Rockstar lost over twenty five million dollars having to pull the game off the shelf. Compared to that, $1.4 million is only a slap on the wrist, and a redundant slap on the wrist at that.
You cannot access Hot Coffee without altering the game's data files. It's not Rockstar's fault if people alter the game in order to enable content not intended for use; remember, it wasn't possible to access Hot Coffee via the game's normal interface out of the box.
I hate state censorship as much as it deserves, but I hate to almost the same degree people who use any situation to screech about state censorship, even when it's apropos of nothing. The FTC didn't crack down on Rockstar for having dry humping and simulated oral sex in its game. The FTC punished them for mislabelling the game, effectively misrepresenting the contents. Now, you can argue about whether or not Rockstar ought to be obliged to use the arbitrary ESRB labelling system or not, but again: Rockstar are being fined for misusing the ESRB system, not for producing a game with smut in it.
When you use a completely different Latin phrase to the one you meant to try and look smart, that's not a fault of "grammar", that's a fault of "vocabulary", aka "ignorance". Way to be a grammar nazi nazi.
"Go play any recent Square RPG (well, not the weird SaGa ones) - they're basically 3D adventure games with a battle system thrown in. I'm playing Chrono Cross right now and it's just like playing Grim Fandango, except I get to beat people up more."
I'm sorry, I respect your opinion and all, but I must disagree. RPGs have indeed taken a few elements from adventure games, but not really to the extent where I'm thinking to myself "Hey...who put their adventure game in my RPG?!"
I was alluding earlier to a true balls-to-the-wall adventure game that was an adventure game form the first keystroke in MSWord to the last closed beta bug to the boxed copy on the shelves. A title that just wants to be a pure adventure game all along, not a cross platform, genre splitting hybrid. No combat...no time constraints...no boss battles...no leveling...no dying...no jumping puzzles, etc..
Certainly no super-deformed, gargantuan-eyed, Japanese, insular misconceptions of American pop-culture with absurd story arcs and dialogue written by grade school students on LSD, who fantasize about falling in love while saving the world, hot dogs, and "...", (For some reason they go on about "..." a lot.) all the while being drop-dead serious about it.
Shudder. No thanks. I decided several years ago that I'd had enough and will probably never play another Square RPG again. (Well, except for my old GB titles, perhaps.)
This was a big reason why I gravitated strongly towards the PC in the late eighties and haven't looked back since. Sure I try things out on the console side every once and awhile that I really enjoy (GTA, Fable) but the platform really doesn't speak to me, excite me, inspire me, entertain me, or even motivate me the way computer games do. There are many other reasons as well.
In all honesty, I'm just scared because I'd be lying if I said I didn't see the writing on the wall. Each year that goes by since the PS1 came out in '95 or so, I see PC gamers becoming ever increasingly in the minority. I walk into my local EB and Gamestop and am horrifically hurt and saddened to see the PC games carelessly crammed away in the furthest, back corner of the store, huge, gooey bar-code stickers slapped over 50% of the sides (the only visible portion of the box) of unshrink-wrapped, dog-eared boxes. Contrast this with a local Walden Software 10 years ago that had over half of the store space dedicated to PC games.
Since the arrival of the XBOX, I see many (at one time) die-hard PC companies fold or jump ship to (at best) cross platform, lowest common denominator detritus. I see 1.5 million people splooging over mainstream titles like Halo 2 and wonder "Do that many people not know that Half-Life did it better, smarter, and cooler back in '98? Are there that many people out there in console land who have never played an engrossing (and dare I say "better") FPS before Halo on the PC?"
Maybe I'm just bitter and unyielding - fearing change. Maybe I know all too well what I like and see that it's no longer matching up with the mass market. Either way, I'm pretty upset and I want desperately something to be done about it. I certainly don't know what to do, and even feel that I'm actively trying. Frankly, I'm terrified. The day they stop making engrossing, mature, dark, funny, deep, detailed, immersive, atmospheric, complex PC titles, be them adventure, RPG, action, FPS, is probably the day I stop being a gamer...and that's too horrible for me to even think about.
