Typically I would agree with a statement like this, but MK is different. The original arcade versions contained silly red spray and spatter. Dismemberment looked cartoonish. Technology changed that, and today's versions of MK can be quite gruesome.
Your comment intrigued me and I decided to see for myself how Mortal Kombat has progressed since I last paid it any mind many years ago. So I watched a few gameplay trailers and I do not agree that MK has gotten any less silly or more gruesome, relatively speaking.
Yeah, there are more pixels on the screen now, but, importantly, the characters don't really seem to suffer. They don't realistically shriek or cower. They more or less shrug off being stabbed through the chest with a giant icicle, or having their bones beaten into dust. It may not be cel-shaded, but it's cartoon violence in capitals. Like Wile E. Coyote being flattened under a boulder. In reality, any one of the fighting moves in MK would absolutely lay an opponent out. Most would never fight again, IF they didn't die from their injuries.
I think what bothers people about these sorts of things is what they themselves imagine that other people get out of them. I don't really care for fighting games, but if I did, I might play Mortal Kombat for the reason that, like the late George Carlin, I like excess in my entertainment. I don't want to hurt people. I won't even squish a bug. But ripping someone's entire skeleton out through their butthole? What a delightfully absurd idea. But the busybodies worry about sickos using MK for porn. Or children being - wait, Mortal Kombat is in no way a children's game, so what the fuck?
Today's MK is no worse than yesterday's Doom. Some people will wring their hands, and 10 years from now we'll all shake our heads in wonder at how naive and prudish we were.
Someone had used a programmable curcuit board and let it evolve using some simple evolutionary algorithm. After thousands or perhaps millions of iteration where only the best design solution(s) were allowed to survive they examined the final results. Strangely, one of the finalist could not be understood by the circuit board analysis program. So, they took to analyses the device manually. What they eventually found was that it had designed a little radio telescope of sorts which had sent its signal across an unconnected, empty area without wiring! I have tried several times to find the article again. If someone else remembers it, please, reply and gives us a link.
For the record, Google's very first claim (about copying variables doubling memory consumption) is dubious. Although the language itself passes most variable types by value, the PHP interpreter copies variables lazily using copy-on-write. So in general, "aliasing" variables for readability should be OK. However, I'm not sure whether the interpreter copies individual array elements lazily...
... I don't find playing the auction house fun. In fact, I find it highly unethical. You're taking advantage of people who don't know what things really should cost.
Uhh, just because I choose to undercut my competitors (other sellers) doesn't mean I don't know what my loot is "worth". I hardly feel taken advantage of when the gold's rolling in faster than I can run to the mail box - gold I can put to work immediately, while my higher-priced competitors twiddle their thumbs.
One thing I cannot understand: How programmers continue to fail to encode data in a context-appropriate way before operating on it. When I code, I don't even think about it - I just do it. The brain cycles I save, I spend on higher-level problems.
If I need to output some data in the context of an XML document, I entity encode the data. Bam! - done. I don't stop to think about how likely it is the data will contain control information; whether it'd be worth the extra 1.5 seconds (of typing) to encode it; that the data provider (a user, say) ought to know better than to include "funny" characters...
I agree with you that the price of perfection is too high for most applications, but come on. Failing to sanitize data moving across major boundaries (the client/server boundary, for example) is like failing to check whether the garage door is open before attempting to drive through it. Don't excuse that crap.
... and those extra semi-colons "just in case" are also ugly.
En garde!
To me, omitting syntax that isn't strictly necessary is a form of premature optimization. It takes more work to determine whether a statement needs to be terminated with a semi-colon than it does to subconsciously terminate _every_ statement; it takes more work to translate between the block and inline form of an if-statement as code evolves; it takes more work to rearrange case statements if some include an implied break.
I used to strive for "compactness" in my code. When I realized how much keeping track of all my own formatting rules and exceptions was costing me brain cycles (plus the aforementioned issues), I switched to striving for consistency.
