Men and women have different anxieties and fantasies. Different ethnicities have different anxieties and fantasies. Different ages have different anxieties and fantasies. (Much of the best manga and anime includes subtexts about the Japanese experience since World War 2 - the conflicts about memory, identity, guilt, and affiliation - that are at best misunderstood or more commonly simply missed by non-Japanese audiences. Series like Blue Submarine and Evangelion all have in common a sort of epiphany that the side for which one was fighting may have been in the wrong - there's an ambiguity about the relationship between duty and morality that comes from the modern Japanese historical experience.)
That doesn't mean you can't enjoy, understand, or appreciate stories that "target" or express concerns that aren't quite the same as yours - being able to understand the structure of an anxiety that you don't have is a sort of acquired skill, a kind of narrative literacy - and the general experience of anxiety, fear, love, etc. tends to be understandable by all, even if the contexts and structures in which those emotions occur are more specific. But the fact that different genres attract different demographics, and that producing for those genres garners audienceship in those demographics, demonstrates the point. Boys can enjoy Revolutionary Girl Utsena, as well, but statistically, the audiencship numbers will line up according to genre.
The specific anxieties of adolescent boys that I'm most explicitly addressing are those in which there's a sense of messianic purpose in conflict with anomie, isolation, and loneliness. That's very much part of the development of male identity in those years - a lot of kind of messianic/superhero fantasies are a way of testing possible social identities, and compensating for a profound feeling of persecuted powerlessness and shame. Girls aren't disqualified from having the same sort of complexes, it's just a social fact that, for the most part, they don't - in shorthand, girls anxieties are about competing with other girls for social status, while boys' are about accumaliting the trappings and apparata of power and authority.
And there's absolutely nothing sexist about it - any feminist film/literary theorist would not only agree with it, but observe that a refusal to note the fact of gender is, in a sense, a way of making the male universal.
Considering that how many Hondas and Toyotas sold in the US are made in the US with union labor, and how many Fords and Chevys are made in Mexico and Brazil, I think it has more to do with jingoistic national pride.
The US most certainly did not support Castro's taking over of Cuba. Batista enjoyed extensive support from American corporations, the American mafia, and the US government.
The original point is still valid: a serious gamer will have the system for which the games they want to play were targetted.
WineX is a crap shoot at best. Not that it isn't a noble and worthwhile effort, and if I weren't a serious gameplayer, I'd consider it a viable way to have one or two games to play in my Linux box. But I shop for my games without checking for WineX support - checking for WineX support first would be too limiting.
There are certain types of stories that speak to the anxieties and fantasies of adolescent boys, and until you get to the other side of adolesence, you probably won't recongize them.
Akira is not really one of them - Akira has a story that can appeal to adults of both genders (once you forgive portentuousness, which is *usually* a dead giveaway for a pitch at the young crowd. When you're young, everything interesting seems like a world-historical event; when you get older, seeing the world on such epic scale comes over as a bit silly.)
I travel, and play games on my laptop. I use Virtual CD to create a library of CD images of CD's that I already own, to save space. I don't know about the majority, but I know about my own practices.
The fact is that the dedicated deadbeat will scour for cracked versions and find them. I, a paying customer, will get frustrated after not being able to play games I've bought in a way convenient to myself.
Early frustrations with NWN actually motivated me to *find* a No-CD-crack site, which gave me opportunities to purloin that I'd never had bothered to look for before. I buy what I use, so I didn't avail myself of them (except to get a copy of NWN- which I did, mind you, pay for - that I could use while I travel) but such inconviences send paying customers into the arms of the warez kids. I really can't imagine this as something that the game producers would want to do.
For starters, 10K is not significant debt if your education can get you an income that makes up the difference quickly. In most fields, a college education can mean double the earning capacity. $10K would be an excellent investment.
Likewise, if you know what you want to study, a strong program in that field is more important than bargain hunting. If your plans include graduate school, the name on your BS or BA can make a lot of difference.
No, they aren't. A couple loudmouths in the Rio tourist board said that they were going to, but didn't. Brazil (as a federal gov't) didn't even mention the issue. Get your facts straight.
Real men have their overweight paid IT monkeys and clerical flunkies do all that crap while they go have sex with starlets and supermodels on their Surface-to-Air-Missle equipped luxury hover-yachts.
