Just because you have the power to abuse your political position, doesn't mean that it is acceptable to do so. I don't know where the American people got the idea that it IS okay. It's not. Maybe it was all those cock-and-bull stories about Clinton... (Well, the other cock-and-bull stories.)
And just for an update in government theory: the president is supposed to defend the interests of the people. For the sane presidents, this has meant appointing people who could get the issues right even when he couldn't. President =! Pope. Just because he really thinks something doesn't make it the right thing to do.
And just while I'm in a posting mood, your last sentence reminds me of a story I heard at a rehearsal dinner many years ago.
The best man was telling a story about a trip he and his friends had taken to see a laser light show. You know, the kind that take place way up in the mountains where the show is projected on a canyon wall? Well, apparently they got to talking in the car on the way up, and one of the girls in the group said that, if she could choose to be born into any religion it would be Buddhism. The best man grins at this point and says, "Needless to say, she ended up walking to the laser light show." Almost broke my fucking champagne glass.
Actually, I believe that with this plan you use less herbicide. If you have to use one certain kind because others will kill your crop, (which is true in many cases of GM) the only way to get rid of weeds is to give them larger and larger doses of weedkiller. This way you can just spray a small amount of a different kind and get the same or better effect.
What we should worry about is one company owning the rights to the pesticides and "locking farmers in" to using their seed and chemicals. But if you can easily buy weedkiller brand x and use it on this rice, then I have a hard time seeing a downside to it.
The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops
It's been a while since Biology, but as I recall the fraction of plants that survived to harvest was about 1/3 for natural crops, and 2/3 for GM. Do I remember wrong?
Uh... This bill has nothing to do with gay marriage. It was about discrimination in government service and commercial practices, including hiring and firing people. As a major employer, that's something Microsoft would be interested in, eh?
I think someone further up pointed out that being gay is much more like belonging to a certain religion. In fact, you could say that it is very close to that, since many churches now make it a point of doctrine whether or not they support gay couples.
I know people like the ones you're describing. I know that it's pretty disturbing to see people doing big, life-changing things for the wrong reasons. But in America, we don't ask you whether you're truly devout before defending your right to practice your religion. Why should we be required to find out whether or not you're "really" gay?
Some say that we shouldn't be so liberal granting religious protections to strange and even agnostic religions. But time and time again, we have come to affirm that the first amendment constitutes the promise of total religious freedom, even if we don't understand or find completely vile a single protected faith. I honestly don't see why this promise does not extend to gay rights. Maybe for more insight you could ask your local reconciling church.
I haven't played either of these games, but I believe what you are talking about is an issue of copyright ownership, not material-like ownership. In Second Life, you own the copyright to anything you create because you came up with the model, scripts, name, etc. Likewise, SOE owns the copyright to all the game contents they created (which, in games like EQ2, is all of it). As much as many of us would like to believe otherwise, these are NOT the same thing.
You do NOT own the land you buy in Second Life; you rent it. If your account gets cancelled for whatever reason, the company reclaims that land. (And they might also charge you a hefty resale fee!) Likewise, you don't own the data you created. And I quote:
you do not own the account you use to access the Service, nor do you own any data Linden stores on Linden servers (including without limitation any data representing or embodying any or all of your Content).
However, you still keep the copyright to whatever you built in the game; it's just that it's impossible to "own" data sitting on someone else's server.
If you happen to be an AC from the Austin area, may I suggest GameFellas? They are the game equivalent of an indie record store; usually have everything for less than EB and carry a wide range of older materials (and even "exotic" items like WonderSwan cartridges). Also, when I looked they were the only game store in town that had Katamari Damacy.
and EB dropped their customer friendly return policy.
Since when did EB have a customer friendly return policy? I remember them giving me the runaround about a game in an uponened box when I tried to return it in 1995.
Actually, OpenOffice's encoding for.doc doesn't work perfectly. And it's a downright bitch if you're trying to pass files between OpenOffice and Word. I was a freelance manual writer for a while, and my copy of Word self-destructed. (It wouldn't take the activation code that was printed ON THE DISK.)
So I thought, time to switch to an open alternative. Bad idea. I couldn't pass edits to the engineer I was working with because every time I'd get back a file with corrupted layout and images about the size of Jupiter.
As far as I can tell, this is because they have to build their.doc encoder based on intelligent guesswork. If the standards were open, they could get compatability spot on.
I think this is a bad thing, not because of the questionable free speech situations, but because it means my state will be spending my taxes on a useless service.
