Is there a market out there full of people who want to use their portable devices in the least portable way possible? And in the case of the DS, a way that not only can't capture the device's full functionality, but hinders it as you look back and forth between your handheld and the television?
On my Nintendo add-on scale of 1 to Power Glove, this gets a -3.
FYI: To someone who'd never played the game, 'Battle Rank 6' sounded pretty decent. This was probably because I was unconsciously imagining World of Warcraft PvP ranks. However, you can reach Battle Rank 4 just by demo'ing all of your faction's weapons in your starter base in less than an hour.
Sure, it's a decent little diversion for the price you pay, but you're still going to get your face melted in about two seconds to most of the real players out there. Or at least, that was my experience when I tried it yesterday.
I think that's a very very important distinction to make... The music industry always rants and raves about "music sales", but what's important to remember is that they don't care about music as a whole -- they only care about the mainstream artists on their labels.
Since indie bands get practically zero recognition in mainstream sources, the Power of the Internet (TM) can do nothing to hurt and everything to help them gain some non-zero share of the average joe's music and music-related merchandise budget, which I feel is fair to assess as being somewhat static.
I wholeheartedly support TPB in their continued legal tensions, and I wholeheartedly support their goals and ideals, even if what they were doing were against the law. The thing that bothers me about this situation, though, is the fact that our Swedish friends' greatest legal mind is a law student. Maybe even a kid about my age. Frankly, I'd be scared out of my wits if the American media cartel / extortion machines were knocking at my door, law or no law.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, since American corporations write the laws here, and since our capitalist warlords have no problem negotiating international deals in the name of the almighty dollar, how long will it be until the USA starts making politicorporate deals with the Swedish industry / government like the ones we've had (or tried) with China, UAE, India, and any other place with oil or cheap labor?
The short version (not to necessarily be trusted, what with me being a lv 49 noob on a sleepy role-playing server): Ahn'Qiraj is a big hole in the ground out in the middle of the desert filled with huge ugly bug monsters. It's necessary to beat it because.... you know... bugs are ugly. So ugly that both opposing factions have teamed up to wage war against it. It takes forty top-level characters to beat, so we're probably talking days of planning and hours upon hours of setup before you can even walk in the door. Oh, and everyone on the server had to collect resources before ANYONE could try any of this.
NPC: "Hey kids! Give us 8 million linen bandages and 476,000 crisp basilisk urethras!" Player: "Won't that be terribly boring? And completely useless for actually advancing my character?" NPC: "You don't understand! This is for... the War Effort! You asked Blizzard for more content, right?" Player: "Soooo.... Content means turning everyone on the server into farmers? For worthless items?" NPC: "Shut up, kid. This is an epic adventure. This is what you're paying for." Player: "Okay, okay. Even if it's not very useful, it won't be so bad to have all these resources stored up for when we want to storm this new dungeon.... " NPC: "Wait, what? You mean you thought you'd ever see any of that again? We're pretty much burying those bandages and urethras out in the desert." Player: "Sigh. I guess this is what you have to deal with if you want to see the high-end content. Or even if you don't, really." NPC: "That's the spirit! And look, the dungeon just opened! You can find it past the--"
"Reggie Fils-Aime, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America,"
Fils = Sons
Aime = Like
Until someone more fluent in French can prove me wrong, I just can't take Mr. Boy-Love seriously, even if I am excited about the Revolution's weird controllers.
I don't know if anyone else has commented on this yet, but apparently single letters are VERY important to the branding of at least some entertainers/corporations... Does anyone remember when (IIRC) Warren G sued Garth Brooks, because both used a single lowercase "g" as their icon while on tour? Then, a few years later, Garth sued Geri Hallwell for the exact same thing, only her "g" had little devil horns on it. Apparently, there are people who could be so confused by a lowercase G that they wouldn't know whether they were at a Geri Hallwell or Warren G concert.
Let's assume for the moment that only physical matter exists. And also, let's assume (based on our current understanding of psychology and neurology) that our physical actions are caused by brain states. These brain states (as we understand them so far) are reducible to chemicals and electrical impulses. Chemistry is reducible to physics, and physics is reducible to math. Math is basically unchanging, and so the laws of physics are just that - laws that can not be broken. Therefore, everything I do is driven by the laws of physics, and not any wants or needs that I may have (whatever "I", in fact, actually am - body, brain, set-of-brain-states, etc).
