Weird, Windows and Linux seem to handle pretty much any task I need handled. Not bad for a couple of clunkers.
Who knows? Maybe he's right. Personally, I think the concept of television networks is a clunker of an idea waaay past its time. I suggest that in this age of the Internet, we should all be watching on-demand content provided directly by the content makers that's financed by micropayments paid by the consumers, and we receive our "signal" via high-speed Internet connections to the content providers.
Boy, it sure is easy for me to sit back and say that. But where the rubber meets the road—actually making these brave new ideas come to pass... Well, that's the challenge, isn't it? Until someone can cough up the resources to invest into creating, distributing, and marketing BobOS and my IP television studios, I guess we'll just have to keep talking about how nice it would be, and make the best of the clunkers that I suppose are working well enough for now.
But seriously, if you want to invest in my IP television studio, let me know...
If goldfarming is okay, the[n] using a bot to goldfarm is okay. It's my subscription money.
You know, I've seen this attitude before, and it disgusts me. Not the goldfarming attitude (though I find that disgusting, too), but the attitude that since you pay a subscription fee, you're entitled to do whatever you want to in a game.
First of all, you're flat out wrong. If you read your EULA, you will find that there are a lot of things (probably a lot more than you even realize) that are outright prohibited. That in itself is enough to show that "It's my subscription money" doesn't mean jack when it comes to you doing stupid things. Every game I know of prohibits using 'bots in the EULA.
Let me put it another way that maybe you can understand. Paying an annual fee for a driver's license doesn't give you the right to do whatever the hell you want on the freeways. If you deliberately make the roads unsafe for other drivers, you'll be banned from driving. Paying a monthly fee for a game license doesn't give you the right to do whatever the hell you want in the game. If you deliberately make the game not fun for other players, you'll be banned from playing. Capiche?
All that aside, there's another principle at work, too. When you sign up to play an MMORPG, you're also implicitly agreeing to become part of that community. As such, you have certain social responsibilities as a part of that community, the primary of which IMHO is to not be an asshole. Even if the EULA has no prohibitions in it at all, your comment would still be flawed. Sure, maybe you could technically do whatever you wanted, but if any but an extremely small number of people did, the game would quickly lose its community and you'd be left with nothing but 'bots playing. No one will pay a monthly fee just for their 'bots to play with other people's 'bots, and the game would quickly die.
Hey, maybe that's what you want. But it's obviously not what Blizzard and other WoW players want, and I for one hope they wield their banhammer a lot more often.
As for goldfarming, it's just plain stupid, and I'll never understand why a market for this stuff exists in the first place. If I'm paying a monthly fee to play a game, it will be a cold day in hell before I pay other people money on top of that to play the game for me. And anyone who buys in-game items with out-of-game money is a fool in my book. But then, I come from the era of pencil-n-paper RPGs. If I were a GM and someone offered me cash for their character to get in-game wealth or items, I would quickly find a creatively gruesome way to irrevocably kill off their character, and would likely never invite that person to play again.
Perhaps a better idea than outright banning these people's accounts would be to make them waste their time. Slowly nerf their characters until the game eventually becomes practically unplayable. After all, if we're going to let real life affect our in-game worlds, why should such effects only be positive?
I'm sorry if my harsh opinion keeps you from having fun, but it's for the best to the majority of players. Perhaps you should try a more farming-friendly game instead, such as Progress Quest. I think you'll find it infinitely more fun that these boring old games that make you work for what you get.
Well, in America, we also know that you all love wrestling crocodiles and drinking Foster's beer.;-)
Seriouly, Australia looks like a really cool place, and most Australian folks I know are super nice people. I'm thinking of moving there someday. The "Australia founded by criminals" is just an interesting story that gets propagated because of its novelty, I don't think that people mean it as an insult. At least, I can assure you that my own opinion of Australia isn't tainted by the story.
After all, let's not forget that the United States was founded by a bunch of insurgents. Funny how our own opinions of insurgencies have changed...
(Shameless—but relevant—fan site plug, with hopefully useful info...)
I'm the admin of the ParagonWiki, a CoH/CoV wiki. Last week, I wrote an article called Winter Event 2005 in which I've tried to cover in-depth everything that CoH/CoV has done for the winter holidays.
If I missed anything, feel free to edit it. It's a purely fan volunteer effort, so although I don't really believe in hell, if you vandalize it, I'm pretty sure you'll end up there.
The simple reason why lawyers are "standard" today in the court of law is that the law is overly complex (and therefore ambiguous, exploitable, and corrupt).
This is correct, but it's not the only reason.
The legal system functions like a club. Even if you're fully aware of your rights and the laws, if you're not in the club, you will grossly mistreated no matter how right you are, and when all is said and done, you'll end up screwed.
When I was a broke college student, I tried to represent myself in court one time against a minor offense I was accused of. I thought it was going to be open-and-shut, with me being the beneficiary of our fine system of justice. I had incontrovertible proof that I was 100% right. (Incontrovertible proof in the "photographic evidence" sense, before the days of digital cameras and desktop photo editing.) I was up against an assistant prosecutor who was obviously trying to get a promotion (aren't we all, right?) and two police officers who flat-out lied on the witness stand. (Again, I had incontrovertible photographic evidence that they lied.)
While I was testifying, the prosecutor objected to my pictures because she hadn't seen them. (I'm sorry, since when does the prosecution have the right of discovery?) The judge cut me off while I was questioning one of the officers about how he knew where I was at a particular time (which was the crux of the case against me) because it was "irrelevant." Before the case, the judge told me that I was not entitled to a jury trial, and after the case, when the judge said, "Guilty," she literally leaned over the bench as I was walking by and said under earshot of everyone else in the room (including the court reporter), "You know, you never really had a chance."
I saw the prosecutor a little later, and she said, "You can appeal if you want to, but they never overturn these cases, and it will cost you thousands of dollars. You should just pay the fine and be done with it."
If I had money backing me and a lawyer with me in the room, I'm 100% sure it would have been a totally different story, and I'll never set foot in a courtroom (or a police station, for that matter) without a lawyer representing me. Not because I think they're particularly smart or because I don't think they're scummy like everyone else does. In my estimation, the vast majority of them are not providing a valuable service, they're just bottom scrapers who leech off benefits from a crooked system.
