Fallout 3 is a very large game, I certainly don't feel like it wasn't well worth its price. I have no issue with paying a fair price for them to add more. But it isn't the value side that bothers me.
If I buy the DLC on my Xbox it is linked to my console. Not only does that make it impossible for me to sell, it also can be a real pain in the ass getting DLC stuff back if your console breaks or gets stolen. I know why the DLC model exists, I just wish us backwards types could get it on physical media.
Are you against companies offering you a discount for not sending a paper bill? In all real terms it is the same thing. It costs a company money to print and post a document, if you don't require that service why should you be obliged to pay for it?
Your point about economic isolation simply isn't true, because although their are some compelling arguements for limited use of tariffs to protect internal markets, their will be a very large number of goods where buying globally is economically beneficial.
The first example that comes to mind is textiles. The cost of (non-branded) clothing now is incredibly low, almost entirely due to the low costs of production in countries like China. If you were to block importating to make a domestic textiles trade viable then the cost to consumers would rocket, doing this effectively makes everyone poorer due to higher cost of living and any wage rise to counter this would raise the price of other goods and services domestically, while also making America less competitive in other markets.
Additionally, creating a volume textile industry with the need for say 500,000 workers is allocating American workers to an extremely low value industry with no export potential. In a less regulated economy these workers could be employed in a higher value industry. The fact of the matter is that a good life in America relies on getting a good job, and this in part relies on peoples abilities and education, if your competing for jobs that a Chinese factory worker can do more cost effectively you've a big problem.
Now I'm happy for America to try economic isolationism, after all I don't live there, but I don't think it'll benefit you economically.
Although your comments on the cost of storage are accurate, I don't see the complete relevance to the issue at hand.
Unless your are being paid to store data, storing data for users is a cost and thus not something you 'profit' on. To use your example as an example of storing statements for a finance account. To store customer statements you buy an array of 300GB drives, this costs you £5 per customer (Including all costs to run array, backup to seperate location, pay for data centre etc) and will store 2 years worth of data.
After 2 years you have filled your arrays. For the next two years you have the following options, replace your storage for 20% the original cost and write over the oldest records, or double your storage so you can keep the old records and store the next two years for 40%.
In this example if you had 1,000,000 customers the difference in cost would be £1,000,000. Even if the service you are offering was already profitable is it not worth considering being £1,000,000 more profitable or what else you could do with that £1,000,000 that would improve customer service by more?
Surely those barriers are true with physical resources as well? Is having to buy a computer economic slavery? Is needing to pay for internet access to receive data you require in a timely manner economic slavery? Is needing to buy a petrol generator to get reliable power supply?
There are lots of things I don't like about Microsoft's Business practice, but the idea that simply paying for the best
software is economic slavery is incorrect.
Software doesn't need to be free and the fact that free software exists doesn't mean it is always the best option for everyone (or even the very poor). Open Source software provides competition to propriatary software, and as the software end users get improves then it doesn't matter which type of software the end user chooses.
Also, stop thinking that the fact Microsoft is paying Goverment organisations to stay with it instead of moving to Open Source alternatives. Every time MS drops it prices to stop someone jumping ship it is decreasing their profits, and saving organisation money.
My bank gives me access to my last 12 statements online, and then charges £2 to mail any older statements. If I leave, I will lose access to my online statements as soon as the account is closed. I download, store as PDF and print them on a 6 monthly cycle. The last thing we need is for goverment to spend a large amount of money creating, passing and enforcing uneeded regulations when we are capable of seeing what the terms were before we sign up.
Obviously if the item was something like a Credit Card or service which you will need to pay off then removing access to the information on what you need to pay before you are able to is an issue, but I haven't heard of this happening and would expect that the law already contains regulation that would protect against this.
For all the things I dislike about Apple, and about the iPhone itself it is like you say a great example of something many people didn't know they wanted till they knew about it.
Because Bob Barr on that cold day in hell where he actually won would never do anything you disagreed with? He was saying he knew Obama would do some things he wouldn't like, not that he didn't like him.