If it's true that all my actions boil down to the laws of physics, and if I have no control over the laws of physics, then I have no control over my actions, and nothing I do is my fault. Nor are the consequences that arise from these actions.
Wake me up when the MPAA has signed an agreement with each of the dozens of sites people actually use to find trackers. I've used bittorrent for about a year and a half now, and I didn't even know bittorrent.com had links to torrents. I guess I've been spoiled by Suprnova, IsoHunt, TorrentReactor, et al.
See, up until now, if you knowingly gave hackers your credentials, they'd be able to log on to your account with them. But now Google's refined their system to the point that even if you give out your personal information, hackers can't get in!
It's really very simple. They simply cycle through every Google ad you've ever clicked on (to find potential phishers), geo-locate the IP trying to log on and cross-reference it to the "From" location in most of your Google Maps directions searches, attempt to visually identify you from any webcam pictures they may have cached, calculate the speed in which the username/password was typed in compared to the "keyboard profile" they have on file from all your searches, and compare the logon time to your typical usage times for GMail and Google Talk.
Perfect security. At least, from everybody but Google.
Classic case of bullying. But, even as a dumbass kid myself, I reserve the right to call this guy a dumbass kid -- If he's going to just hand over his property, potentially worth millions, he should at least have asked for $35 like that girl who designed the Nike Swoosh.
** Puts on his "Slippery Slope Guy" hat **
on
Grokster Shutting Down?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
participating directly or indirectly in the theft of copyrighted files
I don't think I like such vague wording. How close to the pirating does software need to be in order to be "indirectly participating". Lots of pirated movies are encoded with Divx, are they next? Some come packed in RAR archives, how about them?
Hell, why not go for the gusto? Maybe it can be proven that the majority of pirates who rip and encode copyrighted media do so on Dell machines with Intel components running Microsoft Windows and we can take out the whole triumvirate.
I humbly, and with great fear of my own imminent downmodding, wonder why this was marked as flamebait. Although it might not have been the reason for the outcome of THIS particular vote, I think it's as naive as naivete gets to think that politicians don't vote on certain topics based on whether they or their opponents gain more from a particular piece of legislation.
I think it's also a totally valid criticism to state that a politician's personal views are sometimes at odds with what stands to benefit them politically, and that they could potentially sacrifice the former for the latter.
I have it on good authority that In Lucas' original vision of Star Wars, the role of the young Jedi was played by a hilarious cat named Meow Skywalker.
Good news! I'll admit that since I was at work, I'd only skimmed the article regarding where the donation was going. I apologize for my finger-shaking on that point, and for doubting the guys who put together something as great and magnanimous as Child's Play.
Let me be the first to say that Jack Thompson is verifiably batshit loco insane. He has twisted a simple premise (he believes that violent media has a role in violent behavior in some kids and adults, and since there's no sure way to know how these impressionable kids will react, we shouldn't sell it to them) into a media-whoring shouting match the likes of a mentally unstable street preacher. Let me also say that Gabe and Tycho enlighten me and entertain me on nearly a daily basis and I love them to death.
That said, I still think that both sides have handled the situation fairly poorly, as I see it. First off, if Jack really wants to change things, he should have offered his $10,000 toward nonprofit research that proves the positive mental effects of nonviolent games. If you tell the 16-year-olds of the world that being good at Tetris will get them laid, Rockstar would be bankrupt in a week.
On the other hand, I feel the guys at PA have sunk to the same shameful ad hominem depths as their opponent with their "I hate Jack Thompson" shirt. It's their right to sell it, of course, but it shows no class and seeks to profit from causing misery to a specific individual. I happen to think they also should have donated their $10,000 to starving families and dying children, and not the Entertainment Software Association. Sure, it's funny that "Jack Thompson" is sending the ESA a check, but all they're really doing is furthering their own agenda and probably funding lawyers -- I had hoped that out of this debacle people in need would see some benefit, but I guess that's too much to assume.
Hey, don't be so pessimistic! This is a totally solid, set in stone, 100% official, absolutely definite "maybe"!
(Don't the thoughts behind "official statement" and "maybe one day" seem a little contrary? This seriously isn't the confirmation many of us were hoping for.)
