Better than that... start a company called "Because We're Greedy Bastards".
"Yes, your honor, we're suing Because We're Greedy Bastards. Erm... let me rephrase that. We're bringing suit against the defendant, Because We're Greedy Bastards.
I'm curious, how did they solve all those problems? Is there a paper or document somewhere I can read about it, or would you be willing to explain? (Not attacking you, I am honestly curious as I play EQ a lot:)
Pardon me if this sounds like a flame, but your entire post is bullshit.
The proportion of games that have "craftsmanship" has not changed over time -- the same goes for music, movies, books, comics, take any art form. There were just as many horrible, stupid, piece of shit games in the "old days" as there are now -- but back then, bad games didn't even have shiny graphics as a saving grace!
I get so sick of reading posts like this. There are just as many good, well-crafted games today as there have ever been; we only REMEMBER the old games that were any good, because all the crap ones have passed into history and nobody talks about them any more. (To use a movie example, which one are people going to spend their time reminiscing about: Casablanca (1942) or Hillbilly Blitzkrieg (1942)?)
Yeah, but you're still here. I blame the hydrocodone.:)
I saw this in a screening a couple weeks ago in LA
on
Review: Showtime
·
· Score: 2
First, let me just say... where all da white people at? 90% of the audience was black, and this was in Hollywood, a half block from the Chinese Theatre, which seemed odd -- not that I'm complaining, mind you (I'm white) but I thought Murphy and De Niro were bigger draws among whites. Or maybe the distributor just handed out lots of screening passes in black neighborhoods?
[ Warning: Minor spoilers ahead ]
Anyway, this movie is strange. It's about two cops who end up working on a reality TV cop show together -- one a serious, real cop who's forced into it, and the other a lousy cop who really wants to be an actor. In the context of their TV show, they mock all the buddy-cop TV show/movie clichés... but then the movie's framework (about some illegal gunrunning) is ITSELF full of all the SAME clichés, done in such a way that you can't possibly believe they did it on purpose. It was very bizarre.
What I think you're missing (though maybe I'm missing something) is that a company can then put their nominal "headquarters" in a very low-tax jurisdiction, but contract out to workers and companies in high-tax jurisdictions. The company ends up making a much larger profit simply because of where it is located, regardless of how much revenue it produces, even if other costs (office rent, etc.) are the same.
Apparently this is a bad thing but I don't know all that much about economics, so, just consider me trying to foster debate.:)
Has anyone else noticed how similar Tron was to The Wizard of Oz?
- The main character is transported into a strange, magical world. - Many of the people in the other world look like people in the real world. - The characters journey along a golden path (yellow brick road in Oz, the gold power beam the Solar Sailer moves along in Tron). - The villains have flying beasts to do their dirty work (flying monkeys vs. Recognizers). - There's a big, powerful wizard figure at the end of the road, but he's ultimately just a little old man hiding behind smoke and mirrors. - The wizard has the power to send the hero(ine) back to the real world.
Actually, number of tickets sold (i.e. number of butts in seats) does not hold across time (although it does so better than $$), for the simple reason that there are more people than there used to be.
A better metric is the percentage of people who saw a particular movie in each period, out of all the people who saw any movies in that period. Basically, you take a particular movie's number of tickets sold, and divide it by all tickets sold for a given time period. This gives you a metric that holds across time, because if (for example) The Matrix has a 20% share, and Episode I has a 15% share, and Gone With the Wind has a 50% share (the numbers are made up), then it doesn't matter how many people saw the movie -- of the available movie audience, half of them saw GWTW, but only 1/5 and ~1/7 of the audience saw the other two movies (each of which have grossed more than GWTW in real dollars).
Of course, no matter how you cut it, it's an inexact science -- GWTW has had 63 years for people to view it, and The Matrix has had 3. Plus, there's no exact count kept of who saw the movie more than once, whether 1 person seeing it twice counts as much as 2 people seeing it once, etc.