Besides you missing his point, your view itself is also very niave. Who says there was another candidate that he liked more than Obama? Maybe Obama was the one he agreed with most of all, in which case are you suggesting he not vote as a method of change?
The US political system is nearly as broken as is ours in the UK, and the odd individual voting for minority candidates wont fix it. Until a large enough proportion of Americans realise they have other options, or the system is changed to make a 3+ party system viable, you are best using your energy fighting to change the system, and using your vote to best effect given the system in use.
Adventures will be planned to challenge the ability of the party, if a group of 5 players contains one player who manages to get an additional 20% ability out by working the system than the DM has to scale the adventure to match, to the peril of the weaker characters. The end result tends to be that if anyone games the system very quickly everyone does. No one picks certain items because mathematically others are better and theme and variety quickly depart through the window.
'Rules Lawyers' can be another kettle of fish, generally the behaviour is no problem. It is only when they try and use rules in a way that is not intended (extreme cases), increase gaming time massively with excessive references to the rules or involve themselves in the games of others to point out very minor issues repeatedly without invitation that they become an issue.
Although the article may be correct that historically innovation died away during financially poor times I do wonder whether this will continue to be the case.
Everything in life has a cost, why look into the minor ones when your rolling in so much cash it doesn't matter? What may happen is that although less money is spent on new research and developement, some of the better products already developed become more widely deployed as people realise they need to do things better.
From a personal perspective I have spent a lot more time looking at my finances in the last 12 months, exactly because as I earn more than I spend I (incorrectly) didn't bother in the past. I'm argueable better off now than last year exactly because of the financial crisis.
For an economy the failure of some ineffective businesses allows others to fill the niche, it encourages people to question suppliers while looking for economies.
None of this makes the recession a good thing, and I'd argue that a lot of our goverment's (in the UK) actions will cause more problems than they solve, but I hope the innovators of the world don't believe that now isn't as good a time as any to find improvements.
You are not alone, the only thing that stopped me jumping ship already is doing it in a way that works for me and my partner. Any suggestions on where to go? Personally I quite like Germany, although Ireland is tempting just because of the easier transition.
I'm glad to see you're actually looking at the issue and trying to think of possible solutions.
A large proportion of technically capable web users look on ads purely as an annoyance that will 'never' be of benefit to them. They may well be right, most however are happy to ignore the site owners choice by blocking these adverts.
Over the years I have collected a very large amount of information on the visitors to the websites I control, and I have tested a range of measures related to people who avoid adverts. Everything from simply asking users not to use ad-blocking software to outright refusing access if they do.
What I have found over this time is that even on the most technical of sites (where use of ad-blockers was highest) it was always beneficial to block the blockers. The method changed depending on content and user profiling but it always helped the site financially and never hurt page exposure in the mid-long term.
Why is this relevant? Because I and no doubt 1001 other people know this and are creating software that can be used by site administrators to achieve the same thing, and in the long term this kind of thing is going to become more common.
It isn't reasonable. No organisation is run in a completely open manner, with ALL communications (and everything else) logged and released. In fact I doubt any human lives a life with that level of transparency.
To say it is the truth that something is evil just because you don't have 100% access to information proving it is paranoid, as it is defining everything you don't know everything about as evil.
I never said they're the lapdog of Satan or big brother
You said they were evil, if that isn't what you meant retract it and state what you did mean. If you did then don't obfuscate the issue with irrelevant things you didn't call them;)
No, he's literally programmed by Darwin who sadly due to his other work isn't widely recognised as the father of AI.
I'd agree that it is a good wording for describing a BAD teaching of evolution, not least because it only manages to sound slightly less retarded than most religious explanations.
The website you linked is a joke, it points out that people knew the bad things about the party they didn't vote for.
It manages to act outraged that everyone knew Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant, and ignores questions that show bias the other way. How many Rep voters thought Obama was a Muslim for example.
The guy used multiple choice polls, where the choices helped ensure people voted the way he wanted to.
