I think we basically agree here. I was only using the hidden track/easter egg thing as similar examples not meant to be exactly the same thing. Just to point out that hidden content, intentional or not, is frequently found one way or another. I don't believe it was some vast evil conspiracy. I believe they were acting with gross negligence and incompetence in the quest for more money as is the frequent standard of behavior of any sufficiently large corporate entity and feel no pity for them getting the shaft in this. I think we only disagree on a few things here and they are rather trivial.
1. "Rated M for Mature" means about squat since I have never seen anyone check the rating on a video game before selling it, only movies. I have watched little kids buy these games without so much as a second look. Beyond that, I don't know how old you are, but I know when I was that age I didn't think I was a kid, but now that I am older I realize "holy crap, I was still just a dumb kid at 17" (Now, I think 17 should be more than old enough to handle that content providing they had parents worth a crap that taught the differences between fantasy and reality)
2. "When the truth comes out" has rarely ever stopped a company from deliberately lying about something so moronic. Or anyone for that matter, you see that in peoples day to day lives, you see it in corporate behavior, and you don't see anything BUT that in politics. Truth is what the TV tells people, and any time "It was the haxors!" is paraded about it is instantly believed despite any amount of truth to counter it. Remember Mitnick was able to whistle into a phone to launch missiles.
The old phrase never attribute to malice what could be adequately be described by stupidity applies, however I believe there should be an addition of never attribute to stupidity what could be adequately be described by greed.
It was intentional, they put it there intentionally. They may not have had intended anyone to access it, but it was put there intentionally with the original idea of someone accessing it. Then rather than cleaning up like they should have, they blamed "those evil hackers". Your defense relies on a few things here. 1. That their game developers are so utterly incompetent that they would not realize the likelihood of this content being accessed anyways regardless of many years worth of examples of players getting at that kind of stuff. 2. That any of these other companies left it there out of sheer laziness rather than a hidden bonus...the practice is so common that everyone knows of "hidden tracks" on music, and in software it even has its own name "easter eggs". 3. I am no game developer but that seems like a pretty craptastic way of writing code to have to rely on leaving content that won't be used just to not break the game.
Regardless of it was hidden there intentionally, or if it was left there by incompetence it doesn't change the fact that it was there, and they lied about it which is ultimately my issue with it. Had they come out and said "yeah, geeze, here's the thing, we write really shitty code and couldn't remove it and not break the game, but we didn't want anyone to see it" or even "Yeah, guess we got busted, adult games to kids...that was kinda dumb of us, oh well" but no "EEEVIL HAXORS DID IT!!!" And then we see an innocent company that had content that was legitimately added by a 3rd party get sued over their game
Well maybe when the film director was considering where he wanted his movie to be sold he should have left out the graphic hardcore sex scene. It is no different. That being said, you cannot seriously complain about "no store will carry it" in the day and age where congress is getting upset because more and more commerce is moving online where it can't be taxed. I haven't bought any electronics related product from Walmart or Best Buy in AGES because the internet is, almost without fail, a better source. Also, the PC market is also considerably larger than any 1 console market, so "oh poor people, they are only allowed to release it on the largest market" doesn't do much for me, beyond that if it is successful the consoles will likely open their doors back up if the reward is worth the risk of being associated with that company.
Again, as a bit of a wakeup call to the folks crying censorship... I write a book, its a very edgy book, pushing lots of bounds... I submit it to publishers, they say no, THAT IS NOT CENSORSHIP that is a calculated business decision. So I may be forced to go to another publisher, or publish it myself without all the fancy printing press stuff...its still not censorship...it is independent organizations deciding to do or not to do business together, its capitalism. I am now at a disadvantage due to the content that I am trying to sell...once again this is a product being sold...this isn't the American Citizen's Manifesto being suppressed by The Man and kept out of the public eye. When MS wants to force IE to be shipped with every copy of linux is anyone going to run crying "oh thats censorship, the distros won't include IE" I suspect not.
As far as virtually killing people, I have played a TON of games that are an order of magnitude better than anything this crew has put out. God of War was plenty violent with lots of stress relieving violent face smashery. The key difference being I'm not pretending to beat prostitutes and steal cars which are real life crimes being glorified and rewarded. (Again, I think the parents crying about this is stupid at best, but I think the people claiming it has no effect on young kids to be rewarded for simulating bad behavior is stupid too. The onus still lies on the parent to teach the child the difference between reality and fantasy, and to hit the power button if its objectionable content). In God of War when you see Kratos murdering innocent people you are supposed to get the "Damn, thats fucked up", however, in GTA and its ilk you get the "WOO! I killed another innocent person! more points for me YAY!". There is a considerably different psychological reward happening here.
And here we go, claiming that theatrical works telling a story somehow equate to games where you stalk and murder, or beat hookers, or steal cars and that they are somehow on the same level.
Further, while I have seen most of those movies, there are a few that I can't speak to since I have not seen them, but precious few of them have murder and torture as the main entertainment theme. Silence of the Lambs and Se7en are probably the closest to focusing on the murder and torture, but both of those movies are about CATCHING a murderer not BEING a murderer. Now, beyond that you cannot tell me with a straight face that Pulp Fiction, A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, or Full Metal Jacket aren't deranged. That doesn't mean they are bad movies, actually a few of my favorites, but I still wouldn't let a 12yr old watch any of them.
Ok so 1 Million gil in FFXI on server X = $30, but on server Y = $25. So how do they even begin to figure out the value to tax at? Multiply this out by every online game and every server and you end up with a logistical nightmare of trying to figure out how to tax it. So, not that it would stop them, but it kinda puts them in a situation of spending $1000 to tax you $10.
The other side to this, is that unless you deal with non IT managers and such you will probably never understand. It isn't that they are that greedy trying to come up with inventive ways of taxing you. Its that this kind of shit honestly makes sense to them. I spent 45 minutes the other day trying to explain why we couldn't make something happen, and I wasn't using technical stuff. I was drawing big multicolored circles to show that the two networks in question are not connected and the traffic cannot just go between them just because each network happened to have a computer in the same room as the other. They assume that all the computers are magically connected because they are networked. On top of this they frequently believe they are being lied to by IT because IT just doesn't want to do it, and not that IT is actually telling them it just can't work that way. There is absolutely no concept, nor any desire to learn even the fundamental workings of IT. Look at Sen "internet tubes" he wasn't being intentionally stupid...he really believes that insanity..and because anyone correcting him would be opposing his ideology on the subject he would just assume they are lying to him.