Needless to say, I have a very grim view of our (lack-of-) justice system to this day. While most people are so worked up about how a miniscule number of guilty people walk free because of it, I'm much more concerned about the opposite problem, which is how many innocent people get screwed by a system that is geared to find everyone guilty regardless of the truth, and how many people get extorted by this stupid system. Now, whenever I hear of someone who's been accused of a crime, especially a poor person, who pleads not guilty and is convicted, I keep a much more open mind to their situation. I'm just glad that I found out how it works on, as I said, a minor offense that ended with a fine, and not something serious.
Thanks, Judge Nancy Campbell of Cobb County, Georgia. I used to have a lot of respect for the law and for judges. I really appreciate you showing me just how naïve I truly was.
You're right on the money, so to speak. Although the DMCA the legal stick that is going to be used to beat them senseless, it's not the modding that got these guys in trouble. If they hadn't been selling the games pre-installed on the hard drive with the modded Xbox, no one would have probably ever pursued this case.
Personally, I have no moral problem with people modding their Xboxes, but I do have moral issues with what these guys did. They deserve to be prosecuted and to go to jail, and more to the point, they deserve to be criticized by communities like the/. crowd for taking something clever and exciting (modding Xboxes) and deliberately turning it into something evil (mass copyright infringement for profit).
This is one of the things that made Firefly so great. These days, aliens, robots, artificial intelligence and time travel are the tired plots of conventional stories, and the concept that the universe really isn't so different from home and we'll never really evolve past the emotions and biases we've got right now was a very new and different presentation of our future. It's a refreshing take on the genre that I always thought they pulled off brilliantly.
I hope that this is just a marketing gimmick, but I don't think it is. Oh well, who knows? If DVD sales are high enough, you know they'll do more with it. No one turns down free money when it's waved in front of them. I just hope that whatever Firefly's future holds, it lives up to the standard set by its past. I'd rather see nothing else happen with it than for it to be dumbed down for the masses.
But I also think it's a bit much to say, "Okay everyone, Marvel's done metal claws coming out of a guy's hand. From now on, no one can ever do metal claws coming out of someone's or something's hands. It's totally off-limits."
I disagree on the visor thing. Does it bear a passing resemblance to Cyclops's? Maybe, but it's just that—a passing resemblance. It also kind of reminds me of Geordi's visor, the cylons' visors, etc. I mean, an optical visor is just an optical visor, and they've been a staple of sci-fi since old-timey movies and before. If Cyclops's visor had some kind of emblem on it that the visor in the game copied, Marvel would have a case.
I'm sorry, but to me, "...those claws look an awful lot like Wolverine's" isn't a high enough standard to say that NCsoft wilfully stole Marvel's IP. If NCsoft had created a pre-fab character called "Wolverguy" with claws that could instantly heal and that wears a yellow outfit with stripes, then yeah, Marvel would have a case.
As it is, NCsoft just pretty much said, "Here are some cool bits and pieces you can put together however you want. Go to town!" And let's not forget that NCsoft does monitor created characters, and ones that appear infringing (e.g. a "Wolverguy" that someone created on their own) do get deleted.
And let's also not forget that even if Marvel had a case, actually going through with it is a generally assholish thing to do. I mean, Marvel is supposed to be about entertainment. If some of their fans created characters that look like their IP in City of Heroes, so what? As long as NCsoft is not encouraging it and taking appropriate action in the cases that do pop up (which they were), what's the big deal? Worst case scenario, why couldn't they have just sent a letter to NCsoft saying, "Hey, those claws look an awful lot like Wolverine's, and we've noticed some characters that we think blur the line between your game and our comics. Can you please maybe modify the design of the claws or monitor the characters created a bit more closely?"
Oh, that's right, it's money first, then entertainment. Making a killing off their comic books, movies, toys, and licensing rights isn't enough. Now they have to make it from lawsuits, too.
Ummm... To keep from getting attacked again? Do you really think that subduction and destruction is the way to keep people from attacking you? Yeah, that's worked so well throughout history.
Hey, I'm happy I can still design my characters to my heart's content, but part of me really wishes that there were no settlement. Part of me wishes that they had fought it out in court.
Why? Because I'm pretty durn confident that NCsoft would have won, and it would have put an end to this silliness once and for all. As it stands, now we can look forward to other companies suing over this same thing. The person being sued will see this and think, "Geez, NCsoft settled their case, I'd better settle, too," and the company suing gets rewarded with "undisclosed terms" for their bogus lawsuit.
I also think there's something fundamentally wrong with the terms of the settlement being undisclosed publically. I'd like to know if the terms were something along the lines of, "[NCsoft:] You drop your lawsuit and pay our legal expenses, and we agree not to countersue you or make you look like an idiot in our press release." Given Marvel's semi-defeat earlier this year, I can't imagine that either Marvel's or NCsoft's lawyers would think that Marvel might actually win. If a lawsuit is filed in a public court of law and my tax dollars have to pay for judges and other public servants to process these cases until they're settled, I think the final outcome should be public! Cough it up, NCsoft, what did you agree to other than not changing the costume editor?
(sigh...) Well, I think it's interesting that Marvel is coming out with their own MMORPG for the Xbox 360. I wonder who's in line to sue them even as I write this? I don't know about you, but I'm going to have a really hard time feeling sorry for them.
Well first of all, most browsers do have an option to set fonts and override other page's fonts if that's really what you want to do.
In IE, it's under Tools / Internet Options / Fonts. To make your chosen fonts override fonts set by Web pages, look under Tools / Internet Options / Accessibility, and there's an option labeled, "Ignore font styles specified on Web pages."
In Firefox, it's under Tools / Options / General / Fonts and Colors. The option to force Firefox to override fonts set by the Web is at the bottom, labeled, "Always use my: Fonts"
In Opera, well, you're on your own, because I haven't played with it enough to know. I suspect that it's extremely similar, though.
What you're complaining about seems to be that the Web is increasingly becoming not just about content, but about presentation as well. I know, I know, that's not what it was originally set up for, but it's changed an awful lot over the years. Some sites just don't work right without the ability to say not only what is on a page, but how it's on the page. I'm not talking about not working from a design or coding point of view, I mean from a structural and stylistic point of view.