Ultimately, I wish people would stop obsessing over the financial/numerical popularity of movies and instead focus on how good (or bad) the movies are -- the artistic, social, or political impact of a movie instead of its box office. Every week, hundreds of publications (newspapers, magazines) have stories about how much business each movie did, but you never see a discussion of the movie from an artistic standpoint except for the initial review -- too rarely do publications come back later and have any kind of in-depth discussion of any film.
Doesn't this imply that a geek might have TWO girlfriends? The laws of probability explicitly say that any geek with two girlfriends will cause the universe to implode!
A lot of people are asking, what qualifies as a page view in the subscription system? If I post a comment, is that a page view? If it is, it seems like this system will discourage the most active people from further contributing to the site.
To me, it makes the most sense that the front page (and all news sub-pages, like the apache or science sections), comments (articles) pages, config pages and so on should all count toward your 1,000 page limit, but comment posting pages should not.
The problem I see with this is one of delineation. Obviously, $$$$MAKE$$$$MONEY$$$$FAST$$$$ isn't going to be welcome, but what about an email from a friend of a friend who has an actual business proposition for me? There's obviously a continuum between pure, evil spam and "honest" transactions, and where along that continuum does it become trespassing? I could point at the second email and say, "Business offer! I didn't specifically request it! Trespassing!"
Is it trespassing if a door-to-door salesman walks onto my property and knocks on my door? There is no general consensus as to whether such things are allowed; there's a fair proportion of people who wouldn't object to the salesman walking up, regardless of whether they were interested in his particular business.
Unless the law is specifically written or interpreted to indicate that *only business offers* qualify as trespassing, I could use such a legal maneuver to sue anyone who emailed me that I didn't like. If I posted a flame on Slashdot, and then someone emailed me a response, I could decide to sue him. That hardly seems fair. It's like suing someone for sending you mail, which (as far as I know) you cannot do.
Another question is, what's the difference between Publisher's Clearinghouse sending me snail mail spam, and hotporn.com sending me email spam? Do you think there shouldn't be one (i.e. any spam-like mail you get in your physical box can allow you to charge the sender with trespassing)?
I have a question. Is it the receiving of the spam (i.e. when I go to check my mail on my home computer) that would (in theory) qualify? If so, then what's the difference between spam and a piece of "legitimate" email, aside from the fact that I don't make the mental distinction until I actually read it?
It seems to me that this would be like allowing anyone to walk onto your property, but when you see someone you don't like, but haven't previously told to not come on your property, prosecuting them for trespassing.
Not that I like spam; just curious about the legal ramifications.
But if the energy release is slow enough, then the energy can be absorbed by the surrounding environment gradually, rather than as a destructive explosion. If I light a puddle of gasoline, it will burn, not explode -- but if I vaporize the gasoline and then ignite it, it will explode, even though it's the same quantity of gasoline (the fact that ALL of the gasoline combusts at once in gaseous form, while only the surface of the gasoline combusts in liquid form, is the distinction there). My point with the antimatter is that unless ALL of the antimatter reacts with matter at once, the energy release is going to be much more prolonged. Yeah, any given energy release over a short enough period of time is going to be destructive, but the explosion caused by a containment field dropping and the explosion caused by an antimatter *bomb* are going to be significantly different, I would think, for the reasons given in my earlier post.
Thanks for the reply -- I think that/. already archived my journal entry (it treats them like articles), so "no new comments can be added". Blearg. I've added another new journal entry for the purpose of comments, if you'd like to duplicate your post here in my journal. (If you do respond to that one, I'll duplicate this post there.)
I guess I'm not sure what your point is... I was merely pointing out the common definitions of the words "piracy" and "theft", I wasn't trying to justify their usage. Yes, traditionally "piracy" refers to pillage and plunder on the high seas; but "piracy" in terms of "software piracy" is defined correctly in the journal. I should have made it more clear that I was referring to software piracy, rather than generic piracy.