And how many people saw this on slashdot in the past few days so Manhunt 2 is fresh on their mind every day with a new wild and crazy development. Like it or not, you can't get that kind of mindshare with any paid for advertising. It takes conflict and controversy to generate this kind of free PR buzz all over the net. I don't believe for a second that it is really going to be shelved...its just too stupid to do that to a game that is already almost finished.
No I said they are depicting torture and murder in an entertainment venue, which isn't morally offensive to me, just kinda dumb and deranged. I said the money grubbing fools and their lawyers that try to claim this BS is art would defend John Wayne Gacy as an artist. At no point do I equate their games with torture and murder, I equate the claim that their games are art are along the same lines of claiming torture, murder, porn, or even just shitting on the wall as art. And they are assholes. They are not some innocent company, they put out some pretty bad stuff, and then blame "evil hackers" and give idiots like ol Jack the tolls he needs to demonize the whole industry so that decent companies get screwed, the people get screwed with more moronic laws, and all the little soccer moms that got all up in a tizzy about the thing are happy that the champion of family friendly entertainment won another battle against those vicious lying video game makers trying to pervert little johnnies mind. All in the name of making another buck, when they could have just been responsible and NOT put that bullshit there in the first place, or maybe even owned up to it as a mistake instead of making up stupid stories.
I find nothing morally objectionable with anything in Windows XP. I think their company and business practices are reprehensible and refuse to support them based on the fact they are assholes too. Same thing to me. Its not the content at issue, its their shitty behavior about it. They could have been much more responsible and not caused all this ruckus with ALL of their games, even just by making it clear its for adults. But nope, free PR and buzz and *CA-CHING* was too much for their weak minds to handle. Why do the right thing when you can do the profitable thing?
Uhm...some movies just aren't appropriate for kids period, the same goes for games, and you are right its the parents damned job to hit the power button if they determine its inappropriate. However, I should be able to have a reasonable idea of the content of a movie based on its rating before I bother with it. I shouldn't have to worry about picking up the latest Disney cartoon and it having characters screwing, murdering, and cussing. If you are so against ratings systems then you are basically making the argument that hardcore porn belongs on the shelf at your local Walmart which is just stupid regardless of how liberal your views are. I don't really give a rats ass that porn exists, that people buy it, or anything, what WOULD piss me off is if I can't walk through the isles in the local video store looking for movies to watch without worrying about my kids trotting around the corner with hardcore porn in their hands.
I'm not afraid of natural biological systems by the way, I think it is utterly moronic that naked people will earn a high rating faster than violence. The nipple slip fiasco is an excellent example of how stupid it has gone, I can sit down on any given day and see a couple dozen people get murdered, beaten, tortured, or other such antisocial crap and have it glorified on TV and noone is bothered, but one nipple slip and suddenly the world is Puritan. Its moronic, and once again, the power button is on the TV if you don't like it. Further, while I think the "oh my god violent video games are perverting our poor children, help us mr government, help us" is fucking retarded in the extreme, if you are so stupid to believe that kids are not affected by what they see be it real or not you are a moron too. Teaching kids the difference between fantasy and reality is important and helps, but the younger they are the harder it is for them to make that separation.
I don't claim it was an inside job. If anything I claim it was likely known about and played into for maximum political effect, and it has dirty fingerprints all over it. I say you should NEVER trust what these guys say regardless of how "open" they claim to be. Lets look at the logic of these CIA papers. This is a group responsible for some of the dirtiest tricks ever done, from assassinations, to regime support, to government sabotage, to economic sabotage. Do you believe the serial killer that says "wait wait wait...that body in the river wasn't mine!".
9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq. Except that it became terribly apparent that the American people with their lack of cultural understanding, racist fear of the towel head, and horrible understanding of geography, would be ready and willing to go along with anything our heroic leader said needed to be done. The whole war on terror thing is just a damned fine excuse to make a gigantic power grab for the executive branch. Cheney claims to be executive when it is to protect him, and then claims to not really be executive, when it would require him to do something. It is no neatly woven conspiracy, people in power will do whatever they can get away with to expand that power and keep that power, that is a universal truth to human civilization. You just have to be willing to accept that while YOU wouldn't do something so horrible and alien to your moral code, it does not mean that others wouldn't. The holocaust was only the brainchild of a few sick few, it was only made possible by a large group of people saying "nothing THAT bad would ever happen".
Incidentally, take a close look. This IS their defensive preparations. Look at what they did when busted on Hot Coffee "OOOOh those evil hackers did it" until it came out that was a load of bullshit and it only worked on the people that have no understanding of how technology really works. So they get slapped, they shelf a nearly completed project (once again stupidity at its height if they are serious at all about that). Now people are coming out of the woodworks to cry about how its freedom of speech, and art, and whatnot. They generate a stupid amount of free publicity, put the game back out, and people buy it in droves (just as another poster said) just to "make a statement against censorship!". They aren't stupid, they are just assholes. In the meantime their antics make them wads of cash, we get more assinine laws, asshats like Jack Thomson get more ammunition, and innocent companies get raked over the coals (makers of Oblivion).
I have nothing against the content of their products on a moral level at all. I just thing its stupid. The few interesting titles they have released I refuse to go near because of their behavior.
A couple years ago a game like this wouldn't exist. Go back and look at the games and you will see that this company is primarily responsible for the deranged games that are getting fire. Its like trying to claim that porno really is just a story about a pizza guy who was down on his luck when he met love, and that its all just art. As far as the consoles, still not censorship. They don't want their brands associated with that nonsense. I don't think you will ever see Disney get involved with a Marilyn Manson release. It would be suicide for a company who is trying to market in the family market to associate with nonsense of this caliber. They are protecting their own interests from a company gone insane.