Even if I wanted these wifi spots to be filtered, I couldn't get it. Companies like Secure Computing claim that their products do things that are absolutely impossible. For example, they claim that the URL list for Smartfilter is "Built by our team of multi-lingual Web Analysts who look at thousands of Websites everyday to ensure accurate categorization and comprehensive global coverage." Who among the tech-savvy on Slashdot can read that and not call bullshit?
As far as I'm concerned, these products are scamware designed to take advantage of people who don't know computers well enough to know how intractable real internet filtering is. Why should we legislate money to them?
FOr that matter, is it truly harmless to write "imaginary" words about "imaginary" situations?
Absolutely. In fact, writing about touchy subjects is almost always beneficial. Writing about the most gruesome crimes can prevent crime. Writing about excessive or harmful sex can prevent people from having excessive or harmful sex. Why? Because they learn what it means for something to be gruesome, stomach-churning, painful. They learn the kind of acts that make them feel that way. They also learn the difference between fact and fiction.
The second situation you describe, where the author merely "hints" at the salacious material, is more harmful in my opinion. It leaves a blank space in one's conscience, and you can't reject what you can't see. Unfortunately, "hinting" is the standard in American television writing, and it can get very frustrating at times. (On the other hand, when the morality lobby hears something the author never said and flies of the handle about it, it can also be a great source of amusement.)
I noticed you put imaginary in quotes, implying that you think these are stories about things that actually happened. What makes you think that, or how would you know? Or do you seek to imply that the contents of a certain book makes it "more real" than other books?
Reading gruesome stories about serial murders will make you want to stay away from criminals. Likewise, read Lolita and you'll know why NOT to lust after little girls. Is it morally irresponsible to tell people that it's okay to do harmful things? Yes. Do I think the child porn novels we're talking about are complete and utter filth? Absolutely.
But I would seriously consider the ethical ramifications of equating a written description to the crime it describes. Your reaction proves the grandparent's point, that these laws are put in place for a reason other than explicitly protecting the victims of sex crime. Therefore, some social force is at work here. I'll leave it up to you to figure whether that force will be good or bad for us in the long run.
They already do this in Puzzle Pirates. Instead of "bleeping" certain words they convert them to pirate speak. For example, "bitch" is "tart" and for some reason "fuck" translates to "scupper." It can be quite funny in certain situations.
As a counterexample, I stopped buying CDs when Napster was finally closed down in 2001. Up until then I bought 'em like crazy, even when I was in college and really couldn't afford it. When I stopped using Napster, I stopped buying CDs, and that was the end of it. I've never had any interest in buying one since. On the other hand, my sister, who shares mp3s with her friends through AIM and the like, still buys new music the way I used to. So there's a counter to your story.
I'd also like to point out that the most popular songs with me and my friends right now are some vocal pieces performed by a an extremely talented high school choir. You can't buy their album, though.
Personally, I'd prefer paying sales and other taxes for unlimited wireless to being charged $102.56 for a setup I was told would cost $34.99. Ironically the phone lines in Austin are most used for phone spam, so I should also say I prefer paying taxes to paying for advertising, too.
I have to say, while I know that college profs have a nasty reputation for being biased, I have NEVER failed a paper for disagreeing with one. One of the best scores I ever got was from a paper where I countered my professor's analysis, that she had published in the textbook for the course.
It seems to me that the rule only applies if your paper is pretty bad to begin with. Counterexamples, anyone?
But- but- fear is the mind killer! You can't think and feel at the same time. That's like what girls do.
Seriously, though, it bugs me too. There was a time when we lionized people like doctors (and even firemen, the great heroes of 9/11) because they were able to do exactly that. Now it seems that if you don't go nuts when things get rough, you don't care enough to show that you're on the right side of the fence. It's really demoralizing for those who expect more of themselves to be told, "We don't want your help. We just want your tears."
Not exactly. When someone puts a song on a P2P network and others download it, they're getting it for free. It's unknown whether those people would pay for the content otherwise. (Even if they liked it, each consumer only has a limited amount of money.) It's also unknown whether the person will buy a copy of the work independent of his pirated copy (which sounds ridiculous, but happens frequently.)
When someone sells your product as their own, you KNOW that every person who buys from them would have bought from you, had they known that you made the product. They have stolen a sale from a person who would have definitely paid X amount for your product. The worst part is, the customer already paid for the product, and therefore they aren't going to buy it again from the real owner. It's the difference between thinking you've lost sales, and knowing you have.
