Right now my favorite Wii game is "Everybody Votes,"
Which kind of nicely shows that the Wii is in trouble right now.
Not really. I don't mean it as a condemnation of the Wii at all. What I mean is that the user interface of Everybody Votes really sucks me in so that I feel like have to check it every time they update the poll to see what the new question is and to see if I predicted the last answer right. If Nintendo can make a friggin' poll compelling just by having you grab a Mii instead of just clicking a button, then I'm sure the Wii has a future.
Also, I don't agree that Zelda is the "bad" kind of motion control. If anything what Zelda tells us is that you can make games for the Wii that are the same as traditional button based games with no compromises. So, there doesn't have to be a binary choice between a system with motion controls and traditional games. Zelda tells us that one system can do both. Now, it's true that the sword swinging mechanism of Zelda isn't really treated differently by the system than a simple button press, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel different to the user. Fighting with motion controls (particular the shield attack and spin attack on the nunchuck) is more visceral. It is a little worse for some timing things (I'm thinking particularly of the first form of the final boss, where you have to reflect fireballs with well timed sword swings), but in ordinary fights, the motion control is just more fun and preferable to button based controls. Plus, aiming with the Wii Remote is superior to aiming with a thumb stick (though admittedly still inferior to a mouse in terms of speed and accuracy).
My prediction is that the Xbox 720 and the PlayStation 4 are going to also include a Wii-like system for direct pointing and motion detection. (Though hopefully, they'll come up with a way to do this without a sensor bar.) It lets you play a wider range of games without harming the ability to play traditional games. It's the future.
I don't think it's fair to just say "motion control is a gimmick" and close the book. What makes us so sure that button mashing isn't a gimmick? My girlfriend is still playing WiiSports regularly as a fitness thing. Right now my favorite Wii game is "Everybody Votes," since I already beat Zelda (twice) and Elebits, but I'm still excited for Super Paper Mario. Yes, some people may get tired of the Wii, but it's crazy to say everyone will, especially when you consider the wide range of games that are being made for the Wii, from the goofy party games (Wario Ware, WiiPlay) to traditional games (Mario Galaxy, Metriod, Smash) to RPGs (Fire Emblem, Square stuff) to retro stuff (Virtual Console) to weird genre breakers (Cooking Mama, Wii Music)...
You know Nintendo is going to come out with new colors of Wii with extra features like DVD playback in a year or so. (Or they could add a 120GB HD, paint it black, and take out the WiFi adapter then call it "Wii Elite.";-p ) The question is, will I be allowed to move my Virtual Console games to the new machine if I purge the old one before reselling it? It seems like we should be allowed to, but so far I haven't seen evidence that we will, which kind of screws over the early adopters who want to upgrade later.
Dude, I totally heard a rumor from a guy who's uncle works at Nintendo that with the next Wii Channels update, they'll add one called, "Small Talk Age," that trains your brain to do small talk until you can do it as effortlessly as a 20 year old (girl).
You're thinking of Republicans and Democrats. Their opposition is all for show, and both sides will shift policies if they think they can gain votes from it.
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank -- that is to say, they have a firm pro-market ideology that they don't deviate from.
Krugman is a classical liberal economist. He's not just a Democratic talking head. For example, unlike most of the Congressional Democrats in '02, he opposed the war.
There's a time for saying "tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum" but that time is not when we're talking about Cato and Krugman.
Don't let the sin of one company muddy the waters for the rest of the power companies with nuclear plants.
The problem is that nuclear plants have to be run by human beings. It's the same problem we have with government: we can design systems that work great in theory, like communism, if we ignore the fact that humans make mistakes all the time, but to make a system that really works, we need to count on people screwing some things up but have a system in place where those screw ups won't kill us all.
I'm not against nuclear power per se. I think it is our cleanest power source. But I think that a lot of time defenders of nuclear power will say, "Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island were massive screw ups by the people in the plant," as a defense, but presuming future plants are also run by people, the problem won't go away.
(Incidentally, that's what's so promising about the pebble bed reactors: they allow fewer chances for people to do stuff wrong.)
I addressed that in the thing. With Miis, people are more likely to choose avatars that look like themselves, since the point of a Mii is to put yourself into the game. Besides, even if there were a non-random bias toward Miis of different gender than oneself, do you think it would inflate or deflate the percentage of women reportedly using the system? I think it would tend to inflate it, since in other online games, men play using female avatars. (Of course, one reason for this is to get "eye candy" while playing the game -- a factor that doesn't come into play with Miis, since they are all pretty much sexless.) However, the reported percentage of women is only 25%, which means if the number of women is being inflated, it isn't by that much.
