Or better yet: don't, let the stupid artists supporting these organizations starve themselves alongside the scumbags who employed them, and next time you want to hear some music make bloody sure it's available under a CC license in its entirety.
Everyone here is going to talk about how outrageous it is for a supermarket to be charged for playing the radio, but the fact of the matter is that they use the radio to create a pleasant environment for their customers, which makes it a tool of commerce. Songwriters are the ones who get compensated for this, and rightfully so: people are using the fruits of their labor (music) to help sell merchandise.
Same goes for the guy who did the decorations, yet *he* ain't getting monthly royalties either. No, they're both equally inmoral and stupid, its just that the Decorators Guild (if there's even such a thing) ain't as good as lobbying for advantageous laws.
Without due diligence on this and other fronts, professional songwriters (who are not, by the by, a particularly wealthy lot) would not have an income. And please don't make the claim that songwriters get paid for years for 5 minutes of work, because they write far more songs that get rejected or fail commercially than are successful. It's a job, and not an easy one.
Then songwriters should take a lesson from software developers and charge for services, not for some "intellectual property" bullshit. A company needs you to write them a song, you charge for it, a company wants you to write songs for them regularly, you get employed by them for a stable salary. No need to deal with stupid lobbying organizations, overzealous lawyers, or paying royalties to people who've never had a hand in actually running the goddamned business. Win for all.
Have you tried the Galactic Civilizations series, or any of Paradox's titles such as Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron? they all get recommended frequently for their AI, though not being a great strategist myself I can't say for certain.
Though I disagree that learning from their mistakes is a "low bar" for AI. Knowing you're losing is relatively simple, knowing *why* you're losing requires a deep understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game (even for a human), but knowing how to counter that in a similar but not entirely alike situation in the future is much, much harder.
Your problem is that you're only thinking of large, AAA titles like Modern Warfare 2 or Diablo 3. Take a look at devs such as Tripwire and you'll see that the cost/benefit ratio isn't so clear-cut for all devs.
And then you have the niche titles, of the kind that'd never sell enough copies on console to pay for the development fees, let alone generate a profit: hardcore strategy/political simulations like Hearts of Iron 3, hardcore driving simulations like Live for Speed, hardcore flight simulators like X-Plane, games that in general cater to an older, mature crowd that likely already owns a good PC by virtue of their work and only need a $50 GPU to play and is unwilling, either by its expense or stigma, to purchase a console regardless.
Sure, in the long term we may lose all the kid-oriented style-over-substance titles like Crysis, but who cares? I don't.
Well, as every industry matures the mainstream tends towards the lowest common denominator. Britney on music, Transformers on movies, now Crysis on games, is it at all surprising?
But look beyond the purely mainstream and you'll still find plenty of innovation done during the past five years. Sins of a Solar Empire's real-time version of classic strategy games (though arguably the Europa Universalis series did it first, it all depends on what you define as "real time"), Zeno Clash's mix of the FPS and beat 'em up genres, or Peggle and Portal's reinvention of the puzzle genre.
And no, the small independant software house hasn't died, far from it. They may not be able to achieve mainstream popularity before being hired/bought by a large publisher (ala Portal and Valve), but they're alive and, thanks to the wonders of digital distribution, doing better than ever. Check out the catalogues at Impulse and Valve when you have time, you'll be surprised.
When it comes to graphics drivers, these issues are mitigated to a large extent by the fact that Nvidia and ATI have very active driver teams that keep up with things.
As an ATI user, no they don't. The closed-source ATI driver sucks *major* ass, and is the only thing besides a dying HDD that has ever made a Linux system of mine crash. Yes, the whole system, not just X.
Which is another advantage for your list: if the driver sucks, it can be fixed and/or replaced with relative ease. Which is exactly what happened with the Free ATI driver which works properly, cleanly, and even supports 3D acceleration on many chipsets thanks to the community.
There's a reason why all the open source games you see are still something like Wesnoth and Warsow.
Fixed that for you. If you're gonna talk about the state-of-the-art of F/OSS gaming development you should update your examples, TuxRacer doesn't cut it anymore.
