Re:I got modded flame-bait last time I said this
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Bad Signs For Blu-ray
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You're missing the point. The point I was making is that even if some people did make that argument for real, it's still an incredibly stupid argument because there are obvious and immediate advantages of CDs over cassettes that have nothing to do with the difference in sound but everything to do with certain frustrations people had in the experience of trying to listen to music. The fact that you heard very stupid people making arguments that completely ignored actual existing features doesn't change that.
BluRay has no such advantage over DVD currently. There is nothing I can do with a BluRay movie that I can't do with a DVD - I can just do a little bit more of it (or less if all my kit isn't compatible with the DRM). Somewhat better picture (assuming I have an expensive television), more special features (assuming I care about those) etc. Granted, quantity has a quality all it's own, but the leap in storage and resolution simply isn't that great - we're not getting entire runs of television series on one disk, which would be something that might actually matter to consumers.
You mention some unexpected possibility that a new movie would come out that people simply *must* own on BluRay. Can you explain what this mass-market phenomenon might be or what gives us any reason to think that simply tripling/quadrupling the storage space on the disk might somehow lead to millions and millions of people to buy into BluRay?
For the record, I was around when vinyl was the only game in town (unless you had a reel-to-reel) and I can tell you, we were *grateful* for it... wait, wrong meme. And, also for the record, I have a PS3 (thankfully it's the kind with the hardware emulation of PS2 games) and was given the Spider-Man trilogy on BluRay (which I am sure you can all imagine my glee at being given SM3 in HIGHER RESOLUTION so I could see each of Toby Maguire's emo tears as he pranced about) - I've got a decent television, I'm pretty well able to spot differences in image quality and such, and I couldn't really tell that much difference between the two from 12' away while things were exploding and such on screen.
Re:I got modded flame-bait last time I said this
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Bad Signs For Blu-ray
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· Score: 1
The whole "make an argument look stupid by changing a couple of the words" thing would work better if you weren't wrong.
I don't know about you, but I consider being able to skip to a particular song without having to screw around with fast-forward/rewind and over/under-shooting as well as not having to worry about playback quality loss when the discs are properly cared for to be pretty huge advantages.
BluRay doesn't change the way people watch movies; CDs changed the way people listen to music.
The change to DVD from VHS was similarly huge - not just the improvement in quality, but not having to mess around with tracking, not having to fast-forward/rewind to get wherever, not having to spend movie watching time on stupid stuff that a machine does better.
My bet is on a combination of downloads and chip based storage being the real next gen format. I'd love it if I could either download a movie to whatever kind of personal media server I have (love it even more if I had a really easy way to access that same media server from wherever I happened to be on any device capable of hitting the net)(and I suspect this is the eventual set-up we'll have), but in the meantime I think it would be pretty reasonable to be able to get people to buy a fairly cheap box that connects to their TV/home theater that can download movies for playback & act as storage for movies that were bought. People could buy a movie by either downloading it to that box (for one price), buying it in a store on a new memory card (a bit more expensive to cover the physical cost of the card & as a premium for being able to easily make back-ups) or by plugging in their own memory card to a kiosk at a store (probably the cheapest per-movie rate, since the consumer is providing their own hardware, not using bandwidth).
That kind of situation would lead to some big changes in the experience people have watching movies at home.
"The right of free speech must be complete, absolute, and universal. Yes, you have to put up with assholes, but that's the price you pay for freedom."
There's a problem with what you said. The problem is when people act on misinformation or outright lies that have been passed along.
For example, let's say your neighbor publicly accuses you of molesting his 6-year-old daughter. In the US, at least, it pretty much won't matter if you are innocent - you're fucked just based on the accusation. Even if you're later completely exonerated, people will still remember you as that guy who might have molested a kid. You might lose your job, your marriage, your home, even your life, all because some asshole decided to spread lies about you.
I think it's awfully stupid that the general populace has such a "think of the children, don't think about anything else!" mentality, but that's the way it is, unfortunately. There need to be, not limits to free speech, but severe penalties for abusing that freedom when it causes real harm to other people.
"What I think would be cool is to implement a reporting system like the above and the offenders will be silenced from sending global messages after a certain number of people report them."
Bad idea. Large groups of people will grief regular players by mass reporting them.
What would be better is to design the game in such a way that people don't want to buy gold, they'd rather play.
Personally, I think a game like WoW would be MUCH better off if they simply allowed gold to be irrelevant - make it so all the stuff people really, really want to get (better equipment, faster mounts) is obtainable only through play. Instead of a fast flying mount costing 5k gold, make it require an incredibly challenging quest line. Instead of making skills/spells cost money, give them to the character when they hit the appropriate level and then make it so they have to use them to become fully effective (kind of like the way WoW's weapon skills work now, except a bit quicker). Gold should *purely* be seen as a way of getting stuff from NPC's like food, or paying rent on housing (housing that is initially earned through quests) and so on.
If I want to worry about money, I'll just deal with real life. I play MMO's to escape from that kind of thing and enjoy myself.
Libertarians are also, since we're making generalizations, bugfuck crazy.
Remember that guy who was running for Senate in one of the most Libertarian states imaginable (Montana) and he was so afraid of Y2K that he drank silver solution and turned himself blue?
Yeah. The best candidate the Libertarians could muster in their likely strongest state was Poppa Smurf.
Please wake me up when they field a candidate who isn't insane, then I'll listen.
Not propaganda, and not anything I "believed" or "blindly swallowed" that was fed to me - it's something I've come to believe about the world based on my own personal experiences.
I believe that I'm more than what I do for a living. I believe that learning things for the sake of learning them and knowing more about the world is a *good* thing. Most of us are going to spend roughly 1/3 of our waking hours in this life at work - less if we're lucky, more if we're not; liking it if we're lucky, tolerating it if we're not - so why in hell would it make sense for someone to waste an amazing opportunity to enrich themselves by learning about work in a field they may or may not actually enjoy once they get there?