I honestly don't care what they make. This isn't some moralistic thing for me. Its a matter of common sense and the only envelope this group is pushing is pure stupidity. To be honest I would classify the things like Saw and Hostel in the same category of "this is a little beyond a normal R rating"
Watching them justify this crap as art is unreal. This shit is not art, this shit is about making waves, free media blitz, and big dollars. David in all his naked rock cock glory is art (that people ironically enough protested about as well). Nudes can be art porno is not art. Tattoos and such can be art torture is not art. I swear to god the lawyers in this mess would have defended John Wayne Gacy as being an artist by dressing as a clown and stuffing bodies in his floor. There are tons of things that don't like that I still consider art, its just art I don't like. This is far from any of that.
Oh what ever... This is not censorship at all. Censorship would be not allowing it to exist. Not allowing it to be sold in stores where noone checks ratings anyways when they sell to kids is not Censorship. It is no different than not allowing hard core porn to be sold on shelves in walmart.
1. The company is known for making deranged games.
2. The company is known for lying about content in said deranged games
3. This particular game is supposed to be incredibly dark and violent
4. As a result of all this it got an X type rating
As a parent this is what I expect. I shouldn't be required to worry about whether or not the PG-13 movie has a XXX porno on it if you push the appropriate buttons at the right time in the movie. This is what they get for their actions. The lawsuits against Oblivion user created content was a direct result of this companies assinine behavior and blaming "those evil hackers" for that Hot Coffee nonsense. Oblivion was wronged in this for something they didn't do. That said I don't care that these games exist, if people want to buy them from other places let them. I don't care for hardcore porno movies, so I don't go to the porno store and buy them, but nothing stops anyone else from doing it, and I don't really care if they do. The real irony here is that you classify sex as more evil than violence while deriding people for giving another deranged rockstar release an adult only rating.
I agree that this is not the governments problem to solve poor parenting, and this nanny state crap has got to go. Rating systems and saying you cant sell stuff of a certain rating in certain types of stores doesn't bother me in the least and it is not censorship at all. The porn industry is doing just fine knowing that their stuff is going to be rated a certain way and can only be sold in certain places. The folks that bring you such fine beverages as rum, whiskey, and so on also are only allowed to sell in certain areas and they are doing fine. Last I checked TVs still had power buttons, so its up to the parent to control that. However, as long as this is considered censorship, lets go ahead and sell porno in walmart and see how you feel when your daughter walks up with a DVD that has jenna jameson on the cover with a cock in her mouth and starts asking questions. Rating systems and limits on where they can be sold is how it is supposed to work, not by making violent video games illegal, two TOTALLY different things, and making the game illegal is censorship. Rockstar knew what they were putting into the game, Rockstar knew what was likely to happen, and Rockstar should be more than aware of their less than stellar track record for trying to game the system rather than play along like a responsible vendor...they should have expected this and I don't feel sorry for their lost revenue one bit, it was a stupid business decision.
Yes and no. The government is quite capable of small conspiracy, even more so when its been a small select group of people running the show for almost 30 years. Vast conspiracy like moon landing fakes, aliens, and that kind of thing are all but impossible. The government just isn't that competent to pull it off. It amuses me that people will trot out all the thousands of reasons our government is totally incompetent (as they frequently are) and then go on about these vast conspiracies. However, Cheney has fingerprints all over events in the last 30 years, exercises on top of real world events to generate confusion. We just happen to be having an exercise of "what if Iraq invades Kuwait" when Iraq invaded Kuwait...how terribly convenient to have all our forces in place just at that perfect moment...kinda like we just happened to be having an exercise about people flying planes into buildings the day some planes flew into buildings...while Cheney was sitting at the control center and Bush was reading My Pet Goat. (Let us not forget the similarity of Bush Sr, VP to an actor with Cheney as one of his partners, and Cheney as VP with Dubya out front being a misunderestimated distracting force). There is alot of repeating patterns here in the way this crew operates our country, and they have been at the helm for a long while.
Good job jackass. You let the secret out. Lets see, we have an ultraparanoid government hell bent on spying on the American populace through any way possible so much that we have had to have numerous rulings calling it unconstitutional, saying that email IS protected, and that illegal wiretapping is illegal (leave it to congress on that one). Now, would YOU want YOUR anti-bush stuff front page news with a government that paranoid? You not gunna be a smilin dog when they got you stacked in a naked pyramid asking you about your terrorist connections!
These posts have been moderated down to protect the innocent.
Funny how that freedom of the press thing works when it operates correctly. I think that was exactly the purpose of that even in the world before mass communication. I think our legal system was meant to be a last resort thing not first resort in this sense. More convoluted laws only hurts this, and it seemed clear to me the idea was to have more of a light and lean and modifiable legal system to try and cope with strange issues like this. Only when things absolutely cannot be worked out should the court system get involved.
Congratulations, you just called every locksmith in business a safe cracker. You just put the engineer who built your car on the same level as the guy who runs over a cop. The architect that built your house is now the same as the guy that kicks your front door in to steal your TV.
It isn't even in the same ballpark. Hacker came from people coding and other engineering/reverse engineering feats. Cracking has precious little to do with that, and frequently involves no kind of coding/engineering/reverse engineering. They are breaking and entering. Hackers CAN be crackers, just as an architect COULD break down your door more effectively knowing its weak points and steal your TV, so some overlap is possible. This isn't a moral judgement thing, its describing two entirely different types of acts. The real offense comes from the people that take pride in being skilled hackers being put on the same level as criminals and script kiddies.
People that don't read english have no business voting in America.
I'm all for immigrants, unless you are native American you came to America as an immigrant. The difference being the families showed up at the door they walked up, signed in, and frequently had their names changed and basically had to learn to read and write english to get by. If you want to speak spanish, pay in pesos, and so on, go to mexico. If you really think America is so great, then learn to integrate your culture and quit forcing the rest of us to learn your language. And before I hear some racist crap, one of my best friends growing up was an immigrant from Argentina. Mom, dad, and all the kids spoke perfect english (though they mostly spoke spanish at home), mom actually home schooled the kids up through grade school and taught spanish on the side. They are the perfect example of how immigrants can integrate into American society and still retain their culture.
