"It is as it was a vision of the time and a reflection on the changing times of a decade from the 60's to the 70's."
So you're saying your four-year-old is capable of that kind of subtle distinction? Because I'm guessing most aren't. Thus the warning.
Times change, societal expectations change, and the stuff we deem appropriate for kids changes because of that. Would you show your kids "Bre'er Rabbit" despite the blatant racist overtones? How about the Disney versions of "Dumbo" or "Peter Pan" (which are pretty bad themselves, if you watch them anew)?
How about Pepe LePew, forcing himself on all those poor female cats who wanted nothing to do with him? Do we really think attempted rape is appropriate entertainment for kids?
Yeah, cry about "political correctness." It ain't exactly something new. Ever wonder why it's always evil STEPmothers in all those Grimm Brothers fairy tales? The original folk-stories often had evil birth-mothers, but the Grimm brothers found that unacceptable for children, so they whitewashed the stories.
Honestly, I think the Sesame Street producers are doing the best thing possible here: release the original material uncensored and unedited (Cookie Monster shoots first), but let parents know that they can't just stick in the DVD and expect it to be appropriate for all kids.
Title: "Google, Sun Headed for Showdown" Summary: There MAY be trouble brewing between Google and Sun... TFA: Google COULD get in trouble with Sun, according to some analyst (but both parties declined to comment) Reality: Move along, nothing to see here...
But is that just an effect of the current economic model that incorporates CD sales? I've heard that a lot of bands tour basically as a way of advertising their CDs, whereas before the 70s it was the other way around - bands only sold records to get people to show up to their performances. If that's the case, ticket prices may be artificially cheap right now, and after the CD-sales economy crashes, they could rise high enough to support more touring bands.
Honest question, because I really don't know much about the logistics.
It's the same argument you hear from the hardest of the hardcore FOSS guys - that ALL products that can be reproduced electronically - music, code, games, books, presumably movies - should be available for free, and that the artists should support themselves either by asking for handouts or by selling something marginally related to their art.
I'd argue that rock stars don't WANT to shill t-shirts, or they'd be in a t-shirt company. And honestly, if you're looking for LESS crappy pop music, do you really want to encourage them to base their economics on having faces that look good on lunch boxes?
Same for programmers, of course. While the line is blurred in many cases, at heart I'd say many coders don't WANT to work as "support" for their own product. I mean, isn't that the basic coder stereotype, impatience with people who don't understand technology?
The paradigm breaks down even more for novelists. A novelist's entire skill set revolves around writing stuff, and anything he writes is gonna take ten seconds to copy and upload, so without "intellectual property" of SOME sort he's basically SOL.
FORTUNATELY, (and here's where I hopefully mitigate the -1 Troll points I foresee for this post), merchandising ISN'T the only way musicians can make money aside from CD profits. They also have that little niche called "live performances," which sustained them for a good 99.9% of human history.
If you're saying that a studio should be expected to churn out 50% stinkers as the price of being "innovative," I'd have to disagree. Look at Nintendo - their worst first-party games are still better that 90% of the stuff EA puts out, and they're probably the most innovative game-makers out there.
If that sounds like fanboyism, look at some more "conservative" studios (which I think you could argue have innovated more than this EA department ever did): Bioware (pre-EA), Blizzard, Valve.
What do all these companies have in common? They put an emphasis on playability and consistent fun, which mean EXTENSIVE playtesting and polish, every step of the way.
If you're a game company pushing a game gold when you think it's only got a 50% chance of entertaining people, you've already screwed up.
1. The reason the max volume is limited isn't JUST software. The little speaker they've got in there has a limited top end as well. Pump too strong a signal into the speaker and it'll break, or at the very least top out and sound distorted.
2. What the hell are you going to do if you DO have access to that info? Go Gordon Freeman and jam a crowbar in the cell tower to optimize your signal? It sucks that calls get dropped, but having more info about why wouldn't help you much. (P.S.: That cell tower you're staring at might not be for the network you're using.)
3. Find me the piece of consumer electronics that DOESN'T have people complaining on the internet about its reliability and we'll talk. Personally, I've never had a cell phone break.
