This is getting ridiculous. It would take at least 6 months for a casual gamer to reach level 70. But the issue is not the length of time itself; the issue is that for people who value their scarce free time, WoW is not a sound investment, because the game developers both reserve and frequently exercise the right to dramatically change class balance and dynamics.
You can spend weeks doing research to determine the perfect class to play and invest your time in. But 6 months now, as Blizzard proved again and again, the class you will find yourself with will be very different than the same class you based your decision on 6 months or a year prior.
I certainly will never play WoW again; 6 months of my free time is too valuable an investment to put into the hands of Blizzard again.
"...the other would have connected a city of 300,000 people and skyrocketing property prices to a large area of undeveloped land."
I see. And this second bridge, unlike the first, is a not a bridge to "nowhere" because it connects to a large area of...undeveloped, unoccupied land?
Thanks for clarifying.
We wouldn't want the real estate developers to have to finance their own development. Nosiree! That's what hard working american men and women are for... to finance real estate development that they'd never be able to afford themselves.
"I don't mean to be an art snob or to demean the people who doubtlessly worked hard on this," and yet you very much did demean their hard work, work for which they were not paid, did not ask your blessing, nor did they need it. It's the very essence of snobbery to suppose that your personal taste is the yardstick by which others judge success and failure.
"Heavenly Sword seems, to me, the pinnacle of what I hate about female protagonists in games."
"They're all petite and totally badass. They're blatantly one dimensional..."
Cry me a river. You realize the objective of this game amounts to: swing sword, kill monsters, watch pretty pictures on screen, don't you?
Were you expecting The Adventures of Linda the Large-Boned Soccer Mom? Or maybe Heavenly Sword: Intellectual Adventures in Feminism?
If you don't like it, don't play it.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret pal. This may shock and amaze you, but there are billion dollar media industries whose entired business models are based on the objectification of women.
"Are they completely aware the program won't do one damned thing to solve any problem, but the propose it anyway just so they can put a blurb in their campaign ads about how they protect children."
Well you don't have to look far, when voting against a measure like this will guarantee that next election cycle your opponent will run a black and white ad with ominous music saying, "Sen. Jim Bob wants to protect the rights of sexual predators to contact your children on the internet!"
House races especially are dirty like this. This crap happens all the time, I've even seen it in live debates.
And you want to know the really sad part? A lot of voters eat this stuff up. If you're average Soccer Mom Susie, all of a sudden you're not sure you can trust the candidate anymore, and if you already hated the candidate, well now he or she is the devil himself.
"While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child's online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material"
And the same can be said of the fucking postal system.
While it's true that parents can screen the letters that arrive at and are sent from their home post office box to somewhat guard against their children using the postal system to solicit, receive, and exchange adult material, the practice of screening by parents is farm from universal and even when applied may not be fool-proof.
We had better start filtering and monitoring all domestic mail as well. And, my God, what about international mail? We'll have to screen that for sure, maybe even just stop it all.
And, and,...oh God no!! What about satellite dishes and even shortwave! Those porn terrorists could be beaming it directly into our homes. Why if a minor were to come into the possession of a electro-magnetic wave receiving device, it could be the end of civilization as we know it!
"With copyright, I am involved in the system whether I like it or not."
That's preposterous. Simply stop buying their products and you will be quite uninvolved.
But what's that you say? Oh, you enjoy their products. In fact you enjoy them so much that despite their price and restrictions, you desire and purchase them anyhow.
That's wonderful news. That means the market is working. But what of the artificial scarcity we have created? Quite alright! You hardly would otherwise have a claim to any ownership of Ms. Spears' latest songs simply by virtue of existing. And certainly you have no necessity of them that would trump this.
Where do you get the notion that you have some right to these products that is denied you by the current copyright system? Do you honestly expect us to believe that simply by virtue of existing, and contributing to "society" in some ambiguous, insignificant way, that you come to have any claim whatsoever of ownership of or right to these products?
"BTW there is nothing in what I said that says Chinese people are bad - those who want to come to the West and participate in Western values, come on over."
Over where now? Certainly not to the EU. They aren't letting them in. Not to the US. We aren't letting them in. I don't know what world you are living in, but even among those who can afford to get into the US or EU, or for that matter are even allowed to leave their country of origin, they have no where to go because legal immigration is restricted to a trickle.