Of course, many copyright holders are willing to count a theoretical loss of sale as a real one. This has worked to their advantage in the past, but most of those "lost sales" are illusionary, since the customer wouldn't have paid for the downloaded game/song/movie anyway. It's like saying you could have made a hundred thousand more dollars a year if you licensed oranges.
I hate to tell you this, but if you pay for the books you now buy with a credit card, they can already track your purchases. Do you really think you can buy something with a card and send it to your home address and keep the feds from knowing? Of course, they'd have to be watching you specifically - but that's just because they know you know. (Which explains why the radio keeps shouting your name intermittently.)
I agree with everything you said, but I have to point out that financial survivability is also an issue. The substantial tax breaks given to married couples have been around so long that our economy has adjusted to it. Today two unmarried people living together have a much harder time surviving than might the same two people as a married couple. So getting those tax breaks is important to most gay couples who live together.
However, the grandparent is wrong in thinking that the desire to get these particular tax breaks indicates some kind of greed. I don't mean wrong in the factual sense, I mean wrong in the way that should make them ashamed to say such things. If a convicted felon can get the tax break just by getting married, I think it's safe to say we give them out to more or less anyone, regardless of whether they "dilute" societal standards. Wanting to be on the same financial footing as everyone else is not "greed" - it's more like survival instinct.
Indeed. This, apparently, is why Katamari Damacy had such a small first run in the US. Namco didn't take preorders, and they use the preorders to determine how many copies to print in the first run. No preorders means they have to guess, and unless it's Halo 2, they guess low.
How can one reject temptation without knowing when they are being tempted? And if you have some clue as to the contents of a salacious piece of media, surely you have to repress the thoughts and urges which allow you the liberty of understanding, in order to practice self-restraint.
Thus, I don't see how self-censorship can replace emotional suppression. It seems to rely upon it. Can you explain this?
Actually, the belief that all denominations outside the particular church are somehow "bad" is not exactly a prerequisite to fundamentalism. Most of them do delineate between "god's people" and "others," but many (like the churches that constitute the Christian Coalition) understand that to mean some collection of churches and people with the same fundamental beliefs, rather than just the single church against the world.
On the flipside, "non-denominational" is something of a watchword for radical groups where I live. I believe this is because some interpret the term not as "we accept all denominations equally," but as "all denominations are unsatisfactory." Groups that recruit students often use the term, since it sounds like one but means the other. I doubt that's quite the kind of faith professed by the grandparent, though, because he seems like fairly sensible folk.
Consider this alternative view: Nintendo does do a lot of innovative in-house work. Who do you think makes these games? I'm sure they hire game developers who would otherwise be independent. And then, they take the ideas of the people they hired and put money and support behind them. This is generally referred to as "publishing."
The only way that Nintendo could stifle innovation, would be to kill off the good ideas in the pipeline. It's obvious they aren't doing that, since, as you pointed out, the games these developers put out end up very good. So what exactly is Nintendo doing, as a publisher, to stifle innovation? They've just released a system that gives prospective developers a ton of new interaction methods that, frankly, just aren't available elsewhere. How is that uncreative?
Now, you may say, the only people who get to develop for those systems are big publishers with huge advertising budgets. This isn't true, but it IS true that big publishers are likely to make more games for a system, and to advertise them more. Chances are, they also hire good talent, just as Nintendo hires talented people to make it's games. But many of those companies, for whatever reason, choose not to use that talent. They choose to churn out sequels, to cut deadlines to the wire, and throw out new ideas because they're too hard. If they choose to carry an independent developer's work, they try to squeeze as much cash out of it for themselves as possible.
What Nintendo wants, more than anything else, is to have a system with good games on it. With the third party developers, they can't guarantee that, although they try to help with things like the Super Mario Club. This is why Nintendo maintains in-house game development, to make sure that somebody is making good games for their systems. You don't quite get that kind of guarantee from Microsoft, and you certainly won't get it from Sony. Basically, Nintendo says, "we're going to make sure someone innovates and makes good games, even if it has to be us."
I'm not saying that everything those teams do is going to be solid gold, or that Nintendo is the only person doing good game development. I'm just saying that, as far as I can tell, Nintendo takes responsibility for the quality of games on their platforms, and I have a hard time seeing how that stifles creativity.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you have the power to abuse your political position, doesn't mean that it is acceptable to do so. I don't know where the American people got the idea that it IS okay. It's not. Maybe it was all those cock-and-bull stories about Clinton... (Well, the other cock-and-bull stories.)