I know this post will get modded down because it doesn't suggest immediate formatting and installing of *nix on every hard drive in existence, but here's something I don't understand about the folks who complain about Microsoft's approach toward security: Why didn't they also complain about, say, the designers of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building?
Microsoft makes this giant software behemoth called Windows that's comprised of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Somebody finds a flaw in the way that it's put together, and Microsoft's the bad guy because they let it happen. Worse yet, they're taking another PR beating by selling an ongoing security service for their behemoth. (Whether this service is provided in a complete or timely manner is both highly unlikely and outside the scope of the point I'm making).
In the physical world, people built a giant behemoth of a building comprised of hundreds of thousands of pounds of concrete and steel in Oklahoma City. Somebody finds a flaw ("Hey! I can park this rental truck full of explosives only a few feet away on the street!"), and to my knowledge, no one thought to blame the building's architects and construction workers for not thinking to encase the whole building in a blast-proof dome. Now, let's say that when Freedom Tower is finished in New York, they hire a full-time security force to patrol the grounds and monitor the skies so we don't have a repeat of the WTC bombings. Would they be bad guys and extortionists too?
The Nobel site clearly shows via pie-chart icons that each of the three winners only gets a fraction of that little medal. I hope they seriously do cut it and mail them the parts, because to give each a medal would be mathematically dishonest at best.
I also hope jealous laureates fight one another to gain their medal-pieces and complete the artifact Triforce-style. Mostly because the mental image amuses me.
I've only skimmed the article, but something very similar was done by some of my friends in the University of Alabama's Computer-Based Honors Program two years ago. Main difference being that they only used 802.11 hotspots and not GSM towers. They published their results in the college's research journals, but since I can't even find the papers via Google, we can safely say they didn't get the word out enough for me to get uppity.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nice and all, but is it compatible with Accordion Hero?
Wait. Republican Commando?
Is this a George-Bush-in-a-flightsuit mod that I wasn't aware of? Are the Geonosians replaced by Democrats? Budget-reform advocates? Civil liberties?
"Fixer! Slice that warrant requirement for searches! Sev, keep Barack Obama at bay while I revive Social Security!"
(Note that I don't actually have Karma to burn... I just like to live dangerously.)
But so far, they're the only company whose announcements can get me excited about a cardboard box.
It does take a few cups to persuade me to come to work in the morning. Then a few more to persuade me to stop refreshing slashdot and start working.
Is there a market out there full of people who want to use their portable devices in the least portable way possible? And in the case of the DS, a way that not only can't capture the device's full functionality, but hinders it as you look back and forth between your handheld and the television?
On my Nintendo add-on scale of 1 to Power Glove, this gets a -3.
FYI: To someone who'd never played the game, 'Battle Rank 6' sounded pretty decent. This was probably because I was unconsciously imagining World of Warcraft PvP ranks. However, you can reach Battle Rank 4 just by demo'ing all of your faction's weapons in your starter base in less than an hour.
Sure, it's a decent little diversion for the price you pay, but you're still going to get your face melted in about two seconds to most of the real players out there. Or at least, that was my experience when I tried it yesterday.
I think that's a very very important distinction to make... The music industry always rants and raves about "music sales", but what's important to remember is that they don't care about music as a whole -- they only care about the mainstream artists on their labels.
Since indie bands get practically zero recognition in mainstream sources, the Power of the Internet (TM) can do nothing to hurt and everything to help them gain some non-zero share of the average joe's music and music-related merchandise budget, which I feel is fair to assess as being somewhat static.
I wholeheartedly support TPB in their continued legal tensions, and I wholeheartedly support their goals and ideals, even if what they were doing were against the law. The thing that bothers me about this situation, though, is the fact that our Swedish friends' greatest legal mind is a law student. Maybe even a kid about my age. Frankly, I'd be scared out of my wits if the American media cartel / extortion machines were knocking at my door, law or no law.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, since American corporations write the laws here, and since our capitalist warlords have no problem negotiating international deals in the name of the almighty dollar, how long will it be until the USA starts making politicorporate deals with the Swedish industry / government like the ones we've had (or tried) with China, UAE, India, and any other place with oil or cheap labor?