Just because the universities may try to shape people for work, just because corporate interests can have an effect on the curriculum doesn't mean that the student has to go along with it. It's funny that you basically called me a sheep while you're the one who seems to believe he's powerless to do anything but what his corporate masters demand.
Of course, I'm biased... I've never had to pay a cent for any of my degrees (full scholarship for my undergrad [in the laughably "worthless according to you" field of natural philosophy, from a TINY liberal arts college], worked as a researcher for my graduate degree after taking a bit over 10 years in between to work and see the world) and I've had fantastic jobs between university experiences. If it so happens that I'm somehow serving someone else's nefarious plans, well, so be it - I'm definitely having a good time while doing it.
Because the purpose of an undergraduate university education is not to get a person a job, it's to help them become *educated* and able to explore many things to depths beyond a casual survey of fields. Of course, actually being *educated* (as opposed to just getting a degree) does help in many, many ways with jobs, but it's not really the point.
If you want a degree to get a job, that's what grad school is for. You have the rest of your life to become narrow, why make it happen sooner?
It doesn't really matter, actually, because the very fact that DRM is being used means that the publishers are out of touch with reality. If they were able to appreciate reality based arguments such as "people aren't buying your game because your DRM is abhorrent to them," they wouldn't be using DRM in the first place because they would have already understood the other reality based argument of "DRM won't stop the people you're actually worried about pirating your stuff from pirating it."
I like to game, and one of the (relatively minor) nits I face when trying to have fun gaming is DRM. Fortunately it's laughably easy to remove that I just more or less think of it as part of having this as a hobby. I suppose, if I didn't have better things to do, I *could* get up in arms about it, but... meh, it just isn't worth getting upset about.
(And, for the record, I'm loving Spore - the $50 plus the 30 seconds I spent getting and installing the crack is definitely a fair price to pay for the fun I've been having)
You can buy a real version and install it, then crack it so the DRM is disabled. That's what I did, and if it isn't legal, it's the kind of "illegal" that I don't care about.
Exactly. I have thousands of songs and when I'm listening to music, I just want to listen to what I want/how I want it. I don't want to have to fight my gadgets, and though I am a geeklet, I still don't understand people who enjoy overly complicated interfaces to do something simple.
Well, if you ignore the fact that this is a scam, kidnappings tend to be emotionally damaging. If someone truly felt that there was a credible threat to a loved one that they couldn't otherwise avoid, it makes sense, in that it would help their loved one avoid undue emotional distress and risk.
Of course, what makes more sense is contacting the FBI and saying "Hey, some asshole is threatening to kidnap my..." But who can say.
No, I got your point just fine, and you definitely missed mine:
The players in my example are NOT vying for the same thing. They are vying for whatever goals make sense to their faction. For some factions, that's total global domination. For other factions that might simply be survival. For other factions it could be global unification (world government, not conquest). For another it might be developing technology that allows them to leave the current world. For another it might be eradicating a disease. Etc. and so on. All different goals, but they do happen to intersect at points and, on occasion, in order to add some flavor, there ARE big events in the world where everyone has a similar goal because the events threaten their real goals if left unattended.
Here's the problem with your proposed episodic MMO: What happens when new players join? Can they do the old episodes? If so, isn't that just like current MMO's where new players start in newbie zones and do quests that veterans have already done? And what happens when players rush through the contents of the new episodes (because there will always be some people who do that)? SWG tried to have episodes, and what wound up happening was that people did them much faster than the designers intended, so you wound up with a months long wait between issues where people who wanted new episodes got bored. Really, if you want episodic content, single player games with sequels are the way to go.
The problem with MMO's is that in the current type, there's nothing meaningful for new players to do to make a contribution to the world. They help Joeschmuck the sage find the same cure for the same plague that veterans already did a million times before. They collect 10 bear asses to learn the same skill of bear ass cooking that a million other players already did. What I'm suggesting would make it so that there is always something meaningful for players at any level to do, something that will get your side closer to one of their many current goals and won't result in the current "LOL, that princess has been rescued a bajillion times already! They should get her some bodyguards so she doesn't get kidnapped!" thing. MMO's need to capitalize on the fact that there are tens of thousands (if not millions) of people who can play and contribute - there's no need for thousands of quests and storylines; the emergent behavior that happens in the world is the storyline, with the occasional big event thrown in.
Why have NPC's do things when you can get the players to do it instead?
I can easily see a person taking the profession of "City Defense Commander" where they have the role of re-building and defending cities from attack. They could start out with a limited knowledge of fortifications and defensive options available, but as they gain experience they can build thicker/better walls (or, rather, rally faster workers who can make better city improvements), grant special bonuses to people who are in the city (rested bonuses when not being attacked, combat bonuses, whatever). Make it so that there is a bonus for experienced city defense commanders to work with inexperienced players too so that you don't just have a "Get the best commander here" thing going on.
Ditto for other things that normally NPC's would do. Tree farming for resources to rebuild can be made interesting if the player isn't running around planting saplings but instead is someone who is either a trader (putting in orders to NPC quest brokers who then have other players chop down trees and bring them back to the broker who in turn sells them to the first player. This would let new players get a job (chopping down trees) and experienced players have a higher-level role (trader, etc.)
In SWG, a game that sucked for any number of reasons, the ONE thing they did VERY very well was the player run economy. At one point, I had 100 other players working for me (I made armor and weapons) doing various tasks. For example, I needed hundreds of thousands of various chemicals, ores, biological components in order to make LOTS of equipment to sell. So I hired a few dozen players to go out and hunt particular creatures and bring back their hides. I hired other players to simply put my factories, extractors, or other buildings on their "lots" because I could only have 10 lots personally. I hired someone else to run around scouting for new resources for me and good places to put my factories. I hired OTHER players to re-sell my armor and weapons on other planets because I could only have a fixed number of merchants. When I got tired of being a tycoon (well, when I amassed a fortune in the tens of billions of credits), I sold my stocks of materials (for another few billion credits) and then went out into the world to serve the Empire (because, of course, I also sold weapons in exchange for "faction points" so I was I think a Colonel in the Empire right from the get-go) and would just sort of hop around the galaxy doing things that entertained me. Personally, I would not have found running around skinning Womp Rats all that entertaining, but some people did, and so I paid them for it.