I see this as a potentially very bad thing, but I might be mistaken. Tell me where I'm wrong here.
1. NIH requires articles be published in journals that are free after a year. 2. Since NIH funds a TON of stuff, basically ALL journals must go free after a year. 3. Very small institutions and groups drop their subscriptions to journals because hey, they get the articles free now. 4. Those journals have to raise subscription prices to make up for the lost customers (because despite the summary's tone, I get the feeling they're not all swimming in profits right now). 5. Medium-sized groups and institutions have to be more selective in which journals when they subscribe to (since they have limited funds for subscriptions). 6. Lesser-known journals lose circulation, and therefore prestige, and therefore can't find those great "free" peer reviewers and go out of business.
END RESULT: There are fewer peer-reviewed journals out there, which means fewer peer-reviewed scientific publications. But hey, the ones that are left are open to everyone!
Just what I was thinking. I like most of Whedon's projects, but the guy sure knows how to whine. I mean, I wish Firefly hadn't been canceled too, but c'mon, it cost a million bucks an episode to make and it was unpopular (until the DVDs came out AFTER it was canceled). They even sprang for a feature film, which in turn lost money... and Joss wouldn't stop talking to the press about how much it sucked working with Fox. Dude, they footed the bill! They risked a tens of millions of dollars on a feature film for a canceled TV show!
I'm guessing there's a REASON that Whedon keeps coming back to Fox... and it's that despite all his complaints (many of which I'm sure are valid), they're the only ones with enough cash and enough interest to buy what he's selling.
Sure it is. "A device whereby hydrogen is converted through fusion reactions to helium for the purpose of releasing energy." Didn't you read IBM's patent application?
"The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity."
Except for, say, the aforementioned sun, which human beings have been regularly "utilizing" ever since we first decided it might be a good idea for our bodies to process some Vitamin D.
1. Companies lower their prices in Thailand to account for low wages/cost of living. 2. Companies pay people in Thailand less because the cost of living is so low. 3. Your job gets outsourced to Thailand because the labor there is so much cheaper. 4. ??? 5. Profit! (But not for jobless you.)
Thing is, the free market sees some opportunities for consumers in step 1, which is why companies like Valve have to take extra steps to shut it out.
I hope Jack got the copy of Bioshock back before his kid was exposed to it. You know how impressionable teenagers are - a few hours of playing, and Jack Jr. might have been inspired to craft complex literary-political allegories that investigate the nature of humanity.
But this still suggests some pretty serious confirmation bias. Would he have re-read it so carefully if it was being cited by evolutionists rather than creationists? Are most scientific papers written so poorly that a quick re-read (fifty years later) will reveal a ton of factual/methodological mistakes that make it worthy of withdrawal?
I'm considering switching back to a PC for my next computer.
Why? Because Apple doesn't offer accidental damage protection in their extended warranty, and Dell does. The last two laptops I've owned have ended up with broken LCDs - including the one I'm typing on right now via an external monitor. (Yes, obviously I'm a klutz, but that's something I'm pretty much stuck working around.)
On the other hand, when my little sister recently got a new laptop to go off to college with, I helped her pick out a MacBook. We could have gotten a Dell a couple hundred dollars cheaper, but for her it was worth the cost to not have to deal with virus scanners, driver problems, and all the other hassles that come with PCs. (For me, this wouldn't be as much of an issue, since I've had PCs long enough to get used to that kind of crap.)
Anyway, my point is that there IS a certain segment of the market for whom the specter of an OS switch isn't the biggest issue on their minds when choosing a computer.
I actually did buy the album through their website, but the site was poorly laid-out (you had to click "preorder" to download the album) and slow as hell on the day of the release. It took like ten minutes for the download page to load for me, and I talked to one or two people for whom it didn't load at all. And although I actually paid like five bucks, if I was gonna pay zero, I wouldn't see any moral downside to skipping the hassle downloading it via a torrent. (Hell, if anything you're doing Radiohead a server by reducing their bandwidth costs.)
Fuel efficiency: We have made strides forward, but American consumers seem to prefer using the added efficiency to improve acceleration rather than gas mileage. (For example, I've heard that even a 2007 Civic has significantly better acceleration and handling than the powerful muscle cars from the 50s.)