As for me, I don't mind. I say, let the site designers present the information to me the way they want to. Yes, sometimes it comes out hideous. Personally, I think whoever picked Bitstream Vera Sans for the ImageMagick home page should be shot. (In the leg; I'm not a capital punishment kind of guy...) If a site looks bad enough, I might avoid it site altogether.
But most of the time, when site designers dink around with the formatting and style, it doesn't degrade from the look and usability. Sometimes, it turns out really spiffy.
So unless a site proves that it's not worth looking at, I think giving them the benefit of a doubt and letting them selecting particular named font is perfectly okay.
Besides, who wants a world in which every frickin' web page looks exactly the same? I kind of like that there are so many different styles of presentation out there in addition to the virtually infinite content!
I'm just glad that someone here realized what the hell I was talking about in spite of the Redundant mod. Apparently, too many folks here haven't actually watched MTV since the 1980's. Oh well, can't say I blame 'em.
They'll figure it out soon enough, though. I wonder how long it will be before this new online music service only has content about pimping cars, playing jokes on people, weird people forced to share a house, and so on instead of, well, you know... music.
That's not necessarily true. In the old days, if a business venture was making money, everyone was happy. These days, making money isn't enough.
Most companies, and the media industry is particularly bad about falling into this trap, want to be SUPERSTARS! (Yes, read those caps as yelling, that's the idea.)
So they have a show like The Screen Savers that a good number of computer geeks consistently watch and enjoy. Is everyone in the country watching it? What, everyone in the country isn't a computer geek? Dammit, we have to be a SUPERSTAR!, so yank it off the air and put a show on that everyone in the country will probably hate, but has a very small chance of being a breakout hit. Let's try more dribble about games!
Then the network starts losing money, and they all have a meeting to figure out what went wrong. "Obviously, we need to change to something even more different than before! Let's put a shos on about cars! And video babes!"
More money disappears. "Let's try old reruns of The Man Show!" More money out the window.
In the quest to be a SUPERSTAR!, going back to what the channel was to begin with—a cool station with cool shows that made a decent income—will never be a consideration because they've already proven that that's not the formula to be a SUPERSTAR! Even if they have to go completely out of business and shut their studio doors forever, they think, it's worth it to relentlessly pursue the miniscule chance that they may yet be a SUPERSTAR!
I don't have numbers to back me up on any of this. I'm not privvy to their financial records. For all I know, TechTV could have been losing money out the wazoo and G4 is now wildly successful. I just seriously doubt it, and I've seen what I've described happen to waaaay too many formerly reputable companies in this new age of the SUPERSTAR!
I just don't see why it's such an either TechTV or G4 type of zero-sum game. Why can't someone just start another TechTV-like network? You know that the old TechTV crew are just dying for something like that to come along.
They know the guy pacing up and down the game aisle is a valuable customer, and for at least the next 40 years there are plenty of people accustomed to shopping at brick and mortar stores, even if they game online.
And I, in turn, disagree. 40 years? Wow, that's a long time to be guessing things won't change dramatically. Businesses work so much differently now than they did in 1965 it's unreal, and changes are coming a lot faster now than they have been.
I know that if I had my choice of buying a game in a store or over the Internet, I'd pick the Internet every time. Hell, I already do, buying most of my games at Amazon.com, Gamestop.com, or other online retailers, and I grew up in a brick-and-mortar world myself. If they would let me download the stuff I buy instead of shipping it to me, all the better!
I think that as brick-and-mortar shoppers get older and today's kids who are used to doing everything on the Internet already start getting disposable incomes, you're going to see exactly what Eric's talking about. Brick-and-mortar stores will last a bit longer, but eventually, it just won't be profitable. Everyone will buy online or, in the case of brick-and-mortar shoppers, get games at general merchandise retailers like Target and such. There just won't be a place for brick-and-mortar game stores any more.
No, the shares weren't actually sold for 1 yen each. From TFA:
No buyer was actually able to pick up the phantom shares for 1 yen due to market rules designed to limit price fluctuations, but the shares may have gone as cheaply as 572,000 yen ($4,750) each, a more than 9 percent discount to the intended sale price.
Selling the shares for 572,000 yen is where the 27 billion yen figure came from, not selling them for 1 yen.
Also...
...you could theoretically have bought 610,000 shares for $.0083.
Aside from the fact that you couldn't have theoretically bought the shares because of market safeguards already mentioned, that sentence is missing a very important word: 610,000 shares for $.0083 each.
Still, it would have been one helluva holiday sale, wouldn't it?
The other thing I thought was interesting was from the other article. It said:
The accidental order was 42 times bigger than the number of issued shares, but a computer warning of the misplaced order was overlooked.
How much yen do you want to bet that it's one of those stupid "Are you sure?" dialog boxes that everyone clicks "Yes" to without actually thinking about what it's asking? Ah, how I love ignoring those warnings, too.
I disagree. The submitter obviously can't compete with the major retail chains based solely on price and availability. If he wants to open an independent gaming store, he must find some way (or preferably, ways) to say to his customers, "I am different" and provide something that his big-name competitors either can't, won't, or for whatever other reason, don't.
I think the couches idea is a good one. I think the highly knowledgeable staff is a better one. I think circulating your name among LAN partiers and the gaming community is key. I think that whatever he can do to convince people that they're a valued customer, not just an expendable profit source, is what will be necessary for his store to survive and thrive.
it's all about getting the people who have the money and the desire to spend it on videogames, into your store.
Boy, talk about an oversimplification. If this is his only MO, without a better plan (which I think he is asking for here), he will fail miserably. Why? Because that's what every other store from GameStop to Target to Newegg.com does. In fact, substitute x for videogames, and that's what every store that sells x does. The tricky thing isn't recognizing that, it's implementing it. And if his store is like everyone else's, why in the world would they shop at his instead of at the bigger names?
Actually, I feel kind of guilty about that. In hindsight, your submission clearly indicates that yes, you were indeed kidding in that first sentence.
It's my bad—living in a so-called "red state" in the deep south, I get beaten to death with people saying stuff like that who aren't kidding, that I've gotten used to automatically going into defensive mode.
Sorry also that this comment will probably end up at the default 2 rating and remain forever buried.
