Moral ambiguity bothers children, not adults. To the extent that there are older people who can not appreciate moral ambiguity, we have extended childhood into the adult years. Clearly, then, Homefront is a game for children, like most games.
(Aggrieved gamers: please don't citing the list of games like Bioshock or Mass Effect or Heavy Rain with moral ambiguity in them. I know a great deal about these - and other, more independent - games already. Of those three, I think only Heavy Rain truly avoids moral simplicity, but that's neither here nor there.)
People still want films that haven't been made yet. So, in a world where you can't get people to pay for something after it's been made, pay will occur, mostly, before, rather than after production - which is how it used to be with music and theater.
Think "Kickstarter" was known producers and directors: if enough fans want something, they pay five or ten dollars and it goes into an escrow account until the film is made. If it stinks, the reputation-capital of the people involved drops and they have trouble getting funded for their next project.
This restores things like music and film making to what they should be: a service. Otherwise, the film industry is a textbook case of what is called "rent-seeking behavior."
I'm contemptuous of a lot of the self-justifying talk of people who leech software and try to get something for free without compensating the producer, but I'm afraid that the GP - and the others on this thread - have a point. I'm pretty religious about paying for what I use: I may want music to become a service and find new funding models, but until those models are developed, I want musicians to get paid. Same with games, etc.
But DRM has pushed me into the piracy camp, as well, I actually buy a copy of the game, but then run the pirated edition. I can't say that I'm surprised that a lot of people who might otherwise be honest get pushed into skipping the first half of that equation out of sheer frustration - after all, it gets tempting to simply grab and "try" another game once you're in the piracy "ecosystem."
What is depressing is when you see this kind of corporate-brand fandom in adults. Almost always males, and usually very neurotic and often under-sexed. Paraphilias for sexually frustrated people is nothing new: cathexis into a brand is.
Remember, these are people for whom being beaten at a game by a cheater is one of the the worst thing that's happened in their lives. You can't really expect a lot of perspective.
Look, Sony not-supporting someone who tries to get back Other OS is one thing. It was poor manners for Sony to use an update (which people usually just click through, because you can't really plop in a game without it pushing you to update) but within their rights. Going after someone who, on a system that they bought, finds out how to do it themselves is something else. That is the issue, more than anything else. Not seeing this is simply being an ostrich.
If Sony wants to shut off anyone who tinkers with their hardware from PSN, I'm OK with that. Using technology to prevent piracy and cheating, that's OK. With their onine services, I'm alright with "their house, their rules."
But mucking with the right of someone to tinker with hardware that they've already bought, so that they can use it in their own homes the way they want to (and share that with others) by filing charges, civil and even criminal, is Orwellian. It's such an over-reach of corporate arrogance and coopting of the legal system, it really needs to be shouted down as the backward-thinking anti-humanist gesture it really is. And that was the point of my post.
Like I mention up-thread, I wonder if the campaign to identify and harass the families of Sony executives compelled him to settle. It looked like he was ready to go to the trenches until that started.
To be honest, Geohot strikes me as principled and ethical. He may have also been horrified at the targeting of the families of Sony execs by that Anonymous splinter group, and decided to step back, accept this compromise, and let it end.
I was going to say "your right to a walled garden stops where my right to tinker with the things I've bought begins," but I'll go farther and say that it is depressing that our roles in society as consumers has eclipsed and dominates are status in society as citizens. Because even if, at the end of the day, you recognize that your convenience is not important enough to justify legal action someone who has tinkered with what they've purchased, there are thousands and thousands of people who do not recognize that.
It puts me in the "we just can't have nice things (like a civil democracy)" camp.
Trying to turn the Bible into a secretly liberal-minded, humanistic text is a failed enterprise. Ultimately, the Bible does advocate the severe intolerance of a nomadic desert tribe, softened in the new testament by a cosmopolitanism introduced by a trans-cultural empire. Better to reject the absurd idea that this collection of texts is the word of God than trying to make it a sock-puppet for our 21st century ideas of fairness.
The concept of zero doesn't need a lot of cognitive preparation, and the non-flatness of the earth (which was actually recognized over 2000 years ago: the whole Columbus / flat earth thing is a myth) is a simple one-shot learning fact. Quantum mechanics has a lot of dependencies to be understood: mathematical and otherwise. You can't squeeze all those dependencies into the brains of children, generally speaking, give or take the occasional neurologically atypical savant.
IIf I walk up to a person of faith and tell them their belief is wrong, the best I can hope for is to be labelled a heretic or infidel. As often as not, I can expect some form of retaliation, in some cases extreme enough to risk death.