I certainly DON'T think that people should be using the word "piracy" for anything that analogizes poorly to piracy (such as unauthorized copying of copyrighted material), or isn't ACTUAL, sea-borne piracy; but people will keep using it, and we have to deal with it:) Generally speaking I use the words "copying" and "copy" rather than "piracy" and "pirate", since it doesn't place a value judgment on the actions, and helps prevent stigmatizing by those I'm communicating with.
You seem like you know what you're talking about, so I'll ask you here (although, again, respond in my journal please:))... what do you think should be done about the whole situation? It's technically infeasible (and socially unpopular) to try and prevent people copying and sharing media content, but take it too far and you end up with the less-content-produced-because-you-can't-make-money situation (at least, in theory). What's the ideal social setup?
I get the impression that accidental release of antimatter would not be nearly as destructive as some people like to think. For one thing, let's say you have a sphere of antimatter held inside a spherical containment field. The containment field drops instantly, exposing the antimatter to the air outside. (Let's assume there's no pressure difference between the antimatter and the air.)
First of all, the outer edge of the antimatter sphere is going to contact the air first, but the inside won't quite yet. The outside layer converts to energy, presumably causing an "explosion" which sends energy in all directions, symmetrically, both out into the air and back into the antimatter sphere. This explosion will, for a short period of time, keep the matter and antimatter separate, so they will not be further reacting. After a few milliseconds, more of the antimatter will start reacting, but probably in a nonsymmetrical manner, and we end up with a prolonged (in reactive terms; a fraction of a second instead of the few milliseconds it takes for a normal chemical or even nuclear explosion to take its course) release of energy.
Thoughts? Am I wrong? Right? Deranged? (Well, yeah.)
Slashdot Mirror
Better than that... start a company called "Because We're Greedy Bastards".
"Yes, your honor, we're suing Because We're Greedy Bastards. Erm... let me rephrase that. We're bringing suit against the defendant, Because We're Greedy Bastards.
Crap."
No need -- the original report was written in crayon!
I'm curious, how did they solve all those problems? Is there a paper or document somewhere I can read about it, or would you be willing to explain? (Not attacking you, I am honestly curious as I play EQ a lot :)
Pardon me if this sounds like a flame, but your entire post is bullshit.
The proportion of games that have "craftsmanship" has not changed over time -- the same goes for music, movies, books, comics, take any art form. There were just as many horrible, stupid, piece of shit games in the "old days" as there are now -- but back then, bad games didn't even have shiny graphics as a saving grace!
I get so sick of reading posts like this. There are just as many good, well-crafted games today as there have ever been; we only REMEMBER the old games that were any good, because all the crap ones have passed into history and nobody talks about them any more. (To use a movie example, which one are people going to spend their time reminiscing about: Casablanca (1942) or Hillbilly Blitzkrieg (1942)?)
First, let me just say... where all da white people at? 90% of the audience was black, and this was in Hollywood, a half block from the Chinese Theatre, which seemed odd -- not that I'm complaining, mind you (I'm white) but I thought Murphy and De Niro were bigger draws among whites. Or maybe the distributor just handed out lots of screening passes in black neighborhoods?
[ Warning: Minor spoilers ahead ]
Anyway, this movie is strange. It's about two cops who end up working on a reality TV cop show together -- one a serious, real cop who's forced into it, and the other a lousy cop who really wants to be an actor. In the context of their TV show, they mock all the buddy-cop TV show/movie clichés... but then the movie's framework (about some illegal gunrunning) is ITSELF full of all the SAME clichés, done in such a way that you can't possibly believe they did it on purpose. It was very bizarre.
William Shatner kicks ass, though.
Real men measure their speed in femtoparsecs per microfortnight!
The military is going to hire Cobra Commander!
What I think you're missing (though maybe I'm missing something) is that a company can then put their nominal "headquarters" in a very low-tax jurisdiction, but contract out to workers and companies in high-tax jurisdictions. The company ends up making a much larger profit simply because of where it is located, regardless of how much revenue it produces, even if other costs (office rent, etc.) are the same.
