/direct distribution-- cf. the recent Slashdot article about iTunes killing Netflix and Blockbuster as the studios obviate the middleman-- but in terms of initial releases, the studios are scared to try something novel with one of their otherwise sure things.
Why is all this? Because making movies is expensive. I recently worked on a student film shoot that cost a total of approximately $1000 in labor. It was shot on a Panavision Gold II with Super-35mm film. It looks gorgeous, but the producers and director got what they paid for: this 20 minute short cost $45,000. Had they paid for labor or had they not had academic insurance, that cost could have easily doubled or even tripled. For a 20 minute short. To be fair, they were shooting in New York, NY, which boosts every cost across the board.
But the newest iteration of technology boggles the mind. The cost of film and development can be swallowed by the new equipment. Consider, for example, the immediate availability of HD. While you would be hard-pressed to film a studio feature on the Panasonic HVX-200, the quality is still remarkable, and the tricks available to a clever cinematographer with a 35mm lens adapter such as the PS Teknik further extend the range of a filmmaker's visual options. The HVX uses proprietary "P2" cards which fit into any PCMCIA slot. Any movies made never need to see a conventional film format. The Panasonic HVX-200 can be purchased (not even rented!) on ebay for $5,000.
Go up another echelon. The much-ballyhooed Red. The body of the camera can be purchased for $17,000. While this seems like a lot, it's CONSIDERABLY cheaper than the conventional Super-35 route, and renting a Red can be reasonably expected to run cheaper than renting a Panavision Genesis. (The digital camera used to film, among others, Superman Returns.) The Red's capability to awe audiences with its visuals is yet to be seen, but Peter Jackson is very excited, and concerned parties will be watching Wanted--filmed with the Red-- very carefully.
So that's the camera. You pay union rates for teamsters, G&E, sound, etc. These drive up the cost. A lot. Still, if your overall budget is low enough, these costs are commensurately low. Micro-budget, ultra-low budget, and low-budget all command different rates from different unions.
Then you pay more for insurance. This also drives up the cost.
Locations are an x-factor. Depending on where you shoot, they can lower or raise the movie's price tag considerably, especially if you consider tax issues from state to state or country to country. Ditto grants and funds available for foreign investors with the same considerations. It's no accident that so many movies are shot in Sydney and Prague.
Art assets don't come cheaply at all. In the democratized film environment I'm describing, the biggest cutback will be the
USMC DRILL INSTRUCTOR: "Put that left sock on right now! 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."
USMC RECRUITS: "Done, sir, done!"
USMC DRILL INSTRUCTOR: "Put that right sock on right now! 10, 9, 5, 3, 2, 1!"
USMC RECRUITS: "Done, sir, done!"
I went to a strict parochial school, and they had NOTHING on the good ol' USMC.
More on topic, perhaps unfocused use of the internet is exactly why people don't get work done in the real world, necessarily. Yes, yes, they'll be fired, a good workplace monitors traffic and blocks non-productive sites, but to deny the tendency to take extemporaneous hour breaks in the modern workplace is to put Popcap out of business.
I don't know how you would implement a meaningful traffic control policy for K-12-- it seems like it would probably have to occur at the district level of IT mentioned above-- but in a world of PornTube, 2girls1cup, and a trillion other sites, maybe limiting kids' full access to the internet isn't totally evil. I know if I were capable of unfettered computer/internet access when I was in school, I would have visited all manner of unspeakable internet nonsense... and I did when my high school finally got broadband access!
I'm NOT saying the kid was up to no good here. He was probably stunned at how stupid his teacher was. But the general sentiment on Slashdot always seems to be, "Let all information run free all the time, as in beer and speech, no matter what!"
Conversely, even if I love a game's mechanics, I don't usually waste my energy playing if I can't see myself trying to one-up my friends. I've poured thousands of hours into the Soul Calibur games and damned near that into Guitar Hero, and I love tearing those games up with my friends. I enjoyed Katamari Damacy but never finished it because it didn't give me a reason to care.