"Cause if there are people in China who are willing to work for cheaper than people in your country then you best make sure business and consumers can't benefit from that."
Or, you know, maybe the EU - unlike the US - will stand up for its principles in the world by negotiating trade deals with these countries that are tied to human rights, to having a representative, participatory democracy, and to their people being free from government infringement upon their liberties?
But then who are we to intervene? Afterall, it's not our fault these poor saps over in China flunked out of interdimensional soul-school and got themselves born into the world as dirt poor factory laborers in a communist regime, right? Sucks to be them, amirite?! Damn right you should be smug! I mean, you wouldn't have been born in the good old US of A if you didn't deserve it.
"The less tax the better, because at it's core government is horribly inefficent"
Imposing import tariffs in order to penalize countries that oppress their laborers, that deny them basic human rights, that deny them democratic participation and representation in their government, in my opinion are exactly the sort of cases when countries should impose tariffs.
Do you think those laborers want to be there? It's not their fault they were born there. And where else are they going to go, even if they could afford to leave, even if their countries of birth would let them leave? Not to the E.U. Not to the U.S. We won't let them in. And you and I no more deserve the countries of our birth than they do theirs. The least we can do as decent human beings is to at least try to leverage our positions of power to help them along on their path to prosperity.
Now, I know these countries are imposing tariffs just to protect local economies not out of any genuine empathy, and I know that they will not negotiate treaties or pursue policies specifically to use those tariffs as leverage to improve the freedom and quality of life of foreign laborers, but that speaks against the practice, not against the principle. And in spite of their motivations, there is still great potential for good to come of it.
And I'll tell you what, I am libertarian leaning, and to the best of my ability I have been a strong supporter of Ron Paul; he's my candidate. That's my general philosophy toward government, But at the same time I believe there are some fundamental inequalities in this world, the chief of which is our country of birth, and in spite of my political persuasions, I will continue to advocate for basic human decency in government and business dealings. Screw the Randroid assholes.
"Not to mention how much time it frees up for other things."
Right on. I haven't owned a television in I believe 6.5 years now. I also rarely rent or go to movies.
I usually scan through and watch some of the high rated YouTube videos in the evening. Some of those are short clips from television, yes, but I couldn't imagine watching the entire program just for those few moments of humor; I'll let someone else filter out the cruft for me. And it's always on my schedule. If I can't get it when I want it, not interested.
To get my news I listen to the Democracy Now! audio broadcast, as well as check a few blogs and news sites most days.
The one thing I do miss is CSPAN. Watching it yourself is pretty much the only way to get reliable and thorough coverage of the very important things going on now in the House and Senate Judiciary committees. I would gladly pay for some service where I can select the sessions I want recorded and have those videos available to me in the evenings. But there doesn't seem to be a consumer market for that. Or maybe there is and someone just needs to fill it.
I've seen the 24 hour news stations when staying at hotels and so forth. They are 24 hours of biased, low brow crap. The very best thing these stations could do is to provide daily, unbiased coverage of committee and floor debate, as well as reasoned commentary, analysis, and background information when not in session.
It really makes me sad to think about how most Americans form the opinions they hold about our government, our elected representatives, and policies. Most people don't read the newspaper, and even many of those who do don't get beyond the sports and local sections. They certainly aren't getting enough information in 30 minutes of national broadcast television news. And the 24 hour news channels don't seem to offer more than 30 minutes of substance in any given 24 hours themselves.
So on what do most Americans base their political viewpoints? As far as I can tell, on labels, gossip, and propaganda, and that really saddens me. In this day and age we have the ability to follow and shape the goings on of our democracy more than every in our history, and we are squandering that opportunity. No, not just squandering, we are throwing it away, it and our future, and our children will not realize what we have lost until it is too late.
Forget Mario, revive some of the real classics
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Where the Wii Fits In
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And not through your "Virtual Console". Let's see some new development. Just because people aren't paying money for your 15 and 20 year old games doesn't mean there isn't a market.