:)
Apparently this is a bad thing but I don't know all that much about economics, so, just consider me trying to foster debate.
Too late. I already painted my house with invisible paint. It looks exactly the same as it did before.
What? I'm not just making that up because I'm lazy.
Has anyone else noticed how similar Tron was to The Wizard of Oz?
- The main character is transported into a strange, magical world.
- Many of the people in the other world look like people in the real world.
- The characters journey along a golden path (yellow brick road in Oz, the gold power beam the Solar Sailer moves along in Tron).
- The villains have flying beasts to do their dirty work (flying monkeys vs. Recognizers).
- There's a big, powerful wizard figure at the end of the road, but he's ultimately just a little old man hiding behind smoke and mirrors.
- The wizard has the power to send the hero(ine) back to the real world.
Freaky eh?
Actually, number of tickets sold (i.e. number of butts in seats) does not hold across time (although it does so better than $$), for the simple reason that there are more people than there used to be.
A better metric is the percentage of people who saw a particular movie in each period, out of all the people who saw any movies in that period. Basically, you take a particular movie's number of tickets sold, and divide it by all tickets sold for a given time period. This gives you a metric that holds across time, because if (for example) The Matrix has a 20% share, and Episode I has a 15% share, and Gone With the Wind has a 50% share (the numbers are made up), then it doesn't matter how many people saw the movie -- of the available movie audience, half of them saw GWTW, but only 1/5 and ~1/7 of the audience saw the other two movies (each of which have grossed more than GWTW in real dollars).
Of course, no matter how you cut it, it's an inexact science -- GWTW has had 63 years for people to view it, and The Matrix has had 3. Plus, there's no exact count kept of who saw the movie more than once, whether 1 person seeing it twice counts as much as 2 people seeing it once, etc.
Ultimately, I wish people would stop obsessing over the financial/numerical popularity of movies and instead focus on how good (or bad) the movies are -- the artistic, social, or political impact of a movie instead of its box office. Every week, hundreds of publications (newspapers, magazines) have stories about how much business each movie did, but you never see a discussion of the movie from an artistic standpoint except for the initial review -- too rarely do publications come back later and have any kind of in-depth discussion of any film.
Doesn't this imply that a geek might have TWO girlfriends? The laws of probability explicitly say that any geek with two girlfriends will cause the universe to implode!
A lot of people are asking, what qualifies as a page view in the subscription system? If I post a comment, is that a page view? If it is, it seems like this system will discourage the most active people from further contributing to the site.
To me, it makes the most sense that the front page (and all news sub-pages, like the apache or science sections), comments (articles) pages, config pages and so on should all count toward your 1,000 page limit, but comment posting pages should not.
The problem I see with this is one of delineation. Obviously, $$$$MAKE$$$$MONEY$$$$FAST$$$$ isn't going to be welcome, but what about an email from a friend of a friend who has an actual business proposition for me? There's obviously a continuum between pure, evil spam and "honest" transactions, and where along that continuum does it become trespassing? I could point at the second email and say, "Business offer! I didn't specifically request it! Trespassing!"
Is it trespassing if a door-to-door salesman walks onto my property and knocks on my door? There is no general consensus as to whether such things are allowed; there's a fair proportion of people who wouldn't object to the salesman walking up, regardless of whether they were interested in his particular business.
Unless the law is specifically written or interpreted to indicate that *only business offers* qualify as trespassing, I could use such a legal maneuver to sue anyone who emailed me that I didn't like. If I posted a flame on Slashdot, and then someone emailed me a response, I could decide to sue him. That hardly seems fair. It's like suing someone for sending you mail, which (as far as I know) you cannot do.
Another question is, what's the difference between Publisher's Clearinghouse sending me snail mail spam, and hotporn.com sending me email spam? Do you think there shouldn't be one (i.e. any spam-like mail you get in your physical box can allow you to charge the sender with trespassing)?