I hope that everyone else reading my comment realizes that I don't really mean to cast aspersions on you, but to those who read your first sentence and said, "Hell yeah!" and who now probably think you're a Communist as well for saying something to the contrary after that first sentence.
Boy, you really are living in a dream world. I admire your idealism, and I wish I could share some of that Utopia. Unfortunately, I live in the real world where some folks just aren't quite of pure heart.
Me wanting government regulation has nothing to do with me fearing my neighbors. It has to do with me fearing corporations.
How many scandals have to go down before folks like you realize that for-profit corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose only: to make money. If they can make more money by killing their customers than not, they'll kill their customers. (Witness the tobacco industry.) If they can do it by hacking into their customers' computers, they'll hack into their customers' computers. (Witness Sony.) If they can do it by projecting a squeaky-clean image, they'll project a squeaky-clean image. (Witness Google.)
Why do we need regulation then? Because somewhere around the dawn of the age of mankind, people discovered that one really effective way to get people to do stuff you want them to (e.g. to give you money, which is, remember the sole purpose of a corporation) is to lie.
There are thriving businesses that makes lots of money that exist for the sole purpose of helping other corporations lie about things. Lawyers, accountants, public relations firms, advertising agencies... the list goes on and on. Why do these businesses exist? So that other companies can pay them some money to make a lot more by lying about things.
Given a choice between making an honest buck or making a dishonest two, very rarely will a corporation choose the former. My own company (a Fortune 100) has gotten in trouble many times over the years, especially the last twenty or so, for doing things that everyone knows is wrong. But it still goes strong, because it pays hundreds of millions of dollars every year to some of those companies listed above to convince everyone that it's an all-American company. Because Americans have such a frustratingly small attention span and don't recognize important things as being important, they keep getting away with it.
So how do us average schmoes out here keep all these unetical companies from absolutely stripping us dry? Well, if we tried your way, I suppose we could depend on what little information we get through investigative journalism and the scant few whistleblowers that are out there to help protect us from these corporate lying bastards, but I kind of like the thought of not being insane. No, a better idea would be to set up some government agencies with the collective power of the American consumer to act on our behalf to serve as the representative of our interests. Thus, we have organizations around like the FAA, the USDA, the FTC, and all the others that are supposedly looking out for us because it's impossible for us, individually, to look out for all the millions of others who want to screw us over and rob us blind every day.
There are two serious problems with the system, though. The first, I hate to say, is people like you. People who give corporations a lot more credit than they deserve, more credit than they've historically earned. They think that the public has some sort of magical insight to see past multi-million dollar ad campaigns to know when corporations are being evil and when they aren't. They think that if a person gets food poisoning because some corporation ran the numbers and figured out that it could make more money by poisoning some small percentage of its customers, it's the sick person's fault for not personally sending every morsel they eat to a lab to be tested. No, they're "irresponsible consumers" who deserve what they get, right?
The other problem is that a lot of the very same government agencies that we set up to protect us are now working for the corporations they're supposed to be protecting us from. That's why you have stuff like energy policies being written by oil companies and DRM laws being written by the RIAA. This i
They're actually expecting to make money from their music business and if sales drop even 5% and they find out it was because people are boycotting them because of the rootkit, you'd think they'd shape up.
Then you and I disagree, because I don't think they'd shape up. I think the first thing they would do is blame piracy. There is precedent for this. In spite of studies that show numerous causes of CD sales slumps including lack of good products, normal business cycles, increased sales of alternative media (e.g. iTunes and such), etc., all you hear from the industry is how piracy is costing billions in CD sales. It's just plain not true, and they're lying to the public—and not changing their ways—about it even though they know it's not true. Hell, a lot of times, they're talking about how much money they're losing even though they're making record profits. (No pun intended.)
The second thing they'd do is work with the industry to for all companies that are part of the RIAA to put DRM on their discs. Don't think for a second this isn't coming. Most of them have already played with it, and it's getting to the point where if you want to do business at all, you will have to force this crap on your customers.
The third thing I think they'd do is, like I said, try to get government to intervene and come up with some sort of screwy law that protects them from such boycotts. I'm not being facetious here. I really do believe that the industry—especially players like Sony—is crooked enough to try to force everyone to release DRM'ed CD's just so that they won't look as bad when they do it. (Broadcast flag, anyone?)
My point is, in an ideal world, a company like Sony would try to make their profit the old fashioned way: Earn it by selling products that consumers want. Nowadays, it's far from ideal. Companies like Sony want to make their profit by screwing their customers as hard as they can and blaming it on the piracy boogeyman.
I won't support a company that spits in my face like that. As far as I'm concerned, the whole company can go to hell. When they prove that they can be trusted again, maybe we'll talk. But until they actually bother to apologize and (more importantly) take meaninful steps to ensure that such a fubar doesn't happen again, they can take their CD's, their buckyballs, their PS3's and PSP's, and all the rest of their products and shove 'em where the sun don't shine.
As you can tell, I feel very strongly about this. As far as I'm concerned, after willing customers paid Sony hard-earned money in good faith for one of their products, Sony rewarded them by trying (and succeeding in a lot of cases) to break into their houses and steal a piece of their computers, trashing the place, and when they were caught (and even to this day), they acted all indignant like they hadn't done anything wrong. Unless they're taught a very serious financial lesson, they'll never shape up; they'll only continue to get worse.
What I don't get is how anyone could possibly continue to do business with a company like that.
Customers are always better off when government bureaucrats get out of the way and let the market work, right?
Is the submitter on drugs? The reason most industries that are regulated are regulated is precisely because the market doesn't work for that industry!
When natural gas was deregulated in my state, prices skyrocketed and a bunch of natural gas marketers (mine included) began outright stealing money from their customers. (Long story.) When cable television was deregulated, my cable prices skyrocketed and I got less and crappier channels. (Thank god for satellite, which itself is regulated to prevent it from competing with cable companies on their own terms.) After 9/11, the airline industry, which isn't regulated, liked the government enough to go begging for a $5 billion bailout. What did they do with the money? Well, Delta Airlines used $17.3 million of it to give executives bonuses while losing $1.3 billion more and cutting 16,000 jobs. But when anyone bought up the thougt of regulating the industry, god, you would have thought we were communists.