Let's see some of the real classics brought up to date, and please take note, I do NOT mean modeled as 3D polygons, with wildly swinging cameras, and wasting precious CPU cycles on half-assed photo-realism. Spend your budget on designers and 2D artists. With the popularity of Japanese style anime among young people today, albeit the market would be all over this with marketing support. And cell-shaded 3D doesn't count. That just gives you all the disadvantages of 3D with none of the advantages of beautiful 2D artwork.
Double Dragon Final Fight Streets of Rage Metal Slug Street Fighter Fatal Fury Art of Fighting King of Fighters
Games like these were all great to play at home and at the arcade. They were also great fun to play with friends, and that seems to be a key strategy for the Wii. These are all great franchises. None of them have the much-criticized kiddie themes of the Mario universe. They just need some decent development and marketing dollars.
Being able to write well formed prose may impress your clients now, but in 10 years once this generation has established itself in the business world, many of your potential clients might well be using text messages as their primary means of conducting business deals.
Your elaborate prose might just be filtered straight to the trash.
If you can't thumb out "dood i am so ur best choice lets talk 2:30 @ joes" in 10 seconds on your mobile, you might not get their contract.
Although you'll have to take that as an artist's rendition. I've never sent a text message. I'm still trying to figure out how to get a phone like my old one back, one that didn't have color, graphics, an integrated ring tone store, 3 layers of menus to get to my stored phone numbers, and didn't have the ability to receive text messages. I see them all the time in the news being sold as low cost phones in India and sub-saharan Africa; am I really that far behind the times?
And to hell with voice mail and a missed calls list. If I didn't get your call, I was busy. Call back if it's important to you. It obviously wasn't important enough to me to answer. Hello?
The spectrum is a necessarily shared resource. Its use is a government mediated monopoly. There are very few if any *viable* alternatives to this arrangement.
It would be unfair to impose use of this government mediated monopoly upon citizens and taxpayers in mode to which they have no democratic political recourse. And I know what you may be thinking, but what we are seeing is *exactly* that, citizens exercising their political recourse to exercise democratic control over this necessarily shared resource. The fact that most voters choose to elect representatives at odds with your agenda to allow unrestricted profanity to be broadcast, has no bearing, so long as you agenda for this naturally limited resource would undermine the democratic will of the people. Most voters also choose to elect representatives who would not favor the idea of painting profane murals on the Senate chamber walls. This is little different.
This is also not a free speech issue. You can stand in front of the capitol building and hurl verbal expletives at your elected representatives, and someone who disagrees with you can shout right back. But just as you can not *paint* expletives on the stairs in front of the capitol, you also can not fill the public broadcast spectrum with expletives in opposition to the democratically expressed will of the people.
For anyone who still does not understand this concept, give some thought to the role of an agency like the FAA. You will find the parallels are remarkable.
"Anyone can see you in the street, log you for any purpose, and any cop can stop you and fuck with you. How is this any different than what's been happening for years?"
So because it's been happening for years, that makes it alright?
The reasoning is this simple: the government exists solely at our pleasure, it is perpetuated solely at our discretion, it is funded WITH OUR MONEY, and the FUCK if I am going to pay someone to rig up an expansive camera monitoring system and spend all day watching us.
Are you out of your mind? Please, I'm not about to slave away at the office 5 days a week just to pay for some wankers sitting around on their arses watching me walk around.
What a bunch of pussies we are all becoming. "It's been this way for years! What's a little more?" A little more is too much, that's what it is.
"That might be. However, spotty bedroom men earning 6 figures in software most certainly do."
That may be, but if they want to reach that corner of the second life market, why don't they just send those 3 guys direct marketing literature rather than wasting their resources trolling through the other 39,997 furries and vampires?
"Sure you might view them as lame, but why does that excuse the disruption of a fantasy they go to such lengths to pursue?"
Because it isn't *their* anything? It's a commercial web service for which they pay $9.95/month to access, run by a very real business that wants to make real money.
"Even only 40,000 people, most with a credit card and leisure time, is a good market."
You mean a market of people most of whom aren't willing to spend more than $9.95/month on their primary leisure time pursuit, and judging by their average play times are almost certainly either students, underemployed, or outright unemployed?
Not to mention who are hostile to your brand and have more interest in simulating sexual intercourse with anthropomorphic wolves than they do in your product line?
Greaaaaat idea, bud. We'll get back to you on that Sales Manager position. Don't call us, we'll call you.