And just for an update in government theory: the president is supposed to defend the interests of the people. For the sane presidents, this has meant appointing people who could get the issues right even when he couldn't. President =! Pope. Just because he really thinks something doesn't make it the right thing to do.
And just while I'm in a posting mood, your last sentence reminds me of a story I heard at a rehearsal dinner many years ago.
The best man was telling a story about a trip he and his friends had taken to see a laser light show. You know, the kind that take place way up in the mountains where the show is projected on a canyon wall? Well, apparently they got to talking in the car on the way up, and one of the girls in the group said that, if she could choose to be born into any religion it would be Buddhism. The best man grins at this point and says, "Needless to say, she ended up walking to the laser light show." Almost broke my fucking champagne glass.
Actually, I believe that with this plan you use less herbicide. If you have to use one certain kind because others will kill your crop, (which is true in many cases of GM) the only way to get rid of weeds is to give them larger and larger doses of weedkiller. This way you can just spray a small amount of a different kind and get the same or better effect.
What we should worry about is one company owning the rights to the pesticides and "locking farmers in" to using their seed and chemicals. But if you can easily buy weedkiller brand x and use it on this rice, then I have a hard time seeing a downside to it.
The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops
It's been a while since Biology, but as I recall the fraction of plants that survived to harvest was about 1/3 for natural crops, and 2/3 for GM. Do I remember wrong?
Uh... This bill has nothing to do with gay marriage. It was about discrimination in government service and commercial practices, including hiring and firing people. As a major employer, that's something Microsoft would be interested in, eh?
I think someone further up pointed out that being gay is much more like belonging to a certain religion. In fact, you could say that it is very close to that, since many churches now make it a point of doctrine whether or not they support gay couples.
I know people like the ones you're describing. I know that it's pretty disturbing to see people doing big, life-changing things for the wrong reasons. But in America, we don't ask you whether you're truly devout before defending your right to practice your religion. Why should we be required to find out whether or not you're "really" gay?
Some say that we shouldn't be so liberal granting religious protections to strange and even agnostic religions. But time and time again, we have come to affirm that the first amendment constitutes the promise of total religious freedom, even if we don't understand or find completely vile a single protected faith. I honestly don't see why this promise does not extend to gay rights. Maybe for more insight you could ask your local reconciling church.
I haven't played either of these games, but I believe what you are talking about is an issue of copyright ownership, not material-like ownership. In Second Life, you own the copyright to anything you create because you came up with the model, scripts, name, etc. Likewise, SOE owns the copyright to all the game contents they created (which, in games like EQ2, is all of it). As much as many of us would like to believe otherwise, these are NOT the same thing.
You do NOT own the land you buy in Second Life; you rent it. If your account gets cancelled for whatever reason, the company reclaims that land. (And they might also charge you a hefty resale fee!) Likewise, you don't own the data you created. And I quote:
you do not own the account you use to access the Service, nor do you own any data Linden stores on Linden servers (including without limitation any data representing or embodying any or all of your Content).
However, you still keep the copyright to whatever you built in the game; it's just that it's impossible to "own" data sitting on someone else's server.
If you happen to be an AC from the Austin area, may I suggest GameFellas? They are the game equivalent of an indie record store; usually have everything for less than EB and carry a wide range of older materials (and even "exotic" items like WonderSwan cartridges). Also, when I looked they were the only game store in town that had Katamari Damacy.
and EB dropped their customer friendly return policy.
Since when did EB have a customer friendly return policy? I remember them giving me the runaround about a game in an uponened box when I tried to return it in 1995.
Actually, OpenOffice's encoding for .doc doesn't work perfectly. And it's a downright bitch if you're trying to pass files between OpenOffice and Word. I was a freelance manual writer for a while, and my copy of Word self-destructed. (It wouldn't take the activation code that was printed ON THE DISK.)
.doc encoder based on intelligent guesswork. If the standards were open, they could get compatability spot on.
So I thought, time to switch to an open alternative. Bad idea. I couldn't pass edits to the engineer I was working with because every time I'd get back a file with corrupted layout and images about the size of Jupiter.
As far as I can tell, this is because they have to build their
I think this is a bad thing, not because of the questionable free speech situations, but because it means my state will be spending my taxes on a useless service.