You can be labelled an "idiot" for disagreeing with a scientist (or a "religious fanatic") even if you're motivation isn't religious. Depending on your circumstances, disagreeing with the wrong science can have serious career consequences.
And many people of faith - I'm not a person of faith, mind you, but I think the rampant idealization and fantasies about science are out of control - will just shrug if you tell them "they are wrong," or point out what many theorists of religion observe: that religion isn't even really about beliefs and explanations, but about entire ways of living, of which the "doctrines" are just expressions. (http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s07e12-all-about-the-mormons)
You are living out your own mythological narrative: the Battle of the Enlightened Rationalist against the Superstitious Horde. It's nonsense in its own right.
If you include the economic value of the area that may have to remain depopulated around Fukushima, how does it stack up?
My own position on this is: I don't like anti-technology hysteria. But I also don't trust the nuclear energy industry, I distrust the hubris of many pro-nuclear advocates, and I'm not a nuclear scientist. I don't entirely trust nuclear scientists, either - not that they are being willfully deceptive, but that they can sometimes deceive themselves, because they are, at the end of the day, also liable to a kind of peer-pressure and group-think. I have no idea what will happen with Fukushima, but I've whiplashed between being anti-nuke to pro-nuke to a stubborn skepticism all around.
The problem is that the cost of a less efficient bulb is partially externalized. The superiority of the CFL is not in the "consumer experience."
The regulation of the meat industry was certainly not to the detriment of the common man, nor the regulation of the auto industry or the aviation industry. The regulation of the toy industry has definitely helped far more than its hurt, by orders of magnitude.
You should try to spend time in de facto unregulated society for a while before you make categorical, religious claims like the above.
Slashdot Mirror
Moral ambiguity bothers children, not adults. To the extent that there are older people who can not appreciate moral ambiguity, we have extended childhood into the adult years. Clearly, then, Homefront is a game for children, like most games.
(Aggrieved gamers: please don't citing the list of games like Bioshock or Mass Effect or Heavy Rain with moral ambiguity in them. I know a great deal about these - and other, more independent - games already. Of those three, I think only Heavy Rain truly avoids moral simplicity, but that's neither here nor there.)
People still want films that haven't been made yet. So, in a world where you can't get people to pay for something after it's been made, pay will occur, mostly, before, rather than after production - which is how it used to be with music and theater.
Think "Kickstarter" was known producers and directors: if enough fans want something, they pay five or ten dollars and it goes into an escrow account until the film is made. If it stinks, the reputation-capital of the people involved drops and they have trouble getting funded for their next project.
This restores things like music and film making to what they should be: a service. Otherwise, the film industry is a textbook case of what is called "rent-seeking behavior."
I'm contemptuous of a lot of the self-justifying talk of people who leech software and try to get something for free without compensating the producer, but I'm afraid that the GP - and the others on this thread - have a point. I'm pretty religious about paying for what I use: I may want music to become a service and find new funding models, but until those models are developed, I want musicians to get paid. Same with games, etc.
But DRM has pushed me into the piracy camp, as well, I actually buy a copy of the game, but then run the pirated edition. I can't say that I'm surprised that a lot of people who might otherwise be honest get pushed into skipping the first half of that equation out of sheer frustration - after all, it gets tempting to simply grab and "try" another game once you're in the piracy "ecosystem."
I would rather have no homebrew, lots of cheating, and a modicum of dignity and civil rights.
What is depressing is when you see this kind of corporate-brand fandom in adults. Almost always males, and usually very neurotic and often under-sexed. Paraphilias for sexually frustrated people is nothing new: cathexis into a brand is.
Remember, these are people for whom being beaten at a game by a cheater is one of the the worst thing that's happened in their lives. You can't really expect a lot of perspective.
Look, Sony not-supporting someone who tries to get back Other OS is one thing. It was poor manners for Sony to use an update (which people usually just click through, because you can't really plop in a game without it pushing you to update) but within their rights. Going after someone who, on a system that they bought, finds out how to do it themselves is something else. That is the issue, more than anything else. Not seeing this is simply being an ostrich.
You really don't get where I'm drawing the line.
If Sony wants to shut off anyone who tinkers with their hardware from PSN, I'm OK with that. Using technology to prevent piracy and cheating, that's OK. With their onine services, I'm alright with "their house, their rules."