The fact that its few members have nothing better to do than to flood the Slashdot story queue about it, grasping for some small, twisted glimpse of relevance, indicates just that: Second Life is popular with a small group of 40,000 people who have nothing better to do with their time than to flood the Slashdot story queue.
Seriously. Small websites have more visitors a day than that.
In fact, if you want to post stories that accurately reflect its accomplishments, try headlines like: "Second Life: Publisher Creates Sexually Explicit Virtual Meeting Place for Furries and Other Fetishists."
KD, hey, so here's the deal. The contract specifies that Slashot will link to the 12 page version of the article WTF are you doing linking to the print version?? Ad money, HELLO?! Do you think we're paying you guys to link our articles for kicks and giggles?
Either this gets fixed by the top of the hour or we expect a full refund.
"Lastly, I'd like a "None of the Above" option on all elections."
True, true. I've long thought that's what it will take to bring the other 40% of the electorate to the polls.
Only instead of the box saying "None of the Above," I'd like it to have a little picture of a clenched fist with it's middle finger extended, to make it crystal clear what I mean.
Heck, why don't we make it real easy? There should be just the two options, the finger, and a man grabbing his ankles. To tell you the truth I'd not be surprised to see the ankles win. You know it.
You have the ballot box, sir. If you want a smaller government, want to reduce taxes, want to restore our liberties, want to get government out of our lives, want to dissolve the IRS, want to take back control of our money supply, and want to stop the government from selling us out to international agencies, then you have a voice at the ballot box.
If you believe those famous words, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem," then you have a voice at the ballot box. Register now and vote in your state primary (Oh how far the mainstream Republican party has strayed from those words...).
Or if you can't do that much for something you feel so strongly about, then at least spend the 60 seconds it will take to donate to the cause: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/. Just $25 will make more difference than your words posted on this forum ever will.
If you want a national platform for your views, this man is it.
"Of course at SOME point, maybe in 20 years or so, the names of who the government was spying on will have to become a non-secret, and thus available under a FOIA request."
Why do people believe this? Of all this administration has done, do you really believe it would be beneath them to destroy the records of their actions?
The only lesson they have learned from the recent scandals is to not get caught.
Most school children I imagine hear about Nixon. But it's a shame they aren't taught about Iran-Contra. It's a shame they aren't shown a young Ollie North testifying before Congress. Because if they had, every one of them would know by now exactly the sort of people we have on our hands here.
"The NRA tends to support politicians that supported the illegal wiretapping."
You're very right. That's why every concerned citizen should support the Gun Owners of America (GOA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Owners_of_America, "The second largest Second Amendment gun rights organization in American," who instead of fighting for the commercial gun lobby, fight for the Constitution.
That's why the NRA isn't very fond of Ron Paul, who the GOA gives an A+. Not only will he not budge an inch on our Second Amendment rights, he also won't give a dime of your tax dollars to the gun cartel.
Why is it always GNU/Linux that is going to make a big splash on the desktop due to Microsoft's latest shortcomings?
Why GNU/Linux, of all things, and not, oh... OS X? I have a very, very hard time coming up with reasons why I should recommend someone go out and buy a new GNU/Linux PC, because it seems to make so much more sense to recommend they go out and buy a new Mac.
Sure, the four essential software freedoms are great, but let's stop kidding ourselves, most PC buyers don't care about these things, and it is extraordinarily challenging to convince them that they should care. If you think Mr. and Mrs. Jones and little Johnny care more about the four essential software freedoms than they do about running their tax software, microsoft office, and Johnny's games, then it's time to venture out of mom's basement for a reality check.
So what do you have left to sell on? Price? I'm sorry, but $50 doesn't mean much when you are just about to pay $500-$2500 for a new machine at Best Buy, especially when $50 is the difference between having a computer that will run your apps and the ones on the store shelves, and one that won't.
If you as an average middle class american whose computer experience largely consists of microsoft office, internet explorer, and that old data entry system at work, want a new computer that will be incredibly easy to use and come with a great suite of software out of the box for internet, email, photos, and multimedia (which make up 99% of my computer use), then you want a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
This is getting ridiculous. It would take at least 6 months for a casual gamer to reach level 70. But the issue is not the length of time itself; the issue is that for people who value their scarce free time, WoW is not a sound investment, because the game developers both reserve and frequently exercise the right to dramatically change class balance and dynamics.