Seriously, the only thing differentiating lilo from any other freelode luser is that he spams "DONATE NOW" notices every half hour. Maybe he should get a real job and then he'll be able to afford all that pizza.
You got laughed at for espousing Linux in the 1990s because, to be frank, Linux sucked as a desktop system back then. It hasn't been until around early 2004 or thereabouts that it's been a feasible option for your typical user.
You do realise that in many cases you can find entire music videos from YouTube? This isn't sampling, this is simply ripping the whole thing from TV or a DVD. That's not anywhere near fair use.
And don't try to get around it by portraying the uploaders as 'promoters'. "Wow! Free publicity!" It's not legal to reproduce a book with this weak excuse, or a film, or a TV series. Yes, believe it or not, the RIAA want to stop losing revenue becase of people like yourself exchanging the works of their artists for free! Don't exaggerate their position by implying that they want to stop all "enjoyment of ANYTHING that we can possible [sic] stamp with OUR ownership!"; that's bullshit. They're just protecting their copyright, and if you think that's somehow wrong: (1) come up with a decent fucking argument, and (2) complain about copyright law, not the companies.
For starters; does anybody need this much space? Taking a typical tape drive diameter of 13 inches, application of simple calculus gives a circumference of approximately 80 inches, so each tape-wind gives 160 square inches of exposed tape. Assuming your typical tape reel has 200 layers of tape wound around it, we get 26 terabytes of storage. Who needs this? No hurr-hurr porn jokes, please, I know this is Slashdot but let's try and think of an actual reason why you need 26TB when a typical word processor document is, say, 600KB, and an entire album lossless rip is only maybe 100 megabytes. Hi-def video is not much greater.
Another thing - tape is slow. When I was 11 years old, I would read about the gigabytes of storage you could get with tape, and say "Wow!" Of course, nobody ever mentioned that tape access is sllllllllooooooowwwwww. Like, really, really, slow. And by increasing the data density by a factor of 15, guess what? I bet access times decrease by a factor of 15. When you're writing a letter, you can cram more text in if you write tiny, but you're going to spend a lot of time writing extremely cautiously to avoid screwing it up. The access times - running into the seconds - would simply be unacceptable.
I bet you couldn't even run Linux off this thing. I know, I know, it's a cliché - "Yes, yes...but does it run LINUX?!?!?", but I'm curious. We have all of these powerful desktop computers nowadays - why return to tape? I mean, magnetic tape has been around since the 1960s, although most of the tape from back then is unusable due to mites, decay, or gradual demagnetisation. Linux is, by comparison, state-of-the-art rocket science tech. You could maybe run muLinux off this, or something. That boots off a floppy disc, which is actually relatively speedy versus magtape. And have fun storing your docs on it!
All in all, an interesting development, but not the most practical expenditure of R 'n' D.
To be frank, I'd rather Sun hadn't open sourced Java, because that would probably reduce its (admittedly already very poor) uptake still more. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan. In trying to overcome the disadvantages of both compiled and interpreted languages, it actually incorporates them all: you get the slow startup times associated with JIT, and slow execution due to fiddling with bytecode. Let's not forget that the only type of optimisation carried out on the bytecode is peephole optimisation, which is inadequate for the majority of I/O intensive operations. The list goes on and on.
Seriously, what real developments have Mac OS X and Windows seen in the past 5 years? They're too shackled to the idea of a consumer-friendly OS to incorporate the best and latest.
Ohhhhh...no. No fucking way. This is some kind of joke, right? Because if not, the fact that the US government is not only willing to fuck over its own citizens but also to use its political largesse to dick with everyone else is just about enough for me to start condoning terrorism. This is essentially what this is, really - the implicit threat behind all of this smells terribly badly. I was already pissed off more than enough by the EU wanting to implement this in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
...but if Rockstar are going to use a rating system, they should use it properly, regardless.
Rockstar lost over twenty five million dollars having to pull the game off the shelf. Compared to that, $1.4 million is only a slap on the wrist, and a redundant slap on the wrist at that.
You cannot access Hot Coffee without altering the game's data files. It's not Rockstar's fault if people alter the game in order to enable content not intended for use; remember, it wasn't possible to access Hot Coffee via the game's normal interface out of the box.