A healthy market depends on well-regulated businesses. If anything, I would say that customers are hardly ever better off when government gets out of the way and let the market work in an unfettered manner. The only exceptions are when the government bureaucrats are working in collusion with the industry, a sad state of affairs that is unfortunately becoming more and more common.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
That's a nifty trick.
Weird, Windows and Linux seem to handle pretty much any task I need handled. Not bad for a couple of clunkers.
Who knows? Maybe he's right. Personally, I think the concept of television networks is a clunker of an idea waaay past its time. I suggest that in this age of the Internet, we should all be watching on-demand content provided directly by the content makers that's financed by micropayments paid by the consumers, and we receive our "signal" via high-speed Internet connections to the content providers.
Boy, it sure is easy for me to sit back and say that. But where the rubber meets the road—actually making these brave new ideas come to pass... Well, that's the challenge, isn't it? Until someone can cough up the resources to invest into creating, distributing, and marketing BobOS and my IP television studios, I guess we'll just have to keep talking about how nice it would be, and make the best of the clunkers that I suppose are working well enough for now.
But seriously, if you want to invest in my IP television studio, let me know...
For the record, the word is vintner, not vinter.
In Soviet Russia, vinters are wery, wery cold.
You know, I've seen this attitude before, and it disgusts me. Not the goldfarming attitude (though I find that disgusting, too), but the attitude that since you pay a subscription fee, you're entitled to do whatever you want to in a game.
First of all, you're flat out wrong. If you read your EULA, you will find that there are a lot of things (probably a lot more than you even realize) that are outright prohibited. That in itself is enough to show that "It's my subscription money" doesn't mean jack when it comes to you doing stupid things. Every game I know of prohibits using 'bots in the EULA.
Let me put it another way that maybe you can understand. Paying an annual fee for a driver's license doesn't give you the right to do whatever the hell you want on the freeways. If you deliberately make the roads unsafe for other drivers, you'll be banned from driving. Paying a monthly fee for a game license doesn't give you the right to do whatever the hell you want in the game. If you deliberately make the game not fun for other players, you'll be banned from playing. Capiche?
All that aside, there's another principle at work, too. When you sign up to play an MMORPG, you're also implicitly agreeing to become part of that community. As such, you have certain social responsibilities as a part of that community, the primary of which IMHO is to not be an asshole. Even if the EULA has no prohibitions in it at all, your comment would still be flawed. Sure, maybe you could technically do whatever you wanted, but if any but an extremely small number of people did, the game would quickly lose its community and you'd be left with nothing but 'bots playing. No one will pay a monthly fee just for their 'bots to play with other people's 'bots, and the game would quickly die.
Hey, maybe that's what you want. But it's obviously not what Blizzard and other WoW players want, and I for one hope they wield their banhammer a lot more often.
As for goldfarming, it's just plain stupid, and I'll never understand why a market for this stuff exists in the first place. If I'm paying a monthly fee to play a game, it will be a cold day in hell before I pay other people money on top of that to play the game for me. And anyone who buys in-game items with out-of-game money is a fool in my book. But then, I come from the era of pencil-n-paper RPGs. If I were a GM and someone offered me cash for their character to get in-game wealth or items, I would quickly find a creatively gruesome way to irrevocably kill off their character, and would likely never invite that person to play again.
Perhaps a better idea than outright banning these people's accounts would be to make them waste their time. Slowly nerf their characters until the game eventually becomes practically unplayable. After all, if we're going to let real life affect our in-game worlds, why should such effects only be positive?
I'm sorry if my harsh opinion keeps you from having fun, but it's for the best to the majority of players. Perhaps you should try a more farming-friendly game instead, such as Progress Quest. I think you'll find it infinitely more fun that these boring old games that make you work for what you get.
Well, in America, we also know that you all love wrestling crocodiles and drinking Foster's beer. ;-)
Seriouly, Australia looks like a really cool place, and most Australian folks I know are super nice people. I'm thinking of moving there someday. The "Australia founded by criminals" is just an interesting story that gets propagated because of its novelty, I don't think that people mean it as an insult. At least, I can assure you that my own opinion of Australia isn't tainted by the story.
After all, let's not forget that the United States was founded by a bunch of insurgents. Funny how our own opinions of insurgencies have changed...
(Shameless—but relevant—fan site plug, with hopefully useful info...)
I'm the admin of the ParagonWiki, a CoH/CoV wiki. Last week, I wrote an article called Winter Event 2005 in which I've tried to cover in-depth everything that CoH/CoV has done for the winter holidays.
If I missed anything, feel free to edit it. It's a purely fan volunteer effort, so although I don't really believe in hell, if you vandalize it, I'm pretty sure you'll end up there.
This is correct, but it's not the only reason.
The legal system functions like a club. Even if you're fully aware of your rights and the laws, if you're not in the club, you will grossly mistreated no matter how right you are, and when all is said and done, you'll end up screwed.
When I was a broke college student, I tried to represent myself in court one time against a minor offense I was accused of. I thought it was going to be open-and-shut, with me being the beneficiary of our fine system of justice. I had incontrovertible proof that I was 100% right. (Incontrovertible proof in the "photographic evidence" sense, before the days of digital cameras and desktop photo editing.) I was up against an assistant prosecutor who was obviously trying to get a promotion (aren't we all, right?) and two police officers who flat-out lied on the witness stand. (Again, I had incontrovertible photographic evidence that they lied.)
While I was testifying, the prosecutor objected to my pictures because she hadn't seen them. (I'm sorry, since when does the prosecution have the right of discovery?) The judge cut me off while I was questioning one of the officers about how he knew where I was at a particular time (which was the crux of the case against me) because it was "irrelevant." Before the case, the judge told me that I was not entitled to a jury trial, and after the case, when the judge said, "Guilty," she literally leaned over the bench as I was walking by and said under earshot of everyone else in the room (including the court reporter), "You know, you never really had a chance."
I saw the prosecutor a little later, and she said, "You can appeal if you want to, but they never overturn these cases, and it will cost you thousands of dollars. You should just pay the fine and be done with it."
