Unless you wath only tv anime series, I disagree. Japanese fans pay around $60 for a single OVA (original video animation: straight-to-video anime). Japanese people paid $15 to see Howl's Moving Castle. People bitch about how FLCL (a popular ova) is two eps to a disc here and costs $60 bucks total, but that's one SIXTH the price it originally sold for. Heck, it was even aired on cable here (eventually that might happen in Japan too, but most likely not for as many runs or in as good a time slot). And nowadays I'm noticing "value packs" where full seasons are much cheaper than before, due to anime geting more mainstream here or something. It's entirely possible that supporting the industry could lead to better prices, at least on select series.
This content is of inferior quality and capitalizes the S in the middle of Microsoft, not to mention random verbs, but sadly, I must concede it's better than PS3 vs. 360 projections and "ohnoes vap0rware!". Though I guess more of us should get our shit together and submit better stuff, rather than just bitching about it...
...a miraculous new optical technology that was announced five years ago. I know it works on different principles, but this is at best a x2 improvement on it, and the story of the FMD-ROM just shows how easily great technology can turn to vaporware if it's not picked up by the big companies and consortia, or it rears its head too far ahead of its time. Hopefully this will do better, but you can see why I'm not dancing in the streets.
They just aren't feature films. Sony released a personal blu-ray recorder a loooooooooong time ago for people to record hd-tv, and anyone interested in watching a demo disc can go to the Sony Building in Tokyo. When I went it was a nature documentary, but it was still pretty impressive.
...earlier this year I saw Xboxen for around $60. I believe some places will try to sell you a Saturn for that much. Presumably the price is now even lower, and will be lower still when the 360 actually comes out. So, anyone who wants to play all of the old Xbox games will be able to do so for less than the cost of a nice tshirt there (ie 30 bucks). Slashdot Japan isn't even listing this as news. Then again, Slashdot Japan is about as big as the Xbox over there...
...but the PS2's parental control system has a universal reset password clearly printed in the manual. Now call me crazy, but I think more kids read these manuals than parents. I have fond memories of my dad going crazy trying to set up the NES.
I strongly doubt any parental control system will be particularly "stronger" than the PS2's either. People forget passwords, especially when they only use it once on Christmas day. Unless Nintendo wants a lot of dead boxen out there, there'll be some sort of back door, so the system won't be very deterent to the determined, and by "determined" I mean "taking three seconds to Google it".
But seriously, why would anyone want this feature to work anyway? Parents presumably buy their kids games, or at least live in the same damn house. Paying attention to what your kids are doing will always be more effective than trying to regulate it with some machine.
No privacy for individuals who consider themselves better than the rest in that place and commit acts of violence.
Most of the legislation that chips away at our privacy (like the patriot act) is founded on that very principle. "If someone's going to commit acts of violence (or at least be suspected of them), it's in the public interest to ignore their rights, and possibly the rights of those surrounding them."(An investigation and trial is hard if all witnesses have the right to privacy) The fact of the matter is that unless you have some sort of universal crime detector, this ends up far from ideal, and innocent people will get their lives ruined by the system, and the system will be abused. Which, unless I'm reading you wrong, is exactly what you don't want. I know you have a system to prevent abuse: a combination of "openness" and monetary leverage, but so does Congress, and they keep screwing me over every time they meet. Eventually your system might involve a warrant, juries, some level of power to the lower class, etc., but that starts to sound fairly familiar...
Marx dreamed. Jefferson dreamed. Things don't always go the way you think they will, even if you're as smart as those guys. I for one would hate to live in a country where the streets aren't safe to drive on all because some guy who bought the island had some crazy ideology about law. That kinda defies the entire primary purpose of government (to keep other people from killing me or taking my stuff). Not to mention some of your laws are contradictory. How are you perserving privacy if you punish murderers publicly? (and you're practically guaranteed not all "murderers" found guilty in your society acutally committed a crime) And the guilty would be very hard to punish with everyone fending for themselves. No one's going to work for an unpaid police force, and you won't be able to investigate crimes anyway because that will invade someone's privacy. Hell, without taxes, no one's going to enforce your "one law", and people somewhere on your island might set up an "invasive" government just to protect themselves from the chaos around them. I'm not trying to discourage you or your dream, I'm just saying many brilliant people have spent lifetimes trying to figure out "a better way", and there's a reason there's no utopian countries out there. Also, on an "I learned something today" note: Government is about compromise. We give up some of our freedoms in order to make the world an overall safe place for us, our loved ones, and our stuff. It's a unending game of give and take, and before it started, you would have lived in constant fear of a larger guy coming and killing you just because he felt like it. Maybe being able to feel secure about the world around me is a kind of "freedom."