Yeah, I can see how by looking at a four paragraph summary about a persons time with a company, a one liner about throwing a notepad really gets you to the centre of the issue.
You've just make a gigantic assumption, thus you must obviously be a very poor person to employ.
Of course the above is just another example of the flawed logic you used, I couldn't possibly rate your personality on such limited information (especially given peoples ability to say far stupider things online than they do in person). I'm just amazed some people thought it was insightful.
Oh come on. Fighting injust laws is a duty, breaking the law just because you don't agree with it is plain stupid (with the possible exception of doing it to get caught so you can fight the law as a defendant in court).
I disagree with the smoking ban in public places (in the UK) because I believe people should be left to 'choose' whether to attend a smoking venue, I'm not about to take up smoking under some delusion that this is the most effective way of fighting it.
I'd actually argue that protesting against a law that you don't break, and have no reason to want to break is probably more effective. If you are protesting against something you want to be able to do legally then you will always be seen as biased.
This entire thread came around from your original statement "If something costs lots and lots of time and effort to create, it will take quite a bit of resources to run as well.". It's outright wrong, and you deserved to get called on it.
Who says they have to make the same game cover 3 consoles?
Wii's are currently outselling both the 360 and PS3 by a massive margin, and although that is undoubtedly down to casual gamers the quantity of mature gamers with Wiis is still going to be sizeable. As a developer, ignoring an oppurtunity to put a title on a high selling console which has lower developement costs (peoples expectations regarding graphics are much lower) and with less competition (most Wii games are crap, especially none Nintendo ones) than on other consoles is an opportunity they shouldn't miss.
Hell considering Sony are still selling 200,000 PS2s a month I'd probably have teams working on titles for 360/PS3, and other teams working on Wii/PS2.
I've never underclocked a CPU, don't replace fans unless they break or get noisy and turn my computer off an average of two times a day. Never, ever has a computer broken even though I'm ignoring 3 of your rules.
The thing is my above observation means absolutely nothing as the sample is far to small to be of any statistical significance. I expect the same is true for your experience with PSUs. If someone has done testing on a reasonable scale, in monitored condition then it would be of real use to people buying 100s of units who want to minimise TCO.
I tend to buy reasonably good PSUs but mainly because I'm after energy efficiency (which is also why I power down twice a day).
If you'd even attempted to inform yourself enough on the issue that you knew America has intentionally avoided labelling the detainees as POWs then I'd give you a full response.
As your just an ignorant fool, I'll save it for someone worth the effort.
Like just about everything in life Micropayments are not inherently good or evil (though probably Lawful rather than Chaotic;) ). I've tried a couple of MMORPGs though never for more than a month.
Guildwars: Buy the game, possibly buy expansions but pay no subscription.
WoW: Buy the game, possibly buy expansions and then pay subscription.
Warhammer Online: Buy game, possibly buy expansions and then pay subscription.
I am quite happy with all the above payment methods as long as the cost is balanced to the value of the game. I have the same feeling for micro-payments (MPs).
My main concern with MPs is that level of spending becomes a defining factor in the capability of your character. A secondary concern is that their are a lot of morons in MMOs, and although I would rather the producer actually moderated the games in most cases inability to pay is one of the few lameness filters present.
As to the fact that MPs haven't taken off in the western world yet, Bioware are releasing a new Star Wars MMORPG which will feature them. The combination of a big franchise, a different setting to WoW and a well respected (by most) developer gives this a fair chance of becoming a big hit. Especially as it'll be 'FREE'.
Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture)
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
I agree with the GPs point, torture in 24 very often does not benefit 24. Richard Heller did not break when his Dad ordered him tortured, Michelle Dessler is tortured while innocent and Jack's brother held out. I certainly think the show is quite critical of the American intelligence community (with Bauer being about the only character it defends).
However, torture has never been shown in 24 to have a negative outcome. This combined with Jack's straight forward dedication to country regardless of ethics probably gives a strong message to viewers that the ends justify the means.