Sorry, just one of my pet peeves about that kind of thing, but all your other points on the issues with paper ballots are spot on. Don't forget the infamous butterfly ballots too. I am a firm believer that we need to drop Diebold and all these other e-voting companies and contact Fisher Price to make a good voting machine that you can't screw up.
Well here is the unfortunate truth. Most of the first landers WERE religious nuts wanting to be free to practice their more nuttier things. (Note: Not all religious people are nuts, but I bet you can't look at me and tell me with a straight face that the puritans weren't psychotic zealots assuming you know the history.) The other large portion of the early landers were about as dumb as they come. "Come to the New World, there are gems all over the forest floor, everyone can be as rich as a king", and people bought that crap. They tricked people into coming to the new world with promises of magical riches because gems and gold and whatnot were just laying around on the ground to be picked up. So we have the religious zealots, and the gullible idiots, and I'm certain there is quite a bit of overlap in those two groups as well.
Not that there weren't plenty of good things later, I mean the Constitution and all that were terribly good developments, but the real beginnings were pretty sad. Austrailia was a prison camp when it started, so its not like they are still a giant penal colony in the modern world.
It was shipped from HP, and I suggest you talk to your suppliers and possibly appologize because turns out that HP misidentifying legit HP ink/toner cartridges is a known issue and is just a bug of in a bullshit system to attempt to force a vendor lock in.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE For all who read this understand this very very basic lesson in economics because I keep hearing this nonsense about "they lose money every time they sell one" NO THEY DON'T! I have been told to buy an Xbox because I don't like MS because it hurts them when I do because they lose money on it! So here is the lesson.
1. HP/MS/ETC do not make products to order like Burger King makes burgers. They order X thousands of units and then sell them and put in a new order when they run low.
2. Widget cost of MFG = $1000 - retail price of widget $700. The widget maker lost $1000 making the stupid thing, you buying it cut their loss to $300 instead of $1000. So of coarse they want you to buy it because it reduces their already incurred losses. They absolutely do not "lose money when they sell you one".
3. That being said, Widget Refill cost of MFG = $1, retail price of Widget Refill = $50. So if they warn you at 50% that you need a new one that means for what would have been a full use of one that they made a $49 profit for, they convinced you to buy 2 for the same ammount of usage and they made a $98 profit.
Sorry to get a little crazy here but that 'they lose money when you buy it' nonsense is painfully stupid, and such horrible math and economic understanding is why so many people are in such terrible financial situations with debt and the like. No, when I leave that Xbox 360 sitting on the shelf MS loses even MORE money, me purchasing it does not cause them to lose money in any way shape or form. Now I suppose if me and 1,000,000 of my friends ran out and bought enough to artificially raise the demand so that MS starts producing more that they think they will sell...yeah buying one could cost MS money, but it takes a whole lot of people doing that to do that with the demand.
And last I checked those pilgrims and other early settlers that came here were Puritan Sepratists leaving England to do their own thing.
The logic that would say that Massachusetts would be ground zero for the religious right is flawed for the exact reason you state. They moved west to get away from the sins of the growing cities (sorta what prompted their move to America in the first place) and thats how we got the whole "bible belt" thing. So you are right about the big city thing, but that is basically what kept blowing them westward from England until they were able to settle down in areas that largely remained insular little towns and didn't grow into big cities.
Given all of the insanity surrounding refilling ink cartridges, DMCA lawsuits, "authenticity checks" on cartridges, and the give them the printer sell them the cartridges style business is anyone, anyone at all, even remotely surprised, maybe even just raised an eyebrow, that the vendors would stoop so low as to have the printer lie to you to get you to go buy another "DMCA protected authentic cartridge we are gunna sue you if you try to refill it" item that costs nearly as much as the stupid printer did in the first place as often as possible?
I am just gunna call "well duh" on this whole thing. I have worked with HP laserjets that told me I had 200 pages left that I could print. After printing 192 pages it told me I could still print 320 pages. All said and done that day, I had printed some 500 pages and its final number was that I could still print another 250ish pages. Whether they lie, or their math is freaking horrible for figuring it out is up for debate I suppose, but given the problems we have had with that same model and HP accusing us of theft because a brand new HP cartridge out of the box was determined to be not authentic by the stupid machine...well I assume they are just out for blood. 4 hours of fighting with their technician to have them exchange the stupid cartridge.
Bundling, sounds like kindling. I bet the girls who got pregnant were burned because the boys claimed they did nothing, so she must have been a witch and forced them into it! (Remember kids, girls = evil according to the bible, stupid twit listening to a talking snake and ruining it for all of us)
I fail to see how this has anything to do with my imagination, this was the stated and demonstrated purpose of arming the Predator. And there absolutely is a natural progression from unarmed to armed in unmanned vehicles, it means the squishy human operator doesn't have to risk getting shot at to do the shooting, so I fail to see why you think there is no natural progression there, considering that is exactly what happened. The Predator is a recon craft, my point was that it started with nothing, and they eventually realized that it would really help to have an early engagement capability. I am saying that they probably intend to do the same thing here. They didn't arm the predator because it operated with close air support. The predator is on the scene long before the close air support or ground forces are. The idea was so that for targets of opportunity they wouldn't even have to call ground/air support in to handle it in the first place. It's not like this new thing is stuck doing mach 6 at 100k ft, else it would be terribly difficult to take off and land.
The Predator had the same life. Initially recon only, then they stuck a single hellfire missile on it for targets of opportunity because frequently if it sees something that really needs to be hit it will be able to engage the target LONG before any kind of support would be available. That said the Predator is not designed to engage anything beyond small targets of opportunity. I would imagine that this is exactly the same thing except it goes faster now. That being said, go look at the latest generation of stealthy aircraft, they don't carry weapons on the outside because it screws up that whole stealth thing. I suspect that this thing would never be armed for real use beyond a small target of opportunity and I imagine it would probably carry what little armament it might have in a closed bay.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm...Well put, yet Godwin's Law...what now?