The short version (not to necessarily be trusted, what with me being a lv 49 noob on a sleepy role-playing server): Ahn'Qiraj is a big hole in the ground out in the middle of the desert filled with huge ugly bug monsters. It's necessary to beat it because.... you know... bugs are ugly. So ugly that both opposing factions have teamed up to wage war against it. It takes forty top-level characters to beat, so we're probably talking days of planning and hours upon hours of setup before you can even walk in the door. Oh, and everyone on the server had to collect resources before ANYONE could try any of this.
NPC: "Hey kids! Give us 8 million linen bandages and 476,000 crisp basilisk urethras!"
Player: "Won't that be terribly boring? And completely useless for actually advancing my character?"
NPC: "You don't understand! This is for... the War Effort! You asked Blizzard for more content, right?"
Player: "Soooo.... Content means turning everyone on the server into farmers? For worthless items?"
NPC: "Shut up, kid. This is an epic adventure. This is what you're paying for."
Player: "Okay, okay. Even if it's not very useful, it won't be so bad to have all these resources stored up for when we want to storm this new dungeon.... "
NPC: "Wait, what? You mean you thought you'd ever see any of that again? We're pretty much burying those bandages and urethras out in the desert."
Player: "Sigh. I guess this is what you have to deal with if you want to see the high-end content. Or even if you don't, really."
NPC: "That's the spirit! And look, the dungeon just opened! You can find it past the--"
Disconnected from server.
"Reggie Fils-Aime, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America,"
Fils = Sons
Aime = Like
Until someone more fluent in French can prove me wrong, I just can't take Mr. Boy-Love seriously, even if I am excited about the Revolution's weird controllers.
I don't know if anyone else has commented on this yet, but apparently single letters are VERY important to the branding of at least some entertainers/corporations... Does anyone remember when (IIRC) Warren G sued Garth Brooks, because both used a single lowercase "g" as their icon while on tour? Then, a few years later, Garth sued Geri Hallwell for the exact same thing, only her "g" had little devil horns on it. Apparently, there are people who could be so confused by a lowercase G that they wouldn't know whether they were at a Geri Hallwell or Warren G concert.
Let's assume for the moment that only physical matter exists. And also, let's assume (based on our current understanding of psychology and neurology) that our physical actions are caused by brain states. These brain states (as we understand them so far) are reducible to chemicals and electrical impulses. Chemistry is reducible to physics, and physics is reducible to math. Math is basically unchanging, and so the laws of physics are just that - laws that can not be broken. Therefore, everything I do is driven by the laws of physics, and not any wants or needs that I may have (whatever "I", in fact, actually am - body, brain, set-of-brain-states, etc).
If it's true that all my actions boil down to the laws of physics, and if I have no control over the laws of physics, then I have no control over my actions, and nothing I do is my fault. Nor are the consequences that arise from these actions.
Wake me up when the MPAA has signed an agreement with each of the dozens of sites people actually use to find trackers. I've used bittorrent for about a year and a half now, and I didn't even know bittorrent.com had links to torrents. I guess I've been spoiled by Suprnova, IsoHunt, TorrentReactor, et al.
See, up until now, if you knowingly gave hackers your credentials, they'd be able to log on to your account with them. But now Google's refined their system to the point that even if you give out your personal information, hackers can't get in!
It's really very simple. They simply cycle through every Google ad you've ever clicked on (to find potential phishers), geo-locate the IP trying to log on and cross-reference it to the "From" location in most of your Google Maps directions searches, attempt to visually identify you from any webcam pictures they may have cached, calculate the speed in which the username/password was typed in compared to the "keyboard profile" they have on file from all your searches, and compare the logon time to your typical usage times for GMail and Google Talk.
Perfect security. At least, from everybody but Google.
Classic case of bullying. But, even as a dumbass kid myself, I reserve the right to call this guy a dumbass kid -- If he's going to just hand over his property, potentially worth millions, he should at least have asked for $35 like that girl who designed the Nike Swoosh.
participating directly or indirectly in the theft of copyrighted files
I don't think I like such vague wording. How close to the pirating does software need to be in order to be "indirectly participating". Lots of pirated movies are encoded with Divx, are they next? Some come packed in RAR archives, how about them?
Hell, why not go for the gusto? Maybe it can be proven that the majority of pirates who rip and encode copyrighted media do so on Dell machines with Intel components running Microsoft Windows and we can take out the whole triumvirate.
I humbly, and with great fear of my own imminent downmodding, wonder why this was marked as flamebait. Although it might not have been the reason for the outcome of THIS particular vote, I think it's as naive as naivete gets to think that politicians don't vote on certain topics based on whether they or their opponents gain more from a particular piece of legislation.
I think it's also a totally valid criticism to state that a politician's personal views are sometimes at odds with what stands to benefit them politically, and that they could potentially sacrifice the former for the latter.
I have it on good authority that In Lucas' original vision of Star Wars, the role of the young Jedi was played by a hilarious cat named Meow Skywalker.
Good news! I'll admit that since I was at work, I'd only skimmed the article regarding where the donation was going. I apologize for my finger-shaking on that point, and for doubting the guys who put together something as great and magnanimous as Child's Play.
Let me be the first to say that Jack Thompson is verifiably batshit loco insane. He has twisted a simple premise (he believes that violent media has a role in violent behavior in some kids and adults, and since there's no sure way to know how these impressionable kids will react, we shouldn't sell it to them) into a media-whoring shouting match the likes of a mentally unstable street preacher. Let me also say that Gabe and Tycho enlighten me and entertain me on nearly a daily basis and I love them to death.
That said, I still think that both sides have handled the situation fairly poorly, as I see it. First off, if Jack really wants to change things, he should have offered his $10,000 toward nonprofit research that proves the positive mental effects of nonviolent games. If you tell the 16-year-olds of the world that being good at Tetris will get them laid, Rockstar would be bankrupt in a week.
On the other hand, I feel the guys at PA have sunk to the same shameful ad hominem depths as their opponent with their "I hate Jack Thompson" shirt. It's their right to sell it, of course, but it shows no class and seeks to profit from causing misery to a specific individual. I happen to think they also should have donated their $10,000 to starving families and dying children, and not the Entertainment Software Association. Sure, it's funny that "Jack Thompson" is sending the ESA a check, but all they're really doing is furthering their own agenda and probably funding lawyers -- I had hoped that out of this debacle people in need would see some benefit, but I guess that's too much to assume.
Hey, don't be so pessimistic! This is a totally solid, set in stone, 100% official, absolutely definite "maybe"!
(Don't the thoughts behind "official statement" and "maybe one day" seem a little contrary? This seriously isn't the confirmation many of us were hoping for.)
I know this post will get modded down because it doesn't suggest immediate formatting and installing of *nix on every hard drive in existence, but here's something I don't understand about the folks who complain about Microsoft's approach toward security: Why didn't they also complain about, say, the designers of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building?
Microsoft makes this giant software behemoth called Windows that's comprised of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Somebody finds a flaw in the way that it's put together, and Microsoft's the bad guy because they let it happen. Worse yet, they're taking another PR beating by selling an ongoing security service for their behemoth. (Whether this service is provided in a complete or timely manner is both highly unlikely and outside the scope of the point I'm making).
In the physical world, people built a giant behemoth of a building comprised of hundreds of thousands of pounds of concrete and steel in Oklahoma City. Somebody finds a flaw ("Hey! I can park this rental truck full of explosives only a few feet away on the street!"), and to my knowledge, no one thought to blame the building's architects and construction workers for not thinking to encase the whole building in a blast-proof dome. Now, let's say that when Freedom Tower is finished in New York, they hire a full-time security force to patrol the grounds and monitor the skies so we don't have a repeat of the WTC bombings. Would they be bad guys and extortionists too?
Can we just go ahead and batch-flag every comment to be added to this story as "-1, Redundant"? Because I've got a bad feeling about this.
The Nobel site clearly shows via pie-chart icons that each of the three winners only gets a fraction of that little medal. I hope they seriously do cut it and mail them the parts, because to give each a medal would be mathematically dishonest at best.
I also hope jealous laureates fight one another to gain their medal-pieces and complete the artifact Triforce-style. Mostly because the mental image amuses me.
I've only skimmed the article, but something very similar was done by some of my friends in the University of Alabama's Computer-Based Honors Program two years ago. Main difference being that they only used 802.11 hotspots and not GSM towers. They published their results in the college's research journals, but since I can't even find the papers via Google, we can safely say they didn't get the word out enough for me to get uppity.
Roll Tide anyway, though.