One of the most disturbing cybercrime trends in 2008, many security analysts say, has been the emergence of a full-blown underground economy where credit card information, identity theft information, and spam and phishing software are all available for relatively low prices.
I'm not a 1337 hacker, I'm not a computer expert, and I'm certainly not savvy to the cutting edge of crime but I'm sure this isn't remotely new. Is anyone else reading this and thinking that this was the case at least as far back as 2006?
Slashdot Mirror
Fallout 3 is a very large game, I certainly don't feel like it wasn't well worth its price. I have no issue with paying a fair price for them to add more. But it isn't the value side that bothers me.
If I buy the DLC on my Xbox it is linked to my console. Not only does that make it impossible for me to sell, it also can be a real pain in the ass getting DLC stuff back if your console breaks or gets stolen. I know why the DLC model exists, I just wish us backwards types could get it on physical media.
Are you against companies offering you a discount for not sending a paper bill? In all real terms it is the same thing. It costs a company money to print and post a document, if you don't require that service why should you be obliged to pay for it?
Your point about economic isolation simply isn't true, because although their are some compelling arguements for limited use of tariffs to protect internal markets, their will be a very large number of goods where buying globally is economically beneficial.
The first example that comes to mind is textiles. The cost of (non-branded) clothing now is incredibly low, almost entirely due to the low costs of production in countries like China. If you were to block importating to make a domestic textiles trade viable then the cost to consumers would rocket, doing this effectively makes everyone poorer due to higher cost of living and any wage rise to counter this would raise the price of other goods and services domestically, while also making America less competitive in other markets.
Additionally, creating a volume textile industry with the need for say 500,000 workers is allocating American workers to an extremely low value industry with no export potential. In a less regulated economy these workers could be employed in a higher value industry. The fact of the matter is that a good life in America relies on getting a good job, and this in part relies on peoples abilities and education, if your competing for jobs that a Chinese factory worker can do more cost effectively you've a big problem.
Now I'm happy for America to try economic isolationism, after all I don't live there, but I don't think it'll benefit you economically.
Although your comments on the cost of storage are accurate, I don't see the complete relevance to the issue at hand.
Unless your are being paid to store data, storing data for users is a cost and thus not something you 'profit' on. To use your example as an example of storing statements for a finance account. To store customer statements you buy an array of 300GB drives, this costs you £5 per customer (Including all costs to run array, backup to seperate location, pay for data centre etc) and will store 2 years worth of data.
After 2 years you have filled your arrays. For the next two years you have the following options, replace your storage for 20% the original cost and write over the oldest records, or double your storage so you can keep the old records and store the next two years for 40%.
In this example if you had 1,000,000 customers the difference in cost would be £1,000,000. Even if the service you are offering was already profitable is it not worth considering being £1,000,000 more profitable or what else you could do with that £1,000,000 that would improve customer service by more?
Surely those barriers are true with physical resources as well? Is having to buy a computer economic slavery? Is needing to pay for internet access to receive data you require in a timely manner economic slavery? Is needing to buy a petrol generator to get reliable power supply?
There are lots of things I don't like about Microsoft's Business practice, but the idea that simply paying for the best software is economic slavery is incorrect.
Software doesn't need to be free and the fact that free software exists doesn't mean it is always the best option for everyone (or even the very poor). Open Source software provides competition to propriatary software, and as the software end users get improves then it doesn't matter which type of software the end user chooses.
Also, stop thinking that the fact Microsoft is paying Goverment organisations to stay with it instead of moving to Open Source alternatives. Every time MS drops it prices to stop someone jumping ship it is decreasing their profits, and saving organisation money.
My bank gives me access to my last 12 statements online, and then charges £2 to mail any older statements. If I leave, I will lose access to my online statements as soon as the account is closed. I download, store as PDF and print them on a 6 monthly cycle. The last thing we need is for goverment to spend a large amount of money creating, passing and enforcing uneeded regulations when we are capable of seeing what the terms were before we sign up.
Obviously if the item was something like a Credit Card or service which you will need to pay off then removing access to the information on what you need to pay before you are able to is an issue, but I haven't heard of this happening and would expect that the law already contains regulation that would protect against this.