Have you ever used Google AdWords? AdWords encourages advertisers to select relevant search terms for their ads by progressively delisting ads that perform poorly (low click-to-view ratio). Some ads perform poorly because nobody at all is interested, but I think most do so because they're not targeted well (you can sell anything to the right person). Advertisers who wish to succeed must do the work of correctly matching search terms with interests....
It's been mentioned in this thread that the Semantic Web can only work with a lot of elbow grease from content providers, encoding meaning into their content. Well, Google has an army of advertisers—motivated by nothing less than money!—defining semantic relationships for them. I'm sure Google mines these data to improve their search. In fact, maybe PageRank was merely a way to bootstrap the process—to provide enough eyeballs to pique advertisers' interest—and now takes a backseat to Google's human-driven AdWords algo.
(I live in the US. I'm speaking from a US perspective.)
I wonder to what extent driving-related accidents are the result of emotional immaturity vs. inexperience.
So let's assume emotional immaturity is the greater issue, and pretend we increase the minimum driving age to 21. In time, it becomes evident that newly-licensed 21-year-olds drive like crap, too. In fact, they drive worse because they're also experimenting with alcohol. (And consider that many will have been recently emancipated from their parents' rule.) People soon forget what conditions were like before we last increased the driving age, and press to have it increased again. After all, studies have shown that older drivers are better drivers. Or something.
I was once almost run off the road by a couple of young guys--but every other close call has involved middle-aged businessmen on important business, distracted soccer moms, dozing truckers, good ol' boys driving big-ass trucks... Is this not generally the case?
They want to do what they want to do and the computer should magically understand that and play along.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this expectation.
I hate spam. I don't ever want to see it in my email. Nobody likes spam, so why does Microsoft (I have a PC) even bother with it? Probably they're getting kickbacks from China, huh. I want email without spam, and the computer should magically understand that.
P.S. By spam, I mean everything: advertisements for "v1agra", Nigerian scams, newsletters I signed up for and then forgot about, anything from Mailer Daemon (I'm a Christian, thank you), and anything I wouldn't want my wife to know about.
P.P.S The fact that I receive a disproportionately large amount of spam because I give my email address away like confetti into a passing parade, and that the combined efforts of my email provider and email client in fact stop 99.99% of it from ever reaching my inbox, does not interest me. What interests me is the spam I _do_ receive. And I don't want to hear about "Baysian filters" or "false positives", or the "sheer impossibility" of what I'm demanding. It takes me a fraction of a second to identify an unwanted email: how hard can it be?
If you define "hardcore" as "boring and overly complicated" then you hit it in one.
I own, or have owned, nearly every Nintendo system, including every flavor of Game Boy, and a Virtual Boy that I still play from time to time. September of '96, I called my best friend to _listen_ to him unpack and play his N64 for the first time, since I had to wait for mine.
The Nintendo Wii is the _only_ system I've ever waited in line for on launch day. I bought one for my little brother, and helped convince at least two people to buy one. I own most games worth having on the Wii, my favorite being Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (the controls are fantastic--it's tough to go back).
Having said all that, I can no longer side with the Wii apologists. There is _something_ about the Wii, about Nintendo's New Strategy, and it goes beyond games being "light" and "fun" as opposed to "boring and overly complicated". I can't put my finger on it, but here is a fact worth mentioning: My 360 gets _way_ more play time--whatever mood I'm in. I want a quick distraction, I play Geometry Wars. Immersion? Half-Life 2, BioShock. Adrenaline rush? Geometry Wars--I mean UT3. Intellectual stimulation? Portal, Braid... All of which are available in HD.
On the Wii I play mostly GameCube and VC games. Which, by the way, the Classic Controller sucks. The tether, the Z button placement, the lack of rumble--it's a poor controller from a company that knows better. WiiWare has so far failed to impress me. Xbox LIVE Arcade has a bigger selection, a better selection, and is so much easier to purchase from. Online connectivity for Wii games is limited or awkward (Geometry Wars: Galaxies' leaderboards! Ugh!). Nintendo really dropped the ball there.