Internet bandwidth: Huh? Ten years ago, almost everyone outside of a university was on dialup, if they had internet access at all; now, over 90% of residences have access to some kind of broadband. Sounds like a big stride forward to me...
Disclaimer: all statistics noted in this thread are things I vaguely recall hearing at some point or possibly imagined entirely.
"Kill Bill" and "The Passion of the Christ" were both rated R, weren't they?
There's a wide range of stuff that's considered "mature." Some of it is mindlessly gory, some of it seriously handles mature topics.
That's not to say I buy the premise that Halo 3 is a great fit for church life. Maybe it's "Die Hard" instead of "Grindhouse," but that doesn't make it a good fit.
Funny, because when I picked up Bioshock, I thought, "Wow, they captured the cool character customization, hacking, and plot of SS2, but actually got all the gameplay elements done right this time." To me, the world just felt more alive in Bioshock, and I didn't miss playing around with the inventory and the other elements they "streamlined" away.
I'd accuse you of nostalgic bias, but that might force me to contemplate Chrono Trigger not being the best game of all time, so never mind.
Whenever a school shooting or other media event gets blamed on kids having access to violent video games, Slashdotters are quick to point out that the parents weren't paying attention to the ratings. But the reaction to this story seems to imply that a lot of people would like those ratings to be basically toothless - like there's no level of horrific violence that should EVER qualify a game for the equivalent of an X-rating.
Do we apply this standard to movies? Of course not. Everyone more or less accepts that movies have to censor themselves down to make an "R" rating rather than "X" (OK, "NC-17"). While there are plenty of people who oppose the specifics of movie ratings, I don't think I've heard many people espouse indiscriminately giving porn an "R" rating.
Anyway, good play by Rockstar. Their crappy game managed to get more media coverage than Halo 3 by playing the controversy card.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is as it was a vision of the time and a reflection on the changing times of a decade from the 60's to the 70's."
So you're saying your four-year-old is capable of that kind of subtle distinction? Because I'm guessing most aren't. Thus the warning.
Times change, societal expectations change, and the stuff we deem appropriate for kids changes because of that. Would you show your kids "Bre'er Rabbit" despite the blatant racist overtones? How about the Disney versions of "Dumbo" or "Peter Pan" (which are pretty bad themselves, if you watch them anew)?
How about Pepe LePew, forcing himself on all those poor female cats who wanted nothing to do with him? Do we really think attempted rape is appropriate entertainment for kids?
Yeah, cry about "political correctness." It ain't exactly something new. Ever wonder why it's always evil STEPmothers in all those Grimm Brothers fairy tales? The original folk-stories often had evil birth-mothers, but the Grimm brothers found that unacceptable for children, so they whitewashed the stories.
Honestly, I think the Sesame Street producers are doing the best thing possible here: release the original material uncensored and unedited (Cookie Monster shoots first), but let parents know that they can't just stick in the DVD and expect it to be appropriate for all kids.
Title: "Google, Sun Headed for Showdown"
Summary: There MAY be trouble brewing between Google and Sun...
TFA: Google COULD get in trouble with Sun, according to some analyst (but both parties declined to comment)
Reality: Move along, nothing to see here...
But is that just an effect of the current economic model that incorporates CD sales? I've heard that a lot of bands tour basically as a way of advertising their CDs, whereas before the 70s it was the other way around - bands only sold records to get people to show up to their performances. If that's the case, ticket prices may be artificially cheap right now, and after the CD-sales economy crashes, they could rise high enough to support more touring bands.
Honest question, because I really don't know much about the logistics.
It's the same argument you hear from the hardest of the hardcore FOSS guys - that ALL products that can be reproduced electronically - music, code, games, books, presumably movies - should be available for free, and that the artists should support themselves either by asking for handouts or by selling something marginally related to their art.
I'd argue that rock stars don't WANT to shill t-shirts, or they'd be in a t-shirt company. And honestly, if you're looking for LESS crappy pop music, do you really want to encourage them to base their economics on having faces that look good on lunch boxes?