Interestingly, I played with the wrench for as much of the game as I could. Between the strength augmentations, the ability to freeze enemies, and the stealth augmentation, it can be pretty lethal. Obviously I had to change it up for Big Daddies but for nearly everything else-- including at least one boss fight-- I used the wrench. I'm not being contrary for my own sake, just pointing out that the game gave ME an experience that was probably far different from yours through the extensibility of its system, meager though it was compared to System Shock 2.
A lot of these arguments seem to come from lack of experience and looking at tech specs. I own a PS3 and an XBox with the HD-DVD mod, and I regularly use my XBox Live account to watch HD movies. I hate doing this, but my local cable provider doesn't provide an on-demand HD option. (If anyone reading lives in Manhattan and can tell me I'm doing something wrong, I welcome the information.) You can SAY Blu-Ray is technologically superior because of the specs, but in terms of video and audio quality, there is no discernable difference. Moreover, the above poster talking about a 20 min stream is wrong. It's more like a one minute stream. The bigger problem and inconvenience of downloadable movies versus disc-in-hand is the expiration date. There is no option to OWN movies on XBox Live, only to rent. That ugly reality hobbles the service for me and for others, I suspect.
"others holding the Fallout and Star Trek MMORPG rights, the [Elder Scrolls] is the only truly proven property in Bethesda's catalog."
This is just shoddy reporting. Bethesda is making Fallout 3. They have the rights. They are making the game. Why would you even say this?
Point 2: Grammar Nazism
"Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus that the URL registration confirms the existence of an Elder Scrolls MMORPG."
Is this really the level of editorial craftsmanship I have to look forward to when I check Slashdot? Zonk, I thank you for taking on your thankless role. I think you get too much shit from a community here that doesn't bother to appreciate your performance of a task most here would just as soon skip. Nevertheless, considering the volume of your readership, I don't think it's unreasonable for me or anyone else to expect some degree of technical competence in the copy when I check the site.
Even under the most liberal rules of English construction, I think it's fair to say that a colon following a question mark serves no point, is lazy, and its use will jar the reader. I am not harping on formal English. e.e. cummings and Cormac McCarthy got mad skillz, yo. I'm saying that for clarity of expression and the successful conveyance of ideas, this is an instance where adherence to traditional rules of punctuation would make sense. In the future, just use a question mark. You asked a question. The next sentence answers that question. No colon is required. Yay!
I'd like to take a stab at the bizarre non-sentence following your punctuational orgy, but the above paragraph made me tired. I'll be brief: a sentence consists of a subject and a verb. Again, this is not so that you can pay fealty to some draconian grammar overlord. It is for clarity of expression.
Software piracy is the norm. You can acquire scandalously cheap, perfect-looking copies of everything from Office to Everquest for dirt cheap, i.e. cents, not dollars. The Chinese government has been remarkably slow in taking action to support the authority of nations seeking the enforcement of copyright laws, and while I doubt this action will have any real effect, if it's the sign of a larger commitment to action-- and it well could be, what with China's footprint in the global economy increasing every day-- this could well be a major sign of things to come.
Will Wright is a special case. As is TheSims. The Sims generates over a billion dollars a year for EA. This is why it's a separate division with its own name. EA's track record in this department is not great. Bullfrog. Origin. Westwood. This is worthy of fear.
I don't mean to presume, but what intelligent species is just going to leapfrog around, warping through the universe, hoping to find something interesting? Am I wrong to assume that they would be checking out spectroscopes before they discovered warp, so they would know and understand their destination and hopefully be prepared for something resembling us?
So were the pilots of the craft the first scientists or astronauts to ever try their warp drive out? Did they leave a kind of scientific return address? Wouldn't they have some sort of radio frequency going back home? I mean, I don't think we'd send anything out without some sort of radio beacon saying, "Yes, we're doing fine." Is there some annoyed alien NASA who thought they sent out their first manned hyperspace probe to a planet like their own, but the signal apruptly died and the craft never got there, so they're scrapping the designs and trying again?
As a side note, this kind of thing has always made me uncomfortable with Superman's origin story. Jor-El puts his son in a small capsule capable of hyperspace flight blasts him out toward earth. Maybe the craft put young Kal-El into deep sleep and Jor-El got lucky and hit earth, where everyone looks like Kryptonians. But it's far more likely he was AIMING for earth, an earth filled with people like Kryptonians-- and thus in our evolutionary time frame-- he would have needed hyperspace travel. And on this planet, where hyperspace travel is available at the last minute for baby-sized craft, how come a hundred other Kryptonians didn't do the same damned thing? Sorry. Tangent over.