Other than that I agree with you, if by Modern Warfare 2 you mean the single-player part. One of the downers of working in stuff such as a game is that you already know how the story goes, perhaps the AI's quirks and faults as well, and that diminishes your own enjoyment of the game itself. But multiplayer its a different thing, the more you work on the game the more *you* enjoy it, so a F/OSS game on the level of MW2's multiplayer isn't unthinkable and, perhaps, not even hard either.
The hard parts are having a solid 3D engine and coordination, and the first is entirely solvable within F/OSS or if all else fails, use one of ID's. The second is a bit more problematic, modding a preexisting engine likely aimed at run-and-gun deathmatch shooters for a more tactical approach as in CoD but I don't think its impossible either, it just requires somebody with a good idea and a willingness to work hard for it.
Probably due to having a computer background. The ideal in typography is around 70, but I believe computer terminals standardized on 80 characters per line to account for shell prompts and such, so its common for us computer guys to use 80 characters instead of the sightly more legible 70.
Ever had to read a piece of text with 150+ characters per line? "painful" doesn't even begin to describe it. That's one of the biggest reasons I push for LaTeX over MSOffice or OpenOffice: it may not do as well as a professional typesetter, but it's considerably better than what 99% of people do 99% of the time using a modern office suite.
That's a problem with perception, not a technical one. OpenOffice has had better-than-MSO compatibility since 1.0 or so, its just that when people see problems with newer versions of MSO they assume the document was faulty, whereas if the problem arises with OO.o its the software that is.
The overarching effects of what you propose are gigantic and would result in a brain-dead communist nation of zombies...
...while the overaching effects of what you propose are similarly gigantic and would result in a brain-dead consumist nation of zombies, which would hardly be any better.
Or perhaps you just need to brush up on your fallacies, and try to avoid them next time.
Off-topic, but it reminds me of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the protagonist's background as two-thirds god and one-third human. Just try to explain *that* one without using either an infinite series or double penetration.
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever. The thing is, if some "trivial" piece of hardware which has been part of mostly every computer since about 1990, still *does not fucking work* correctly today, I don't give a rat's ass whose fault that is.
Then keep the complains to yourself, and don't waste developers' time with your pointless bitching until you're at *least* able to determine that you're bitching at the right developer.
Acrobat Reader may suck big donkey balls, but if I went to complain to Microsoft about it that'd only be a waste of time for them *and* me.
South America or Europe. Yeah, the europeans have had it pretty badly these last couple years, but they're still *FAR* from the US in terms of human rights and such.
Again, citation needed. Remember that most RIAA and MPAA members are based in Europe and Asia so if you were gonna count *THEM* in, try again.
Within the last 100 years, you saved us from the Nazis, fascist Japan and International Communism
No, the Russians saved us from the Nazis, and they would've gotten around to demolishing Japan as well given time. In fact, that's *why* the US threw the nukes at them, they didn't want Japan to lose against Russia as that would've tipped the post-war's world balance in their favor. Communism you did, but I'm not sure that Imperialism is much better.
and you're the only power who could save the world again if another threat comes up.
Besides, again, Russia, China or the EU.
Yes, the US appears to be mean and cold - but I shudder to think where the world would be without you. I believe that these things are unfortunately two sides of the same coin.
So, the US appears to be mean and cold because the world would be worse off without them. Why? are you sure, then, if being "mean and cold" is a side-effect of becoming a huge superpower, that the Russians would *really* have been worse rather than it being merely the apperance of it as result of being *another* huge superpower, albeit one farther from (your) home?
Besides, my own little problem with the US isn't that they appear mean and cold, most governments do. Its that they appear to be bloody *STUPID* on top of it. I mean, they recognized the terrorists' goals after 9/11 were to destroy their freedoms and make their citizens afraid and feeling they were in a state of war, and then what did they do? EXACTLY! destroy their freedoms and make a whole show out of pretending they were in a war where they could be killed any minute. I mean, you couldn't have done worse if you tried.
That goes for everything. Fortunately I was not only highly intelligent but also physically strong while growing up so I could solve any conflict that came my way easily and cleanly, but I know in a prolonged lawsuit my dad would've had to declare bankrupcy before my idiot classmates' rich parents began to resent their lawyer's bills, so I for one am thankful this form of bullying wasn't around when I was growing up.