At every level of game play, there will be players who will want to do the jobs. Have a huge army? Well, some players will want to be grunts. Some will want to be squad leaders. Some will want to be Platoon leaders, and on and on and on. Give each level a special role to play and specific abilities that make the unit more effective and you will see that things naturally sort themselves out into a functioning unit. When people realize that being a General doesn't give them anything personally special that being a grunt doesn't, they won't strive to be the alpha dog (because there is no alpha dog), they'll try to find the role they *like*. If you have roles like General or "Faction Leader" open to players, but make keeping that job contingent upon successfully completing objectives, with failure resulting not only in demotion, but in npc town criers screaming "So and so: Worst Leader EVER, 'leads' army to CATASTROPHIC failure vs. Enemy!", players who really suck at the leadership type roles will find themselves naturally falling to the level of their competence, etc.
When I think of what could be done in WoW with it's player base of 10 million people with varying interests...
In a properly designed world, you don't need to have an end-point or only one overarching story. There would ideally be many dynamics going on at every point. Pretend that real-world countries are factions players can be a part of (and the world in the 19th century or so)
Player A joins the Prussian faction. Currently, the goals of the Prussians are securing a food supply and building up an army so that they can go to war with the French faction and conquer territory that would let them have easy access to the Atlantic Ocean resource.
Player B is a member of the British faction. Britain is currently involved in a massive empire expansion, trying to take over large swaths of territory in the tropical regions. Players in this faction might have to do things like find a new resource or establish a new trade-route, put down colonials who are trying to rebel and throw off the British yoke, etc.
Player C is a member of the United States faction. The US faction is at this point simply trying to establish dominance on their own continent (removing or otherwise assimilating native populations), establish a strong infrastructure, etc.
Player D is a member of the Iroquois faction and they are trying to fend off aggression by US faction players. Their cause of entirely repulsing the US faction is hopeless, but they can try to come to a more favorable situation than "die." Depending on how they play, and how the US faction plays, and maybe they can get help from other factions, they might be able to do things like stake out their own territory (a sovereign nation) or whatever.
It's a BIG world, why should there only be one or two storylines going on? One storyline might be resolved (temporarily, as in the case of the Prussian expansion leading to WW1, then to WW2, then to the Cold War), while another might be more permanently resolved (Native American/First People - probably not going to ever be much that will happen there again). And so on.
If you make quests versatile enough you don't need that many to keep players occupied and then you can have BIG events happen when certain thresholds are reached. For example, a World War might come about when the Prussians reach their objectives and that might trigger a whole bunch of new quests (blow up bridge foo over the river bar, capture 10 enemy soldiers from this camp for interrogation, kill 20 enemy players, find and steal the secret weapon from the enemy fortress, assassinate a specific general who has been doing way too well to replace them with a hopefully less capable subordinate, and on and on).
Players could take on MANY roles. Players who want to be well known might focus on careers/classes that would lead to fame (or infamy) - a player could try their hand at being a politician, entertainer, etc. Some players who don't want to be well known could focus on things like mercantilism, or soldering, or any number of other things. Each professional track could have a stock of quests that use different mechanics but can be repeated (just capturing one stronghold doesn't mean there aren't any more, etc).
I could easily see a game starting off with about 10-20 different "factions", each faction being able to dynamically change alliances depending on the actions of the players. Heck, get the ENTIRE player base unified against some larger (temporary) threat like the above mentioned zombie hordes or alien invasions, or whatever.
My total point is: forget having *one* story arc - why not have 50 of them all going on simultaneously?
I hear ya. I no longer buy PC games that have any kind of CD requirement or copy protection scheme other than a 1 time product key. Unless the game is an MMO, I don't want it checking the Internet unless I tell it to (to look for a patch, for example).
In fact, I'm so anal about this that when a game I would want to buy comes out but it laden with this stuff, I send email to various addresses at the developer and publisher to let them know that they are losing a sale because the only thing that copy protection schemes have done in my experience is inconvenience me when I'm just trying to relax and game.
Most of the time the emails get ignored, but in one case a fairly informative, friendly and interesting dialog with one of the key developers for a game ensued, and he sent me a free copy of the game.
The problem isn't that people want to create a new law and punish her with it (ex post facto ain't allowed [yet]) - it's that they want to twist the currently extant laws into some kind of tortured abortion so that they apply so they can get her.
I don't disagree that this couldn't have been the only factor, but I do think that the hounding and harassment of another human being or group of human beings with malicious intent/desire to cause psychological harm or distress *should* be illegal.
Some people are bullies. They don't just want to take the piss, they want to *HURT* their victims. They go out of their way to find someone who is, in their mind, vulnerable, and they use whatever means they can to harm them. If it was some guy who beat the shit out of a teenage boy you can bet he'd have his ass thrown in jail. Why not some woman who did the psychological equivalent to someone else?
It isn't the outcome of her behavior that is the most problematic - I don't think even a huge asshole such as Lori Drew expected the girl would kill herself - but the behavior itself. Anyone stalking and tormenting someone else in such a fashion should face charges, and the disparity of age should be an aggravating factor.
Anyway, in another comment I said that I think she should not go to jail, but I will not be bothered by the idea that she's going to likely face massive social retribution (ostracism, difficulty finding work, etc.) for what she did.
Any employer who hires people for above minimum wage (and even many of them) will have some process by which they do a google search on anyone who applies. Hell, my nephew got a job at a hot-dog stand at the beach last summer and they googled him! You might think that employers won't look, but they really do - it's very common now, and will be as ubiquitous as any other current part of the hiring process in short order.