You can spend weeks doing research to determine the perfect class to play and invest your time in. But 6 months now, as Blizzard proved again and again, the class you will find yourself with will be very different than the same class you based your decision on 6 months or a year prior.
I certainly will never play WoW again; 6 months of my free time is too valuable an investment to put into the hands of Blizzard again.
"...the other would have connected a city of 300,000 people and skyrocketing property prices to a large area of undeveloped land."
...undeveloped, unoccupied land?
I see. And this second bridge, unlike the first, is a not a bridge to "nowhere" because it connects to a large area of
Thanks for clarifying.
We wouldn't want the real estate developers to have to finance their own development. Nosiree! That's what hard working american men and women are for... to finance real estate development that they'd never be able to afford themselves.
Go to hell, much? Thanks, bye.
"I don't mean to be an art snob or to demean the people who doubtlessly worked hard on this," and yet you very much did demean their hard work, work for which they were not paid, did not ask your blessing, nor did they need it. It's the very essence of snobbery to suppose that your personal taste is the yardstick by which others judge success and failure.
How do you say... oh, FUCK OFF?
Seriously. What is your problem?
"Heavenly Sword seems, to me, the pinnacle of what I hate about female protagonists in games."
"They're all petite and totally badass. They're blatantly one dimensional..."
Cry me a river. You realize the objective of this game amounts to: swing sword, kill monsters, watch pretty pictures on screen, don't you?
Were you expecting The Adventures of Linda the Large-Boned Soccer Mom? Or maybe Heavenly Sword: Intellectual Adventures in Feminism?
If you don't like it, don't play it.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret pal. This may shock and amaze you, but there are billion dollar media industries whose entired business models are based on the objectification of women.
"Are they completely aware the program won't do one damned thing to solve any problem, but the propose it anyway just so they can put a blurb in their campaign ads about how they protect children."
Well you don't have to look far, when voting against a measure like this will guarantee that next election cycle your opponent will run a black and white ad with ominous music saying, "Sen. Jim Bob wants to protect the rights of sexual predators to contact your children on the internet!"
House races especially are dirty like this. This crap happens all the time, I've even seen it in live debates.
And you want to know the really sad part? A lot of voters eat this stuff up. If you're average Soccer Mom Susie, all of a sudden you're not sure you can trust the candidate anymore, and if you already hated the candidate, well now he or she is the devil himself.
"While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child's online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material"
...oh God no!! What about satellite dishes and even shortwave! Those porn terrorists could be beaming it directly into our homes. Why if a minor were to come into the possession of a electro-magnetic wave receiving device, it could be the end of civilization as we know it!
And the same can be said of the fucking postal system.
While it's true that parents can screen the letters that arrive at and are sent from their home post office box to somewhat guard against their children using the postal system to solicit, receive, and exchange adult material, the practice of screening by parents is farm from universal and even when applied may not be fool-proof.
We had better start filtering and monitoring all domestic mail as well. And, my God, what about international mail? We'll have to screen that for sure, maybe even just stop it all.
And, and,
"With copyright, I am involved in the system whether I like it or not."
That's preposterous. Simply stop buying their products and you will be quite uninvolved.
But what's that you say? Oh, you enjoy their products. In fact you enjoy them so much that despite their price and restrictions, you desire and purchase them anyhow.
That's wonderful news. That means the market is working. But what of the artificial scarcity we have created? Quite alright! You hardly would otherwise have a claim to any ownership of Ms. Spears' latest songs simply by virtue of existing. And certainly you have no necessity of them that would trump this.
Where do you get the notion that you have some right to these products that is denied you by the current copyright system? Do you honestly expect us to believe that simply by virtue of existing, and contributing to "society" in some ambiguous, insignificant way, that you come to have any claim whatsoever of ownership of or right to these products?
"BTW there is nothing in what I said that says Chinese people are bad - those who want to come to the West and participate in Western values, come on over."
Over where now? Certainly not to the EU. They aren't letting them in. Not to the US. We aren't letting them in. I don't know what world you are living in, but even among those who can afford to get into the US or EU, or for that matter are even allowed to leave their country of origin, they have no where to go because legal immigration is restricted to a trickle.