For all the things I dislike about Apple, and about the iPhone itself it is like you say a great example of something many people didn't know they wanted till they knew about it.
Because Bob Barr on that cold day in hell where he actually won would never do anything you disagreed with? He was saying he knew Obama would do some things he wouldn't like, not that he didn't like him.
Besides you missing his point, your view itself is also very niave. Who says there was another candidate that he liked more than Obama? Maybe Obama was the one he agreed with most of all, in which case are you suggesting he not vote as a method of change?
The US political system is nearly as broken as is ours in the UK, and the odd individual voting for minority candidates wont fix it. Until a large enough proportion of Americans realise they have other options, or the system is changed to make a 3+ party system viable, you are best using your energy fighting to change the system, and using your vote to best effect given the system in use.
Adventures will be planned to challenge the ability of the party, if a group of 5 players contains one player who manages to get an additional 20% ability out by working the system than the DM has to scale the adventure to match, to the peril of the weaker characters. The end result tends to be that if anyone games the system very quickly everyone does. No one picks certain items because mathematically others are better and theme and variety quickly depart through the window.
'Rules Lawyers' can be another kettle of fish, generally the behaviour is no problem. It is only when they try and use rules in a way that is not intended (extreme cases), increase gaming time massively with excessive references to the rules or involve themselves in the games of others to point out very minor issues repeatedly without invitation that they become an issue.
Although the article may be correct that historically innovation died away during financially poor times I do wonder whether this will continue to be the case.
Everything in life has a cost, why look into the minor ones when your rolling in so much cash it doesn't matter? What may happen is that although less money is spent on new research and developement, some of the better products already developed become more widely deployed as people realise they need to do things better.
From a personal perspective I have spent a lot more time looking at my finances in the last 12 months, exactly because as I earn more than I spend I (incorrectly) didn't bother in the past. I'm argueable better off now than last year exactly because of the financial crisis.
For an economy the failure of some ineffective businesses allows others to fill the niche, it encourages people to question suppliers while looking for economies.
None of this makes the recession a good thing, and I'd argue that a lot of our goverment's (in the UK) actions will cause more problems than they solve, but I hope the innovators of the world don't believe that now isn't as good a time as any to find improvements.
You are not alone, the only thing that stopped me jumping ship already is doing it in a way that works for me and my partner. Any suggestions on where to go? Personally I quite like Germany, although Ireland is tempting just because of the easier transition.
I'm glad to see you're actually looking at the issue and trying to think of possible solutions.
A large proportion of technically capable web users look on ads purely as an annoyance that will 'never' be of benefit to them. They may well be right, most however are happy to ignore the site owners choice by blocking these adverts.
Over the years I have collected a very large amount of information on the visitors to the websites I control, and I have tested a range of measures related to people who avoid adverts. Everything from simply asking users not to use ad-blocking software to outright refusing access if they do.
What I have found over this time is that even on the most technical of sites (where use of ad-blockers was highest) it was always beneficial to block the blockers. The method changed depending on content and user profiling but it always helped the site financially and never hurt page exposure in the mid-long term.
Why is this relevant? Because I and no doubt 1001 other people know this and are creating software that can be used by site administrators to achieve the same thing, and in the long term this kind of thing is going to become more common.
To say it is the truth that something is evil just because you don't have 100% access to information proving it is paranoid, as it is defining everything you don't know everything about as evil.
You said they were evil, if that isn't what you meant retract it and state what you did mean. If you did then don't obfuscate the issue with irrelevant things you didn't call them ;)
No, he's literally programmed by Darwin who sadly due to his other work isn't widely recognised as the father of AI.
I'd agree that it is a good wording for describing a BAD teaching of evolution, not least because it only manages to sound slightly less retarded than most religious explanations.
The website you linked is a joke, it points out that people knew the bad things about the party they didn't vote for.
It manages to act outraged that everyone knew Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant, and ignores questions that show bias the other way. How many Rep voters thought Obama was a Muslim for example.
The guy used multiple choice polls, where the choices helped ensure people voted the way he wanted to.
Yeah, I can see how by looking at a four paragraph summary about a persons time with a company, a one liner about throwing a notepad really gets you to the centre of the issue.
You've just make a gigantic assumption, thus you must obviously be a very poor person to employ.
Of course the above is just another example of the flawed logic you used, I couldn't possibly rate your personality on such limited information (especially given peoples ability to say far stupider things online than they do in person). I'm just amazed some people thought it was insightful.
Oh come on. Fighting injust laws is a duty, breaking the law just because you don't agree with it is plain stupid (with the possible exception of doing it to get caught so you can fight the law as a defendant in court).
I disagree with the smoking ban in public places (in the UK) because I believe people should be left to 'choose' whether to attend a smoking venue, I'm not about to take up smoking under some delusion that this is the most effective way of fighting it.
I'd actually argue that protesting against a law that you don't break, and have no reason to want to break is probably more effective. If you are protesting against something you want to be able to do legally then you will always be seen as biased.
I hope they don't do this, I downloaded Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer Miis to my console, I wouldn't last 5 minutes :|
This entire thread came around from your original statement "If something costs lots and lots of time and effort to create, it will take quite a bit of resources to run as well.". It's outright wrong, and you deserved to get called on it.
Who says they have to make the same game cover 3 consoles?
Wii's are currently outselling both the 360 and PS3 by a massive margin, and although that is undoubtedly down to casual gamers the quantity of mature gamers with Wiis is still going to be sizeable. As a developer, ignoring an oppurtunity to put a title on a high selling console which has lower developement costs (peoples expectations regarding graphics are much lower) and with less competition (most Wii games are crap, especially none Nintendo ones) than on other consoles is an opportunity they shouldn't miss.
Hell considering Sony are still selling 200,000 PS2s a month I'd probably have teams working on titles for 360/PS3, and other teams working on Wii/PS2.
I've never underclocked a CPU, don't replace fans unless they break or get noisy and turn my computer off an average of two times a day. Never, ever has a computer broken even though I'm ignoring 3 of your rules.
The thing is my above observation means absolutely nothing as the sample is far to small to be of any statistical significance. I expect the same is true for your experience with PSUs. If someone has done testing on a reasonable scale, in monitored condition then it would be of real use to people buying 100s of units who want to minimise TCO.
I tend to buy reasonably good PSUs but mainly because I'm after energy efficiency (which is also why I power down twice a day).
If you'd even attempted to inform yourself enough on the issue that you knew America has intentionally avoided labelling the detainees as POWs then I'd give you a full response.
As your just an ignorant fool, I'll save it for someone worth the effort.
I am quite happy with all the above payment methods as long as the cost is balanced to the value of the game. I have the same feeling for micro-payments (MPs).
My main concern with MPs is that level of spending becomes a defining factor in the capability of your character. A secondary concern is that their are a lot of morons in MMOs, and although I would rather the producer actually moderated the games in most cases inability to pay is one of the few lameness filters present.
As to the fact that MPs haven't taken off in the western world yet, Bioware are releasing a new Star Wars MMORPG which will feature them. The combination of a big franchise, a different setting to WoW and a well respected (by most) developer gives this a fair chance of becoming a big hit. Especially as it'll be 'FREE'.
I agree with the GPs point, torture in 24 very often does not benefit 24. Richard Heller did not break when his Dad ordered him tortured, Michelle Dessler is tortured while innocent and Jack's brother held out. I certainly think the show is quite critical of the American intelligence community (with Bauer being about the only character it defends).
However, torture has never been shown in 24 to have a negative outcome. This combined with Jack's straight forward dedication to country regardless of ethics probably gives a strong message to viewers that the ends justify the means.
I'm not a 1337 hacker, I'm not a computer expert, and I'm certainly not savvy to the cutting edge of crime but I'm sure this isn't remotely new. Is anyone else reading this and thinking that this was the case at least as far back as 2006?