If I had money backing me and a lawyer with me in the room, I'm 100% sure it would have been a totally different story, and I'll never set foot in a courtroom (or a police station, for that matter) without a lawyer representing me. Not because I think they're particularly smart or because I don't think they're scummy like everyone else does. In my estimation, the vast majority of them are not providing a valuable service, they're just bottom scrapers who leech off benefits from a crooked system.
Needless to say, I have a very grim view of our (lack-of-) justice system to this day. While most people are so worked up about how a miniscule number of guilty people walk free because of it, I'm much more concerned about the opposite problem, which is how many innocent people get screwed by a system that is geared to find everyone guilty regardless of the truth, and how many people get extorted by this stupid system. Now, whenever I hear of someone who's been accused of a crime, especially a poor person, who pleads not guilty and is convicted, I keep a much more open mind to their situation. I'm just glad that I found out how it works on, as I said, a minor offense that ended with a fine, and not something serious.
Thanks, Judge Nancy Campbell of Cobb County, Georgia. I used to have a lot of respect for the law and for judges. I really appreciate you showing me just how naïve I truly was.
I almost posted a thousand-word response to his post, but you just said it better than I ever could have.
You're right on the money, so to speak. Although the DMCA the legal stick that is going to be used to beat them senseless, it's not the modding that got these guys in trouble. If they hadn't been selling the games pre-installed on the hard drive with the modded Xbox, no one would have probably ever pursued this case.
Personally, I have no moral problem with people modding their Xboxes, but I do have moral issues with what these guys did. They deserve to be prosecuted and to go to jail, and more to the point, they deserve to be criticized by communities like the /. crowd for taking something clever and exciting (modding Xboxes) and deliberately turning it into something evil (mass copyright infringement for profit).
This is one of the things that made Firefly so great. These days, aliens, robots, artificial intelligence and time travel are the tired plots of conventional stories, and the concept that the universe really isn't so different from home and we'll never really evolve past the emotions and biases we've got right now was a very new and different presentation of our future. It's a refreshing take on the genre that I always thought they pulled off brilliantly.
I hope that this is just a marketing gimmick, but I don't think it is. Oh well, who knows? If DVD sales are high enough, you know they'll do more with it. No one turns down free money when it's waved in front of them. I just hope that whatever Firefly's future holds, it lives up to the standard set by its past. I'd rather see nothing else happen with it than for it to be dumbed down for the masses.
But I also think it's a bit much to say, "Okay everyone, Marvel's done metal claws coming out of a guy's hand. From now on, no one can ever do metal claws coming out of someone's or something's hands. It's totally off-limits."
I disagree on the visor thing. Does it bear a passing resemblance to Cyclops's? Maybe, but it's just that—a passing resemblance. It also kind of reminds me of Geordi's visor, the cylons' visors, etc. I mean, an optical visor is just an optical visor, and they've been a staple of sci-fi since old-timey movies and before. If Cyclops's visor had some kind of emblem on it that the visor in the game copied, Marvel would have a case.
I'm sorry, but to me, "...those claws look an awful lot like Wolverine's" isn't a high enough standard to say that NCsoft wilfully stole Marvel's IP. If NCsoft had created a pre-fab character called "Wolverguy" with claws that could instantly heal and that wears a yellow outfit with stripes, then yeah, Marvel would have a case.
As it is, NCsoft just pretty much said, "Here are some cool bits and pieces you can put together however you want. Go to town!" And let's not forget that NCsoft does monitor created characters, and ones that appear infringing (e.g. a "Wolverguy" that someone created on their own) do get deleted.
And let's also not forget that even if Marvel had a case, actually going through with it is a generally assholish thing to do. I mean, Marvel is supposed to be about entertainment. If some of their fans created characters that look like their IP in City of Heroes, so what? As long as NCsoft is not encouraging it and taking appropriate action in the cases that do pop up (which they were), what's the big deal? Worst case scenario, why couldn't they have just sent a letter to NCsoft saying, "Hey, those claws look an awful lot like Wolverine's, and we've noticed some characters that we think blur the line between your game and our comics. Can you please maybe modify the design of the claws or monitor the characters created a bit more closely?"
Oh, that's right, it's money first, then entertainment. Making a killing off their comic books, movies, toys, and licensing rights isn't enough. Now they have to make it from lawsuits, too.
Ummm... To keep from getting attacked again? Do you really think that subduction and destruction is the way to keep people from attacking you? Yeah, that's worked so well throughout history.
Hey, I'm happy I can still design my characters to my heart's content, but part of me really wishes that there were no settlement. Part of me wishes that they had fought it out in court.
Why? Because I'm pretty durn confident that NCsoft would have won, and it would have put an end to this silliness once and for all. As it stands, now we can look forward to other companies suing over this same thing. The person being sued will see this and think, "Geez, NCsoft settled their case, I'd better settle, too," and the company suing gets rewarded with "undisclosed terms" for their bogus lawsuit.
I also think there's something fundamentally wrong with the terms of the settlement being undisclosed publically. I'd like to know if the terms were something along the lines of, "[NCsoft:] You drop your lawsuit and pay our legal expenses, and we agree not to countersue you or make you look like an idiot in our press release." Given Marvel's semi-defeat earlier this year, I can't imagine that either Marvel's or NCsoft's lawyers would think that Marvel might actually win. If a lawsuit is filed in a public court of law and my tax dollars have to pay for judges and other public servants to process these cases until they're settled, I think the final outcome should be public! Cough it up, NCsoft, what did you agree to other than not changing the costume editor?
(sigh...) Well, I think it's interesting that Marvel is coming out with their own MMORPG for the Xbox 360. I wonder who's in line to sue them even as I write this? I don't know about you, but I'm going to have a really hard time feeling sorry for them.
Well first of all, most browsers do have an option to set fonts and override other page's fonts if that's really what you want to do.
In IE, it's under Tools / Internet Options / Fonts. To make your chosen fonts override fonts set by Web pages, look under Tools / Internet Options / Accessibility, and there's an option labeled, "Ignore font styles specified on Web pages."
In Firefox, it's under Tools / Options / General / Fonts and Colors. The option to force Firefox to override fonts set by the Web is at the bottom, labeled, "Always use my: Fonts"
In Opera, well, you're on your own, because I haven't played with it enough to know. I suspect that it's extremely similar, though.