I think that the huge amount of embarrassment caused by this whole thing hitting mainstream news is enough to get Sony management to change their policies, if they even condoned this in the first place. Besides, I doubt very many people will hold to their principles for very long. Sony makes cool stuff. Blizzard was slammed for doing something similar back in the day (though it wasn't as mediafied), and many gamers cried boycott. Who's boycotting now?! Everyone and their grandma plays WoW. Blizzard really hasn't changed much either, but it's many peoples' favorite company. So c'mon, make a new year's resolution you can keep this time. I'll be buying a PS3, and maybe write something about this on the little feedback card, but that's the best I can ask of myself or most of the tech-liking community, it seems.
First off, I have to say that part of my post (which I think spawned this thing) was in hopeful jest. I don't need to consult a patent professional to know that you'd have to get up preeetty early in the morning to slip the "A method to do everything using anything" patent past the system.
Also, it's an accepted fact among IP professionals that a lot of stuff being patented nowadays ("One-click shopping", "The moon") wouldn't have gotten through the system twenty years ago. I haven't gone to law school, but it does seem like this is blatant abuse of a system designed to promote technology, and it's self-perpetuating (It's like crack; no one feels right doing it, but the rewards are too sweet to ignore). I know that lots of companies are making an effort to boost the quality and lower the quantity of their patents using rating systems and the like, but there's still a lot of shenanigans going on.
My "point" was that this trend will chill itself. The insane amount of obvious patents granted now will help realign the definition of "obvious" to what it should be in the future. I mean, only so much stuff actually is obvious, right? Supposedly they'll eventually run out...
I don't see why I can't have an opinion. Not being a patent lawyer doesn't immediately disqualify me to speak any more than being one would qualify me to. Presumably Mr. Volfson's patent was drafted by someone working fulltime in patent law. I'm not saying you're remotely his level, I'm just saying that being a patent lawyer isn't a magical trigger for correctness.
If some guy in Indiana wants to pay hundreds of dollars to patent stuff that (regardless of being real physics or not) can't possibly be implemented before the patent expires, I'm all for it. That means that if/when technology finally catches up it'll be public domain. He should go ahead and slip in a broad patent on near-light travel, and something about wormholes.
To tell the truth, I feel the same way about gene patents. If they want to patent them all, let them. As many incredible advances as have been made in genetics, I somehow feel they'll be much more useful in twenty years.
The goverment is too dumb to figure out what's obvious and what's not, so if we just patent [i]everything[/i] now and check back in twenty years, the problem will be solved.
I'm pretty sure a lot more people play games at cyber cafes in Malaysia than in America. It's an big thing in Asia. They're even popular (at least relative to the U.S.) in Japan, despite just about everyone owning a pc and having god-like broadband. So if you want to stop people from playing MMOs at night, cracking down on net cafes is the way to do it.
Now what they're missing here is that stopping people from playing at night isn't what they want to do. By "addiction problem", they mean that MMOs are distracting people from their real lives. By restricting play to only hours when they SHOULD be doing something else, it's only going to make things worse for a good number of people. People will ditch work to catch a few hours of WoW fix. I know a bunch of people like that here, so in a city with some sort of chronic problem already this is not the way to go.
The clones were a big one-time order that took years to create, and presumably cost more than just paying some guy to stand guard duty.
That would makes sense if:
1) There wasn't an entire planet of one-dimensional characters who for whatever reason dedicate themselves to the clone and weapon makin' process.
2) The Empire wasn't an um... Empire.
I mean, I doubt they're short on cash, but even if they were they could easily 0wn the planet into submission.
Pretty much since the two companies became one they've been trying to do this. They've put out plenty of betas in Japan trying to look for that winning genre combination. There's "Junkmetal", which is an MMO mech-based FPS, and "Shisso, Yankee Tamashii.", a more original MMO where you play as a Japanese highschool delinquent. There's not really that much you can do with the MMO model, though, but they don't seem to get that...
Slashdot Mirror
The game industry will be over by then, remember?