But mucking with the right of someone to tinker with hardware that they've already bought, so that they can use it in their own homes the way they want to (and share that with others) by filing charges, civil and even criminal, is Orwellian. It's such an over-reach of corporate arrogance and coopting of the legal system, it really needs to be shouted down as the backward-thinking anti-humanist gesture it really is. And that was the point of my post.
Like I mention up-thread, I wonder if the campaign to identify and harass the families of Sony executives compelled him to settle. It looked like he was ready to go to the trenches until that started.
To be honest, Geohot strikes me as principled and ethical. He may have also been horrified at the targeting of the families of Sony execs by that Anonymous splinter group, and decided to step back, accept this compromise, and let it end.
I was going to say "your right to a walled garden stops where my right to tinker with the things I've bought begins," but I'll go farther and say that it is depressing that our roles in society as consumers has eclipsed and dominates are status in society as citizens. Because even if, at the end of the day, you recognize that your convenience is not important enough to justify legal action someone who has tinkered with what they've purchased, there are thousands and thousands of people who do not recognize that.
It puts me in the "we just can't have nice things (like a civil democracy)" camp.
Trying to turn the Bible into a secretly liberal-minded, humanistic text is a failed enterprise. Ultimately, the Bible does advocate the severe intolerance of a nomadic desert tribe, softened in the new testament by a cosmopolitanism introduced by a trans-cultural empire. Better to reject the absurd idea that this collection of texts is the word of God than trying to make it a sock-puppet for our 21st century ideas of fairness.
I think that makes you Sony. Sorry. Hopefully, though, you didn't pick up the paranoid schizophrenia.
There is no priestly class?
Haven't you gone to grad school yet?
The concept of zero doesn't need a lot of cognitive preparation, and the non-flatness of the earth (which was actually recognized over 2000 years ago: the whole Columbus / flat earth thing is a myth) is a simple one-shot learning fact. Quantum mechanics has a lot of dependencies to be understood: mathematical and otherwise. You can't squeeze all those dependencies into the brains of children, generally speaking, give or take the occasional neurologically atypical savant.
IIf I walk up to a person of faith and tell them their belief is wrong, the best I can hope for is to be labelled a heretic or infidel. As often as not, I can expect some form of retaliation, in some cases extreme enough to risk death.
You can be labelled an "idiot" for disagreeing with a scientist (or a "religious fanatic") even if you're motivation isn't religious. Depending on your circumstances, disagreeing with the wrong science can have serious career consequences.
And many people of faith - I'm not a person of faith, mind you, but I think the rampant idealization and fantasies about science are out of control - will just shrug if you tell them "they are wrong," or point out what many theorists of religion observe: that religion isn't even really about beliefs and explanations, but about entire ways of living, of which the "doctrines" are just expressions. (http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s07e12-all-about-the-mormons)
You are living out your own mythological narrative: the Battle of the Enlightened Rationalist against the Superstitious Horde. It's nonsense in its own right.
Blame Chris Vogler and Robert McKee.
It needed a lot more programs and a lot less monomyth. I found the grid a lot more interesting than the "hero's journey."
Hahaha. Patents expiring, things entering the public domain. Haha. That's a good one. Tell me, how's the weather in the 19th century?
He said "rouge" app. So, apps that make you blush. As good a litmus as any.
But TEPCO is a private business. The free market will sort this all out! We don't want to start getting crazy with regulation, do we?
If you include the economic value of the area that may have to remain depopulated around Fukushima, how does it stack up?
My own position on this is: I don't like anti-technology hysteria. But I also don't trust the nuclear energy industry, I distrust the hubris of many pro-nuclear advocates, and I'm not a nuclear scientist. I don't entirely trust nuclear scientists, either - not that they are being willfully deceptive, but that they can sometimes deceive themselves, because they are, at the end of the day, also liable to a kind of peer-pressure and group-think. I have no idea what will happen with Fukushima, but I've whiplashed between being anti-nuke to pro-nuke to a stubborn skepticism all around.
For the "massive majority," 99 cents is close to a day's earnings. What you mean is "the massive majority of the people who I think matter."
The problem is that the cost of a less efficient bulb is partially externalized. The superiority of the CFL is not in the "consumer experience."
The regulation of the meat industry was certainly not to the detriment of the common man, nor the regulation of the auto industry or the aviation industry. The regulation of the toy industry has definitely helped far more than its hurt, by orders of magnitude.
You should try to spend time in de facto unregulated society for a while before you make categorical, religious claims like the above.
It's measured in the ability to RTFM, which Chinese scientists seems to excel at:
"The figures are based on the papers published in recognised international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier."