Well hold on now. Yes, google and the likes have in a sense aided the government in censoring its own people's criticisms. On the other hand, a censored communication is better than the complete absense of one. By providing the service for a couple months and then pulling the plug, they are creating an unexplainable void - when the people of China start asking about why google left, it's going to create a lot of questions about the ethics of China's censorship policies. But they couldn't ask why they don't have information services like google if they never tasted them in the first place could they?
Slightly off topic - but think about how pulling financial aid from Palestine has forced their people to reconsider their stance on cooperating with foreign countries. Such political pressure would never be possible if the aid wasn't there to begin with. It's a blatent carrot and stick measure, but it sure beats a war. Google's got a nice juicy carrot in China, and while I hate to think of them as a political company, if it brings about more civil rights and liberties in China, then perhaps google has done the right thing.
Yes, but censorship will affect the production of video games the way it already affects the production of movies. There is good and bad to this. On the good side, developers may consider making a fun concept presentable to a wider audience by striping out some scenes/graphics that overall don't affect gameplay. On the bad side, said scenes can - when done right - create the horrific environment that is the craved experience of the gamer. There would be no system shock or doom 3 without the corpses of the main character's former colleagues littering the ship, slowly forming a picture of the horror that had taken place. And unfortunately, in today's world of retail, the only way to sell a game big is to convince distributors of its potential - ie, a wide audience.
It's a timeless question really. I hate losing my privacy as much as the next guy, but the recent bust of Canadian extremists does remind you of the alternatives. Security vs Privacy.
Personally, I'd compromise a lot on Privacy if the government would back off their conservative "we know what's best for you" bullshit. Legalize the sex, drugs, gambling, file sharing, contraversial media (*), and what does the plebian have left to hide? I have no problem with someone picking through cell phone records with a fine tooth comb if they are doing it to stop murders, rapes, kidnappings, and actual terrorists. Ask a parent who's been searching for their kid for ten years how they would feel if the investigator could use cell phone records to help find their child. It's when they use the information to put average Joe in jail who isn't hurting anyone, while a terrorist blows up 3000 people, that I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on something else.
*I'd make an exception to minors. Before a certain age I like any sane person believe children need some protection. But upon reaching the age where you can sign your life over to the military, I think the government needs to back the **** off what you can and can't do.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Google has a good idea here, but until we get a legit Internet Privacy Act where the government can't at a moment's notice supeona every one of those spreadsheets, the practical application of this will be very limited. Sure, I can track my guild's DKP, work out some simple math, etc. - but anything financial or personally identifying? Forget it.
Hey, I can't give you any karma, but here's a +1 - Hell yea Brotha!
A magazine with 4 pages of editorial and no advertising would be perfect. Cut out all the bullshit, tell me whether you think the games coming out are worth anything, and close up. Put an ad on the back cover and send to print.
(By the way, I love the/. 14 second wait period on submitting a comment. About as much as the 5 day wait period. Typed this since I have the extra time...)
Never heard of it, but I've saved it as a favorites for future reference. Thanks for the tip - just in case I actually need pdfs (damn you IRS for storing the tax code in pdf...)
"That's why she [Hillary Clinton] and fellow senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh have introduced legislation to regulate the video-game industry, codifying its voluntary rating system and making it a federal crime for retailers to sell or rent inappropriate games to minors."
A federal crime?! To compare, selling alcohol to a child, something they could actually kill themselves with, would be a state crime. You know what a colossal waste of time is? Debating how the federal government should regulate trade (it shouldn't) - when there are issues of war, national security, and immigration rights that remain unsettled.
Count one less democrat that I would vote for. It's days like this when I remember why I'm a moderate anarchist.
If I were going to throw something out because marketers found a way to exploit it, my phone and irl mailbox would be gone long before my email box. Email is free (after any isp charges incurred), allows you to filter out certain parties without jumping through hoops (spam filters), is sortable, allows you to easily identify whitelist folks, can be sent to multiple parties (group distributions), and maintains a record of it's sending (proof of sending, and read receipts if you use them).
Yet both of these technologies are still around (the phone and mailbox).
And a shameless self reply - the adobe inlay for internet explorer is horrible. It's a resource hog, and while I'm not that computer savvy, it seems to leave garbage in memory, especially if used concurrently with excel and or certain Java applets.
It's adobe. Ever since their partnership with Yahoo, where everytime Adobe tries to update it defaults to installing a yahoo toolbar, I've boycotted the PDF.
I'd love a MS PDF reader. Why should one company have exclusive rights to a file format? Unless Adobe can prove MS reverse engineered their software, I think their lawyers are smug on this one.
What's with the comment about gamers not paying attention to older titles? Did Microsoft suddenly release them as freeware? No... so there's a regonizable commercial demand for them, yes?
Some of my favorite titles took backwards compatibility to the next step - importability. Like with the old Might and Magic games you could import characters from the previous game. The sega genesis had a hardware piece that would let you play master system games on the newer 16 bit console. That's right folks - 20th century technology. And it didn't cost 600 bucks either.
Sadly, this, like Vista (also suffering compatibility issues), would rather see you purchase new titles than allow you to enjoy your old ones.
If Microsoft ran an MMO, all your armor would break every time you gained a level.
Exactly. Jack Thompson is a lawyer. Thus the exceptionally vague law will provide him years of work in his favorite subject area. Fucking Brilliant.
On another note, how's that GTA clone coming along featuring Jack Thompson as the main character? We need to add some literary, scientific, and artistic fluff a la Da Vinci Code, so we can sell it to the kids.
"100% backward compatibility is a stupid expectation."
I disagree. Maybe I just don't buy into the whole software is a service mechanic theme yet. I find however that I've peeved when I have to jump through hoops and hurdles to make a game that came out in the 1980s function on "state of the art" technology. When the OS starts requiring a quarter GB of ram just to run, I *DO* expect somewhere in there room for the 640k that ran everything in DOS back in the day. We're talking less than 1% of the whole system here, to run an OS licensed by the same company.
Some of the later OSs, like Win 95 and Win 98 - I could see issues involving newer file systems, and security holes. Still, if a runtime command existed back in the day for a software, give the computer operator the rights to run it. Everytime a software becomes obsolete on a new OS, I view it as that OS losing a feature or functionality.
"BusinessWeek profiles four individuals identified by law enforcement as the world's foremost online criminals. They're accused of crimes ranging from re-shipping rings to credit card theft and email fraud -- '...all are Russian"
Now, I don't always keep up with the computing world, but last I checked, Bill Gates was not Russian!
"WTF is a YRO product?" YRO = Your Rights Online. It's actually the category where this story landed on/.
Gmail is actually a very proactive version of what you are talking about - gmail users report spam, which forms a collective blacklist of domains to auto filter to the spam folder. Someone or something has harnessed my own email address, but to date every "yo d1ck s0 sm4ll" email has landed squarely in the spam can.
Ultimately, they need to do with email what they did with telephones, and create a do not email list, with the same 10000 dollar fines. I'm just not sure how well such a law would hold up against international law, in the case of international spam. I know people would worry about the do not email list being harnessed for good addresses, but really, these things get harnessed anyways, they aren't a secret.
Well, it depends what you do with it. If you develop a working, stable product from your invention, it sounds like the supreme court will uphold your patent. However, if you aren't selling anything either because 1. Your invention had horrible flaws or 2. You really never intended to develop a product from your invention : then you aren't really out any money for someone else stepping in and making the better product. And unfortunately, today's patent laws encourage people to play "squatter" with inventions, claiming them years ahead of when they can actually develop them, ultimately leading to very useful ideas being caught in the red tape of a "I had it first!" game.
Very true. I've seen the computer novice in action attempting to learn windows for the first time. Windows, while popular, is not in fact as easy to learn as one might make it sound. It's just that through market share, and being the dominant platform for software, that users steer towards MS. And once they've spent hours on end learning the interface, they are too scared to switch to something else, especially if the going notion is that it's going to be harder.
I'd actually bet more slashdot readers get laid than you give credit for. Most people don't play the GTA auto series for cheap porn, they do it because they can steal a wide variety of vehicles and not go to jail for it. Personally, I love to see how long I can evade the police in a camper.
If the currently produces US ethanol is not cost effective against oil, then it's not going to be produced/purchased anyways. Therefore I fail to see the loss of American jobs/income. If it can be produced outside the US for less, and gets us out of the oil trap, by all means we should do it!
Maybe I'm looking at this from an economic standpoint instead of an energy conservationist standpoint, but - wouldn't the removal of tariffs lead to greater supply, lowering fuels costs? If it becomes more economically feasible to use alternative fuels like ethanol, it could greatly help the US to quit sucking up all the oil, and get us away from this 3 dollar a gallon norm the oil companies would like to press on us.
Show me an economic way to start using ethanol fuels, without huge startup costs, and I'll show you a revolution.
:) is not intellectual property. It's a god damned smiley face. My 4 year old draws them all the time. They are drawn in schools across the country. The guy that invented it is long, long dead. He was probably a cave man.
If you pass a lawyer today, please do the world a favor and shoot him in the face.
Blizzard has enough lore behind Azeroth at this point to rival Lord of the Rings - I think they could create a fantastic movie of it. I agree that they should use CGI for it though - they have some of the best drawn and most intriguing intro's to their games of any I've played.
Slashdot Mirror
Well hold on now. Yes, google and the likes have in a sense aided the government in censoring its own people's criticisms. On the other hand, a censored communication is better than the complete absense of one. By providing the service for a couple months and then pulling the plug, they are creating an unexplainable void - when the people of China start asking about why google left, it's going to create a lot of questions about the ethics of China's censorship policies. But they couldn't ask why they don't have information services like google if they never tasted them in the first place could they?
Slightly off topic - but think about how pulling financial aid from Palestine has forced their people to reconsider their stance on cooperating with foreign countries. Such political pressure would never be possible if the aid wasn't there to begin with. It's a blatent carrot and stick measure, but it sure beats a war. Google's got a nice juicy carrot in China, and while I hate to think of them as a political company, if it brings about more civil rights and liberties in China, then perhaps google has done the right thing.
Yes, but censorship will affect the production of video games the way it already affects the production of movies. There is good and bad to this. On the good side, developers may consider making a fun concept presentable to a wider audience by striping out some scenes/graphics that overall don't affect gameplay. On the bad side, said scenes can - when done right - create the horrific environment that is the craved experience of the gamer. There would be no system shock or doom 3 without the corpses of the main character's former colleagues littering the ship, slowly forming a picture of the horror that had taken place. And unfortunately, in today's world of retail, the only way to sell a game big is to convince distributors of its potential - ie, a wide audience.
It's a timeless question really. I hate losing my privacy as much as the next guy, but the recent bust of Canadian extremists does remind you of the alternatives. Security vs Privacy.
Personally, I'd compromise a lot on Privacy if the government would back off their conservative "we know what's best for you" bullshit. Legalize the sex, drugs, gambling, file sharing, contraversial media (*), and what does the plebian have left to hide? I have no problem with someone picking through cell phone records with a fine tooth comb if they are doing it to stop murders, rapes, kidnappings, and actual terrorists. Ask a parent who's been searching for their kid for ten years how they would feel if the investigator could use cell phone records to help find their child. It's when they use the information to put average Joe in jail who isn't hurting anyone, while a terrorist blows up 3000 people, that I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on something else.
*I'd make an exception to minors. Before a certain age I like any sane person believe children need some protection. But upon reaching the age where you can sign your life over to the military, I think the government needs to back the **** off what you can and can't do.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Google has a good idea here, but until we get a legit Internet Privacy Act where the government can't at a moment's notice supeona every one of those spreadsheets, the practical application of this will be very limited. Sure, I can track my guild's DKP, work out some simple math, etc. - but anything financial or personally identifying? Forget it.
Hey, I can't give you any karma, but here's a +1 - Hell yea Brotha!
A magazine with 4 pages of editorial and no advertising would be perfect. Cut out all the bullshit, tell me whether you think the games coming out are worth anything, and close up. Put an ad on the back cover and send to print.
When you have no data to back your claims, just ask google. Or in this case, googlefight:
o rd1=Driving+Game&word2=Shooting+Gameo rd1=Shooting+Death&word2=Driving+Death
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&w
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&w
Clearly, the increased number of driving games has caused an increased number of driving deaths. Ban Grand Turismo Now!!
[/sarcasm]
Rim?
/. 14 second wait period on submitting a comment. About as much as the 5 day wait period. Typed this since I have the extra time...)
(By the way, I love the
Never heard of it, but I've saved it as a favorites for future reference. Thanks for the tip - just in case I actually need pdfs (damn you IRS for storing the tax code in pdf...)
From the full article:
"That's why she [Hillary Clinton] and fellow senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh have introduced legislation to regulate the video-game industry, codifying its voluntary rating system and making it a federal crime for retailers to sell or rent inappropriate games to minors."
A federal crime?! To compare, selling alcohol to a child, something they could actually kill themselves with, would be a state crime. You know what a colossal waste of time is? Debating how the federal government should regulate trade (it shouldn't) - when there are issues of war, national security, and immigration rights that remain unsettled.
Count one less democrat that I would vote for. It's days like this when I remember why I'm a moderate anarchist.
If I were going to throw something out because marketers found a way to exploit it, my phone and irl mailbox would be gone long before my email box. Email is free (after any isp charges incurred), allows you to filter out certain parties without jumping through hoops (spam filters), is sortable, allows you to easily identify whitelist folks, can be sent to multiple parties (group distributions), and maintains a record of it's sending (proof of sending, and read receipts if you use them).
Yet both of these technologies are still around (the phone and mailbox).
Email has many, many, many years of life left.
And a shameless self reply - the adobe inlay for internet explorer is horrible. It's a resource hog, and while I'm not that computer savvy, it seems to leave garbage in memory, especially if used concurrently with excel and or certain Java applets.
It's adobe. Ever since their partnership with Yahoo, where everytime Adobe tries to update it defaults to installing a yahoo toolbar, I've boycotted the PDF.
I'd love a MS PDF reader. Why should one company have exclusive rights to a file format? Unless Adobe can prove MS reverse engineered their software, I think their lawyers are smug on this one.
What's with the comment about gamers not paying attention to older titles? Did Microsoft suddenly release them as freeware? No... so there's a regonizable commercial demand for them, yes?
Some of my favorite titles took backwards compatibility to the next step - importability. Like with the old Might and Magic games you could import characters from the previous game. The sega genesis had a hardware piece that would let you play master system games on the newer 16 bit console. That's right folks - 20th century technology. And it didn't cost 600 bucks either.
Sadly, this, like Vista (also suffering compatibility issues), would rather see you purchase new titles than allow you to enjoy your old ones.
If Microsoft ran an MMO, all your armor would break every time you gained a level.
Exactly. Jack Thompson is a lawyer. Thus the exceptionally vague law will provide him years of work in his favorite subject area. Fucking Brilliant.
On another note, how's that GTA clone coming along featuring Jack Thompson as the main character? We need to add some literary, scientific, and artistic fluff a la Da Vinci Code, so we can sell it to the kids.
"100% backward compatibility is a stupid expectation."
I disagree. Maybe I just don't buy into the whole software is a service mechanic theme yet. I find however that I've peeved when I have to jump through hoops and hurdles to make a game that came out in the 1980s function on "state of the art" technology. When the OS starts requiring a quarter GB of ram just to run, I *DO* expect somewhere in there room for the 640k that ran everything in DOS back in the day. We're talking less than 1% of the whole system here, to run an OS licensed by the same company.
Some of the later OSs, like Win 95 and Win 98 - I could see issues involving newer file systems, and security holes. Still, if a runtime command existed back in the day for a software, give the computer operator the rights to run it. Everytime a software becomes obsolete on a new OS, I view it as that OS losing a feature or functionality.
"BusinessWeek profiles four individuals identified by law enforcement as the world's foremost online criminals. They're accused of crimes ranging from re-shipping rings to credit card theft and email fraud -- '...all are Russian"
Now, I don't always keep up with the computing world, but last I checked, Bill Gates was not Russian!
Although it certainly would explain a lot.
"WTF is a YRO product?" /.
YRO = Your Rights Online. It's actually the category where this story landed on
Gmail is actually a very proactive version of what you are talking about - gmail users report spam, which forms a collective blacklist of domains to auto filter to the spam folder. Someone or something has harnessed my own email address, but to date every "yo d1ck s0 sm4ll" email has landed squarely in the spam can.
Ultimately, they need to do with email what they did with telephones, and create a do not email list, with the same 10000 dollar fines. I'm just not sure how well such a law would hold up against international law, in the case of international spam. I know people would worry about the do not email list being harnessed for good addresses, but really, these things get harnessed anyways, they aren't a secret.
Well, it depends what you do with it. If you develop a working, stable product from your invention, it sounds like the supreme court will uphold your patent. However, if you aren't selling anything either because 1. Your invention had horrible flaws or 2. You really never intended to develop a product from your invention : then you aren't really out any money for someone else stepping in and making the better product. And unfortunately, today's patent laws encourage people to play "squatter" with inventions, claiming them years ahead of when they can actually develop them, ultimately leading to very useful ideas being caught in the red tape of a "I had it first!" game.
Very true. I've seen the computer novice in action attempting to learn windows for the first time. Windows, while popular, is not in fact as easy to learn as one might make it sound. It's just that through market share, and being the dominant platform for software, that users steer towards MS. And once they've spent hours on end learning the interface, they are too scared to switch to something else, especially if the going notion is that it's going to be harder.
I'm almost positive it's gonna be at 40 dollars.
1 47383818/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-5637480-4577449?_ encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=468642
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BWZY7Q/qid=1
I'd actually bet more slashdot readers get laid than you give credit for. Most people don't play the GTA auto series for cheap porn, they do it because they can steal a wide variety of vehicles and not go to jail for it. Personally, I love to see how long I can evade the police in a camper.
If the currently produces US ethanol is not cost effective against oil, then it's not going to be produced/purchased anyways. Therefore I fail to see the loss of American jobs/income. If it can be produced outside the US for less, and gets us out of the oil trap, by all means we should do it!
Maybe I'm looking at this from an economic standpoint instead of an energy conservationist standpoint, but - wouldn't the removal of tariffs lead to greater supply, lowering fuels costs? If it becomes more economically feasible to use alternative fuels like ethanol, it could greatly help the US to quit sucking up all the oil, and get us away from this 3 dollar a gallon norm the oil companies would like to press on us.
Show me an economic way to start using ethanol fuels, without huge startup costs, and I'll show you a revolution.
:) is not intellectual property. It's a god damned smiley face. My 4 year old draws them all the time. They are drawn in schools across the country. The guy that invented it is long, long dead. He was probably a cave man.
If you pass a lawyer today, please do the world a favor and shoot him in the face.
Blizzard has enough lore behind Azeroth at this point to rival Lord of the Rings - I think they could create a fantastic movie of it. I agree that they should use CGI for it though - they have some of the best drawn and most intriguing intro's to their games of any I've played.