If she changes her name, you can bet that at least one person who knows her will publicize the fact that she changed her name so that's no escape. And employers will look up her SSN and other names.
So she's basically screwed. She's not going to be able to find a job, she's going to be hounded by friends and family of her victim, and she's essentially going to face the same kind of social torment she inflicted on her victim. I want her to win her case - the current laws should not be twisted to get her - but fortunately her punishment of social ostracism will fit the crime.
What's interesting is that normally I am not a fan of vigilantism, but in this case I wonder if the reaction by people in general would be vigilantism or just normal social reaction to someone who is an asshole to the Nth degree? I know some people who are socially obnoxious (not to the point of hounding children to suicide, just obnoxious) and they're generally socially isolated as a result, so certainly if that's something that people don't get up in arms about, this definitely shouldn't.
A couple of years ago I had surgery that required me to stay in bed for 5 days without getting up at all. I couldn't even roll over onto my stomach, so I had to lie flat, sort of on my side, or propped up a little bit.
Hellish is a term that I would use to describe it, even though I had ample access to morphine and other drugs.
Some stories are GREAT in comics, but would suck horribly if faithfully adapted as movies. Some characters are fantastic in comics, but likewise would suck horribly if faithfully adapted to film.
Comics are not movies; movies are not comics. "Getting it right" when adapting a comic to a film doesn't mean following the comic as gospel; it means making a film that will appeal to a very broad audience in the hopes of making big bucks while hopefully keeping true to the spirit of the books (See: Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man) So, my suspicion is that the powers that be felt that Gambit and Blob would be more appropriate than Maverick, Mastadon and Kestrel for the purposes of making a film.
Personally, I prefer that the filmmakers not try to duplicate the comic - I've read the comics, and if I want to see them all I have to do is root around in a couple of long boxes until I find them. I want the movies to be new, different and good in their own way rather than simple retellings of old stories.
I *loved* the way that Batman and Spider-Man have been handled in their respective movies. Neither of them are entirely faithful to the comics: Batman isn't shown to be some kind of freakishly brilliant detective/inventor - he offloads that stuff to Lucius Fox; Peter Parker is smart, but he doesn't single-handedly invent technology that he could certainly patent and sell for billions of dollars - he's got organic webs. In both cases, there were plenty of people who were pissing and moaning about these issues, and yet the movies were very, very successful in both the financial and critical senses (I am pretending Spider-Man 3 didn't happen, though there were some aspects of that film that were brilliantly done that many people despise).
Minutes!? Are they a bit slow? No exaggeration, but my father, who is 84, going senile, and who has trouble operating automatic flushers in bathrooms, was given an iPhone and has been able to use the various features quite easily right off the bat.
Anyway, on topic, I suspect that one of the reasons the Apple stuff works the way it does is because people are TERRIFIED of Steve and where he will put his foot if they give him something fucked up. Anyone remember the "rant" that was posted online recently about how Bill Gates had issues using the Windows Update service? He was merely somewhat snarky and sarcastic; I imagine that anyone who gave Jobs an unpolished turd like that would literally burst into flame from the response.
I'm not sure what you mean about there not being enough quests in each zone to level (in WoW). A few months back they released a massive patch that changed the whole 1-60 game. They changed quests to give a lot more xp, reduced the amount of xp you needed to level, and re-itemized quest rewards and instance loot so that they're actually somewhat useful rather than being random garbage.
In the latest patch, they threw a bone in to make it even easier - mounts are now gotten at 30, for less gold, instead of at 40.
Also, when Burning Crusade came out, both the new starting zones for the 2 new races were put in, and those will easily get someone to 20, are (in my opinion) interesting, well designed, and generally a lot more fun than the old starting areas.
I agree that vanilla WoW was pretty meh at points, but they've done a bit to change it. I wouldn't mind if they kept on adding new zones, but there's a fair amount of content there now.
They are pushing out an unfinished product now, and in my experience with MMOs, when a company gets into the habit of pushing out now, fixing later, that sets the tone for the entire project. I have *no* reason to expect that they will change their behavior down the road and every reason to expect that they are going to keep up this kind of rush rush mentality.
What really nails it for me is that much of the removed stuff is "just" content - it isn't like they are saying "We wanted to add in x, y and z features which would be revolutionary and incredibly cool but it's just not technically feasible right now." They're saying "we couldn't have our art and content team finish 4/6ths of the game" - that screams of really bad project management, and really bad project management in MMOs generally leads to massive failure.
It will take a LOT of really glowing player reviews of WAR to get me to consider buying it, and it'll take longer than 6 months of said reviews, and both of those conditions are because of how they've handed their launch. If the game is still around, well received and going strong a year after launch, I'll consider it.
I won't buy it in 6 months because they've already established a precedent for rushing things out, unfinished, just to make a release date. If they'll do that for their launch, then it isn't much of a stretch to think they'll do that for anything else they add on to it. In other words, they have essentially issued a press release saying they are absolutely willing to put out a substandard offering to meet an arbitrary deadline.
Why would I want to buy a product from them now or in six months? Why would I want to play a game offered by a company willing to sacrifice quality in the name of expediency, knowing that such sacrifices will likely be made in the future as well since they're willing to fuck up their launch?
Personally, I wouldn't bother upgrading the internal HDD on a Mac, either as a DIY job or paying for it.
Why? Because the internal HDD on any Mac is going to be enough for OS, Applications, a pretty decent amount of documentation, etc. If you have lots and lots of stuff you want to have access to - image files, video, whatever - then I'd recommend buying an external drive or making your own. Yeah, the access is slower, but if speed of access is really important to you then you can just copy over the files you'll be using with and then clear 'em out after. Not an optimal solution, but it's fairly inexpensive.
I haven't had any real issues with this, but obviously different users will have different needs. If the external upgrade won't do it for you, then yeah, might as well pay a few bucks more for the upgrade.