I think we basically agree here. I was only using the hidden track/easter egg thing as similar examples not meant to be exactly the same thing. Just to point out that hidden content, intentional or not, is frequently found one way or another. I don't believe it was some vast evil conspiracy. I believe they were acting with gross negligence and incompetence in the quest for more money as is the frequent standard of behavior of any sufficiently large corporate entity and feel no pity for them getting the shaft in this. I think we only disagree on a few things here and they are rather trivial.
1. "Rated M for Mature" means about squat since I have never seen anyone check the rating on a video game before selling it, only movies. I have watched little kids buy these games without so much as a second look. Beyond that, I don't know how old you are, but I know when I was that age I didn't think I was a kid, but now that I am older I realize "holy crap, I was still just a dumb kid at 17" (Now, I think 17 should be more than old enough to handle that content providing they had parents worth a crap that taught the differences between fantasy and reality)
2. "When the truth comes out" has rarely ever stopped a company from deliberately lying about something so moronic. Or anyone for that matter, you see that in peoples day to day lives, you see it in corporate behavior, and you don't see anything BUT that in politics. Truth is what the TV tells people, and any time "It was the haxors!" is paraded about it is instantly believed despite any amount of truth to counter it. Remember Mitnick was able to whistle into a phone to launch missiles.
The old phrase never attribute to malice what could be adequately be described by stupidity applies, however I believe there should be an addition of never attribute to stupidity what could be adequately be described by greed.
It was intentional, they put it there intentionally. They may not have had intended anyone to access it, but it was put there intentionally with the original idea of someone accessing it. Then rather than cleaning up like they should have, they blamed "those evil hackers". Your defense relies on a few things here. 1. That their game developers are so utterly incompetent that they would not realize the likelihood of this content being accessed anyways regardless of many years worth of examples of players getting at that kind of stuff. 2. That any of these other companies left it there out of sheer laziness rather than a hidden bonus...the practice is so common that everyone knows of "hidden tracks" on music, and in software it even has its own name "easter eggs". 3. I am no game developer but that seems like a pretty craptastic way of writing code to have to rely on leaving content that won't be used just to not break the game.
Regardless of it was hidden there intentionally, or if it was left there by incompetence it doesn't change the fact that it was there, and they lied about it which is ultimately my issue with it. Had they come out and said "yeah, geeze, here's the thing, we write really shitty code and couldn't remove it and not break the game, but we didn't want anyone to see it" or even "Yeah, guess we got busted, adult games to kids...that was kinda dumb of us, oh well" but no "EEEVIL HAXORS DID IT!!!" And then we see an innocent company that had content that was legitimately added by a 3rd party get sued over their game
Well maybe when the film director was considering where he wanted his movie to be sold he should have left out the graphic hardcore sex scene. It is no different. That being said, you cannot seriously complain about "no store will carry it" in the day and age where congress is getting upset because more and more commerce is moving online where it can't be taxed. I haven't bought any electronics related product from Walmart or Best Buy in AGES because the internet is, almost without fail, a better source. Also, the PC market is also considerably larger than any 1 console market, so "oh poor people, they are only allowed to release it on the largest market" doesn't do much for me, beyond that if it is successful the consoles will likely open their doors back up if the reward is worth the risk of being associated with that company.
Again, as a bit of a wakeup call to the folks crying censorship... I write a book, its a very edgy book, pushing lots of bounds... I submit it to publishers, they say no, THAT IS NOT CENSORSHIP that is a calculated business decision. So I may be forced to go to another publisher, or publish it myself without all the fancy printing press stuff...its still not censorship...it is independent organizations deciding to do or not to do business together, its capitalism. I am now at a disadvantage due to the content that I am trying to sell...once again this is a product being sold...this isn't the American Citizen's Manifesto being suppressed by The Man and kept out of the public eye. When MS wants to force IE to be shipped with every copy of linux is anyone going to run crying "oh thats censorship, the distros won't include IE" I suspect not.
As far as virtually killing people, I have played a TON of games that are an order of magnitude better than anything this crew has put out. God of War was plenty violent with lots of stress relieving violent face smashery. The key difference being I'm not pretending to beat prostitutes and steal cars which are real life crimes being glorified and rewarded. (Again, I think the parents crying about this is stupid at best, but I think the people claiming it has no effect on young kids to be rewarded for simulating bad behavior is stupid too. The onus still lies on the parent to teach the child the difference between reality and fantasy, and to hit the power button if its objectionable content). In God of War when you see Kratos murdering innocent people you are supposed to get the "Damn, thats fucked up", however, in GTA and its ilk you get the "WOO! I killed another innocent person! more points for me YAY!". There is a considerably different psychological reward happening here.
And here we go, claiming that theatrical works telling a story somehow equate to games where you stalk and murder, or beat hookers, or steal cars and that they are somehow on the same level.
Further, while I have seen most of those movies, there are a few that I can't speak to since I have not seen them, but precious few of them have murder and torture as the main entertainment theme. Silence of the Lambs and Se7en are probably the closest to focusing on the murder and torture, but both of those movies are about CATCHING a murderer not BEING a murderer. Now, beyond that you cannot tell me with a straight face that Pulp Fiction, A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, or Full Metal Jacket aren't deranged. That doesn't mean they are bad movies, actually a few of my favorites, but I still wouldn't let a 12yr old watch any of them.
Ok so 1 Million gil in FFXI on server X = $30, but on server Y = $25. So how do they even begin to figure out the value to tax at? Multiply this out by every online game and every server and you end up with a logistical nightmare of trying to figure out how to tax it. So, not that it would stop them, but it kinda puts them in a situation of spending $1000 to tax you $10.