I hate state censorship as much as it deserves, but I hate to almost the same degree people who use any situation to screech about state censorship, even when it's apropos of nothing. The FTC didn't crack down on Rockstar for having dry humping and simulated oral sex in its game. The FTC punished them for mislabelling the game, effectively misrepresenting the contents. Now, you can argue about whether or not Rockstar ought to be obliged to use the arbitrary ESRB labelling system or not, but again: Rockstar are being fined for misusing the ESRB system, not for producing a game with smut in it.
lol
"Whom" is never used for the subject of a sentence. Idiots who make this mistake are irritating to whomever their poor victims are.
When you use a completely different Latin phrase to the one you meant to try and look smart, that's not a fault of "grammar", that's a fault of "vocabulary", aka "ignorance". Way to be a grammar nazi nazi.
"Go play any recent Square RPG (well, not the weird SaGa ones) - they're basically 3D adventure games with a battle system thrown in. I'm playing Chrono Cross right now and it's just like playing Grim Fandango, except I get to beat people up more."
I'm sorry, I respect your opinion and all, but I must disagree. RPGs have indeed taken a few elements from adventure games, but not really to the extent where I'm thinking to myself "Hey...who put their adventure game in my RPG?!"
I was alluding earlier to a true balls-to-the-wall adventure game that was an adventure game form the first keystroke in MSWord to the last closed beta bug to the boxed copy on the shelves. A title that just wants to be a pure adventure game all along, not a cross platform, genre splitting hybrid. No combat...no time constraints...no boss battles...no leveling...no dying...no jumping puzzles, etc..
Certainly no super-deformed, gargantuan-eyed, Japanese, insular misconceptions of American pop-culture with absurd story arcs and dialogue written by grade school students on LSD, who fantasize about falling in love while saving the world, hot dogs, and "...", (For some reason they go on about "..." a lot.) all the while being drop-dead serious about it.
Shudder. No thanks. I decided several years ago that I'd had enough and will probably never play another Square RPG again. (Well, except for my old GB titles, perhaps.)
This was a big reason why I gravitated strongly towards the PC in the late eighties and haven't looked back since. Sure I try things out on the console side every once and awhile that I really enjoy (GTA, Fable) but the platform really doesn't speak to me, excite me, inspire me, entertain me, or even motivate me the way computer games do. There are many other reasons as well.
In all honesty, I'm just scared because I'd be lying if I said I didn't see the writing on the wall. Each year that goes by since the PS1 came out in '95 or so, I see PC gamers becoming ever increasingly in the minority. I walk into my local EB and Gamestop and am horrifically hurt and saddened to see the PC games carelessly crammed away in the furthest, back corner of the store, huge, gooey bar-code stickers slapped over 50% of the sides (the only visible portion of the box) of unshrink-wrapped, dog-eared boxes. Contrast this with a local Walden Software 10 years ago that had over half of the store space dedicated to PC games.
Since the arrival of the XBOX, I see many (at one time) die-hard PC companies fold or jump ship to (at best) cross platform, lowest common denominator detritus. I see 1.5 million people splooging over mainstream titles like Halo 2 and wonder "Do that many people not know that Half-Life did it better, smarter, and cooler back in '98? Are there that many people out there in console land who have never played an engrossing (and dare I say "better") FPS before Halo on the PC?"
Maybe I'm just bitter and unyielding - fearing change. Maybe I know all too well what I like and see that it's no longer matching up with the mass market. Either way, I'm pretty upset and I want desperately something to be done about it. I certainly don't know what to do, and even feel that I'm actively trying. Frankly, I'm terrified. The day they stop making engrossing, mature, dark, funny, deep, detailed, immersive, atmospheric, complex PC titles, be them adventure, RPG, action, FPS, is probably the day I stop being a gamer...and that's too horrible for me to even think about.
I can't think of what else that fat fuck is spending his cash on...certainly not a network security apprenticeship...
Seriously, the only thing differentiating lilo from any other freelode luser is that he spams "DONATE NOW" notices every half hour. Maybe he should get a real job and then he'll be able to afford all that pizza.