Unless you wath only tv anime series, I disagree. Japanese fans pay around $60 for a single OVA (original video animation: straight-to-video anime). Japanese people paid $15 to see Howl's Moving Castle. People bitch about how FLCL (a popular ova) is two eps to a disc here and costs $60 bucks total, but that's one SIXTH the price it originally sold for. Heck, it was even aired on cable here (eventually that might happen in Japan too, but most likely not for as many runs or in as good a time slot). And nowadays I'm noticing "value packs" where full seasons are much cheaper than before, due to anime geting more mainstream here or something. It's entirely possible that supporting the industry could lead to better prices, at least on select series.
I've been following it, and it seems safe to say it comes out after Duke Nukem Forever...
This content is of inferior quality and capitalizes the S in the middle of Microsoft, not to mention random verbs, but sadly, I must concede it's better than PS3 vs. 360 projections and "ohnoes vap0rware!". Though I guess more of us should get our shit together and submit better stuff, rather than just bitching about it...
...a miraculous new optical technology that was announced five years ago. I know it works on different principles, but this is at best a x2 improvement on it, and the story of the FMD-ROM just shows how easily great technology can turn to vaporware if it's not picked up by the big companies and consortia, or it rears its head too far ahead of its time. Hopefully this will do better, but you can see why I'm not dancing in the streets.
They just aren't feature films. Sony released a personal blu-ray recorder a loooooooooong time ago for people to record hd-tv, and anyone interested in watching a demo disc can go to the Sony Building in Tokyo. When I went it was a nature documentary, but it was still pretty impressive.
...earlier this year I saw Xboxen for around $60. I believe some places will try to sell you a Saturn for that much. Presumably the price is now even lower, and will be lower still when the 360 actually comes out. So, anyone who wants to play all of the old Xbox games will be able to do so for less than the cost of a nice tshirt there (ie 30 bucks). Slashdot Japan isn't even listing this as news. Then again, Slashdot Japan is about as big as the Xbox over there...
...but the PS2's parental control system has a universal reset password clearly printed in the manual. Now call me crazy, but I think more kids read these manuals than parents. I have fond memories of my dad going crazy trying to set up the NES.
I strongly doubt any parental control system will be particularly "stronger" than the PS2's either. People forget passwords, especially when they only use it once on Christmas day. Unless Nintendo wants a lot of dead boxen out there, there'll be some sort of back door, so the system won't be very deterent to the determined, and by "determined" I mean "taking three seconds to Google it".
But seriously, why would anyone want this feature to work anyway? Parents presumably buy their kids games, or at least live in the same damn house. Paying attention to what your kids are doing will always be more effective than trying to regulate it with some machine.
No privacy for individuals who consider themselves better than the rest in that place and commit acts of violence.
Most of the legislation that chips away at our privacy (like the patriot act) is founded on that very principle. "If someone's going to commit acts of violence (or at least be suspected of them), it's in the public interest to ignore their rights, and possibly the rights of those surrounding them."(An investigation and trial is hard if all witnesses have the right to privacy) The fact of the matter is that unless you have some sort of universal crime detector, this ends up far from ideal, and innocent people will get their lives ruined by the system, and the system will be abused. Which, unless I'm reading you wrong, is exactly what you don't want. I know you have a system to prevent abuse: a combination of "openness" and monetary leverage, but so does Congress, and they keep screwing me over every time they meet. Eventually your system might involve a warrant, juries, some level of power to the lower class, etc., but that starts to sound fairly familiar...
Marx dreamed. Jefferson dreamed. Things don't always go the way you think they will, even if you're as smart as those guys. I for one would hate to live in a country where the streets aren't safe to drive on all because some guy who bought the island had some crazy ideology about law. That kinda defies the entire primary purpose of government (to keep other people from killing me or taking my stuff). Not to mention some of your laws are contradictory. How are you perserving privacy if you punish murderers publicly? (and you're practically guaranteed not all "murderers" found guilty in your society acutally committed a crime) And the guilty would be very hard to punish with everyone fending for themselves. No one's going to work for an unpaid police force, and you won't be able to investigate crimes anyway because that will invade someone's privacy. Hell, without taxes, no one's going to enforce your "one law", and people somewhere on your island might set up an "invasive" government just to protect themselves from the chaos around them. I'm not trying to discourage you or your dream, I'm just saying many brilliant people have spent lifetimes trying to figure out "a better way", and there's a reason there's no utopian countries out there. Also, on an "I learned something today" note: Government is about compromise. We give up some of our freedoms in order to make the world an overall safe place for us, our loved ones, and our stuff. It's a unending game of give and take, and before it started, you would have lived in constant fear of a larger guy coming and killing you just because he felt like it. Maybe being able to feel secure about the world around me is a kind of "freedom."