The other side to this, is that unless you deal with non IT managers and such you will probably never understand. It isn't that they are that greedy trying to come up with inventive ways of taxing you. Its that this kind of shit honestly makes sense to them. I spent 45 minutes the other day trying to explain why we couldn't make something happen, and I wasn't using technical stuff. I was drawing big multicolored circles to show that the two networks in question are not connected and the traffic cannot just go between them just because each network happened to have a computer in the same room as the other. They assume that all the computers are magically connected because they are networked. On top of this they frequently believe they are being lied to by IT because IT just doesn't want to do it, and not that IT is actually telling them it just can't work that way. There is absolutely no concept, nor any desire to learn even the fundamental workings of IT. Look at Sen "internet tubes" he wasn't being intentionally stupid...he really believes that insanity..and because anyone correcting him would be opposing his ideology on the subject he would just assume they are lying to him.
And how many people saw this on slashdot in the past few days so Manhunt 2 is fresh on their mind every day with a new wild and crazy development. Like it or not, you can't get that kind of mindshare with any paid for advertising. It takes conflict and controversy to generate this kind of free PR buzz all over the net. I don't believe for a second that it is really going to be shelved...its just too stupid to do that to a game that is already almost finished.
No I said they are depicting torture and murder in an entertainment venue, which isn't morally offensive to me, just kinda dumb and deranged. I said the money grubbing fools and their lawyers that try to claim this BS is art would defend John Wayne Gacy as an artist. At no point do I equate their games with torture and murder, I equate the claim that their games are art are along the same lines of claiming torture, murder, porn, or even just shitting on the wall as art. And they are assholes. They are not some innocent company, they put out some pretty bad stuff, and then blame "evil hackers" and give idiots like ol Jack the tolls he needs to demonize the whole industry so that decent companies get screwed, the people get screwed with more moronic laws, and all the little soccer moms that got all up in a tizzy about the thing are happy that the champion of family friendly entertainment won another battle against those vicious lying video game makers trying to pervert little johnnies mind. All in the name of making another buck, when they could have just been responsible and NOT put that bullshit there in the first place, or maybe even owned up to it as a mistake instead of making up stupid stories.
I find nothing morally objectionable with anything in Windows XP. I think their company and business practices are reprehensible and refuse to support them based on the fact they are assholes too. Same thing to me. Its not the content at issue, its their shitty behavior about it. They could have been much more responsible and not caused all this ruckus with ALL of their games, even just by making it clear its for adults. But nope, free PR and buzz and *CA-CHING* was too much for their weak minds to handle. Why do the right thing when you can do the profitable thing?
Uhm...some movies just aren't appropriate for kids period, the same goes for games, and you are right its the parents damned job to hit the power button if they determine its inappropriate. However, I should be able to have a reasonable idea of the content of a movie based on its rating before I bother with it. I shouldn't have to worry about picking up the latest Disney cartoon and it having characters screwing, murdering, and cussing. If you are so against ratings systems then you are basically making the argument that hardcore porn belongs on the shelf at your local Walmart which is just stupid regardless of how liberal your views are. I don't really give a rats ass that porn exists, that people buy it, or anything, what WOULD piss me off is if I can't walk through the isles in the local video store looking for movies to watch without worrying about my kids trotting around the corner with hardcore porn in their hands.
I'm not afraid of natural biological systems by the way, I think it is utterly moronic that naked people will earn a high rating faster than violence. The nipple slip fiasco is an excellent example of how stupid it has gone, I can sit down on any given day and see a couple dozen people get murdered, beaten, tortured, or other such antisocial crap and have it glorified on TV and noone is bothered, but one nipple slip and suddenly the world is Puritan. Its moronic, and once again, the power button is on the TV if you don't like it. Further, while I think the "oh my god violent video games are perverting our poor children, help us mr government, help us" is fucking retarded in the extreme, if you are so stupid to believe that kids are not affected by what they see be it real or not you are a moron too. Teaching kids the difference between fantasy and reality is important and helps, but the younger they are the harder it is for them to make that separation.
I don't claim it was an inside job. If anything I claim it was likely known about and played into for maximum political effect, and it has dirty fingerprints all over it. I say you should NEVER trust what these guys say regardless of how "open" they claim to be. Lets look at the logic of these CIA papers. This is a group responsible for some of the dirtiest tricks ever done, from assassinations, to regime support, to government sabotage, to economic sabotage. Do you believe the serial killer that says "wait wait wait...that body in the river wasn't mine!".
9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq. Except that it became terribly apparent that the American people with their lack of cultural understanding, racist fear of the towel head, and horrible understanding of geography, would be ready and willing to go along with anything our heroic leader said needed to be done. The whole war on terror thing is just a damned fine excuse to make a gigantic power grab for the executive branch. Cheney claims to be executive when it is to protect him, and then claims to not really be executive, when it would require him to do something. It is no neatly woven conspiracy, people in power will do whatever they can get away with to expand that power and keep that power, that is a universal truth to human civilization. You just have to be willing to accept that while YOU wouldn't do something so horrible and alien to your moral code, it does not mean that others wouldn't. The holocaust was only the brainchild of a few sick few, it was only made possible by a large group of people saying "nothing THAT bad would ever happen".
Incidentally, take a close look. This IS their defensive preparations. Look at what they did when busted on Hot Coffee "OOOOh those evil hackers did it" until it came out that was a load of bullshit and it only worked on the people that have no understanding of how technology really works. So they get slapped, they shelf a nearly completed project (once again stupidity at its height if they are serious at all about that). Now people are coming out of the woodworks to cry about how its freedom of speech, and art, and whatnot. They generate a stupid amount of free publicity, put the game back out, and people buy it in droves (just as another poster said) just to "make a statement against censorship!". They aren't stupid, they are just assholes. In the meantime their antics make them wads of cash, we get more assinine laws, asshats like Jack Thomson get more ammunition, and innocent companies get raked over the coals (makers of Oblivion).
I have nothing against the content of their products on a moral level at all. I just thing its stupid. The few interesting titles they have released I refuse to go near because of their behavior.
A couple years ago a game like this wouldn't exist. Go back and look at the games and you will see that this company is primarily responsible for the deranged games that are getting fire. Its like trying to claim that porno really is just a story about a pizza guy who was down on his luck when he met love, and that its all just art. As far as the consoles, still not censorship. They don't want their brands associated with that nonsense. I don't think you will ever see Disney get involved with a Marilyn Manson release. It would be suicide for a company who is trying to market in the family market to associate with nonsense of this caliber. They are protecting their own interests from a company gone insane.