Even if I wanted these wifi spots to be filtered, I couldn't get it. Companies like Secure Computing claim that their products do things that are absolutely impossible. For example, they claim that the URL list for Smartfilter is "Built by our team of multi-lingual Web Analysts who look at thousands of Websites everyday to ensure accurate categorization and comprehensive global coverage." Who among the tech-savvy on Slashdot can read that and not call bullshit?
As far as I'm concerned, these products are scamware designed to take advantage of people who don't know computers well enough to know how intractable real internet filtering is. Why should we legislate money to them?
Ah, the Dissent of Man!
FOr that matter, is it truly harmless to write "imaginary" words about "imaginary" situations?
Absolutely. In fact, writing about touchy subjects is almost always beneficial. Writing about the most gruesome crimes can prevent crime. Writing about excessive or harmful sex can prevent people from having excessive or harmful sex. Why? Because they learn what it means for something to be gruesome, stomach-churning, painful. They learn the kind of acts that make them feel that way. They also learn the difference between fact and fiction.
The second situation you describe, where the author merely "hints" at the salacious material, is more harmful in my opinion. It leaves a blank space in one's conscience, and you can't reject what you can't see. Unfortunately, "hinting" is the standard in American television writing, and it can get very frustrating at times. (On the other hand, when the morality lobby hears something the author never said and flies of the handle about it, it can also be a great source of amusement.)
I noticed you put imaginary in quotes, implying that you think these are stories about things that actually happened. What makes you think that, or how would you know? Or do you seek to imply that the contents of a certain book makes it "more real" than other books?
Reading gruesome stories about serial murders will make you want to stay away from criminals. Likewise, read Lolita and you'll know why NOT to lust after little girls. Is it morally irresponsible to tell people that it's okay to do harmful things? Yes. Do I think the child porn novels we're talking about are complete and utter filth? Absolutely.
But I would seriously consider the ethical ramifications of equating a written description to the crime it describes. Your reaction proves the grandparent's point, that these laws are put in place for a reason other than explicitly protecting the victims of sex crime. Therefore, some social force is at work here. I'll leave it up to you to figure whether that force will be good or bad for us in the long run.
Actually, I think Nabokov would find this all pretty amusing.
They already do this in Puzzle Pirates. Instead of "bleeping" certain words they convert them to pirate speak. For example, "bitch" is "tart" and for some reason "fuck" translates to "scupper." It can be quite funny in certain situations.
As a counterexample, I stopped buying CDs when Napster was finally closed down in 2001. Up until then I bought 'em like crazy, even when I was in college and really couldn't afford it. When I stopped using Napster, I stopped buying CDs, and that was the end of it. I've never had any interest in buying one since. On the other hand, my sister, who shares mp3s with her friends through AIM and the like, still buys new music the way I used to. So there's a counter to your story.
I'd also like to point out that the most popular songs with me and my friends right now are some vocal pieces performed by a an extremely talented high school choir. You can't buy their album, though.
Personally, I'd prefer paying sales and other taxes for unlimited wireless to being charged $102.56 for a setup I was told would cost $34.99. Ironically the phone lines in Austin are most used for phone spam, so I should also say I prefer paying taxes to paying for advertising, too.
I have to say, while I know that college profs have a nasty reputation for being biased, I have NEVER failed a paper for disagreeing with one. One of the best scores I ever got was from a paper where I countered my professor's analysis, that she had published in the textbook for the course.
It seems to me that the rule only applies if your paper is pretty bad to begin with. Counterexamples, anyone?
But- but- fear is the mind killer! You can't think and feel at the same time. That's like what girls do.
Seriously, though, it bugs me too. There was a time when we lionized people like doctors (and even firemen, the great heroes of 9/11) because they were able to do exactly that. Now it seems that if you don't go nuts when things get rough, you don't care enough to show that you're on the right side of the fence. It's really demoralizing for those who expect more of themselves to be told, "We don't want your help. We just want your tears."
Not exactly. When someone puts a song on a P2P network and others download it, they're getting it for free. It's unknown whether those people would pay for the content otherwise. (Even if they liked it, each consumer only has a limited amount of money.) It's also unknown whether the person will buy a copy of the work independent of his pirated copy (which sounds ridiculous, but happens frequently.)
When someone sells your product as their own, you KNOW that every person who buys from them would have bought from you, had they known that you made the product. They have stolen a sale from a person who would have definitely paid X amount for your product. The worst part is, the customer already paid for the product, and therefore they aren't going to buy it again from the real owner. It's the difference between thinking you've lost sales, and knowing you have.