There's a difference between "simple", and "watered down"--or "casual", and "half-assed". To an extent, Nintendo is appealing to gamers who don't know any better. Like people who have never tasted real whipped cream, and can't imagine that it's any better than Cool Whip.
If you love gaming, especially classic-era gaming, get a 360. (Well, you might wait until the next hardware revision.;-))
But seriously, the purpose of my original post was merely to suggest an explanation for why lots of people have a hard time accepting the apparent symmetry of the tower collapses being due to chance. (And kudos if you can parse that puppy on the first try.)
It's a common misconception that random events don't or can't look very neat and tidy. [...] The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down [...]
It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives.
What?! F-Zero GX is hands-down one of the greatest racers of all time. I've never been a fan of the F-Zero series, or of racers in general, but I've burned countless hours on GX--not least because it's absolutely bursting with unlockable content. New tracks, new pilots and vehicles, dozens of campy video clips... The gameplay is rock-solid, the visuals are like candy, the soundtrack is large and impressive. It's an enormously challenging and rewarding game, and I will cherish my copy to the grave.
GX is as pure and timeless and brilliant as Ikaruga, Puzzle League, Geometry Wars--and other games you may have never played.:-P It deserves better than to be called "shovelware"!
I once received a CV from "slap_head_dave@..." He didn't even get an interview.
Did you "seriously" shitcan Dave's CV because the username part of his email address failed to meet your threshold for seriousness?
Call me an idealist, but even if your petty dismissal of an otherwise qualified applicant (I'm giving Dave the benefit of the doubt) is SOP in the "real world", I wouldn't expect you to be so smug about it!
I thought gold had intrinsic value because of its "resistance to corrosion, electrical conductivity, ductility and lack of toxicity" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Other) combined with the relative difficulty of extracting it.
I fear that classifying--damn near everything--as addictive, shifts responsibility from the "addictee" to the "addictor".
"I know it's not OK that I'm playing WoW when I should be feeding my kids, but I can't help myself. Blizzard designed WoW to be the most addictive game ever! They're rich and powerful, and I'm just a poor sucker. Ahh, that's better."
Addiction is a failure of self control. You mentioned, "[reducing] the allowance for addictiveness in games". Do you really think that reducing the need for self control by filtering potentially addictive material is going to result in an overall win for humanity? How do you even define "addictiveness" at this point?
I used to download a lot of porn off (e.g.) Kazaa. I'd search for an unambiguous keyword like "blowjob", select all 10,000 results--and check back in the morning! I can't count the number of times I found files in my Downloads directory with bogus names like "lolita underage blowjob britney spears.mp3.jpg". Once or twice, I found actual child porn. By the time I identified and deleted it, it's likely I had been sharing it for hours.
Somehow I doubt my story would convince these people.
Actually, undoing magic_quotes is quite a bit more involved. Some things to consider:
- magic_quotes affects more than just GET, POST and cookie data
- GPC data may contain arrays
- magic_quotes doesn't process the keys of top-level arrays
Here's an excerpt from my personal library that addresses these issues and more. It works in PHP 4+ (I forget which minor version). Just give me some credit if you use it!
// magic_quotes_runtime is _like_ magic_quotes_gpc/sybase, except that it // applies to return data (from functions) ini_set('magic_quotes_runtime', '0');
// magic_quotes_gpc/sybase cannot be preempted like magic_quotes_runtime; if // either is enabled, the damage is already done if (ini_get('magic_quotes_gpc') === '1' || ini_get('magic_quotes_sybase') === '1') { /** * @author Adam Siler <amsiler@icglp.com> * @param mixed $value * @param bool $top * @return mixed */ function undo_magic_quotes($value, $top = true) { // unescape strings if (is_string($value)) { // stripslashes is magic_quotes_sybase-aware return stripslashes($value); } // recurse into arrays elseif (is_array($value)) { // as described here: <http://us.php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.disabling.php#71817>, // magic_quotes_gpc (sybase?) does not escape the keys of top-level // arrays
$unescaped_array = array();
foreach ($value as $key => $array_value) { if (!$top) { $key = stripslashes($key); }
// other scripts may check the value of magic_quotes_gpc or // magic_quotes_sybase and conclude, incorrectly, that GPC data is escaped. // this should fix that ini_set('magic_quotes_gpc', '0'); ini_set('magic_quotes_sybase', '0'); }
It's an unwritten rule of kung fu moviedom that good guys don't use guns. They can be beaten and bloody, up against a wall, with a discarded gun at their feet, and a broom handle well out of reach--and they'll go for the broom handle every time.