One one hand, it's helpful to have scholars challenge the old assumption that video games create behavorial problems in the young. Japan's use of video games is definitely in the "catharsis theory" school, allowing people - often adults - to do things they can't or shouldn't do in real life. There are arcade simulators that let men grab virtual asses in simulated subways!
Ultimately, however, what will protect video games from censorship will be free speech issues, not arguments about level of or lack of harm. The fact the more and more video game players are adults will help build consensus for thinking of them as a full-fledged media, and not just a children's toy.
The point of the newsiness of the story is that 1. it gives credence to those of us who claimed that the Patriot Act was unconstitutional, and 2. provides the possible basis of a test case. That's the issue. It's not just a matter of blaming the school - in fact, the school may be doing the best thing possible for civil liberties, by setting up a good test-case for the constitutionality of the Patriot Act - but of identifying - accurately - the situation as one of censorship directly attributable to the Patriot Act.
Going back to your original post (the everpopular, often glib "hey, what's the big deal" post), that's the big deal.
The UC system, of which UCSD is a part (UCSD is part of the research triumverate, with Berkeley and UCLA) is a state school. It is also the most highly rated state school in the country, and one of the top universities in the world.
In Mexico, there was a crackdown on small cybercafes using pirated copies of Windows. A few big busts happen, word gets out, and everyone panics. Many cybercafes start installing Linux everywhere, since they simply can't afford the retail price of Windows.
This hurts Microsoft more than it helps. It weakens their monopoly. On the other hand, they can't lower their prices in Mexico significantly below what it is in the US, or else everyone in the US will simply go down to Mexico to get their licenses. It makes better sense for them to selectively enforce against deep-pocketed violaters (including legitimate businesses that might have just a couple yahoos who install a couple too many copies of a piece of software they otherwise legitimately license) and to leave the streets and schools alone. This is a logic that everyone had been citing for ages, but the BSA had been "debunking" it - until the free software started getting installed everywhere.
If they are using a proxy server, they are hosting those files on site. Interesting that anyone runnng a proxy server now may be, in fact, violating the Patriot Act, by "hosting" terrorist information on their hardware.
Additionally, material support could be interpreted to include publicity and propaganda.
1. It's a public school. And a world-class research institute, at that. A school that gets lots of federal money. That increases their free-speech mandate.
2. They aren't saying "UCSD will not allow this." They are citing Federal law. They interpret the Patriot Act as making that link illegal. That's a direct first amendment issue.
So many people don't understand this: a few principled hold-out - unorganized, isolated, idiosyncratic - are irrelevant in terms of the momentum of Palladium/DRM-type developments. Opposition to it has to be organized - a PR campaign against the loss of consumer rights and personal freedom. Too many mistake this for saying that what is called for is a governmental solution (although a truth-in-advertising law - demanding that rights-limiting technologies boldly and explicitly advertise "YOU WILL BE UNABLE TO COPY YOUR MUSIC AND DATA IN MANY SITUATIONS USING THIS DEVICE", might not be a bad bit of legislation), but at least as important is simply embarassing hardware manufacturers and content distributors away from such techniques.
So, does this qualify as "Flame Bait" or "Troll"?:)
As simply wrong. The Soviet Union did very poorly by its own citizens, but its military posture was always defensive, and even conservative US military analysts will largely agree. Taking over the world was not their goal. Extending their "sphere of influence," on the other hand, was - as it is that of the US.
Given a choice between being an American, and having a good understanding of history, economics, languages, and the difference between not being able to afford recent technology and not being able to eat, I'll take what's behind door number 2.
It's not that all Americans are this clueless - it's just that the attitude betrayed by the parent post is particularly irksome. Americans are resented for their cultural and political hegemony, not because everyone else is starving.
Actually, I'm not sure about the GameCube games, either - those may have actually been legitimate (and there were very few of them - it's definitely not the platform of choice here at all, what with the new GameCube costing about $700 US. Yes, that's correct - it would be cheaper for someone to fly to the US, buy one, and bring it in, but most just get a PSOne.) But PC, PlayStation, and PS/2 - plenty of those.