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Stupid Flanders.
You're missing the point. The point I was making is that even if some people did make that argument for real, it's still an incredibly stupid argument because there are obvious and immediate advantages of CDs over cassettes that have nothing to do with the difference in sound but everything to do with certain frustrations people had in the experience of trying to listen to music. The fact that you heard very stupid people making arguments that completely ignored actual existing features doesn't change that.
BluRay has no such advantage over DVD currently. There is nothing I can do with a BluRay movie that I can't do with a DVD - I can just do a little bit more of it (or less if all my kit isn't compatible with the DRM). Somewhat better picture (assuming I have an expensive television), more special features (assuming I care about those) etc. Granted, quantity has a quality all it's own, but the leap in storage and resolution simply isn't that great - we're not getting entire runs of television series on one disk, which would be something that might actually matter to consumers.
You mention some unexpected possibility that a new movie would come out that people simply *must* own on BluRay. Can you explain what this mass-market phenomenon might be or what gives us any reason to think that simply tripling/quadrupling the storage space on the disk might somehow lead to millions and millions of people to buy into BluRay?
For the record, I was around when vinyl was the only game in town (unless you had a reel-to-reel) and I can tell you, we were *grateful* for it... wait, wrong meme. And, also for the record, I have a PS3 (thankfully it's the kind with the hardware emulation of PS2 games) and was given the Spider-Man trilogy on BluRay (which I am sure you can all imagine my glee at being given SM3 in HIGHER RESOLUTION so I could see each of Toby Maguire's emo tears as he pranced about) - I've got a decent television, I'm pretty well able to spot differences in image quality and such, and I couldn't really tell that much difference between the two from 12' away while things were exploding and such on screen.
The whole "make an argument look stupid by changing a couple of the words" thing would work better if you weren't wrong.
I don't know about you, but I consider being able to skip to a particular song without having to screw around with fast-forward/rewind and over/under-shooting as well as not having to worry about playback quality loss when the discs are properly cared for to be pretty huge advantages.
BluRay doesn't change the way people watch movies; CDs changed the way people listen to music.
The change to DVD from VHS was similarly huge - not just the improvement in quality, but not having to mess around with tracking, not having to fast-forward/rewind to get wherever, not having to spend movie watching time on stupid stuff that a machine does better.
My bet is on a combination of downloads and chip based storage being the real next gen format. I'd love it if I could either download a movie to whatever kind of personal media server I have (love it even more if I had a really easy way to access that same media server from wherever I happened to be on any device capable of hitting the net)(and I suspect this is the eventual set-up we'll have), but in the meantime I think it would be pretty reasonable to be able to get people to buy a fairly cheap box that connects to their TV/home theater that can download movies for playback & act as storage for movies that were bought. People could buy a movie by either downloading it to that box (for one price), buying it in a store on a new memory card (a bit more expensive to cover the physical cost of the card & as a premium for being able to easily make back-ups) or by plugging in their own memory card to a kiosk at a store (probably the cheapest per-movie rate, since the consumer is providing their own hardware, not using bandwidth).
That kind of situation would lead to some big changes in the experience people have watching movies at home.
"The right of free speech must be complete, absolute, and universal. Yes, you have to put up with assholes, but that's the price you pay for freedom."
There's a problem with what you said. The problem is when people act on misinformation or outright lies that have been passed along.
For example, let's say your neighbor publicly accuses you of molesting his 6-year-old daughter. In the US, at least, it pretty much won't matter if you are innocent - you're fucked just based on the accusation. Even if you're later completely exonerated, people will still remember you as that guy who might have molested a kid. You might lose your job, your marriage, your home, even your life, all because some asshole decided to spread lies about you.
I think it's awfully stupid that the general populace has such a "think of the children, don't think about anything else!" mentality, but that's the way it is, unfortunately. There need to be, not limits to free speech, but severe penalties for abusing that freedom when it causes real harm to other people.
"What I think would be cool is to implement a reporting system like the above and the offenders will be silenced from sending global messages after a certain number of people report them."
Bad idea. Large groups of people will grief regular players by mass reporting them.
What would be better is to design the game in such a way that people don't want to buy gold, they'd rather play.
Personally, I think a game like WoW would be MUCH better off if they simply allowed gold to be irrelevant - make it so all the stuff people really, really want to get (better equipment, faster mounts) is obtainable only through play. Instead of a fast flying mount costing 5k gold, make it require an incredibly challenging quest line. Instead of making skills/spells cost money, give them to the character when they hit the appropriate level and then make it so they have to use them to become fully effective (kind of like the way WoW's weapon skills work now, except a bit quicker). Gold should *purely* be seen as a way of getting stuff from NPC's like food, or paying rent on housing (housing that is initially earned through quests) and so on.
If I want to worry about money, I'll just deal with real life. I play MMO's to escape from that kind of thing and enjoy myself.
Libertarians are also, since we're making generalizations, bugfuck crazy.
Remember that guy who was running for Senate in one of the most Libertarian states imaginable (Montana) and he was so afraid of Y2K that he drank silver solution and turned himself blue?
Yeah. The best candidate the Libertarians could muster in their likely strongest state was Poppa Smurf.
Please wake me up when they field a candidate who isn't insane, then I'll listen.
Not propaganda, and not anything I "believed" or "blindly swallowed" that was fed to me - it's something I've come to believe about the world based on my own personal experiences.
I believe that I'm more than what I do for a living. I believe that learning things for the sake of learning them and knowing more about the world is a *good* thing. Most of us are going to spend roughly 1/3 of our waking hours in this life at work - less if we're lucky, more if we're not; liking it if we're lucky, tolerating it if we're not - so why in hell would it make sense for someone to waste an amazing opportunity to enrich themselves by learning about work in a field they may or may not actually enjoy once they get there?