And what about all those who don't want to fight, not because they are weak, but because they don't like fighting.
Same thing that goes for all of us who don't like using a team of highly-paid lawyers to crush those who can't afford to fight, or who don't like to go and manipulate a mob to make your opponent a social pariah: tough luck, and make sure you're the one picking the battleground next time you fight.
I may not have much respect for those who use violence to settle their conflicts, but I have even less for those who use their daddy's lawyers to do so, that's just pathetic.
Well, from reading their webpage that limitation apparently goes away if you were ever at any point a subscriber or have bought anything from their store.
So, you can buy a 60-day time card, see which "VIP" features are worth grinding for and which aren't, then when it expires become a Premium customer with unlimited storage, without them ever having your CC number for the paranoid among us. I like it.
The Geneva Conventions results apply only when the guys who are winning want them too.
Wrong. The Geneva Convention's results apply for as long as *neutral* countries want them too, if the US declared war against China and threw the Geneva Convention out of the window but China didn't, which side do you think Europe and the rest of America would take? hint: not that of the US. And if you think the US can withstand alone a war against Europe, China and the rest of America, I'd like to welcome you to this place we call "the real world".
Lawful good: plays by the rules, helps new players. Lawful neutral: plays by the rules, ignores anyone below his skill level. Lawful evil: plays by the rules, but enjoys waving his e-peen in front of the "st00pid nubs".
Neutral good: uses shortcuts to get stuff faster, and is willing to teach them to other players. True neutral: plays to win, using shortcuts and loopholes but no cheating, ignores anyone or anything that doesn't contribute to his min-maxing. Neutral evil: plays to win (including ganking et al), may cheat if he thinks he won't be caught and serves his min-maxing purposes.
Chaotic good: enjoys discovering loopholes or overpowered builds for the game, will document them on the game's wiki afterwards. Chaotic neutral: enjoys discovering loopholes for the game, and abusing them until the devs hit them with the "nerf" bat. May complain for a bit before resuming his activities. Chaotic evil: enjoys cheating of all kinds, abuses them to improve his e-peen, and will complain loudly when the devs hit him with the "ban" hammer before buying (or stealing) a new account and resuming his activities.
Perhaps he's already successful and prefers to *spend* the money he's already got rather than making even more for e-peen purposes. That'd explain why he's being cited in Slashdot and Apple's website, too.
Hell, as much as I dislike the concept of "partying", I believe the world would be a much better place if successful enterpreneurs were as him, rather than succumbing to their greed and small dicks.
hey, who says your CD burning software isn't infected - implications on trusting trust and all.
I understand there's only a fine line between safety and paranoia, but the idea of a CD burning software having been compromised to detect Linux LiveCD ISOs and add a software keylogger to the system included therein is so far up in 'paranoia' territory it already got full citizenship and is considering running for president against "Elvis is hidden in Area 51" and "9/11 was planned by Israel to draw the US into the middle east".
and by using sci-fi instead of trying to fit the story into a historical setting or the present day, the writer gets an easy way to create his own world that's however he designs it, while still being plausible (unlike pure fantasy works with dragons and knights and swords and magic and such, which is also rather limiting)
If you think fantasy is about "dragons and knights and swords and magic and such", you don't have any business criticizing him. In fact, fantasy is such a huge, diverse genre of literature many have called for the "soft" sci-fi you describe to be considered a sub-genre of it rather than of sci-fi proper, providing very compelling arguments for doing so.
Maybe the difference is that Arthur C. Clarke had no trouble selling tons of books with his hard sci-fi stories, so he never felt like he needed to trash popular "soft" sci-fi, and this guy, whatever his name is, is such a crappy writer that he has no sales and feels like he needs to attack someone.
If you don't know who Charles Stross is, you *certainly* do not have any business talking about sci-fi. He may not be Asimov but he's *far* from an unknown writer either, do some research.
Slashdot Mirror
Or better yet: don't, let the stupid artists supporting these organizations starve themselves alongside the scumbags who employed them, and next time you want to hear some music make bloody sure it's available under a CC license in its entirety.