Same for programmers, of course. While the line is blurred in many cases, at heart I'd say many coders don't WANT to work as "support" for their own product. I mean, isn't that the basic coder stereotype, impatience with people who don't understand technology?
The paradigm breaks down even more for novelists. A novelist's entire skill set revolves around writing stuff, and anything he writes is gonna take ten seconds to copy and upload, so without "intellectual property" of SOME sort he's basically SOL.
FORTUNATELY, (and here's where I hopefully mitigate the -1 Troll points I foresee for this post), merchandising ISN'T the only way musicians can make money aside from CD profits. They also have that little niche called "live performances," which sustained them for a good 99.9% of human history.
Scientists need to stop going out of their way to encourage scenarios where I steal a classic (pre-1972) roadster and go on the run from the law.
If you're saying that a studio should be expected to churn out 50% stinkers as the price of being "innovative," I'd have to disagree. Look at Nintendo - their worst first-party games are still better that 90% of the stuff EA puts out, and they're probably the most innovative game-makers out there.
If that sounds like fanboyism, look at some more "conservative" studios (which I think you could argue have innovated more than this EA department ever did): Bioware (pre-EA), Blizzard, Valve.
What do all these companies have in common? They put an emphasis on playability and consistent fun, which mean EXTENSIVE playtesting and polish, every step of the way.
If you're a game company pushing a game gold when you think it's only got a 50% chance of entertaining people, you've already screwed up.
1. The reason the max volume is limited isn't JUST software. The little speaker they've got in there has a limited top end as well. Pump too strong a signal into the speaker and it'll break, or at the very least top out and sound distorted.
2. What the hell are you going to do if you DO have access to that info? Go Gordon Freeman and jam a crowbar in the cell tower to optimize your signal? It sucks that calls get dropped, but having more info about why wouldn't help you much. (P.S.: That cell tower you're staring at might not be for the network you're using.)
3. Find me the piece of consumer electronics that DOESN'T have people complaining on the internet about its reliability and we'll talk. Personally, I've never had a cell phone break.
I see this as a potentially very bad thing, but I might be mistaken. Tell me where I'm wrong here.
1. NIH requires articles be published in journals that are free after a year.
2. Since NIH funds a TON of stuff, basically ALL journals must go free after a year.
3. Very small institutions and groups drop their subscriptions to journals because hey, they get the articles free now.
4. Those journals have to raise subscription prices to make up for the lost customers (because despite the summary's tone, I get the feeling they're not all swimming in profits right now).
5. Medium-sized groups and institutions have to be more selective in which journals when they subscribe to (since they have limited funds for subscriptions).
6. Lesser-known journals lose circulation, and therefore prestige, and therefore can't find those great "free" peer reviewers and go out of business.
END RESULT: There are fewer peer-reviewed journals out there, which means fewer peer-reviewed scientific publications. But hey, the ones that are left are open to everyone!
Hell, my G4 PowerBook can do that.
Just what I was thinking. I like most of Whedon's projects, but the guy sure knows how to whine. I mean, I wish Firefly hadn't been canceled too, but c'mon, it cost a million bucks an episode to make and it was unpopular (until the DVDs came out AFTER it was canceled). They even sprang for a feature film, which in turn lost money... and Joss wouldn't stop talking to the press about how much it sucked working with Fox. Dude, they footed the bill! They risked a tens of millions of dollars on a feature film for a canceled TV show!
I'm guessing there's a REASON that Whedon keeps coming back to Fox... and it's that despite all his complaints (many of which I'm sure are valid), they're the only ones with enough cash and enough interest to buy what he's selling.
Sure it is. "A device whereby hydrogen is converted through fusion reactions to helium for the purpose of releasing energy." Didn't you read IBM's patent application?
"The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity." Except for, say, the aforementioned sun, which human beings have been regularly "utilizing" ever since we first decided it might be a good idea for our bodies to process some Vitamin D.
1. Companies lower their prices in Thailand to account for low wages/cost of living.
2. Companies pay people in Thailand less because the cost of living is so low.
3. Your job gets outsourced to Thailand because the labor there is so much cheaper.
4. ???
5. Profit! (But not for jobless you.)
Thing is, the free market sees some opportunities for consumers in step 1, which is why companies like Valve have to take extra steps to shut it out.