Seriously, can someone explain why I was modded troll? I don't expect everyone to agree with me--maybe you think LittleBigPlanet will work fine on the sixaxis--but I don't see why I was modded troll. I even said I hope I'm wrong and that it does well since it sounds like an interesting idea.
I think it sounds interesting, and I applaud Sony for giving it a shot, but I wonder if this kind of game where you have to move things around on screen and customize them wouldn't be better if you could use a mouse or the Wii remote to do it. Moving stuff around with the sixaxis seems like it would be a bit more tedious. Also, the video of it I saw made it seem like there are a bewildering number of options available -- which would turn off non-hardcore players.
So, I want it to do well, I'm just skeptical that you can make this work on the PS3.
What are you talking about? The graphics were poor (4/10); the story was lame (4/10); the audio just wasn't there (0/10); and the gameplay while OK (8/10) had very little replay value (4/10). I'm sorry, but I have to give this commentary the lowest score there is:
Does anyone else think this is a Bad Idea? If there's one thing we've learned from Second Life, it's that left to build their own world from scratch, adults on the internet will make a lot of sex shops. Now, even if the Lego MMO is targeted for kids, it's also going to be pretty popular with people who played with LEGOs as kids, which means it's inevitable that the entire world is filled with nothing but boobs and wieners made out of CGI little plastic blocks.
It's like, "think of the children," only for real this time, because seriously adults are going to fill Legoland with crap.
Shinto isn't theistic? How does saying that make any sense at all? According to Shinto, Japan was created in the distant past by two gods who subsequently produced a pantheon and the forerunners of the Imperial Family. At present, the world is filled with numerous spirits who help those that follow the right ritualistic practices. If a religion that's filled with personal gods who do things that affect the physical world isn't theistic, what religion is?
Also Buddhism is pretty dedicated to finding right rebirth (although modern sects do tend to be emphasize the this-worldly side of things), which is a supernatural pursuit.
Wha? How does that get a plus 5? Yes, there are a lot of old religions in which the gods look like people, but in all the new fangled ones, they always explicitly tell people, "We're talking about Gods/the gods as though it/they were human, but that's just a metaphor and the God is far beyond our ability to comprehend." I mean seriously, this isn't a secret doctrine; it's the core of post-Platonic religion.
With Windows 98 and, to a lesser extent, 2000, we/.ers could smugly mock Microsoft users by making "Blue Screen of Death" jokes. When Windows XP came out, we kept making these jokes, but as time went on, they got less and less funny due in no small part to the fact that the BSoD has become a less frequent part of the Windows experience. Needless to say, this sucks for those of us who use OS X or Linux! What are we gonna rag on?
Well, then Microsoft went and did a big favor to the alternative OS community: UAC. Now, we can all get a big ol' chuckle (and "+5 Funny" mod points) out of saying, "Cancel or Allow?" in any thread whatsoever. It doesn't even have to be a thread about Vista or Microsoft. Apple even made a commercial about it! It's great. It's like Microsoft declared free karma Christmas!
Something that is meaningful has value over time. It ages well.
Value to whom? Over how long a time? We're all going to die. The sun will explode. The current prediction is that eventually all that will be left in the universe are electrons separated by a near infinite void. Even if this particular prediction doesn't come true, there's still the heat death of the universe to contend with. No species can survive forever. Thus, all value is only temporary relative to the universe as a whole. Permanence of value can exist only relative to the particular organism in time. (Ie. Even if I die tomorrow, it will still always be true that I had certain values on a particular date in the past.)
Everything they do, they do to continue the existence of their species, to propogate. Which doesn't seem very grand or amazing, but it is meaningful. On the other hand, that's what humans have been doing too.... And in the end, that's really all that meaningfulness comes down to, even for us.