Just because the universities may try to shape people for work, just because corporate interests can have an effect on the curriculum doesn't mean that the student has to go along with it. It's funny that you basically called me a sheep while you're the one who seems to believe he's powerless to do anything but what his corporate masters demand.
Of course, I'm biased... I've never had to pay a cent for any of my degrees (full scholarship for my undergrad [in the laughably "worthless according to you" field of natural philosophy, from a TINY liberal arts college], worked as a researcher for my graduate degree after taking a bit over 10 years in between to work and see the world) and I've had fantastic jobs between university experiences. If it so happens that I'm somehow serving someone else's nefarious plans, well, so be it - I'm definitely having a good time while doing it.
Because the purpose of an undergraduate university education is not to get a person a job, it's to help them become *educated* and able to explore many things to depths beyond a casual survey of fields. Of course, actually being *educated* (as opposed to just getting a degree) does help in many, many ways with jobs, but it's not really the point.
If you want a degree to get a job, that's what grad school is for. You have the rest of your life to become narrow, why make it happen sooner?
It doesn't really matter, actually, because the very fact that DRM is being used means that the publishers are out of touch with reality. If they were able to appreciate reality based arguments such as "people aren't buying your game because your DRM is abhorrent to them," they wouldn't be using DRM in the first place because they would have already understood the other reality based argument of "DRM won't stop the people you're actually worried about pirating your stuff from pirating it."
I like to game, and one of the (relatively minor) nits I face when trying to have fun gaming is DRM. Fortunately it's laughably easy to remove that I just more or less think of it as part of having this as a hobby. I suppose, if I didn't have better things to do, I *could* get up in arms about it, but... meh, it just isn't worth getting upset about.
(And, for the record, I'm loving Spore - the $50 plus the 30 seconds I spent getting and installing the crack is definitely a fair price to pay for the fun I've been having)
You can buy a real version and install it, then crack it so the DRM is disabled. That's what I did, and if it isn't legal, it's the kind of "illegal" that I don't care about.
Exactly. I have thousands of songs and when I'm listening to music, I just want to listen to what I want/how I want it. I don't want to have to fight my gadgets, and though I am a geeklet, I still don't understand people who enjoy overly complicated interfaces to do something simple.
Well, if you ignore the fact that this is a scam, kidnappings tend to be emotionally damaging. If someone truly felt that there was a credible threat to a loved one that they couldn't otherwise avoid, it makes sense, in that it would help their loved one avoid undue emotional distress and risk.
Of course, what makes more sense is contacting the FBI and saying "Hey, some asshole is threatening to kidnap my ..." But who can say.
No, I got your point just fine, and you definitely missed mine:
The players in my example are NOT vying for the same thing. They are vying for whatever goals make sense to their faction. For some factions, that's total global domination. For other factions that might simply be survival. For other factions it could be global unification (world government, not conquest). For another it might be developing technology that allows them to leave the current world. For another it might be eradicating a disease. Etc. and so on. All different goals, but they do happen to intersect at points and, on occasion, in order to add some flavor, there ARE big events in the world where everyone has a similar goal because the events threaten their real goals if left unattended.
Here's the problem with your proposed episodic MMO: What happens when new players join? Can they do the old episodes? If so, isn't that just like current MMO's where new players start in newbie zones and do quests that veterans have already done? And what happens when players rush through the contents of the new episodes (because there will always be some people who do that)? SWG tried to have episodes, and what wound up happening was that people did them much faster than the designers intended, so you wound up with a months long wait between issues where people who wanted new episodes got bored. Really, if you want episodic content, single player games with sequels are the way to go.
The problem with MMO's is that in the current type, there's nothing meaningful for new players to do to make a contribution to the world. They help Joeschmuck the sage find the same cure for the same plague that veterans already did a million times before. They collect 10 bear asses to learn the same skill of bear ass cooking that a million other players already did. What I'm suggesting would make it so that there is always something meaningful for players at any level to do, something that will get your side closer to one of their many current goals and won't result in the current "LOL, that princess has been rescued a bajillion times already! They should get her some bodyguards so she doesn't get kidnapped!" thing. MMO's need to capitalize on the fact that there are tens of thousands (if not millions) of people who can play and contribute - there's no need for thousands of quests and storylines; the emergent behavior that happens in the world is the storyline, with the occasional big event thrown in.
Why have NPC's do things when you can get the players to do it instead?
I can easily see a person taking the profession of "City Defense Commander" where they have the role of re-building and defending cities from attack. They could start out with a limited knowledge of fortifications and defensive options available, but as they gain experience they can build thicker/better walls (or, rather, rally faster workers who can make better city improvements), grant special bonuses to people who are in the city (rested bonuses when not being attacked, combat bonuses, whatever). Make it so that there is a bonus for experienced city defense commanders to work with inexperienced players too so that you don't just have a "Get the best commander here" thing going on.
Ditto for other things that normally NPC's would do. Tree farming for resources to rebuild can be made interesting if the player isn't running around planting saplings but instead is someone who is either a trader (putting in orders to NPC quest brokers who then have other players chop down trees and bring them back to the broker who in turn sells them to the first player. This would let new players get a job (chopping down trees) and experienced players have a higher-level role (trader, etc.)
In SWG, a game that sucked for any number of reasons, the ONE thing they did VERY very well was the player run economy. At one point, I had 100 other players working for me (I made armor and weapons) doing various tasks. For example, I needed hundreds of thousands of various chemicals, ores, biological components in order to make LOTS of equipment to sell. So I hired a few dozen players to go out and hunt particular creatures and bring back their hides. I hired other players to simply put my factories, extractors, or other buildings on their "lots" because I could only have 10 lots personally. I hired someone else to run around scouting for new resources for me and good places to put my factories. I hired OTHER players to re-sell my armor and weapons on other planets because I could only have a fixed number of merchants. When I got tired of being a tycoon (well, when I amassed a fortune in the tens of billions of credits), I sold my stocks of materials (for another few billion credits) and then went out into the world to serve the Empire (because, of course, I also sold weapons in exchange for "faction points" so I was I think a Colonel in the Empire right from the get-go) and would just sort of hop around the galaxy doing things that entertained me. Personally, I would not have found running around skinning Womp Rats all that entertaining, but some people did, and so I paid them for it.