At the end of the day, I think it has more to do with good cinematography than "honor". Which brings me to my point:
The reality is that mouse-and-keyboard (gun) beats dual-analog (broom handle) in terms of lethal efficiency. However, many people prefer the protracted, often more strategic battles (cinematography) that dual-analog induces. Consider the popularity of GoldenEye. Or Halo 2.
I'm not strictly adverse to blinding-fast gameplay, but I enjoy other types of challenges as well. Your assertion that mouse-and-keyboard is the only viable control scheme for FPSes is narrow minded.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I am too often interrupted by co-workers who think they're doing me a favor breaking my concentration. And, naturally, the busier I am, the more they feel the need to switch my gears for me.
I didn't mean to imply that I think artists who make lots of money are buttholes (wah), and so the entire industry should be eliminated. I know that's a common argument, but it's not mine.
You mentioned "buying tracks". The very idea of "buying a track" (that is, buying the right to play a song, often via a particular medium), is artificial, and just plain weird--it only seems normal.
There's so much I want to say about this subject... Let me respond to two of your ideas.
I don't think that just because an industry provides jobs, that that industry ought to exist. Broken records (er, windows) and all that... Imagine what 100,000 people could do if they weren't completely occupied with preserving their own, increasingly pointless jobs.
Also, you mention the importance of promotion and ratings. You're right--there's just too much music in the world for me or you to sift through. However, I don't have a lot of confidence in whatever indexes the radio stations use. There's too much self-interest at that level. They promote the music that they want us to buy. Now, imagine if there was little money to be made selling a particular track or album (because the music is independently produced and the profit goes to the artist). The money, then, would be in helping people acquire the music they want to hear. And the best matching algorithm would win.
Slashdot Mirror
Typically I would agree with a statement like this, but MK is different. The original arcade versions contained silly red spray and spatter. Dismemberment looked cartoonish. Technology changed that, and today's versions of MK can be quite gruesome.
Your comment intrigued me and I decided to see for myself how Mortal Kombat has progressed since I last paid it any mind many years ago. So I watched a few gameplay trailers and I do not agree that MK has gotten any less silly or more gruesome, relatively speaking.
Yeah, there are more pixels on the screen now, but, importantly, the characters don't really seem to suffer. They don't realistically shriek or cower. They more or less shrug off being stabbed through the chest with a giant icicle, or having their bones beaten into dust. It may not be cel-shaded, but it's cartoon violence in capitals. Like Wile E. Coyote being flattened under a boulder. In reality, any one of the fighting moves in MK would absolutely lay an opponent out. Most would never fight again, IF they didn't die from their injuries.
I think what bothers people about these sorts of things is what they themselves imagine that other people get out of them. I don't really care for fighting games, but if I did, I might play Mortal Kombat for the reason that, like the late George Carlin, I like excess in my entertainment. I don't want to hurt people. I won't even squish a bug. But ripping someone's entire skeleton out through their butthole? What a delightfully absurd idea. But the busybodies worry about sickos using MK for porn. Or children being - wait, Mortal Kombat is in no way a children's game, so what the fuck?
Today's MK is no worse than yesterday's Doom. Some people will wring their hands, and 10 years from now we'll all shake our heads in wonder at how naive and prudish we were.