Here, it seems that you explicitly state why learning various skills is meaningful -- it leads to the propagation of the species. (Never mind that it's unclear how paintings or sculptures will directly contribute to the preservation of the species.) However, as stated above, all species will eventually pass away, thus relative to the universe as a whole, the species has no great impact on the final state of the system. (While technically, the point of maximum entropy for the universe is the point of maximum differentiation, I think we can all agree that from a human perspective, it may as well be undifferentiated since there will be nothing but fundamental particles lacking a particular pattern.) Perhaps by using science, we'll be able to find some way to work around one limitation or another, but eventually, there will likely come a point at which the species dies out. If the skills we possess fail to save the species for eternity, does this make all our struggles retroactively worthless? I would argue that it cannot be the case that only when we determine whether the species endures indefinitely can we say whether the struggle to survive was meaningful or not, since such a determination can only be made after an infinite amount of time has endured, ie. never.
On that basis, we may switch to a time relative scale: thing x is meaningful, if x causes the species to endure for longer than it otherwise would have, even if the species doesn't endure forever. However, on this scale, it's unclear what should "count" and what should not. For example, it's unlikely that one person playing World of Warcraft will directly contribute to the death of the species, but perhaps if everyone played the game, it might. Then again, some people meet their mates using online games. It is possible that playing WoW will give a scientist the mental relaxation she needs to develop some survival enhancing technology. On the other hand, perhaps another scientist will be distracted from their job and hence fail to implement some technology. So, whether World of Warcraft is helping or hindering the species is less than clear. If we make the time scale on which we measure too short, then everything becomes trivially meaningful, since nothing short of nuclear war will eliminate the species on a small enough time line. On the longer time line, however as we've said, nothing will save the species. Thus, it's unclear from which perspective to measure the effect of anything on species survival and hence its meaningfulness.
But this should lead us to the question, why is species survival meaningful? From a Darwinian perspective, that things survive at all is a matter of mechanical happenstance: things which propagate tend to grow more numerous overtime (because they have propagated); things which don't, disappear over time (since they failed to propagate). This is the truth of natural selection. However, is this tautology sufficient basis for meaning in the world? I
Am I crazy, or is a nuclear reactor program not really that large of a job? I mean, yes, obviously, you can't let the machine break down *or else*, but outside of that, is it really that complicated? There are just a couple hundred sensors to monitor, and then based on what the sensors say, you change the status of a couple hundred valves, right? There are a lot of variables from the programmer's perspective, but it's not like a modern photo management application, where you have to work with thousands of photographs that are all a megabyte each or a modern web browser, where you have to be able to use a network stack, interpret a page, and drive the graphics system by positioning text (with multiple fonts and pictures and plug-ins). So while programming a reactor is "a big job," since everything has to be correct, it's not "a large job," since there's only a few thousand things to track and calculate...
What's your criteria for meaningfulness vs. meaninglessness? It seems like you're suggesting it comes down to a combination of hard work (building a car, losing weight) or "genuinely" good times (hanging out with a woman), but it's not clear on what basis we can say that certain kinds of hard work (the car, the weight) are meaningful and others are not (writing a reply on/., beating a video game). Is it just that you think that anything revolving around using a computer is too "unnatural" or too easy to be meaningful? Or are physical activities inherently more meaningful than other ones?
Would you say that animals live meaningful lives or meaningless lives? Most of the ancients thought that animals had meaningless lives, since animals can't think, which they held to be the highest activity, but your examples seem to suggest that since you think physical activities like hard work and flirting (step one to reproduction) are meaningful, animals can also lead meaningful lives by living naturally or whatever.
I'm really curious about your criteria here, since from a scientific/materialistic/evolutionary perspective, humans are just a type of animal, so nothing human can do could ever be "unnatural," just natural in a different way, much as the natural actions of a chimp are different from the natural actions of a bacteria. Thus, I find naturalness as a gauge of meaningfulness to be problematic, since there is no way to tell the natural from the unnatural except to suppose that the human animal shouldn't have changed its environment as it has.
At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.'
All of these shows are normal TV shows that are broadcast over the air/on cable. Any show on TV can be (and most are) digitized and uploaded to P2P sites after having all the commercials stripped out. In fact, since pirates usually digitize the HD streams of TV shows, they offer much higher quality than either YouTube or the iTunes store.
It looks like the TV people are just as dumb as the music people: DRM doesn't make sense if you also give away your product in a DRM-free format!
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. I don't mean it as a condemnation of the Wii at all. What I mean is that the user interface of Everybody Votes really sucks me in so that I feel like have to check it every time they update the poll to see what the new question is and to see if I predicted the last answer right. If Nintendo can make a friggin' poll compelling just by having you grab a Mii instead of just clicking a button, then I'm sure the Wii has a future.