I honestly don't care what they make. This isn't some moralistic thing for me. Its a matter of common sense and the only envelope this group is pushing is pure stupidity. To be honest I would classify the things like Saw and Hostel in the same category of "this is a little beyond a normal R rating"
Watching them justify this crap as art is unreal. This shit is not art, this shit is about making waves, free media blitz, and big dollars. David in all his naked rock cock glory is art (that people ironically enough protested about as well). Nudes can be art porno is not art. Tattoos and such can be art torture is not art. I swear to god the lawyers in this mess would have defended John Wayne Gacy as being an artist by dressing as a clown and stuffing bodies in his floor. There are tons of things that don't like that I still consider art, its just art I don't like. This is far from any of that.
Oh what ever... This is not censorship at all. Censorship would be not allowing it to exist. Not allowing it to be sold in stores where noone checks ratings anyways when they sell to kids is not Censorship. It is no different than not allowing hard core porn to be sold on shelves in walmart.
1. The company is known for making deranged games.
2. The company is known for lying about content in said deranged games
3. This particular game is supposed to be incredibly dark and violent
4. As a result of all this it got an X type rating
As a parent this is what I expect. I shouldn't be required to worry about whether or not the PG-13 movie has a XXX porno on it if you push the appropriate buttons at the right time in the movie. This is what they get for their actions. The lawsuits against Oblivion user created content was a direct result of this companies assinine behavior and blaming "those evil hackers" for that Hot Coffee nonsense. Oblivion was wronged in this for something they didn't do. That said I don't care that these games exist, if people want to buy them from other places let them. I don't care for hardcore porno movies, so I don't go to the porno store and buy them, but nothing stops anyone else from doing it, and I don't really care if they do. The real irony here is that you classify sex as more evil than violence while deriding people for giving another deranged rockstar release an adult only rating.
I agree that this is not the governments problem to solve poor parenting, and this nanny state crap has got to go. Rating systems and saying you cant sell stuff of a certain rating in certain types of stores doesn't bother me in the least and it is not censorship at all. The porn industry is doing just fine knowing that their stuff is going to be rated a certain way and can only be sold in certain places. The folks that bring you such fine beverages as rum, whiskey, and so on also are only allowed to sell in certain areas and they are doing fine. Last I checked TVs still had power buttons, so its up to the parent to control that. However, as long as this is considered censorship, lets go ahead and sell porno in walmart and see how you feel when your daughter walks up with a DVD that has jenna jameson on the cover with a cock in her mouth and starts asking questions. Rating systems and limits on where they can be sold is how it is supposed to work, not by making violent video games illegal, two TOTALLY different things, and making the game illegal is censorship. Rockstar knew what they were putting into the game, Rockstar knew what was likely to happen, and Rockstar should be more than aware of their less than stellar track record for trying to game the system rather than play along like a responsible vendor...they should have expected this and I don't feel sorry for their lost revenue one bit, it was a stupid business decision.
Yes and no. The government is quite capable of small conspiracy, even more so when its been a small select group of people running the show for almost 30 years. Vast conspiracy like moon landing fakes, aliens, and that kind of thing are all but impossible. The government just isn't that competent to pull it off. It amuses me that people will trot out all the thousands of reasons our government is totally incompetent (as they frequently are) and then go on about these vast conspiracies. However, Cheney has fingerprints all over events in the last 30 years, exercises on top of real world events to generate confusion. We just happen to be having an exercise of "what if Iraq invades Kuwait" when Iraq invaded Kuwait...how terribly convenient to have all our forces in place just at that perfect moment...kinda like we just happened to be having an exercise about people flying planes into buildings the day some planes flew into buildings...while Cheney was sitting at the control center and Bush was reading My Pet Goat. (Let us not forget the similarity of Bush Sr, VP to an actor with Cheney as one of his partners, and Cheney as VP with Dubya out front being a misunderestimated distracting force). There is alot of repeating patterns here in the way this crew operates our country, and they have been at the helm for a long while.
Good job jackass. You let the secret out. Lets see, we have an ultraparanoid government hell bent on spying on the American populace through any way possible so much that we have had to have numerous rulings calling it unconstitutional, saying that email IS protected, and that illegal wiretapping is illegal (leave it to congress on that one). Now, would YOU want YOUR anti-bush stuff front page news with a government that paranoid? You not gunna be a smilin dog when they got you stacked in a naked pyramid asking you about your terrorist connections!
These posts have been moderated down to protect the innocent.
Funny how that freedom of the press thing works when it operates correctly. I think that was exactly the purpose of that even in the world before mass communication. I think our legal system was meant to be a last resort thing not first resort in this sense. More convoluted laws only hurts this, and it seemed clear to me the idea was to have more of a light and lean and modifiable legal system to try and cope with strange issues like this. Only when things absolutely cannot be worked out should the court system get involved.
Congratulations, you just called every locksmith in business a safe cracker. You just put the engineer who built your car on the same level as the guy who runs over a cop. The architect that built your house is now the same as the guy that kicks your front door in to steal your TV.
It isn't even in the same ballpark. Hacker came from people coding and other engineering/reverse engineering feats. Cracking has precious little to do with that, and frequently involves no kind of coding/engineering/reverse engineering. They are breaking and entering. Hackers CAN be crackers, just as an architect COULD break down your door more effectively knowing its weak points and steal your TV, so some overlap is possible. This isn't a moral judgement thing, its describing two entirely different types of acts. The real offense comes from the people that take pride in being skilled hackers being put on the same level as criminals and script kiddies.
People that don't read english have no business voting in America.
I'm all for immigrants, unless you are native American you came to America as an immigrant. The difference being the families showed up at the door they walked up, signed in, and frequently had their names changed and basically had to learn to read and write english to get by. If you want to speak spanish, pay in pesos, and so on, go to mexico. If you really think America is so great, then learn to integrate your culture and quit forcing the rest of us to learn your language. And before I hear some racist crap, one of my best friends growing up was an immigrant from Argentina. Mom, dad, and all the kids spoke perfect english (though they mostly spoke spanish at home), mom actually home schooled the kids up through grade school and taught spanish on the side. They are the perfect example of how immigrants can integrate into American society and still retain their culture.