I think that the huge amount of embarrassment caused by this whole thing hitting mainstream news is enough to get Sony management to change their policies, if they even condoned this in the first place. Besides, I doubt very many people will hold to their principles for very long. Sony makes cool stuff. Blizzard was slammed for doing something similar back in the day (though it wasn't as mediafied), and many gamers cried boycott. Who's boycotting now?! Everyone and their grandma plays WoW. Blizzard really hasn't changed much either, but it's many peoples' favorite company. So c'mon, make a new year's resolution you can keep this time. I'll be buying a PS3, and maybe write something about this on the little feedback card, but that's the best I can ask of myself or most of the tech-liking community, it seems.
First off, I have to say that part of my post (which I think spawned this thing) was in hopeful jest. I don't need to consult a patent professional to know that you'd have to get up preeetty early in the morning to slip the "A method to do everything using anything" patent past the system. Also, it's an accepted fact among IP professionals that a lot of stuff being patented nowadays ("One-click shopping", "The moon") wouldn't have gotten through the system twenty years ago. I haven't gone to law school, but it does seem like this is blatant abuse of a system designed to promote technology, and it's self-perpetuating (It's like crack; no one feels right doing it, but the rewards are too sweet to ignore). I know that lots of companies are making an effort to boost the quality and lower the quantity of their patents using rating systems and the like, but there's still a lot of shenanigans going on. My "point" was that this trend will chill itself. The insane amount of obvious patents granted now will help realign the definition of "obvious" to what it should be in the future. I mean, only so much stuff actually is obvious, right? Supposedly they'll eventually run out... I don't see why I can't have an opinion. Not being a patent lawyer doesn't immediately disqualify me to speak any more than being one would qualify me to. Presumably Mr. Volfson's patent was drafted by someone working fulltime in patent law. I'm not saying you're remotely his level, I'm just saying that being a patent lawyer isn't a magical trigger for correctness.
If some guy in Indiana wants to pay hundreds of dollars to patent stuff that (regardless of being real physics or not) can't possibly be implemented before the patent expires, I'm all for it. That means that if/when technology finally catches up it'll be public domain. He should go ahead and slip in a broad patent on near-light travel, and something about wormholes. To tell the truth, I feel the same way about gene patents. If they want to patent them all, let them. As many incredible advances as have been made in genetics, I somehow feel they'll be much more useful in twenty years. The goverment is too dumb to figure out what's obvious and what's not, so if we just patent [i]everything[/i] now and check back in twenty years, the problem will be solved.
I'm pretty sure a lot more people play games at cyber cafes in Malaysia than in America. It's an big thing in Asia. They're even popular (at least relative to the U.S.) in Japan, despite just about everyone owning a pc and having god-like broadband. So if you want to stop people from playing MMOs at night, cracking down on net cafes is the way to do it. Now what they're missing here is that stopping people from playing at night isn't what they want to do. By "addiction problem", they mean that MMOs are distracting people from their real lives. By restricting play to only hours when they SHOULD be doing something else, it's only going to make things worse for a good number of people. People will ditch work to catch a few hours of WoW fix. I know a bunch of people like that here, so in a city with some sort of chronic problem already this is not the way to go.
The clones were a big one-time order that took years to create, and presumably cost more than just paying some guy to stand guard duty. That would makes sense if: 1) There wasn't an entire planet of one-dimensional characters who for whatever reason dedicate themselves to the clone and weapon makin' process. 2) The Empire wasn't an um... Empire. I mean, I doubt they're short on cash, but even if they were they could easily 0wn the planet into submission.
...as long as they pick the right targets
...why not release a DVD?
Pretty much since the two companies became one they've been trying to do this. They've put out plenty of betas in Japan trying to look for that winning genre combination. There's "Junkmetal", which is an MMO mech-based FPS, and "Shisso, Yankee Tamashii.", a more original MMO where you play as a Japanese highschool delinquent. There's not really that much you can do with the MMO model, though, but they don't seem to get that...