In Latin America, piracy of both PC games and console games is rampant (and reasonably so - a typical game costs the same as a week's salary; this is a fact after recent economic crises, which means that some people have PC's or consoles that they could afford before their currencies devalued, but now cannot afford to purchase games for them legally). The selling of pirated games is completely tolerated at this point - many stores in malls sell obviously pirated Playstation, PS/2, and GameCube games openly, in window displays. However, PC games are still more popular. Largely this is because many people game at LAN cafes, and because it's easier to justify buying a computer than a console when under budgetary duress.
I'm told that South Korea is almost all PC-based gaming, because of both the institution of PC cafes that act as a nexus of social life (in fact, I think I read that on/.) as well the fact that consoles are associated with the hated Japan.
That's such a feeble and passive response, it's sad. So you keep your money. You think that's going to make the music industry change it's mind?
The bulk of the market for music is between 12 and 20. That's a fairly non-discriminating set of consumers that are very unlikely to give up the pleasures of youth-culture consumption just to protect their rights. Would you have gone without music during those years (assuming a reasonably social adolescence). Remember, we don't have an infinite amount of time in the world - "doing without music" until some theoretical market victory is a pretty extreme step that most people - definitely not enough people to make an effect - are going to do.
Now, I can see this one technology failing to take hold, but a general boycott against the recording industry just isn't going to work. The pressure needs to be more direct, louder, more visible, and more political.
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That doesn't mean you can't enjoy, understand, or appreciate stories that "target" or express concerns that aren't quite the same as yours - being able to understand the structure of an anxiety that you don't have is a sort of acquired skill, a kind of narrative literacy - and the general experience of anxiety, fear, love, etc. tends to be understandable by all, even if the contexts and structures in which those emotions occur are more specific. But the fact that different genres attract different demographics, and that producing for those genres garners audienceship in those demographics, demonstrates the point. Boys can enjoy Revolutionary Girl Utsena, as well, but statistically, the audiencship numbers will line up according to genre.
The specific anxieties of adolescent boys that I'm most explicitly addressing are those in which there's a sense of messianic purpose in conflict with anomie, isolation, and loneliness. That's very much part of the development of male identity in those years - a lot of kind of messianic/superhero fantasies are a way of testing possible social identities, and compensating for a profound feeling of persecuted powerlessness and shame. Girls aren't disqualified from having the same sort of complexes, it's just a social fact that, for the most part, they don't - in shorthand, girls anxieties are about competing with other girls for social status, while boys' are about accumaliting the trappings and apparata of power and authority.
And there's absolutely nothing sexist about it - any feminist film/literary theorist would not only agree with it, but observe that a refusal to note the fact of gender is, in a sense, a way of making the male universal.
Considering that how many Hondas and Toyotas sold in the US are made in the US with union labor, and how many Fords and Chevys are made in Mexico and Brazil, I think it has more to do with jingoistic national pride.
The US most certainly did not support Castro's taking over of Cuba. Batista enjoyed extensive support from American corporations, the American mafia, and the US government.
WineX is a crap shoot at best. Not that it isn't a noble and worthwhile effort, and if I weren't a serious gameplayer, I'd consider it a viable way to have one or two games to play in my Linux box. But I shop for my games without checking for WineX support - checking for WineX support first would be too limiting.
Akira is not really one of them - Akira has a story that can appeal to adults of both genders (once you forgive portentuousness, which is *usually* a dead giveaway for a pitch at the young crowd. When you're young, everything interesting seems like a world-historical event; when you get older, seeing the world on such epic scale comes over as a bit silly.)
The fact is that the dedicated deadbeat will scour for cracked versions and find them. I, a paying customer, will get frustrated after not being able to play games I've bought in a way convenient to myself.
Early frustrations with NWN actually motivated me to *find* a No-CD-crack site, which gave me opportunities to purloin that I'd never had bothered to look for before. I buy what I use, so I didn't avail myself of them (except to get a copy of NWN- which I did, mind you, pay for - that I could use while I travel) but such inconviences send paying customers into the arms of the warez kids. I really can't imagine this as something that the game producers would want to do.
For starters, 10K is not significant debt if your education can get you an income that makes up the difference quickly. In most fields, a college education can mean double the earning capacity. $10K would be an excellent investment.
Likewise, if you know what you want to study, a strong program in that field is more important than bargain hunting. If your plans include graduate school, the name on your BS or BA can make a lot of difference.