"Cause if there are people in China who are willing to work for cheaper than people in your country then you best make sure business and consumers can't benefit from that."
Or, you know, maybe the EU - unlike the US - will stand up for its principles in the world by negotiating trade deals with these countries that are tied to human rights, to having a representative, participatory democracy, and to their people being free from government infringement upon their liberties?
But then who are we to intervene? Afterall, it's not our fault these poor saps over in China flunked out of interdimensional soul-school and got themselves born into the world as dirt poor factory laborers in a communist regime, right? Sucks to be them, amirite?! Damn right you should be smug! I mean, you wouldn't have been born in the good old US of A if you didn't deserve it.
Amen Hallelujah! The truth is marching on!
"The less tax the better, because at it's core government is horribly inefficent"
Imposing import tariffs in order to penalize countries that oppress their laborers, that deny them basic human rights, that deny them democratic participation and representation in their government, in my opinion are exactly the sort of cases when countries should impose tariffs.
Do you think those laborers want to be there? It's not their fault they were born there. And where else are they going to go, even if they could afford to leave, even if their countries of birth would let them leave? Not to the E.U. Not to the U.S. We won't let them in. And you and I no more deserve the countries of our birth than they do theirs. The least we can do as decent human beings is to at least try to leverage our positions of power to help them along on their path to prosperity.
Now, I know these countries are imposing tariffs just to protect local economies not out of any genuine empathy, and I know that they will not negotiate treaties or pursue policies specifically to use those tariffs as leverage to improve the freedom and quality of life of foreign laborers, but that speaks against the practice, not against the principle. And in spite of their motivations, there is still great potential for good to come of it.
And I'll tell you what, I am libertarian leaning, and to the best of my ability I have been a strong supporter of Ron Paul; he's my candidate. That's my general philosophy toward government, But at the same time I believe there are some fundamental inequalities in this world, the chief of which is our country of birth, and in spite of my political persuasions, I will continue to advocate for basic human decency in government and business dealings. Screw the Randroid assholes.
"Not to mention how much time it frees up for other things."
Right on. I haven't owned a television in I believe 6.5 years now. I also rarely rent or go to movies.
I usually scan through and watch some of the high rated YouTube videos in the evening. Some of those are short clips from television, yes, but I couldn't imagine watching the entire program just for those few moments of humor; I'll let someone else filter out the cruft for me. And it's always on my schedule. If I can't get it when I want it, not interested.
To get my news I listen to the Democracy Now! audio broadcast, as well as check a few blogs and news sites most days.
The one thing I do miss is CSPAN. Watching it yourself is pretty much the only way to get reliable and thorough coverage of the very important things going on now in the House and Senate Judiciary committees. I would gladly pay for some service where I can select the sessions I want recorded and have those videos available to me in the evenings. But there doesn't seem to be a consumer market for that. Or maybe there is and someone just needs to fill it.
I've seen the 24 hour news stations when staying at hotels and so forth. They are 24 hours of biased, low brow crap. The very best thing these stations could do is to provide daily, unbiased coverage of committee and floor debate, as well as reasoned commentary, analysis, and background information when not in session.
It really makes me sad to think about how most Americans form the opinions they hold about our government, our elected representatives, and policies. Most people don't read the newspaper, and even many of those who do don't get beyond the sports and local sections. They certainly aren't getting enough information in 30 minutes of national broadcast television news. And the 24 hour news channels don't seem to offer more than 30 minutes of substance in any given 24 hours themselves.
So on what do most Americans base their political viewpoints? As far as I can tell, on labels, gossip, and propaganda, and that really saddens me. In this day and age we have the ability to follow and shape the goings on of our democracy more than every in our history, and we are squandering that opportunity. No, not just squandering, we are throwing it away, it and our future, and our children will not realize what we have lost until it is too late.
And not through your "Virtual Console". Let's see some new development. Just because people aren't paying money for your 15 and 20 year old games doesn't mean there isn't a market.
Let's see some of the real classics brought up to date, and please take note, I do NOT mean modeled as 3D polygons, with wildly swinging cameras, and wasting precious CPU cycles on half-assed photo-realism. Spend your budget on designers and 2D artists. With the popularity of Japanese style anime among young people today, albeit the market would be all over this with marketing support. And cell-shaded 3D doesn't count. That just gives you all the disadvantages of 3D with none of the advantages of beautiful 2D artwork.