Someone had used a programmable curcuit board and let it evolve using some simple evolutionary algorithm. After thousands or perhaps millions of iteration where only the best design solution(s) were allowed to survive they examined the final results. Strangely, one of the finalist could not be understood by the circuit board analysis program. So, they took to analyses the device manually. What they eventually found was that it had designed a little radio telescope of sorts which had sent its signal across an unconnected, empty area without wiring! I have tried several times to find the article again. If someone else remembers it, please, reply and gives us a link.
Here you are, sir.
See also this comment by Dachannien.
For the record, Google's very first claim (about copying variables doubling memory consumption) is dubious. Although the language itself passes most variable types by value, the PHP interpreter copies variables lazily using copy-on-write. So in general, "aliasing" variables for readability should be OK. However, I'm not sure whether the interpreter copies individual array elements lazily...
... I don't find playing the auction house fun. In fact, I find it highly unethical. You're taking advantage of people who don't know what things really should cost.
Uhh, just because I choose to undercut my competitors (other sellers) doesn't mean I don't know what my loot is "worth". I hardly feel taken advantage of when the gold's rolling in faster than I can run to the mail box - gold I can put to work immediately, while my higher-priced competitors twiddle their thumbs.
Poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
God, yes. Thanks for the laugh.
One thing I cannot understand: How programmers continue to fail to encode data in a context-appropriate way before operating on it. When I code, I don't even think about it - I just do it. The brain cycles I save, I spend on higher-level problems.
If I need to output some data in the context of an XML document, I entity encode the data. Bam! - done. I don't stop to think about how likely it is the data will contain control information; whether it'd be worth the extra 1.5 seconds (of typing) to encode it; that the data provider (a user, say) ought to know better than to include "funny" characters...
I agree with you that the price of perfection is too high for most applications, but come on. Failing to sanitize data moving across major boundaries (the client/server boundary, for example) is like failing to check whether the garage door is open before attempting to drive through it. Don't excuse that crap.
If we're going to standardize on a new base, I vote duodecimal.
... and those extra semi-colons "just in case" are also ugly.
En garde!
To me, omitting syntax that isn't strictly necessary is a form of premature optimization. It takes more work to determine whether a statement needs to be terminated with a semi-colon than it does to subconsciously terminate _every_ statement; it takes more work to translate between the block and inline form of an if-statement as code evolves; it takes more work to rearrange case statements if some include an implied break.
I used to strive for "compactness" in my code. When I realized how much keeping track of all my own formatting rules and exceptions was costing me brain cycles (plus the aforementioned issues), I switched to striving for consistency.
It's funny you should say that.
Have you ever used Google AdWords? AdWords encourages advertisers to select relevant search terms for their ads by progressively delisting ads that perform poorly (low click-to-view ratio). Some ads perform poorly because nobody at all is interested, but I think most do so because they're not targeted well (you can sell anything to the right person). Advertisers who wish to succeed must do the work of correctly matching search terms with interests....
It's been mentioned in this thread that the Semantic Web can only work with a lot of elbow grease from content providers, encoding meaning into their content. Well, Google has an army of advertisers—motivated by nothing less than money!—defining semantic relationships for them. I'm sure Google mines these data to improve their search. In fact, maybe PageRank was merely a way to bootstrap the process—to provide enough eyeballs to pique advertisers' interest—and now takes a backseat to Google's human-driven AdWords algo.
That's my theory anyway.
(I live in the US. I'm speaking from a US perspective.)
I wonder to what extent driving-related accidents are the result of emotional immaturity vs. inexperience.
So let's assume emotional immaturity is the greater issue, and pretend we increase the minimum driving age to 21. In time, it becomes evident that newly-licensed 21-year-olds drive like crap, too. In fact, they drive worse because they're also experimenting with alcohol. (And consider that many will have been recently emancipated from their parents' rule.) People soon forget what conditions were like before we last increased the driving age, and press to have it increased again. After all, studies have shown that older drivers are better drivers. Or something.
I was once almost run off the road by a couple of young guys--but every other close call has involved middle-aged businessmen on important business, distracted soccer moms, dozing truckers, good ol' boys driving big-ass trucks... Is this not generally the case?