My point is that it seems normal to assume that when you start warping around, you start caring a lot about where you're going to pop up when the warp is over. As such, it seems like you're going to make some basic assumptions and test flights and computer simulations before you warp in and out, and certainly before you risk first contact with species on another planet.
So yeah... I call bullshit. This guy wants to mess with us, someone else told him to mess with us, etc. There are just too many wide, wide assumptions that forego the myriad demands of spaceflight as I understand them. Please correct me, though. IANAA
I'm surprised by the overall comic book ignorance of the Slashdot audience. I'm not saying it's a bad thing; every second I read Amazing Spider-Man is a second I'm not reading a piece of literature without pictures to accompany it, and I know it. But I guess I expected more, um, nerdiness here at the site which posts news for nerds. The complicated issues with the Marvel Civil War, the war on terror in the real world, the relevance to a post 9/11 world, the Japanese internment camps of World War II... all this stuff is addressed at several angles in the Civil War cross-over books. I agree that demanding readers shell out so much for "spillover" material is corporate greed and editorial excess, but I'm surprised people really seem to be unaware of the comparative renaissance superhero comic books are seeing in terms of writing these days.
Certainly, Western mainstream comic books are male power fantasies by their very nature, but that's not such an awful thing. I mean... So is the Iliad in a lot of ways. Many of the most popular writers in comic books right now have backgrounds in indie comics, and they bring that sensibility to their mainstream work. Sure, some writers still employ the ham-fisted prose of older comics-- Brubaker, Byrne, and Claremont spring to mind-- but in a wildly unsubtle medium, there is a lot of strikingly nuanced work pouring out of the minds of Bendis, Stracynzki, Millar, Morrison, Ennis, Ellis, Loeb, Vaughn, Whedon, and Johns.[1] (To say nothing of Gaiman, Moore, and Miller.)
I started collecting comics in the early 90's. Like a lot of you, I quit around the the collectible cards, foil covers, seventeenth print runs, and Image struck. I discovered Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Alan Moore's Watchmen, and it occurred to me that perhaps some comics could be taken seriously. (I was against the idea with steely intensity for a long time because, "I read Kant. I read Tom Wolfe. I read the Aeneid in Latin. I don't read fucking comic books." Man, was I a prick.) It really is a different landscape because it seems there are far more writers helming the stories these days. If you can overcome the considerable hurdles innate to this slice of the medium-- i.e. the male power fantasy thing, the lack of permanence, the melomelomelodramatic stakes, etc.-- I think you'll find the writing is a lot stronger than most of the people posting are giving credit.
[1] On the off-chance I sparked a narrow crevice in a narrow Slashdot mind, I'll give some reading recommendations. With any luck, the flames I receive for leaving people out or endorsing certain books will result in a wider array of recommended reading!
Bendis - Almost anything. He lapses occasionally in Ultimate Spider-Man, but his writing is never, ever as poor as Ed Brubaker (of Uncanny X-Men and, yes, Captain America fame.)
Stracynzki - Supreme Power #1-18. He's dreadfully uneven, but Supreme Power demands attention.
Millar - Superman: Red Son, Ultimates, The Authority... almost anything, really.
Morrison - He's weird. But he's a good writer. Sometimes. The Xorn thing in X-Men, the whole thing with Magneto being addicted to drugs, the whole Age of Apocalypse thing... meh... he reaches pretty far, and it's not always good. Check out his work on JLA, Animal Man, The Authority, and, say, the first 25 issues of New X-Men.But it often is. He's sort of like Tom Robbins or Cormic McCarthy. Sure, I think they're nuts, and I'd
Being overly concerned with what SHE thinks is the optimal situation during sex is why many men find themselves at women's mercy when it comes to expressing themselves sexually. As this is Slashdot, I don't expect much different, but... well... There are better ways...
http://www.themysterymethod.com
http://www.venusianarts.com
http://www.datinggurubrad.com/
http://www.realsocialdynamics.com/
The Game
I can't help but think about this /. article when I read about people controlling computer games with people's minds:
Stealth Sharks to Patrol the High Seas
So we can use our minds to control computers. And we can use computers to control the motor functions-- and utilize certain sensory faculties-- of certain animals. Both articles explain that even though these are both very exciting projects, they are also rather distant from any kind of supremely complex operation that would prove worrisome.