Also, I don't agree that Zelda is the "bad" kind of motion control. If anything what Zelda tells us is that you can make games for the Wii that are the same as traditional button based games with no compromises. So, there doesn't have to be a binary choice between a system with motion controls and traditional games. Zelda tells us that one system can do both. Now, it's true that the sword swinging mechanism of Zelda isn't really treated differently by the system than a simple button press, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel different to the user. Fighting with motion controls (particular the shield attack and spin attack on the nunchuck) is more visceral. It is a little worse for some timing things (I'm thinking particularly of the first form of the final boss, where you have to reflect fireballs with well timed sword swings), but in ordinary fights, the motion control is just more fun and preferable to button based controls. Plus, aiming with the Wii Remote is superior to aiming with a thumb stick (though admittedly still inferior to a mouse in terms of speed and accuracy).
My prediction is that the Xbox 720 and the PlayStation 4 are going to also include a Wii-like system for direct pointing and motion detection. (Though hopefully, they'll come up with a way to do this without a sensor bar.) It lets you play a wider range of games without harming the ability to play traditional games. It's the future.
I don't think it's fair to just say "motion control is a gimmick" and close the book. What makes us so sure that button mashing isn't a gimmick? My girlfriend is still playing WiiSports regularly as a fitness thing. Right now my favorite Wii game is "Everybody Votes," since I already beat Zelda (twice) and Elebits, but I'm still excited for Super Paper Mario. Yes, some people may get tired of the Wii, but it's crazy to say everyone will, especially when you consider the wide range of games that are being made for the Wii, from the goofy party games (Wario Ware, WiiPlay) to traditional games (Mario Galaxy, Metriod, Smash) to RPGs (Fire Emblem, Square stuff) to retro stuff (Virtual Console) to weird genre breakers (Cooking Mama, Wii Music)...
You know Nintendo is going to come out with new colors of Wii with extra features like DVD playback in a year or so. (Or they could add a 120GB HD, paint it black, and take out the WiFi adapter then call it "Wii Elite." ;-p ) The question is, will I be allowed to move my Virtual Console games to the new machine if I purge the old one before reselling it? It seems like we should be allowed to, but so far I haven't seen evidence that we will, which kind of screws over the early adopters who want to upgrade later.
Dude, I totally heard a rumor from a guy who's uncle works at Nintendo that with the next Wii Channels update, they'll add one called, "Small Talk Age," that trains your brain to do small talk until you can do it as effortlessly as a 20 year old (girl).
(Seriously, I love your story. You rock!)
Yeah, I'd be pissed too.
You'd be drunk too?
Sounds fun, but I don't see how that solves "your friend's" driver problems. Especially after he spent "Great British Pounds Sterling Quid" on it.
Macs for Mac Users!
Macs for Mac Users!
Irregardless, the previous poster should of corrected it.
Um, no.
You're thinking of Republicans and Democrats. Their opposition is all for show, and both sides will shift policies if they think they can gain votes from it.
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank -- that is to say, they have a firm pro-market ideology that they don't deviate from.
Krugman is a classical liberal economist. He's not just a Democratic talking head. For example, unlike most of the Congressional Democrats in '02, he opposed the war.
There's a time for saying "tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum" but that time is not when we're talking about Cato and Krugman.
Actually, the notice mentions that you need express written consent, so just making a phone call wouldn't be enough.
Don't challenge the hackers.
Yeah, like how Apple made those "Get a Mac" ads about how OS X has less malware in the wild than Windows, but then when hackers heard about it...
*Crickets chirping*
Well, now the crickets are loud as hell. I assume we can blame this on the hackers somehow.
Don't let the sin of one company muddy the waters for the rest of the power companies with nuclear plants.
The problem is that nuclear plants have to be run by human beings. It's the same problem we have with government: we can design systems that work great in theory, like communism, if we ignore the fact that humans make mistakes all the time, but to make a system that really works, we need to count on people screwing some things up but have a system in place where those screw ups won't kill us all.
I'm not against nuclear power per se. I think it is our cleanest power source. But I think that a lot of time defenders of nuclear power will say, "Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island were massive screw ups by the people in the plant," as a defense, but presuming future plants are also run by people, the problem won't go away.
(Incidentally, that's what's so promising about the pebble bed reactors: they allow fewer chances for people to do stuff wrong.)