Double Dragon
Final Fight
Streets of Rage
Metal Slug
Street Fighter
Fatal Fury
Art of Fighting
King of Fighters
Games like these were all great to play at home and at the arcade. They were also great fun to play with friends, and that seems to be a key strategy for the Wii. These are all great franchises. None of them have the much-criticized kiddie themes of the Mario universe. They just need some decent development and marketing dollars.
Being able to write well formed prose may impress your clients now, but in 10 years once this generation has established itself in the business world, many of your potential clients might well be using text messages as their primary means of conducting business deals.
Your elaborate prose might just be filtered straight to the trash.
If you can't thumb out "dood i am so ur best choice lets talk 2:30 @ joes" in 10 seconds on your mobile, you might not get their contract.
Although you'll have to take that as an artist's rendition. I've never sent a text message. I'm still trying to figure out how to get a phone like my old one back, one that didn't have color, graphics, an integrated ring tone store, 3 layers of menus to get to my stored phone numbers, and didn't have the ability to receive text messages. I see them all the time in the news being sold as low cost phones in India and sub-saharan Africa; am I really that far behind the times?
And to hell with voice mail and a missed calls list. If I didn't get your call, I was busy. Call back if it's important to you. It obviously wasn't important enough to me to answer. Hello?
The spectrum is a necessarily shared resource. Its use is a government mediated monopoly. There are very few if any *viable* alternatives to this arrangement.
It would be unfair to impose use of this government mediated monopoly upon citizens and taxpayers in mode to which they have no democratic political recourse. And I know what you may be thinking, but what we are seeing is *exactly* that, citizens exercising their political recourse to exercise democratic control over this necessarily shared resource. The fact that most voters choose to elect representatives at odds with your agenda to allow unrestricted profanity to be broadcast, has no bearing, so long as you agenda for this naturally limited resource would undermine the democratic will of the people. Most voters also choose to elect representatives who would not favor the idea of painting profane murals on the Senate chamber walls. This is little different.
This is also not a free speech issue. You can stand in front of the capitol building and hurl verbal expletives at your elected representatives, and someone who disagrees with you can shout right back. But just as you can not *paint* expletives on the stairs in front of the capitol, you also can not fill the public broadcast spectrum with expletives in opposition to the democratically expressed will of the people.
For anyone who still does not understand this concept, give some thought to the role of an agency like the FAA. You will find the parallels are remarkable.
"Anyone can see you in the street, log you for any purpose, and any cop can stop you and fuck with you. How is this any different than what's been happening for years?"
So because it's been happening for years, that makes it alright?
The reasoning is this simple: the government exists solely at our pleasure, it is perpetuated solely at our discretion, it is funded WITH OUR MONEY, and the FUCK if I am going to pay someone to rig up an expansive camera monitoring system and spend all day watching us.
Are you out of your mind? Please, I'm not about to slave away at the office 5 days a week just to pay for some wankers sitting around on their arses watching me walk around.
What a bunch of pussies we are all becoming. "It's been this way for years! What's a little more?" A little more is too much, that's what it is.
"That might be. However, spotty bedroom men earning 6 figures in software most certainly do."
That may be, but if they want to reach that corner of the second life market, why don't they just send those 3 guys direct marketing literature rather than wasting their resources trolling through the other 39,997 furries and vampires?
"Sure you might view them as lame, but why does that excuse the disruption of a fantasy they go to such lengths to pursue?"
Because it isn't *their* anything? It's a commercial web service for which they pay $9.95/month to access, run by a very real business that wants to make real money.
"Even only 40,000 people, most with a credit card and leisure time, is a good market."
You mean a market of people most of whom aren't willing to spend more than $9.95/month on their primary leisure time pursuit, and judging by their average play times are almost certainly either students, underemployed, or outright unemployed?
Not to mention who are hostile to your brand and have more interest in simulating sexual intercourse with anthropomorphic wolves than they do in your product line?
Greaaaaat idea, bud. We'll get back to you on that Sales Manager position. Don't call us, we'll call you.