At every level of game play, there will be players who will want to do the jobs. Have a huge army? Well, some players will want to be grunts. Some will want to be squad leaders. Some will want to be Platoon leaders, and on and on and on. Give each level a special role to play and specific abilities that make the unit more effective and you will see that things naturally sort themselves out into a functioning unit. When people realize that being a General doesn't give them anything personally special that being a grunt doesn't, they won't strive to be the alpha dog (because there is no alpha dog), they'll try to find the role they *like*. If you have roles like General or "Faction Leader" open to players, but make keeping that job contingent upon successfully completing objectives, with failure resulting not only in demotion, but in npc town criers screaming "So and so: Worst Leader EVER, 'leads' army to CATASTROPHIC failure vs. Enemy!", players who really suck at the leadership type roles will find themselves naturally falling to the level of their competence, etc.
When I think of what could be done in WoW with it's player base of 10 million people with varying interests...
In a properly designed world, you don't need to have an end-point or only one overarching story. There would ideally be many dynamics going on at every point. Pretend that real-world countries are factions players can be a part of (and the world in the 19th century or so)
Player A joins the Prussian faction. Currently, the goals of the Prussians are securing a food supply and building up an army so that they can go to war with the French faction and conquer territory that would let them have easy access to the Atlantic Ocean resource.
Player B is a member of the British faction. Britain is currently involved in a massive empire expansion, trying to take over large swaths of territory in the tropical regions. Players in this faction might have to do things like find a new resource or establish a new trade-route, put down colonials who are trying to rebel and throw off the British yoke, etc.
Player C is a member of the United States faction. The US faction is at this point simply trying to establish dominance on their own continent (removing or otherwise assimilating native populations), establish a strong infrastructure, etc.
Player D is a member of the Iroquois faction and they are trying to fend off aggression by US faction players. Their cause of entirely repulsing the US faction is hopeless, but they can try to come to a more favorable situation than "die." Depending on how they play, and how the US faction plays, and maybe they can get help from other factions, they might be able to do things like stake out their own territory (a sovereign nation) or whatever.
It's a BIG world, why should there only be one or two storylines going on? One storyline might be resolved (temporarily, as in the case of the Prussian expansion leading to WW1, then to WW2, then to the Cold War), while another might be more permanently resolved (Native American/First People - probably not going to ever be much that will happen there again). And so on.
If you make quests versatile enough you don't need that many to keep players occupied and then you can have BIG events happen when certain thresholds are reached. For example, a World War might come about when the Prussians reach their objectives and that might trigger a whole bunch of new quests (blow up bridge foo over the river bar, capture 10 enemy soldiers from this camp for interrogation, kill 20 enemy players, find and steal the secret weapon from the enemy fortress, assassinate a specific general who has been doing way too well to replace them with a hopefully less capable subordinate, and on and on).
Players could take on MANY roles. Players who want to be well known might focus on careers/classes that would lead to fame (or infamy) - a player could try their hand at being a politician, entertainer, etc. Some players who don't want to be well known could focus on things like mercantilism, or soldering, or any number of other things. Each professional track could have a stock of quests that use different mechanics but can be repeated (just capturing one stronghold doesn't mean there aren't any more, etc).
I could easily see a game starting off with about 10-20 different "factions", each faction being able to dynamically change alliances depending on the actions of the players. Heck, get the ENTIRE player base unified against some larger (temporary) threat like the above mentioned zombie hordes or alien invasions, or whatever.
My total point is: forget having *one* story arc - why not have 50 of them all going on simultaneously?
I hear ya. I no longer buy PC games that have any kind of CD requirement or copy protection scheme other than a 1 time product key. Unless the game is an MMO, I don't want it checking the Internet unless I tell it to (to look for a patch, for example).
In fact, I'm so anal about this that when a game I would want to buy comes out but it laden with this stuff, I send email to various addresses at the developer and publisher to let them know that they are losing a sale because the only thing that copy protection schemes have done in my experience is inconvenience me when I'm just trying to relax and game.
Most of the time the emails get ignored, but in one case a fairly informative, friendly and interesting dialog with one of the key developers for a game ensued, and he sent me a free copy of the game.
The problem isn't that people want to create a new law and punish her with it (ex post facto ain't allowed [yet]) - it's that they want to twist the currently extant laws into some kind of tortured abortion so that they apply so they can get her.
I don't disagree that this couldn't have been the only factor, but I do think that the hounding and harassment of another human being or group of human beings with malicious intent/desire to cause psychological harm or distress *should* be illegal.
Some people are bullies. They don't just want to take the piss, they want to *HURT* their victims. They go out of their way to find someone who is, in their mind, vulnerable, and they use whatever means they can to harm them. If it was some guy who beat the shit out of a teenage boy you can bet he'd have his ass thrown in jail. Why not some woman who did the psychological equivalent to someone else?
It isn't the outcome of her behavior that is the most problematic - I don't think even a huge asshole such as Lori Drew expected the girl would kill herself - but the behavior itself. Anyone stalking and tormenting someone else in such a fashion should face charges, and the disparity of age should be an aggravating factor.
Anyway, in another comment I said that I think she should not go to jail, but I will not be bothered by the idea that she's going to likely face massive social retribution (ostracism, difficulty finding work, etc.) for what she did.
Any employer who hires people for above minimum wage (and even many of them) will have some process by which they do a google search on anyone who applies. Hell, my nephew got a job at a hot-dog stand at the beach last summer and they googled him! You might think that employers won't look, but they really do - it's very common now, and will be as ubiquitous as any other current part of the hiring process in short order.