Everyone here is going to talk about how outrageous it is for a supermarket to be charged for playing the radio, but the fact of the matter is that they use the radio to create a pleasant environment for their customers, which makes it a tool of commerce. Songwriters are the ones who get compensated for this, and rightfully so: people are using the fruits of their labor (music) to help sell merchandise.
Same goes for the guy who did the decorations, yet *he* ain't getting monthly royalties either. No, they're both equally inmoral and stupid, its just that the Decorators Guild (if there's even such a thing) ain't as good as lobbying for advantageous laws.
Without due diligence on this and other fronts, professional songwriters (who are not, by the by, a particularly wealthy lot) would not have an income. And please don't make the claim that songwriters get paid for years for 5 minutes of work, because they write far more songs that get rejected or fail commercially than are successful. It's a job, and not an easy one.
Then songwriters should take a lesson from software developers and charge for services, not for some "intellectual property" bullshit. A company needs you to write them a song, you charge for it, a company wants you to write songs for them regularly, you get employed by them for a stable salary. No need to deal with stupid lobbying organizations, overzealous lawyers, or paying royalties to people who've never had a hand in actually running the goddamned business. Win for all.
Have you tried the Galactic Civilizations series, or any of Paradox's titles such as Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron? they all get recommended frequently for their AI, though not being a great strategist myself I can't say for certain.
Though I disagree that learning from their mistakes is a "low bar" for AI. Knowing you're losing is relatively simple, knowing *why* you're losing requires a deep understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game (even for a human), but knowing how to counter that in a similar but not entirely alike situation in the future is much, much harder.
Your problem is that you're only thinking of large, AAA titles like Modern Warfare 2 or Diablo 3. Take a look at devs such as Tripwire and you'll see that the cost/benefit ratio isn't so clear-cut for all devs.
And then you have the niche titles, of the kind that'd never sell enough copies on console to pay for the development fees, let alone generate a profit: hardcore strategy/political simulations like Hearts of Iron 3, hardcore driving simulations like Live for Speed, hardcore flight simulators like X-Plane, games that in general cater to an older, mature crowd that likely already owns a good PC by virtue of their work and only need a $50 GPU to play and is unwilling, either by its expense or stigma, to purchase a console regardless.
Sure, in the long term we may lose all the kid-oriented style-over-substance titles like Crysis, but who cares? I don't.
Well, as every industry matures the mainstream tends towards the lowest common denominator. Britney on music, Transformers on movies, now Crysis on games, is it at all surprising?
But look beyond the purely mainstream and you'll still find plenty of innovation done during the past five years. Sins of a Solar Empire's real-time version of classic strategy games (though arguably the Europa Universalis series did it first, it all depends on what you define as "real time"), Zeno Clash's mix of the FPS and beat 'em up genres, or Peggle and Portal's reinvention of the puzzle genre.
And no, the small independant software house hasn't died, far from it. They may not be able to achieve mainstream popularity before being hired/bought by a large publisher (ala Portal and Valve), but they're alive and, thanks to the wonders of digital distribution, doing better than ever. Check out the catalogues at Impulse and Valve when you have time, you'll be surprised.
CFO: Then find me one that will, and remind me never to hire those fuckers again.
Or what, you think that if an outside contractor sent them an OO.o document, they'd switch away from MSO? quit dreaming.
When it comes to graphics drivers, these issues are mitigated to a large extent by the fact that Nvidia and ATI have very active driver teams that keep up with things.
As an ATI user, no they don't. The closed-source ATI driver sucks *major* ass, and is the only thing besides a dying HDD that has ever made a Linux system of mine crash. Yes, the whole system, not just X.
Which is another advantage for your list: if the driver sucks, it can be fixed and/or replaced with relative ease. Which is exactly what happened with the Free ATI driver which works properly, cleanly, and even supports 3D acceleration on many chipsets thanks to the community.
So, instead of supporting Microsoft by buying the attrocity that was Vista, you'll go with Windows XP instead. That'll teach them.
Haven't you thought of, perhaps, playing Battlefield 2 or Red Orchestra instead of simply downgrading to Infinity Ward's previous product?
There's a reason why all the open source games you see are still something like Wesnoth and Warsow.
Fixed that for you. If you're gonna talk about the state-of-the-art of F/OSS gaming development you should update your examples, TuxRacer doesn't cut it anymore.