I hope Jack got the copy of Bioshock back before his kid was exposed to it. You know how impressionable teenagers are - a few hours of playing, and Jack Jr. might have been inspired to craft complex literary-political allegories that investigate the nature of humanity.
But this still suggests some pretty serious confirmation bias. Would he have re-read it so carefully if it was being cited by evolutionists rather than creationists? Are most scientific papers written so poorly that a quick re-read (fifty years later) will reveal a ton of factual/methodological mistakes that make it worthy of withdrawal?
Me too.
Barack Obama's first book was very well-written - and certainly not ghost-written, since it was published when he was recently out of law school.
I'm considering switching back to a PC for my next computer.
Why? Because Apple doesn't offer accidental damage protection in their extended warranty, and Dell does. The last two laptops I've owned have ended up with broken LCDs - including the one I'm typing on right now via an external monitor. (Yes, obviously I'm a klutz, but that's something I'm pretty much stuck working around.)
On the other hand, when my little sister recently got a new laptop to go off to college with, I helped her pick out a MacBook. We could have gotten a Dell a couple hundred dollars cheaper, but for her it was worth the cost to not have to deal with virus scanners, driver problems, and all the other hassles that come with PCs. (For me, this wouldn't be as much of an issue, since I've had PCs long enough to get used to that kind of crap.)
Anyway, my point is that there IS a certain segment of the market for whom the specter of an OS switch isn't the biggest issue on their minds when choosing a computer.
"Lot of merit" my butt. Does this guy really think people are playing Bioshock in order to unlock some stupid "achievements"?
I actually did buy the album through their website, but the site was poorly laid-out (you had to click "preorder" to download the album) and slow as hell on the day of the release. It took like ten minutes for the download page to load for me, and I talked to one or two people for whom it didn't load at all. And although I actually paid like five bucks, if I was gonna pay zero, I wouldn't see any moral downside to skipping the hassle downloading it via a torrent. (Hell, if anything you're doing Radiohead a server by reducing their bandwidth costs.)
Fuel efficiency: We have made strides forward, but American consumers seem to prefer using the added efficiency to improve acceleration rather than gas mileage. (For example, I've heard that even a 2007 Civic has significantly better acceleration and handling than the powerful muscle cars from the 50s.)
Internet bandwidth: Huh? Ten years ago, almost everyone outside of a university was on dialup, if they had internet access at all; now, over 90% of residences have access to some kind of broadband. Sounds like a big stride forward to me...
Disclaimer: all statistics noted in this thread are things I vaguely recall hearing at some point or possibly imagined entirely.
"Kill Bill" and "The Passion of the Christ" were both rated R, weren't they?
There's a wide range of stuff that's considered "mature." Some of it is mindlessly gory, some of it seriously handles mature topics.
That's not to say I buy the premise that Halo 3 is a great fit for church life. Maybe it's "Die Hard" instead of "Grindhouse," but that doesn't make it a good fit.
Appropriate signature.
Funny, because when I picked up Bioshock, I thought, "Wow, they captured the cool character customization, hacking, and plot of SS2, but actually got all the gameplay elements done right this time." To me, the world just felt more alive in Bioshock, and I didn't miss playing around with the inventory and the other elements they "streamlined" away.
I'd accuse you of nostalgic bias, but that might force me to contemplate Chrono Trigger not being the best game of all time, so never mind.
Whenever a school shooting or other media event gets blamed on kids having access to violent video games, Slashdotters are quick to point out that the parents weren't paying attention to the ratings. But the reaction to this story seems to imply that a lot of people would like those ratings to be basically toothless - like there's no level of horrific violence that should EVER qualify a game for the equivalent of an X-rating.
Do we apply this standard to movies? Of course not. Everyone more or less accepts that movies have to censor themselves down to make an "R" rating rather than "X" (OK, "NC-17"). While there are plenty of people who oppose the specifics of movie ratings, I don't think I've heard many people espouse indiscriminately giving porn an "R" rating.
Anyway, good play by Rockstar. Their crappy game managed to get more media coverage than Halo 3 by playing the controversy card.