Sorry, just one of my pet peeves about that kind of thing, but all your other points on the issues with paper ballots are spot on. Don't forget the infamous butterfly ballots too. I am a firm believer that we need to drop Diebold and all these other e-voting companies and contact Fisher Price to make a good voting machine that you can't screw up.
Well here is the unfortunate truth. Most of the first landers WERE religious nuts wanting to be free to practice their more nuttier things. (Note: Not all religious people are nuts, but I bet you can't look at me and tell me with a straight face that the puritans weren't psychotic zealots assuming you know the history.) The other large portion of the early landers were about as dumb as they come. "Come to the New World, there are gems all over the forest floor, everyone can be as rich as a king", and people bought that crap. They tricked people into coming to the new world with promises of magical riches because gems and gold and whatnot were just laying around on the ground to be picked up. So we have the religious zealots, and the gullible idiots, and I'm certain there is quite a bit of overlap in those two groups as well.
Not that there weren't plenty of good things later, I mean the Constitution and all that were terribly good developments, but the real beginnings were pretty sad. Austrailia was a prison camp when it started, so its not like they are still a giant penal colony in the modern world.
It was shipped from HP, and I suggest you talk to your suppliers and possibly appologize because turns out that HP misidentifying legit HP ink/toner cartridges is a known issue and is just a bug of in a bullshit system to attempt to force a vendor lock in.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE For all who read this understand this very very basic lesson in economics because I keep hearing this nonsense about "they lose money every time they sell one" NO THEY DON'T! I have been told to buy an Xbox because I don't like MS because it hurts them when I do because they lose money on it! So here is the lesson.
1. HP/MS/ETC do not make products to order like Burger King makes burgers. They order X thousands of units and then sell them and put in a new order when they run low.
2. Widget cost of MFG = $1000 - retail price of widget $700. The widget maker lost $1000 making the stupid thing, you buying it cut their loss to $300 instead of $1000. So of coarse they want you to buy it because it reduces their already incurred losses. They absolutely do not "lose money when they sell you one".
3. That being said, Widget Refill cost of MFG = $1, retail price of Widget Refill = $50. So if they warn you at 50% that you need a new one that means for what would have been a full use of one that they made a $49 profit for, they convinced you to buy 2 for the same ammount of usage and they made a $98 profit.
Sorry to get a little crazy here but that 'they lose money when you buy it' nonsense is painfully stupid, and such horrible math and economic understanding is why so many people are in such terrible financial situations with debt and the like. No, when I leave that Xbox 360 sitting on the shelf MS loses even MORE money, me purchasing it does not cause them to lose money in any way shape or form. Now I suppose if me and 1,000,000 of my friends ran out and bought enough to artificially raise the demand so that MS starts producing more that they think they will sell...yeah buying one could cost MS money, but it takes a whole lot of people doing that to do that with the demand.
And last I checked those pilgrims and other early settlers that came here were Puritan Sepratists leaving England to do their own thing.
The logic that would say that Massachusetts would be ground zero for the religious right is flawed for the exact reason you state. They moved west to get away from the sins of the growing cities (sorta what prompted their move to America in the first place) and thats how we got the whole "bible belt" thing. So you are right about the big city thing, but that is basically what kept blowing them westward from England until they were able to settle down in areas that largely remained insular little towns and didn't grow into big cities.
Given all of the insanity surrounding refilling ink cartridges, DMCA lawsuits, "authenticity checks" on cartridges, and the give them the printer sell them the cartridges style business is anyone, anyone at all, even remotely surprised, maybe even just raised an eyebrow, that the vendors would stoop so low as to have the printer lie to you to get you to go buy another "DMCA protected authentic cartridge we are gunna sue you if you try to refill it" item that costs nearly as much as the stupid printer did in the first place as often as possible?
I am just gunna call "well duh" on this whole thing. I have worked with HP laserjets that told me I had 200 pages left that I could print. After printing 192 pages it told me I could still print 320 pages. All said and done that day, I had printed some 500 pages and its final number was that I could still print another 250ish pages. Whether they lie, or their math is freaking horrible for figuring it out is up for debate I suppose, but given the problems we have had with that same model and HP accusing us of theft because a brand new HP cartridge out of the box was determined to be not authentic by the stupid machine...well I assume they are just out for blood. 4 hours of fighting with their technician to have them exchange the stupid cartridge.
Bundling, sounds like kindling. I bet the girls who got pregnant were burned because the boys claimed they did nothing, so she must have been a witch and forced them into it! (Remember kids, girls = evil according to the bible, stupid twit listening to a talking snake and ruining it for all of us)
I fail to see how this has anything to do with my imagination, this was the stated and demonstrated purpose of arming the Predator. And there absolutely is a natural progression from unarmed to armed in unmanned vehicles, it means the squishy human operator doesn't have to risk getting shot at to do the shooting, so I fail to see why you think there is no natural progression there, considering that is exactly what happened. The Predator is a recon craft, my point was that it started with nothing, and they eventually realized that it would really help to have an early engagement capability. I am saying that they probably intend to do the same thing here. They didn't arm the predator because it operated with close air support. The predator is on the scene long before the close air support or ground forces are. The idea was so that for targets of opportunity they wouldn't even have to call ground/air support in to handle it in the first place. It's not like this new thing is stuck doing mach 6 at 100k ft, else it would be terribly difficult to take off and land.
The Predator had the same life. Initially recon only, then they stuck a single hellfire missile on it for targets of opportunity because frequently if it sees something that really needs to be hit it will be able to engage the target LONG before any kind of support would be available. That said the Predator is not designed to engage anything beyond small targets of opportunity. I would imagine that this is exactly the same thing except it goes faster now. That being said, go look at the latest generation of stealthy aircraft, they don't carry weapons on the outside because it screws up that whole stealth thing. I suspect that this thing would never be armed for real use beyond a small target of opportunity and I imagine it would probably carry what little armament it might have in a closed bay.