If she changes her name, you can bet that at least one person who knows her will publicize the fact that she changed her name so that's no escape. And employers will look up her SSN and other names.
So she's basically screwed. She's not going to be able to find a job, she's going to be hounded by friends and family of her victim, and she's essentially going to face the same kind of social torment she inflicted on her victim. I want her to win her case - the current laws should not be twisted to get her - but fortunately her punishment of social ostracism will fit the crime.
What's interesting is that normally I am not a fan of vigilantism, but in this case I wonder if the reaction by people in general would be vigilantism or just normal social reaction to someone who is an asshole to the Nth degree? I know some people who are socially obnoxious (not to the point of hounding children to suicide, just obnoxious) and they're generally socially isolated as a result, so certainly if that's something that people don't get up in arms about, this definitely shouldn't.
A couple of years ago I had surgery that required me to stay in bed for 5 days without getting up at all. I couldn't even roll over onto my stomach, so I had to lie flat, sort of on my side, or propped up a little bit.
Hellish is a term that I would use to describe it, even though I had ample access to morphine and other drugs.
$5000 a month isn't NEARLY enough.
Some stories are GREAT in comics, but would suck horribly if faithfully adapted as movies. Some characters are fantastic in comics, but likewise would suck horribly if faithfully adapted to film.
Comics are not movies; movies are not comics. "Getting it right" when adapting a comic to a film doesn't mean following the comic as gospel; it means making a film that will appeal to a very broad audience in the hopes of making big bucks while hopefully keeping true to the spirit of the books (See: Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man) So, my suspicion is that the powers that be felt that Gambit and Blob would be more appropriate than Maverick, Mastadon and Kestrel for the purposes of making a film.
Personally, I prefer that the filmmakers not try to duplicate the comic - I've read the comics, and if I want to see them all I have to do is root around in a couple of long boxes until I find them. I want the movies to be new, different and good in their own way rather than simple retellings of old stories.
I *loved* the way that Batman and Spider-Man have been handled in their respective movies. Neither of them are entirely faithful to the comics: Batman isn't shown to be some kind of freakishly brilliant detective/inventor - he offloads that stuff to Lucius Fox; Peter Parker is smart, but he doesn't single-handedly invent technology that he could certainly patent and sell for billions of dollars - he's got organic webs. In both cases, there were plenty of people who were pissing and moaning about these issues, and yet the movies were very, very successful in both the financial and critical senses (I am pretending Spider-Man 3 didn't happen, though there were some aspects of that film that were brilliantly done that many people despise).
Minutes!? Are they a bit slow? No exaggeration, but my father, who is 84, going senile, and who has trouble operating automatic flushers in bathrooms, was given an iPhone and has been able to use the various features quite easily right off the bat.
Anyway, on topic, I suspect that one of the reasons the Apple stuff works the way it does is because people are TERRIFIED of Steve and where he will put his foot if they give him something fucked up. Anyone remember the "rant" that was posted online recently about how Bill Gates had issues using the Windows Update service? He was merely somewhat snarky and sarcastic; I imagine that anyone who gave Jobs an unpolished turd like that would literally burst into flame from the response.
I'm not sure what you mean about there not being enough quests in each zone to level (in WoW). A few months back they released a massive patch that changed the whole 1-60 game. They changed quests to give a lot more xp, reduced the amount of xp you needed to level, and re-itemized quest rewards and instance loot so that they're actually somewhat useful rather than being random garbage.
In the latest patch, they threw a bone in to make it even easier - mounts are now gotten at 30, for less gold, instead of at 40.
Also, when Burning Crusade came out, both the new starting zones for the 2 new races were put in, and those will easily get someone to 20, are (in my opinion) interesting, well designed, and generally a lot more fun than the old starting areas.
I agree that vanilla WoW was pretty meh at points, but they've done a bit to change it. I wouldn't mind if they kept on adding new zones, but there's a fair amount of content there now.
They are pushing out an unfinished product now, and in my experience with MMOs, when a company gets into the habit of pushing out now, fixing later, that sets the tone for the entire project. I have *no* reason to expect that they will change their behavior down the road and every reason to expect that they are going to keep up this kind of rush rush mentality.
What really nails it for me is that much of the removed stuff is "just" content - it isn't like they are saying "We wanted to add in x, y and z features which would be revolutionary and incredibly cool but it's just not technically feasible right now." They're saying "we couldn't have our art and content team finish 4/6ths of the game" - that screams of really bad project management, and really bad project management in MMOs generally leads to massive failure.
It will take a LOT of really glowing player reviews of WAR to get me to consider buying it, and it'll take longer than 6 months of said reviews, and both of those conditions are because of how they've handed their launch. If the game is still around, well received and going strong a year after launch, I'll consider it.
I won't buy it in 6 months because they've already established a precedent for rushing things out, unfinished, just to make a release date. If they'll do that for their launch, then it isn't much of a stretch to think they'll do that for anything else they add on to it. In other words, they have essentially issued a press release saying they are absolutely willing to put out a substandard offering to meet an arbitrary deadline.
Why would I want to buy a product from them now or in six months? Why would I want to play a game offered by a company willing to sacrifice quality in the name of expediency, knowing that such sacrifices will likely be made in the future as well since they're willing to fuck up their launch?
Personally, I wouldn't bother upgrading the internal HDD on a Mac, either as a DIY job or paying for it.
Why? Because the internal HDD on any Mac is going to be enough for OS, Applications, a pretty decent amount of documentation, etc. If you have lots and lots of stuff you want to have access to - image files, video, whatever - then I'd recommend buying an external drive or making your own. Yeah, the access is slower, but if speed of access is really important to you then you can just copy over the files you'll be using with and then clear 'em out after. Not an optimal solution, but it's fairly inexpensive.
I haven't had any real issues with this, but obviously different users will have different needs. If the external upgrade won't do it for you, then yeah, might as well pay a few bucks more for the upgrade.