So can we stop posting stories about it already?
The fact that its few members have nothing better to do than to flood the Slashdot story queue about it, grasping for some small, twisted glimpse of relevance, indicates just that: Second Life is popular with a small group of 40,000 people who have nothing better to do with their time than to flood the Slashdot story queue.
Seriously. Small websites have more visitors a day than that.
In fact, if you want to post stories that accurately reflect its accomplishments, try headlines like: "Second Life: Publisher Creates Sexually Explicit Virtual Meeting Place for Furries and Other Fetishists."
KD, hey, so here's the deal. The contract specifies that Slashot will link to the 12 page version of the article WTF are you doing linking to the print version?? Ad money, HELLO?! Do you think we're paying you guys to link our articles for kicks and giggles?
Either this gets fixed by the top of the hour or we expect a full refund.
Regards,
Wanker @ Hot Hardware
"Lastly, I'd like a "None of the Above" option on all elections."
True, true. I've long thought that's what it will take to bring the other 40% of the electorate to the polls.
Only instead of the box saying "None of the Above," I'd like it to have a little picture of a clenched fist with it's middle finger extended, to make it crystal clear what I mean.
Heck, why don't we make it real easy? There should be just the two options, the finger, and a man grabbing his ankles. To tell you the truth I'd not be surprised to see the ankles win. You know it.
"So ask yourself, what recourse do you have now?"
You have the ballot box, sir. If you want a smaller government, want to reduce taxes, want to restore our liberties, want to get government out of our lives, want to dissolve the IRS, want to take back control of our money supply, and want to stop the government from selling us out to international agencies, then you have a voice at the ballot box.
If you believe those famous words, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem," then you have a voice at the ballot box. Register now and vote in your state primary (Oh how far the mainstream Republican party has strayed from those words...).
Or if you can't do that much for something you feel so strongly about, then at least spend the 60 seconds it will take to donate to the cause: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/. Just $25 will make more difference than your words posted on this forum ever will.
If you want a national platform for your views, this man is it.
"Of course at SOME point, maybe in 20 years or so, the names of who the government was spying on will have to become a non-secret, and thus available under a FOIA request."
Why do people believe this? Of all this administration has done, do you really believe it would be beneath them to destroy the records of their actions?
The only lesson they have learned from the recent scandals is to not get caught.
Most school children I imagine hear about Nixon. But it's a shame they aren't taught about Iran-Contra. It's a shame they aren't shown a young Ollie North testifying before Congress. Because if they had, every one of them would know by now exactly the sort of people we have on our hands here.
"The NRA tends to support politicians that supported the illegal wiretapping."
a , "The second largest Second Amendment gun rights organization in American," who instead of fighting for the commercial gun lobby, fight for the Constitution.
You're very right. That's why every concerned citizen should support the Gun Owners of America (GOA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Owners_of_Americ
That's why the NRA isn't very fond of Ron Paul, who the GOA gives an A+. Not only will he not budge an inch on our Second Amendment rights, he also won't give a dime of your tax dollars to the gun cartel.
Why is it always GNU/Linux that is going to make a big splash on the desktop due to Microsoft's latest shortcomings?
Why GNU/Linux, of all things, and not, oh... OS X? I have a very, very hard time coming up with reasons why I should recommend someone go out and buy a new GNU/Linux PC, because it seems to make so much more sense to recommend they go out and buy a new Mac.
Sure, the four essential software freedoms are great, but let's stop kidding ourselves, most PC buyers don't care about these things, and it is extraordinarily challenging to convince them that they should care. If you think Mr. and Mrs. Jones and little Johnny care more about the four essential software freedoms than they do about running their tax software, microsoft office, and Johnny's games, then it's time to venture out of mom's basement for a reality check.
So what do you have left to sell on? Price? I'm sorry, but $50 doesn't mean much when you are just about to pay $500-$2500 for a new machine at Best Buy, especially when $50 is the difference between having a computer that will run your apps and the ones on the store shelves, and one that won't.
If you as an average middle class american whose computer experience largely consists of microsoft office, internet explorer, and that old data entry system at work, want a new computer that will be incredibly easy to use and come with a great suite of software out of the box for internet, email, photos, and multimedia (which make up 99% of my computer use), then you want a Mac.