Of course, many copyright holders are willing to count a theoretical loss of sale as a real one. This has worked to their advantage in the past, but most of those "lost sales" are illusionary, since the customer wouldn't have paid for the downloaded game/song/movie anyway. It's like saying you could have made a hundred thousand more dollars a year if you licensed oranges.
I hate to tell you this, but if you pay for the books you now buy with a credit card, they can already track your purchases. Do you really think you can buy something with a card and send it to your home address and keep the feds from knowing? Of course, they'd have to be watching you specifically - but that's just because they know you know. (Which explains why the radio keeps shouting your name intermittently.)
I agree with everything you said, but I have to point out that financial survivability is also an issue. The substantial tax breaks given to married couples have been around so long that our economy has adjusted to it. Today two unmarried people living together have a much harder time surviving than might the same two people as a married couple. So getting those tax breaks is important to most gay couples who live together.
However, the grandparent is wrong in thinking that the desire to get these particular tax breaks indicates some kind of greed. I don't mean wrong in the factual sense, I mean wrong in the way that should make them ashamed to say such things. If a convicted felon can get the tax break just by getting married, I think it's safe to say we give them out to more or less anyone, regardless of whether they "dilute" societal standards. Wanting to be on the same financial footing as everyone else is not "greed" - it's more like survival instinct.
Indeed. This, apparently, is why Katamari Damacy had such a small first run in the US. Namco didn't take preorders, and they use the preorders to determine how many copies to print in the first run. No preorders means they have to guess, and unless it's Halo 2, they guess low.
Your logic is alien to me.
How can one reject temptation without knowing when they are being tempted? And if you have some clue as to the contents of a salacious piece of media, surely you have to repress the thoughts and urges which allow you the liberty of understanding, in order to practice self-restraint.
Thus, I don't see how self-censorship can replace emotional suppression. It seems to rely upon it. Can you explain this?
Actually, the belief that all denominations outside the particular church are somehow "bad" is not exactly a prerequisite to fundamentalism. Most of them do delineate between "god's people" and "others," but many (like the churches that constitute the Christian Coalition) understand that to mean some collection of churches and people with the same fundamental beliefs, rather than just the single church against the world.
On the flipside, "non-denominational" is something of a watchword for radical groups where I live. I believe this is because some interpret the term not as "we accept all denominations equally," but as "all denominations are unsatisfactory." Groups that recruit students often use the term, since it sounds like one but means the other. I doubt that's quite the kind of faith professed by the grandparent, though, because he seems like fairly sensible folk.
These, my offerings to the OT sea...
Consider this alternative view: Nintendo does do a lot of innovative in-house work. Who do you think makes these games? I'm sure they hire game developers who would otherwise be independent. And then, they take the ideas of the people they hired and put money and support behind them. This is generally referred to as "publishing."
The only way that Nintendo could stifle innovation, would be to kill off the good ideas in the pipeline. It's obvious they aren't doing that, since, as you pointed out, the games these developers put out end up very good. So what exactly is Nintendo doing, as a publisher, to stifle innovation? They've just released a system that gives prospective developers a ton of new interaction methods that, frankly, just aren't available elsewhere. How is that uncreative?
Now, you may say, the only people who get to develop for those systems are big publishers with huge advertising budgets. This isn't true, but it IS true that big publishers are likely to make more games for a system, and to advertise them more. Chances are, they also hire good talent, just as Nintendo hires talented people to make it's games. But many of those companies, for whatever reason, choose not to use that talent. They choose to churn out sequels, to cut deadlines to the wire, and throw out new ideas because they're too hard. If they choose to carry an independent developer's work, they try to squeeze as much cash out of it for themselves as possible.
What Nintendo wants, more than anything else, is to have a system with good games on it. With the third party developers, they can't guarantee that, although they try to help with things like the Super Mario Club. This is why Nintendo maintains in-house game development, to make sure that somebody is making good games for their systems. You don't quite get that kind of guarantee from Microsoft, and you certainly won't get it from Sony. Basically, Nintendo says, "we're going to make sure someone innovates and makes good games, even if it has to be us."
I'm not saying that everything those teams do is going to be solid gold, or that Nintendo is the only person doing good game development. I'm just saying that, as far as I can tell, Nintendo takes responsibility for the quality of games on their platforms, and I have a hard time seeing how that stifles creativity.