I addressed that in the thing. With Miis, people are more likely to choose avatars that look like themselves, since the point of a Mii is to put yourself into the game. Besides, even if there were a non-random bias toward Miis of different gender than oneself, do you think it would inflate or deflate the percentage of women reportedly using the system? I think it would tend to inflate it, since in other online games, men play using female avatars. (Of course, one reason for this is to get "eye candy" while playing the game -- a factor that doesn't come into play with Miis, since they are all pretty much sexless.) However, the reported percentage of women is only 25%, which means if the number of women is being inflated, it isn't by that much.
Using the stats given on the "Everybody Votes Channel" for the Wii, I've been able to go back and figure out the percentage of people using male and female avatars for voting on that. It turns out that about 75% of Wii users are male and 25% are female.
No breakdown by age though, but I think that's interesting in light of Nintendo's strategy of pulling in new gamers.
Seriously, can someone explain why I was modded troll? I don't expect everyone to agree with me--maybe you think LittleBigPlanet will work fine on the sixaxis--but I don't see why I was modded troll. I even said I hope I'm wrong and that it does well since it sounds like an interesting idea.
Bizarre modding.
I think it sounds interesting, and I applaud Sony for giving it a shot, but I wonder if this kind of game where you have to move things around on screen and customize them wouldn't be better if you could use a mouse or the Wii remote to do it. Moving stuff around with the sixaxis seems like it would be a bit more tedious. Also, the video of it I saw made it seem like there are a bewildering number of options available -- which would turn off non-hardcore players.
So, I want it to do well, I'm just skeptical that you can make this work on the PS3.
What are you talking about? The graphics were poor (4/10); the story was lame (4/10); the audio just wasn't there (0/10); and the gameplay while OK (8/10) had very little replay value (4/10). I'm sorry, but I have to give this commentary the lowest score there is:
7/10.
Does anyone else think this is a Bad Idea? If there's one thing we've learned from Second Life, it's that left to build their own world from scratch, adults on the internet will make a lot of sex shops. Now, even if the Lego MMO is targeted for kids, it's also going to be pretty popular with people who played with LEGOs as kids, which means it's inevitable that the entire world is filled with nothing but boobs and wieners made out of CGI little plastic blocks.
It's like, "think of the children," only for real this time, because seriously adults are going to fill Legoland with crap.
Shinto isn't theistic? How does saying that make any sense at all? According to Shinto, Japan was created in the distant past by two gods who subsequently produced a pantheon and the forerunners of the Imperial Family. At present, the world is filled with numerous spirits who help those that follow the right ritualistic practices. If a religion that's filled with personal gods who do things that affect the physical world isn't theistic, what religion is?
Also Buddhism is pretty dedicated to finding right rebirth (although modern sects do tend to be emphasize the this-worldly side of things), which is a supernatural pursuit.
Wha? How does that get a plus 5? Yes, there are a lot of old religions in which the gods look like people, but in all the new fangled ones, they always explicitly tell people, "We're talking about Gods/the gods as though it/they were human, but that's just a metaphor and the God is far beyond our ability to comprehend." I mean seriously, this isn't a secret doctrine; it's the core of post-Platonic religion.
The benefits? You have to ask? Pssh, it's simple:
/.ers could smugly mock Microsoft users by making "Blue Screen of Death" jokes. When Windows XP came out, we kept making these jokes, but as time went on, they got less and less funny due in no small part to the fact that the BSoD has become a less frequent part of the Windows experience. Needless to say, this sucks for those of us who use OS X or Linux! What are we gonna rag on?
With Windows 98 and, to a lesser extent, 2000, we
Well, then Microsoft went and did a big favor to the alternative OS community: UAC. Now, we can all get a big ol' chuckle (and "+5 Funny" mod points) out of saying, "Cancel or Allow?" in any thread whatsoever. It doesn't even have to be a thread about Vista or Microsoft. Apple even made a commercial about it! It's great. It's like Microsoft declared free karma Christmas!
"Mod me +5 Funny: Cancel or Allow?"!
And that's the benefit of UAC.
Value to whom? Over how long a time? We're all going to die. The sun will explode. The current prediction is that eventually all that will be left in the universe are electrons separated by a near infinite void. Even if this particular prediction doesn't come true, there's still the heat death of the universe to contend with. No species can survive forever. Thus, all value is only temporary relative to the universe as a whole. Permanence of value can exist only relative to the particular organism in time. (Ie. Even if I die tomorrow, it will still always be true that I had certain values on a particular date in the past.)