They want to do what they want to do and the computer should magically understand that and play along.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this expectation.
I hate spam. I don't ever want to see it in my email. Nobody likes spam, so why does Microsoft (I have a PC) even bother with it? Probably they're getting kickbacks from China, huh. I want email without spam, and the computer should magically understand that.
P.S. By spam, I mean everything: advertisements for "v1agra", Nigerian scams, newsletters I signed up for and then forgot about, anything from Mailer Daemon (I'm a Christian, thank you), and anything I wouldn't want my wife to know about.
P.P.S The fact that I receive a disproportionately large amount of spam because I give my email address away like confetti into a passing parade, and that the combined efforts of my email provider and email client in fact stop 99.99% of it from ever reaching my inbox, does not interest me. What interests me is the spam I _do_ receive. And I don't want to hear about "Baysian filters" or "false positives", or the "sheer impossibility" of what I'm demanding. It takes me a fraction of a second to identify an unwanted email: how hard can it be?
</boneheaded-user>
If you define "hardcore" as "boring and overly complicated" then you hit it in one.
I own, or have owned, nearly every Nintendo system, including every flavor of Game Boy, and a Virtual Boy that I still play from time to time. September of '96, I called my best friend to _listen_ to him unpack and play his N64 for the first time, since I had to wait for mine.
The Nintendo Wii is the _only_ system I've ever waited in line for on launch day. I bought one for my little brother, and helped convince at least two people to buy one. I own most games worth having on the Wii, my favorite being Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (the controls are fantastic--it's tough to go back).
Having said all that, I can no longer side with the Wii apologists. There is _something_ about the Wii, about Nintendo's New Strategy, and it goes beyond games being "light" and "fun" as opposed to "boring and overly complicated". I can't put my finger on it, but here is a fact worth mentioning: My 360 gets _way_ more play time--whatever mood I'm in. I want a quick distraction, I play Geometry Wars. Immersion? Half-Life 2, BioShock. Adrenaline rush? Geometry Wars--I mean UT3. Intellectual stimulation? Portal, Braid... All of which are available in HD.
On the Wii I play mostly GameCube and VC games. Which, by the way, the Classic Controller sucks. The tether, the Z button placement, the lack of rumble--it's a poor controller from a company that knows better. WiiWare has so far failed to impress me. Xbox LIVE Arcade has a bigger selection, a better selection, and is so much easier to purchase from. Online connectivity for Wii games is limited or awkward (Geometry Wars: Galaxies' leaderboards! Ugh!). Nintendo really dropped the ball there.
There's a difference between "simple", and "watered down"--or "casual", and "half-assed". To an extent, Nintendo is appealing to gamers who don't know any better. Like people who have never tasted real whipped cream, and can't imagine that it's any better than Cool Whip.
If you love gaming, especially classic-era gaming, get a 360. (Well, you might wait until the next hardware revision. ;-))
My 2c,
615 (gamer since 1981)
So whose point are you trying to prove?
You're catching on. ;-)
But seriously, the purpose of my original post was merely to suggest an explanation for why lots of people have a hard time accepting the apparent symmetry of the tower collapses being due to chance. (And kudos if you can parse that puppy on the first try.)
It's a common misconception that random events don't or can't look very neat and tidy. [...] The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down [...]
It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives.
Or you could just thow some kerosene on it.
a shovelware title like F-Zero GX
What?! F-Zero GX is hands-down one of the greatest racers of all time. I've never been a fan of the F-Zero series, or of racers in general, but I've burned countless hours on GX--not least because it's absolutely bursting with unlockable content. New tracks, new pilots and vehicles, dozens of campy video clips... The gameplay is rock-solid, the visuals are like candy, the soundtrack is large and impressive. It's an enormously challenging and rewarding game, and I will cherish my copy to the grave. GX is as pure and timeless and brilliant as Ikaruga, Puzzle League, Geometry Wars--and other games you may have never played. :-P It deserves better than to be called "shovelware"!