What you're complaining about seems to be that the Web is increasingly becoming not just about content, but about presentation as well. I know, I know, that's not what it was originally set up for, but it's changed an awful lot over the years. Some sites just don't work right without the ability to say not only what is on a page, but how it's on the page. I'm not talking about not working from a design or coding point of view, I mean from a structural and stylistic point of view.
As for me, I don't mind. I say, let the site designers present the information to me the way they want to. Yes, sometimes it comes out hideous. Personally, I think whoever picked Bitstream Vera Sans for the ImageMagick home page should be shot. (In the leg; I'm not a capital punishment kind of guy...) If a site looks bad enough, I might avoid it site altogether.
But most of the time, when site designers dink around with the formatting and style, it doesn't degrade from the look and usability. Sometimes, it turns out really spiffy.
So unless a site proves that it's not worth looking at, I think giving them the benefit of a doubt and letting them selecting particular named font is perfectly okay.
Besides, who wants a world in which every frickin' web page looks exactly the same? I kind of like that there are so many different styles of presentation out there in addition to the virtually infinite content!
I'm just glad that someone here realized what the hell I was talking about in spite of the Redundant mod. Apparently, too many folks here haven't actually watched MTV since the 1980's. Oh well, can't say I blame 'em.
They'll figure it out soon enough, though. I wonder how long it will be before this new online music service only has content about pimping cars, playing jokes on people, weird people forced to share a house, and so on instead of, well, you know... music.
That's not necessarily true. In the old days, if a business venture was making money, everyone was happy. These days, making money isn't enough.
Most companies, and the media industry is particularly bad about falling into this trap, want to be SUPERSTARS! (Yes, read those caps as yelling, that's the idea.)
So they have a show like The Screen Savers that a good number of computer geeks consistently watch and enjoy. Is everyone in the country watching it? What, everyone in the country isn't a computer geek? Dammit, we have to be a SUPERSTAR!, so yank it off the air and put a show on that everyone in the country will probably hate, but has a very small chance of being a breakout hit. Let's try more dribble about games!
Then the network starts losing money, and they all have a meeting to figure out what went wrong. "Obviously, we need to change to something even more different than before! Let's put a shos on about cars! And video babes!"
More money disappears. "Let's try old reruns of The Man Show!" More money out the window.
In the quest to be a SUPERSTAR!, going back to what the channel was to begin with—a cool station with cool shows that made a decent income—will never be a consideration because they've already proven that that's not the formula to be a SUPERSTAR! Even if they have to go completely out of business and shut their studio doors forever, they think, it's worth it to relentlessly pursue the miniscule chance that they may yet be a SUPERSTAR!
I don't have numbers to back me up on any of this. I'm not privvy to their financial records. For all I know, TechTV could have been losing money out the wazoo and G4 is now wildly successful. I just seriously doubt it, and I've seen what I've described happen to waaaay too many formerly reputable companies in this new age of the SUPERSTAR!
I just don't see why it's such an either TechTV or G4 type of zero-sum game. Why can't someone just start another TechTV-like network? You know that the old TechTV crew are just dying for something like that to come along.
Music?
I know Microsoft has the music player in Windows, but what does MTV have to do with music?
What!!? You don't still play your 2600? The joysticks are a bit harder to find these days but cool games are still being produced for it!
And I, in turn, disagree. 40 years? Wow, that's a long time to be guessing things won't change dramatically. Businesses work so much differently now than they did in 1965 it's unreal, and changes are coming a lot faster now than they have been.
I know that if I had my choice of buying a game in a store or over the Internet, I'd pick the Internet every time. Hell, I already do, buying most of my games at Amazon.com, Gamestop.com, or other online retailers, and I grew up in a brick-and-mortar world myself. If they would let me download the stuff I buy instead of shipping it to me, all the better!
I think that as brick-and-mortar shoppers get older and today's kids who are used to doing everything on the Internet already start getting disposable incomes, you're going to see exactly what Eric's talking about. Brick-and-mortar stores will last a bit longer, but eventually, it just won't be profitable. Everyone will buy online or, in the case of brick-and-mortar shoppers, get games at general merchandise retailers like Target and such. There just won't be a place for brick-and-mortar game stores any more.
No, the shares weren't actually sold for 1 yen each. From TFA:
Selling the shares for 572,000 yen is where the 27 billion yen figure came from, not selling them for 1 yen.
Also...
Aside from the fact that you couldn't have theoretically bought the shares because of market safeguards already mentioned, that sentence is missing a very important word: 610,000 shares for $.0083 each.
Still, it would have been one helluva holiday sale, wouldn't it?
The other thing I thought was interesting was from the other article. It said:
How much yen do you want to bet that it's one of those stupid "Are you sure?" dialog boxes that everyone clicks "Yes" to without actually thinking about what it's asking? Ah, how I love ignoring those warnings, too.
I disagree. The submitter obviously can't compete with the major retail chains based solely on price and availability. If he wants to open an independent gaming store, he must find some way (or preferably, ways) to say to his customers, "I am different" and provide something that his big-name competitors either can't, won't, or for whatever other reason, don't.
I think the couches idea is a good one. I think the highly knowledgeable staff is a better one. I think circulating your name among LAN partiers and the gaming community is key. I think that whatever he can do to convince people that they're a valued customer, not just an expendable profit source, is what will be necessary for his store to survive and thrive.
Boy, talk about an oversimplification. If this is his only MO, without a better plan (which I think he is asking for here), he will fail miserably. Why? Because that's what every other store from GameStop to Target to Newegg.com does. In fact, substitute x for videogames, and that's what every store that sells x does. The tricky thing isn't recognizing that, it's implementing it. And if his store is like everyone else's, why in the world would they shop at his instead of at the bigger names?
Actually, I feel kind of guilty about that. In hindsight, your submission clearly indicates that yes, you were indeed kidding in that first sentence.
It's my bad—living in a so-called "red state" in the deep south, I get beaten to death with people saying stuff like that who aren't kidding, that I've gotten used to automatically going into defensive mode.
Sorry also that this comment will probably end up at the default 2 rating and remain forever buried.
I hope that everyone else reading my comment realizes that I don't really mean to cast aspersions on you, but to those who read your first sentence and said, "Hell yeah!" and who now probably think you're a Communist as well for saying something to the contrary after that first sentence.