Other than that I agree with you, if by Modern Warfare 2 you mean the single-player part. One of the downers of working in stuff such as a game is that you already know how the story goes, perhaps the AI's quirks and faults as well, and that diminishes your own enjoyment of the game itself. But multiplayer its a different thing, the more you work on the game the more *you* enjoy it, so a F/OSS game on the level of MW2's multiplayer isn't unthinkable and, perhaps, not even hard either.
The hard parts are having a solid 3D engine and coordination, and the first is entirely solvable within F/OSS or if all else fails, use one of ID's. The second is a bit more problematic, modding a preexisting engine likely aimed at run-and-gun deathmatch shooters for a more tactical approach as in CoD but I don't think its impossible either, it just requires somebody with a good idea and a willingness to work hard for it.
Probably due to having a computer background. The ideal in typography is around 70, but I believe computer terminals standardized on 80 characters per line to account for shell prompts and such, so its common for us computer guys to use 80 characters instead of the sightly more legible 70.
Ever had to read a piece of text with 150+ characters per line? "painful" doesn't even begin to describe it. That's one of the biggest reasons I push for LaTeX over MSOffice or OpenOffice: it may not do as well as a professional typesetter, but it's considerably better than what 99% of people do 99% of the time using a modern office suite.
That's a problem with perception, not a technical one. OpenOffice has had better-than-MSO compatibility since 1.0 or so, its just that when people see problems with newer versions of MSO they assume the document was faulty, whereas if the problem arises with OO.o its the software that is.
The overarching effects of what you propose are gigantic and would result in a brain-dead communist nation of zombies...
...while the overaching effects of what you propose are similarly gigantic and would result in a brain-dead consumist nation of zombies, which would hardly be any better.
Or perhaps you just need to brush up on your fallacies, and try to avoid them next time.
Off-topic, but it reminds me of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the protagonist's background as two-thirds god and one-third human. Just try to explain *that* one without using either an infinite series or double penetration.
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever. The thing is, if some "trivial" piece of hardware which has been part of mostly every computer since about 1990, still *does not fucking work* correctly today, I don't give a rat's ass whose fault that is.
Then keep the complains to yourself, and don't waste developers' time with your pointless bitching until you're at *least* able to determine that you're bitching at the right developer.
Acrobat Reader may suck big donkey balls, but if I went to complain to Microsoft about it that'd only be a waste of time for them *and* me.
South America or Europe. Yeah, the europeans have had it pretty badly these last couple years, but they're still *FAR* from the US in terms of human rights and such.
That highlights a problem with the domestic students, rather than the institutions themselves.
You also do almost 100% of the world's innovation
Citation needed.
and produce the vast majority of art and culture.
Again, citation needed. Remember that most RIAA and MPAA members are based in Europe and Asia so if you were gonna count *THEM* in, try again.
Within the last 100 years, you saved us from the Nazis, fascist Japan and International Communism
No, the Russians saved us from the Nazis, and they would've gotten around to demolishing Japan as well given time. In fact, that's *why* the US threw the nukes at them, they didn't want Japan to lose against Russia as that would've tipped the post-war's world balance in their favor. Communism you did, but I'm not sure that Imperialism is much better.
and you're the only power who could save the world again if another threat comes up.
Besides, again, Russia, China or the EU.
Yes, the US appears to be mean and cold - but I shudder to think where the world would be without you. I believe that these things are unfortunately two sides of the same coin.
So, the US appears to be mean and cold because the world would be worse off without them. Why? are you sure, then, if being "mean and cold" is a side-effect of becoming a huge superpower, that the Russians would *really* have been worse rather than it being merely the apperance of it as result of being *another* huge superpower, albeit one farther from (your) home?
Besides, my own little problem with the US isn't that they appear mean and cold, most governments do. Its that they appear to be bloody *STUPID* on top of it. I mean, they recognized the terrorists' goals after 9/11 were to destroy their freedoms and make their citizens afraid and feeling they were in a state of war, and then what did they do? EXACTLY! destroy their freedoms and make a whole show out of pretending they were in a war where they could be killed any minute. I mean, you couldn't have done worse if you tried.