I once received a CV from "slap_head_dave@..." He didn't even get an interview.
Did you "seriously" shitcan Dave's CV because the username part of his email address failed to meet your threshold for seriousness?
Call me an idealist, but even if your petty dismissal of an otherwise qualified applicant (I'm giving Dave the benefit of the doubt) is SOP in the "real world", I wouldn't expect you to be so smug about it!
I thought gold had intrinsic value because of its "resistance to corrosion, electrical conductivity, ductility and lack of toxicity" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Other) combined with the relative difficulty of extracting it.
I fear that classifying--damn near everything--as addictive, shifts responsibility from the "addictee" to the "addictor".
"I know it's not OK that I'm playing WoW when I should be feeding my kids, but I can't help myself. Blizzard designed WoW to be the most addictive game ever! They're rich and powerful, and I'm just a poor sucker. Ahh, that's better."
Addiction is a failure of self control. You mentioned, "[reducing] the allowance for addictiveness in games". Do you really think that reducing the need for self control by filtering potentially addictive material is going to result in an overall win for humanity? How do you even define "addictiveness" at this point?
I used to download a lot of porn off (e.g.) Kazaa. I'd search for an unambiguous keyword like "blowjob", select all 10,000 results--and check back in the morning! I can't count the number of times I found files in my Downloads directory with bogus names like "lolita underage blowjob britney spears .mp3.jpg". Once or twice, I found actual child porn. By the time I identified and deleted it, it's likely I had been sharing it for hours.
Somehow I doubt my story would convince these people.
Actually, undoing magic_quotes is quite a bit more involved. Some things to consider:
Here's an excerpt from my personal library that addresses these issues and more. It works in PHP 4+ (I forget which minor version). Just give me some credit if you use it!
Because I've seen this mentioned a couple of times now...
Gmail messages retrieved via POP are _not_ marked read. I have hundreds of "unread" messages in my inbox, dating way back, because I use Thunderbird.
Heh, your argument reminds me of kung fu movies.
It's an unwritten rule of kung fu moviedom that good guys don't use guns. They can be beaten and bloody, up against a wall, with a discarded gun at their feet, and a broom handle well out of reach--and they'll go for the broom handle every time.
At the end of the day, I think it has more to do with good cinematography than "honor". Which brings me to my point:
The reality is that mouse-and-keyboard (gun) beats dual-analog (broom handle) in terms of lethal efficiency. However, many people prefer the protracted, often more strategic battles (cinematography) that dual-analog induces. Consider the popularity of GoldenEye. Or Halo 2.
I'm not strictly adverse to blinding-fast gameplay, but I enjoy other types of challenges as well. Your assertion that mouse-and-keyboard is the only viable control scheme for FPSes is narrow minded.
For relevance: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/02/19.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I am too often interrupted by co-workers who think they're doing me a favor breaking my concentration. And, naturally, the busier I am, the more they feel the need to switch my gears for me.
I didn't mean to imply that I think artists who make lots of money are buttholes (wah), and so the entire industry should be eliminated. I know that's a common argument, but it's not mine.
You mentioned "buying tracks". The very idea of "buying a track" (that is, buying the right to play a song, often via a particular medium), is artificial, and just plain weird--it only seems normal.
There's so much I want to say about this subject... Let me respond to two of your ideas.
I don't think that just because an industry provides jobs, that that industry ought to exist. Broken records (er, windows) and all that... Imagine what 100,000 people could do if they weren't completely occupied with preserving their own, increasingly pointless jobs.
Also, you mention the importance of promotion and ratings. You're right--there's just too much music in the world for me or you to sift through. However, I don't have a lot of confidence in whatever indexes the radio stations use. There's too much self-interest at that level. They promote the music that they want us to buy. Now, imagine if there was little money to be made selling a particular track or album (because the music is independently produced and the profit goes to the artist). The money, then, would be in helping people acquire the music they want to hear. And the best matching algorithm would win.