Boy, you really are living in a dream world. I admire your idealism, and I wish I could share some of that Utopia. Unfortunately, I live in the real world where some folks just aren't quite of pure heart.
Me wanting government regulation has nothing to do with me fearing my neighbors. It has to do with me fearing corporations.
How many scandals have to go down before folks like you realize that for-profit corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose only: to make money. If they can make more money by killing their customers than not, they'll kill their customers. (Witness the tobacco industry.) If they can do it by hacking into their customers' computers, they'll hack into their customers' computers. (Witness Sony.) If they can do it by projecting a squeaky-clean image, they'll project a squeaky-clean image. (Witness Google.)
Why do we need regulation then? Because somewhere around the dawn of the age of mankind, people discovered that one really effective way to get people to do stuff you want them to (e.g. to give you money, which is, remember the sole purpose of a corporation) is to lie.
There are thriving businesses that makes lots of money that exist for the sole purpose of helping other corporations lie about things. Lawyers, accountants, public relations firms, advertising agencies... the list goes on and on. Why do these businesses exist? So that other companies can pay them some money to make a lot more by lying about things.
Given a choice between making an honest buck or making a dishonest two, very rarely will a corporation choose the former. My own company (a Fortune 100) has gotten in trouble many times over the years, especially the last twenty or so, for doing things that everyone knows is wrong. But it still goes strong, because it pays hundreds of millions of dollars every year to some of those companies listed above to convince everyone that it's an all-American company. Because Americans have such a frustratingly small attention span and don't recognize important things as being important, they keep getting away with it.
So how do us average schmoes out here keep all these unetical companies from absolutely stripping us dry? Well, if we tried your way, I suppose we could depend on what little information we get through investigative journalism and the scant few whistleblowers that are out there to help protect us from these corporate lying bastards, but I kind of like the thought of not being insane. No, a better idea would be to set up some government agencies with the collective power of the American consumer to act on our behalf to serve as the representative of our interests. Thus, we have organizations around like the FAA, the USDA, the FTC, and all the others that are supposedly looking out for us because it's impossible for us, individually, to look out for all the millions of others who want to screw us over and rob us blind every day.
There are two serious problems with the system, though. The first, I hate to say, is people like you. People who give corporations a lot more credit than they deserve, more credit than they've historically earned. They think that the public has some sort of magical insight to see past multi-million dollar ad campaigns to know when corporations are being evil and when they aren't. They think that if a person gets food poisoning because some corporation ran the numbers and figured out that it could make more money by poisoning some small percentage of its customers, it's the sick person's fault for not personally sending every morsel they eat to a lab to be tested. No, they're "irresponsible consumers" who deserve what they get, right?
The other problem is that a lot of the very same government agencies that we set up to protect us are now working for the corporations they're supposed to be protecting us from. That's why you have stuff like energy policies being written by oil companies and DRM laws being written by the RIAA. This i
Then you and I disagree, because I don't think they'd shape up. I think the first thing they would do is blame piracy. There is precedent for this. In spite of studies that show numerous causes of CD sales slumps including lack of good products, normal business cycles, increased sales of alternative media (e.g. iTunes and such), etc., all you hear from the industry is how piracy is costing billions in CD sales. It's just plain not true, and they're lying to the public—and not changing their ways—about it even though they know it's not true. Hell, a lot of times, they're talking about how much money they're losing even though they're making record profits. (No pun intended.)
The second thing they'd do is work with the industry to for all companies that are part of the RIAA to put DRM on their discs. Don't think for a second this isn't coming. Most of them have already played with it, and it's getting to the point where if you want to do business at all, you will have to force this crap on your customers.
The third thing I think they'd do is, like I said, try to get government to intervene and come up with some sort of screwy law that protects them from such boycotts. I'm not being facetious here. I really do believe that the industry—especially players like Sony—is crooked enough to try to force everyone to release DRM'ed CD's just so that they won't look as bad when they do it. (Broadcast flag, anyone?)
My point is, in an ideal world, a company like Sony would try to make their profit the old fashioned way: Earn it by selling products that consumers want. Nowadays, it's far from ideal. Companies like Sony want to make their profit by screwing their customers as hard as they can and blaming it on the piracy boogeyman.
I won't support a company that spits in my face like that. As far as I'm concerned, the whole company can go to hell. When they prove that they can be trusted again, maybe we'll talk. But until they actually bother to apologize and (more importantly) take meaninful steps to ensure that such a fubar doesn't happen again, they can take their CD's, their buckyballs, their PS3's and PSP's, and all the rest of their products and shove 'em where the sun don't shine.
As you can tell, I feel very strongly about this. As far as I'm concerned, after willing customers paid Sony hard-earned money in good faith for one of their products, Sony rewarded them by trying (and succeeding in a lot of cases) to break into their houses and steal a piece of their computers, trashing the place, and when they were caught (and even to this day), they acted all indignant like they hadn't done anything wrong. Unless they're taught a very serious financial lesson, they'll never shape up; they'll only continue to get worse.
What I don't get is how anyone could possibly continue to do business with a company like that.
Is the submitter on drugs? The reason most industries that are regulated are regulated is precisely because the market doesn't work for that industry!
When natural gas was deregulated in my state, prices skyrocketed and a bunch of natural gas marketers (mine included) began outright stealing money from their customers. (Long story.) When cable television was deregulated, my cable prices skyrocketed and I got less and crappier channels. (Thank god for satellite, which itself is regulated to prevent it from competing with cable companies on their own terms.) After 9/11, the airline industry, which isn't regulated, liked the government enough to go begging for a $5 billion bailout. What did they do with the money? Well, Delta Airlines used $17.3 million of it to give executives bonuses while losing $1.3 billion more and cutting 16,000 jobs. But when anyone bought up the thougt of regulating the industry, god, you would have thought we were communists.
And don't even get me started on the phone company.
A healthy market depends on well-regulated businesses. If anything, I would say that customers are hardly ever better off when government gets out of the way and let the market work in an unfettered manner. The only exceptions are when the government bureaucrats are working in collusion with the industry, a sad state of affairs that is unfortunately becoming more and more common.