So I understand a really creepy sci-fi movie is many, many decades away from happening. But I'm also sure I'm not the only one who finds a marriage of the two ideas connoted by the developments simultaneously exciting and scary.
Would someone who knows more about the science behind these projects explain why we're oh-so-far from someone putting a nanocomputer in my head and playing me like a video game to patrol the streets of New York City remotely?
This is going to sound crass, but shouldn't there be more girl-on-girl action in video games? I'm not being a troll. We all know the demographics for most gamers, excepting peculiar markets like MMOs and The Sims. From college to work to life in general, guys make up the lion's share of gamers. I agree with the sentiment expressed above as to why I play girls in video games: I like to look at a cute female more than I like to imagine myself as some great hero; this is especially true if I have to look at the avatar all the time. With that in mind, I know I never pursued the options available to me for romance when playing my female characters in Baldur's Gate 2 or Jade Empire. (I might have at least considered it if Anomen hadn't been such a ridiculously worthless character, though.) Now, had I been able to pursue some steamy paladin-on-drow lesbian action, I probably would have been more interested. I don't think I'm alone.
I suppose such a design decision would pander to the most salacious traits of the male gaming demographic, and that might cause an uproar, particularly in post-Hot Coffee America, but it's not like the modern video game market appeals to the noblest instincts of humans anyway. If I can pound a control pad to hammer my wicked chained spikes into a minotaur's throat in God of War, I really don't see why I shouldn't be able to reenact a scene from Lez Be Asians 2 (or 3) in Jade Empire.
(I agree: Best Game Ever. I actually have 12 legit copies expressly to give to avid gamers who missed it for whatever reason.)
Depending on how you played through the game and what choices you made at the end, P:T could be deeply, deeply affecting. I always liked video games, but it was P:T that convinced me that my pretty graphics could be just as involving and compelling as a book or movie or even a television commercial.
I cried while playing Final Fantasy VI, VII, VIII, and X, but over time, I've grown agitated from the lack of any real role-playing. Really, how is the story resolution mechanic different in Metal Gear Solid versus the last four or five Final Fantasy titles? What makes a role-playing game? I think it's short-sighted to say numbers and turn-based combat and mechanical character development, so how exactly is the Metal Gear series that different from the Final Fantasy series? After years of playing hand-crafted, dice-rolled characters with pencil/paper RPGs, eventually it stopped sitting well with me to call a somewhat interactive movie a "role-playing" game. (Even though I love the Final Fantasy games, to be sure. I only feel that the nomenclature is disingenuous.)
Indeed, the only parts where a player interacts with the game in the Final Fantasy series has little to do with the story. At no point do you make any choices that change how the story resolves itself. In Planescape, subtle choices throughout the game can impact your condition when you meet the Transcendant One as well as the options available to you when/if you choose to defeat/fight/negotiate. Moreover, the game explains the linear track far better than any other because your character faces the juggernaut of time's inexorable flow and the pain of potentially losing his identity yet again; it really is like TNO doesn't have a choice, and if THIS TNO didn't perform the acts in the game, a TNO somewhere down the line WOULD.
Crazy brilliant game, and it damned sure made me cry.
"Isn't repeating the same adjective multiple times also pretty hackneyed?"
Most people would probably think twice about taking language-related criticism from someone who was ostensibly unable to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb. Moreover, if you are unable to make the distinction between crude internet shorthand (e.g. "LOL") and poor writing (e.g. overuse of intensifying adverbs like "very," "quite," and "rather"), then I would submit to you that you are a particularly poor source of such judgment.
True, if you use the distribution from the main website.
I'm not sure how any of these builds perform on the Intel-based Macs, but they have worked wonderfully on my Powerbook:
http://www.furbism.com/firefoxmac/