Here, it seems that you explicitly state why learning various skills is meaningful -- it leads to the propagation of the species. (Never mind that it's unclear how paintings or sculptures will directly contribute to the preservation of the species.) However, as stated above, all species will eventually pass away, thus relative to the universe as a whole, the species has no great impact on the final state of the system. (While technically, the point of maximum entropy for the universe is the point of maximum differentiation, I think we can all agree that from a human perspective, it may as well be undifferentiated since there will be nothing but fundamental particles lacking a particular pattern.) Perhaps by using science, we'll be able to find some way to work around one limitation or another, but eventually, there will likely come a point at which the species dies out. If the skills we possess fail to save the species for eternity, does this make all our struggles retroactively worthless? I would argue that it cannot be the case that only when we determine whether the species endures indefinitely can we say whether the struggle to survive was meaningful or not, since such a determination can only be made after an infinite amount of time has endured, ie. never.
On that basis, we may switch to a time relative scale: thing x is meaningful, if x causes the species to endure for longer than it otherwise would have, even if the species doesn't endure forever. However, on this scale, it's unclear what should "count" and what should not. For example, it's unlikely that one person playing World of Warcraft will directly contribute to the death of the species, but perhaps if everyone played the game, it might. Then again, some people meet their mates using online games. It is possible that playing WoW will give a scientist the mental relaxation she needs to develop some survival enhancing technology. On the other hand, perhaps another scientist will be distracted from their job and hence fail to implement some technology. So, whether World of Warcraft is helping or hindering the species is less than clear. If we make the time scale on which we measure too short, then everything becomes trivially meaningful, since nothing short of nuclear war will eliminate the species on a small enough time line. On the longer time line, however as we've said, nothing will save the species. Thus, it's unclear from which perspective to measure the effect of anything on species survival and hence its meaningfulness.
But this should lead us to the question, why is species survival meaningful? From a Darwinian perspective, that things survive at all is a matter of mechanical happenstance: things which propagate tend to grow more numerous overtime (because they have propagated); things which don't, disappear over time (since they failed to propagate). This is the truth of natural selection. However, is this tautology sufficient basis for meaning in the world? I
Am I crazy, or is a nuclear reactor program not really that large of a job? I mean, yes, obviously, you can't let the machine break down *or else*, but outside of that, is it really that complicated? There are just a couple hundred sensors to monitor, and then based on what the sensors say, you change the status of a couple hundred valves, right? There are a lot of variables from the programmer's perspective, but it's not like a modern photo management application, where you have to work with thousands of photographs that are all a megabyte each or a modern web browser, where you have to be able to use a network stack, interpret a page, and drive the graphics system by positioning text (with multiple fonts and pictures and plug-ins). So while programming a reactor is "a big job," since everything has to be correct, it's not "a large job," since there's only a few thousand things to track and calculate...
Or am I woefully misinformed about this?
What's your criteria for meaningfulness vs. meaninglessness? It seems like you're suggesting it comes down to a combination of hard work (building a car, losing weight) or "genuinely" good times (hanging out with a woman), but it's not clear on what basis we can say that certain kinds of hard work (the car, the weight) are meaningful and others are not (writing a reply on /., beating a video game). Is it just that you think that anything revolving around using a computer is too "unnatural" or too easy to be meaningful? Or are physical activities inherently more meaningful than other ones?
Would you say that animals live meaningful lives or meaningless lives? Most of the ancients thought that animals had meaningless lives, since animals can't think, which they held to be the highest activity, but your examples seem to suggest that since you think physical activities like hard work and flirting (step one to reproduction) are meaningful, animals can also lead meaningful lives by living naturally or whatever.
I'm really curious about your criteria here, since from a scientific/materialistic/evolutionary perspective, humans are just a type of animal, so nothing human can do could ever be "unnatural," just natural in a different way, much as the natural actions of a chimp are different from the natural actions of a bacteria. Thus, I find naturalness as a gauge of meaningfulness to be problematic, since there is no way to tell the natural from the unnatural except to suppose that the human animal shouldn't have changed its environment as it has.
All of these shows are normal TV shows that are broadcast over the air/on cable. Any show on TV can be (and most are) digitized and uploaded to P2P sites after having all the commercials stripped out. In fact, since pirates usually digitize the HD streams of TV shows, they offer much higher quality than either YouTube or the iTunes store.
It looks like the TV people are just as dumb as the music people: DRM doesn't make sense if you also give away your product in a DRM-free format!