You got laughed at for espousing Linux in the 1990s because, to be frank, Linux sucked as a desktop system back then. It hasn't been until around early 2004 or thereabouts that it's been a feasible option for your typical user.
You do realise that in many cases you can find entire music videos from YouTube? This isn't sampling, this is simply ripping the whole thing from TV or a DVD. That's not anywhere near fair use.
And don't try to get around it by portraying the uploaders as 'promoters'. "Wow! Free publicity!" It's not legal to reproduce a book with this weak excuse, or a film, or a TV series. Yes, believe it or not, the RIAA want to stop losing revenue becase of people like yourself exchanging the works of their artists for free! Don't exaggerate their position by implying that they want to stop all "enjoyment of ANYTHING that we can possible [sic] stamp with OUR ownership!"; that's bullshit. They're just protecting their copyright, and if you think that's somehow wrong: (1) come up with a decent fucking argument, and (2) complain about copyright law, not the companies.
Yeah, except it's not broken by arbitrary removal of moderation privileges and groupthink.
Or at least, they sure act like it!
(2) Good error reporting and recovery.
Try to avoid generalising like that.
(Stupid Yanks.)
For starters; does anybody need this much space? Taking a typical tape drive diameter of 13 inches, application of simple calculus gives a circumference of approximately 80 inches, so each tape-wind gives 160 square inches of exposed tape. Assuming your typical tape reel has 200 layers of tape wound around it, we get 26 terabytes of storage. Who needs this? No hurr-hurr porn jokes, please, I know this is Slashdot but let's try and think of an actual reason why you need 26TB when a typical word processor document is, say, 600KB, and an entire album lossless rip is only maybe 100 megabytes. Hi-def video is not much greater.
Another thing - tape is slow. When I was 11 years old, I would read about the gigabytes of storage you could get with tape, and say "Wow!" Of course, nobody ever mentioned that tape access is sllllllllooooooowwwwww. Like, really, really, slow. And by increasing the data density by a factor of 15, guess what? I bet access times decrease by a factor of 15. When you're writing a letter, you can cram more text in if you write tiny, but you're going to spend a lot of time writing extremely cautiously to avoid screwing it up. The access times - running into the seconds - would simply be unacceptable.
I bet you couldn't even run Linux off this thing. I know, I know, it's a cliché - "Yes, yes...but does it run LINUX?!?!?", but I'm curious. We have all of these powerful desktop computers nowadays - why return to tape? I mean, magnetic tape has been around since the 1960s, although most of the tape from back then is unusable due to mites, decay, or gradual demagnetisation. Linux is, by comparison, state-of-the-art rocket science tech. You could maybe run muLinux off this, or something. That boots off a floppy disc, which is actually relatively speedy versus magtape. And have fun storing your docs on it!
All in all, an interesting development, but not the most practical expenditure of R 'n' D.
To be frank, I'd rather Sun hadn't open sourced Java, because that would probably reduce its (admittedly already very poor) uptake still more. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan. In trying to overcome the disadvantages of both compiled and interpreted languages, it actually incorporates them all: you get the slow startup times associated with JIT, and slow execution due to fiddling with bytecode. Let's not forget that the only type of optimisation carried out on the bytecode is peephole optimisation, which is inadequate for the majority of I/O intensive operations. The list goes on and on.
Seriously, what real developments have Mac OS X and Windows seen in the past 5 years? They're too shackled to the idea of a consumer-friendly OS to incorporate the best and latest.
...is that you'd have to be tripping to use Ruby on Rails? Sounds about right.
Ohhhhh...no. No fucking way. This is some kind of joke, right? Because if not, the fact that the US government is not only willing to fuck over its own citizens but also to use its political largesse to dick with everyone else is just about enough for me to start condoning terrorism. This is essentially what this is, really - the implicit threat behind all of this smells terribly badly. I was already pissed off more than enough by the EU wanting to implement this in the first place.
Uh, the two most important spanning tree algorithms were discovered by two other people - two men , in fact. They go by the names of Prim and Kruskal.
Your ideas are sadly unfeasible, but at least they're interesting.
So use it, you fool.
That was the very first thing I thought of when I read the story summary.