He's just not a very good Kantian. :)
What does the size of the gun matter? All that matters is who gets the first clear shot. What, you think most gunplay is High Noon quick-draw crap?
No, they aren't. A couple loudmouths in the Rio tourist board said that they were going to, but didn't. Brazil (as a federal gov't) didn't even mention the issue. Get your facts straight.
Damn, don't you learn anything from the movies?
Then I learned how hard it is to play SSX while in traction.
But wait til GTA4!
Ultimately, however, what will protect video games from censorship will be free speech issues, not arguments about level of or lack of harm. The fact the more and more video game players are adults will help build consensus for thinking of them as a full-fledged media, and not just a children's toy.
Going back to your original post (the everpopular, often glib "hey, what's the big deal" post), that's the big deal.
The UC system, of which UCSD is a part (UCSD is part of the research triumverate, with Berkeley and UCLA) is a state school. It is also the most highly rated state school in the country, and one of the top universities in the world.
In Mexico, there was a crackdown on small cybercafes using pirated copies of Windows. A few big busts happen, word gets out, and everyone panics. Many cybercafes start installing Linux everywhere, since they simply can't afford the retail price of Windows.
This hurts Microsoft more than it helps. It weakens their monopoly. On the other hand, they can't lower their prices in Mexico significantly below what it is in the US, or else everyone in the US will simply go down to Mexico to get their licenses. It makes better sense for them to selectively enforce against deep-pocketed violaters (including legitimate businesses that might have just a couple yahoos who install a couple too many copies of a piece of software they otherwise legitimately license) and to leave the streets and schools alone. This is a logic that everyone had been citing for ages, but the BSA had been "debunking" it - until the free software started getting installed everywhere.
Additionally, material support could be interpreted to include publicity and propaganda.
1. It's a public school. And a world-class research institute, at that. A school that gets lots of federal money. That increases their free-speech mandate.
2. They aren't saying "UCSD will not allow this." They are citing Federal law. They interpret the Patriot Act as making that link illegal. That's a direct first amendment issue.
So many people don't understand this: a few principled hold-out - unorganized, isolated, idiosyncratic - are irrelevant in terms of the momentum of Palladium/DRM-type developments. Opposition to it has to be organized - a PR campaign against the loss of consumer rights and personal freedom. Too many mistake this for saying that what is called for is a governmental solution (although a truth-in-advertising law - demanding that rights-limiting technologies boldly and explicitly advertise "YOU WILL BE UNABLE TO COPY YOUR MUSIC AND DATA IN MANY SITUATIONS USING THIS DEVICE", might not be a bad bit of legislation), but at least as important is simply embarassing hardware manufacturers and content distributors away from such techniques.
As simply wrong. The Soviet Union did very poorly by its own citizens, but its military posture was always defensive, and even conservative US military analysts will largely agree. Taking over the world was not their goal. Extending their "sphere of influence," on the other hand, was - as it is that of the US.
It's not that all Americans are this clueless - it's just that the attitude betrayed by the parent post is particularly irksome. Americans are resented for their cultural and political hegemony, not because everyone else is starving.
Actually, I'm not sure about the GameCube games, either - those may have actually been legitimate (and there were very few of them - it's definitely not the platform of choice here at all, what with the new GameCube costing about $700 US. Yes, that's correct - it would be cheaper for someone to fly to the US, buy one, and bring it in, but most just get a PSOne.) But PC, PlayStation, and PS/2 - plenty of those.
I'm told that South Korea is almost all PC-based gaming, because of both the institution of PC cafes that act as a nexus of social life (in fact, I think I read that on /.) as well the fact that consoles are associated with the hated Japan.
The bulk of the market for music is between 12 and 20. That's a fairly non-discriminating set of consumers that are very unlikely to give up the pleasures of youth-culture consumption just to protect their rights. Would you have gone without music during those years (assuming a reasonably social adolescence). Remember, we don't have an infinite amount of time in the world - "doing without music" until some theoretical market victory is a pretty extreme step that most people - definitely not enough people to make an effect - are going to do.
Now, I can see this one technology failing to take hold, but a general boycott against the recording industry just isn't going to work. The pressure needs to be more direct, louder, more visible, and more political.