Funny, it sounds like this post was written 10 years ago. :)
Blade Runner was released in 1982 -- 20 years ago, not 10 -- and DADOES was released in 1968 (34 years ago). Also, Philip K. Dick died in 1982.
Fosterism is, as I recall, from Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein). I could be wrong though.
I have a question. Is it the receiving of the spam (i.e. when I go to check my mail on my home computer) that would (in theory) qualify? If so, then what's the difference between spam and a piece of "legitimate" email, aside from the fact that I don't make the mental distinction until I actually read it?
It seems to me that this would be like allowing anyone to walk onto your property, but when you see someone you don't like, but haven't previously told to not come on your property, prosecuting them for trespassing.
Not that I like spam; just curious about the legal ramifications.
Cornography? Or would we call it cr0n? Wait, we already have cron... hmm.
But if the energy release is slow enough, then the energy can be absorbed by the surrounding environment gradually, rather than as a destructive explosion. If I light a puddle of gasoline, it will burn, not explode -- but if I vaporize the gasoline and then ignite it, it will explode, even though it's the same quantity of gasoline (the fact that ALL of the gasoline combusts at once in gaseous form, while only the surface of the gasoline combusts in liquid form, is the distinction there). My point with the antimatter is that unless ALL of the antimatter reacts with matter at once, the energy release is going to be much more prolonged. Yeah, any given energy release over a short enough period of time is going to be destructive, but the explosion caused by a containment field dropping and the explosion caused by an antimatter *bomb* are going to be significantly different, I would think, for the reasons given in my earlier post.
I get the feeling that most people on Slashdot don't like either country or pop. Call it a hunch.
Thanks for the reply -- I think that /. already archived my journal entry (it treats them like articles), so "no new comments can be added". Blearg. I've added another new journal entry for the purpose of comments, if you'd like to duplicate your post here in my journal. (If you do respond to that one, I'll duplicate this post there.)
:) Generally speaking I use the words "copying" and "copy" rather than "piracy" and "pirate", since it doesn't place a value judgment on the actions, and helps prevent stigmatizing by those I'm communicating with.
:))... what do you think should be done about the whole situation? It's technically infeasible (and socially unpopular) to try and prevent people copying and sharing media content, but take it too far and you end up with the less-content-produced-because-you-can't-make-money situation (at least, in theory). What's the ideal social setup?
I guess I'm not sure what your point is... I was merely pointing out the common definitions of the words "piracy" and "theft", I wasn't trying to justify their usage. Yes, traditionally "piracy" refers to pillage and plunder on the high seas; but "piracy" in terms of "software piracy" is defined correctly in the journal. I should have made it more clear that I was referring to software piracy, rather than generic piracy.
I certainly DON'T think that people should be using the word "piracy" for anything that analogizes poorly to piracy (such as unauthorized copying of copyrighted material), or isn't ACTUAL, sea-borne piracy; but people will keep using it, and we have to deal with it
You seem like you know what you're talking about, so I'll ask you here (although, again, respond in my journal please
I get the impression that accidental release of antimatter would not be nearly as destructive as some people like to think. For one thing, let's say you have a sphere of antimatter held inside a spherical containment field. The containment field drops instantly, exposing the antimatter to the air outside. (Let's assume there's no pressure difference between the antimatter and the air.)
First of all, the outer edge of the antimatter sphere is going to contact the air first, but the inside won't quite yet. The outside layer converts to energy, presumably causing an "explosion" which sends energy in all directions, symmetrically, both out into the air and back into the antimatter sphere. This explosion will, for a short period of time, keep the matter and antimatter separate, so they will not be further reacting. After a few milliseconds, more of the antimatter will start reacting, but probably in a nonsymmetrical manner, and we end up with a prolonged (in reactive terms; a fraction of a second instead of the few milliseconds it takes for a normal chemical or even nuclear explosion to take its course) release of energy.
Thoughts? Am I wrong? Right? Deranged? (Well, yeah.)