That goes for everything. Fortunately I was not only highly intelligent but also physically strong while growing up so I could solve any conflict that came my way easily and cleanly, but I know in a prolonged lawsuit my dad would've had to declare bankrupcy before my idiot classmates' rich parents began to resent their lawyer's bills, so I for one am thankful this form of bullying wasn't around when I was growing up.
And what about all those who don't want to fight, not because they are weak, but because they don't like fighting.
Same thing that goes for all of us who don't like using a team of highly-paid lawyers to crush those who can't afford to fight, or who don't like to go and manipulate a mob to make your opponent a social pariah: tough luck, and make sure you're the one picking the battleground next time you fight.
I may not have much respect for those who use violence to settle their conflicts, but I have even less for those who use their daddy's lawyers to do so, that's just pathetic.
Well, from reading their webpage that limitation apparently goes away if you were ever at any point a subscriber or have bought anything from their store.
So, you can buy a 60-day time card, see which "VIP" features are worth grinding for and which aren't, then when it expires become a Premium customer with unlimited storage, without them ever having your CC number for the paranoid among us. I like it.
The Geneva Conventions results apply only when the guys who are winning want them too.
Wrong. The Geneva Convention's results apply for as long as *neutral* countries want them too, if the US declared war against China and threw the Geneva Convention out of the window but China didn't, which side do you think Europe and the rest of America would take? hint: not that of the US. And if you think the US can withstand alone a war against Europe, China and the rest of America, I'd like to welcome you to this place we call "the real world".
To me, it'd be:
Lawful good: plays by the rules, helps new players.
Lawful neutral: plays by the rules, ignores anyone below his skill level.
Lawful evil: plays by the rules, but enjoys waving his e-peen in front of the "st00pid nubs".
Neutral good: uses shortcuts to get stuff faster, and is willing to teach them to other players.
True neutral: plays to win, using shortcuts and loopholes but no cheating, ignores anyone or anything that doesn't contribute to his min-maxing.
Neutral evil: plays to win (including ganking et al), may cheat if he thinks he won't be caught and serves his min-maxing purposes.
Chaotic good: enjoys discovering loopholes or overpowered builds for the game, will document them on the game's wiki afterwards.
Chaotic neutral: enjoys discovering loopholes for the game, and abusing them until the devs hit them with the "nerf" bat. May complain for a bit before resuming his activities.
Chaotic evil: enjoys cheating of all kinds, abuses them to improve his e-peen, and will complain loudly when the devs hit him with the "ban" hammer before buying (or stealing) a new account and resuming his activities.
Perhaps he's already successful and prefers to *spend* the money he's already got rather than making even more for e-peen purposes. That'd explain why he's being cited in Slashdot and Apple's website, too.
Hell, as much as I dislike the concept of "partying", I believe the world would be a much better place if successful enterpreneurs were as him, rather than succumbing to their greed and small dicks.
hey, who says your CD burning software isn't infected - implications on trusting trust and all.
I understand there's only a fine line between safety and paranoia, but the idea of a CD burning software having been compromised to detect Linux LiveCD ISOs and add a software keylogger to the system included therein is so far up in 'paranoia' territory it already got full citizenship and is considering running for president against "Elvis is hidden in Area 51" and "9/11 was planned by Israel to draw the US into the middle east".
and by using sci-fi instead of trying to fit the story into a historical setting or the present day, the writer gets an easy way to create his own world that's however he designs it, while still being plausible (unlike pure fantasy works with dragons and knights and swords and magic and such, which is also rather limiting)
If you think fantasy is about "dragons and knights and swords and magic and such", you don't have any business criticizing him. In fact, fantasy is such a huge, diverse genre of literature many have called for the "soft" sci-fi you describe to be considered a sub-genre of it rather than of sci-fi proper, providing very compelling arguments for doing so.
Maybe the difference is that Arthur C. Clarke had no trouble selling tons of books with his hard sci-fi stories, so he never felt like he needed to trash popular "soft" sci-fi, and this guy, whatever his name is, is such a crappy writer that he has no sales and feels like he needs to attack someone.
If you don't know who Charles Stross is, you *certainly* do not have any business talking about sci-fi. He may not be Asimov but he's *far* from an unknown writer either, do some research.