"There's a "kiss" button combination, so if you stand in front of a girl and press it, you grab her and you kiss."
Not exactly. You have 'positive' and 'negative' button pushes. With most guys, if you walk up and hit the positive one, he'll say "whassup?" and the dude'll either say something nice back or insult you. With the femmes, you'll say something like "You sure are pretty!", and if that works, you have the option to give them flowers. I haven't bumped into the gay student yet, but I imagine it workst he same way. Instead of the "whassup?" icon you'll get the heart icon.
"Is there anything Rockstar won't do to attract a little press attention?"
If Jack Thompson wasn't such an asshat, Rockstar wouldn't be able to have something as simple as a boy-kisses-boy feature in the game to attract press attention.
SFGate put up a thoughtful opinion piece / review of Bully this past weekend. If you're not familiar with the game, it's a great way to fully understand how there's really nothing to worry about here.
I bought the game last week. I haven't found the boy you can kiss. So far, though, my impression is that the 'controversy' here is laughable at best. When you target people options appear indicating what you can do with them. With some females, for example, you can profess your attraction to them and potentially woo them into smooching. My guess is that there's a boy floating around you can walk up and the heart icon will appear. Wee. Polish those pitchforks./sarcasm
I have to be honest: I think it's more controversial that Bully is described as having 'gay sexual content that deserves a higher rating' than it is to have the option to kiss a boy in the game. Nice little double-standard there.
Though I get your point, the implication is that it's gesture based instead of requiring on-screen input. It's a misappropriate use of the term, but the idea is effectively communicated.
Is it possible that you went to click on an image, but instead of sending you an image, it sent you re-directed HTML? You can all point and laugh at me for admitting this if you like, but this often happens to me with porn searches. You get this really nice thumbnail that claims to be a good res, then ya click on it, and instead of being met with a nice high-res image you're met with a web page saying "Gimme a credit card number!" Is it possible that IE7 has protection against this? Is this considered an exploit or a form of phishing?
Has anybody tested porn image searching with IE7? (Ha!)
"I'm not understanding why that's significant. Are you certain that GTA3/Vice City didn't contain disabled content that would go against the ESRB rating if it were enabled?"
Okay, let's clarify something here: I'm not saying the rating should have been changed in the first place. Honestly, I'm still on the fence about that. The key ingredients for me here are: 1. The content was on the disc. 2. It was easy to find and enable the content. 3. That franchise was under close scrutiny in the first place. Remove ANY of those points and I'd just shut right up. Does that clarify my views a bit?
"Of course they're modable, or you wouldn't have been able to modify the bits necessary to enable the content. The modding capabilities are reduced, but obviously existant."
There's a big difference between flipping a bit here and there and actually adding the new content to the game. Show me somebody who's made their own level for any of the GTA games for the XBOX and PS2 and I'll be happy to reconsider my view. (I mean this. I'm not challenging you because I think it doesn't exist. With the XBOX's hard drive, maybe it's been done and I'm just unaware of it.)
"Saying that San Andreas should be rated based on what this mod did is silly."
In a generic set of circumstances I'd totally agree with you. I couldn't believe it when they went after the Sims because of a totally independent mod.
"In hindsight, maybe, but when designing the game they left it on the disc most likely as a testing issue..."
Um, no, it was stupid hindsight or not. By then, Rockstar had already dealt with two previous GTA games.
"As far as it being "just a bit change", a single bit can change everything. What would be the practical difference between the existing Hot Coffee mod, and a mod which itself contained nude models/skins? The answer is the file size of the patch."
It means the traditionally non-mod'able version on the PS2 and XBOX could see the content. It wasn't just the PC version that was affected. I doubt this whole thing would have blown up otherwise.
"The sex scene exposed by Hot Coffee was not in the game, and hence there was no need to notify you of it."
The content was on the disc. The 'mod' simply unlocked it. I'm not saying I agree that they should have changed the rating, but I can certainly understand why it was contraversial and why Take Two drew fire over it.
"I can't think of any way of wording this that doesn't sound snarky and condescending, because it's so bloody obvious."
I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree that it's so 'bloody obvious'. The hack to unlock it was basically just a bit change, and the 'naughty' bits were made by Rockstar. It was remarkably stupid of them to leave it in. Regardless of what you believe about what the rating should have been, nobody that knew about that content of the game had any right to act surprised at the result.
"Unless you're arguing that the Hot Coffee mod actually influences kids to go out and get teen-pregnant, I fail to see the relevance of your argument."
Nope. I'm saying teen-pregnancy has contributed to sex in video games being more contraversial than violence in video games. I'm talking about why parents would be concerned, not the actual effect.
"The only ones doing that are Jack Thompson types."
Each parent has their own idea of what is and isn't appropriate for their kids. Sadly, I know people who won't let their kids read Harry Potter. I don't agree with that, but it's their kids and their perogative. As long as the game in question is properly labeled, they cannot blame the game publishers if they purchase something questionable. That's pretty much what's preventing some games from being flat out banned. It puts the responsibility of parenting on the parents instead of the publishers.
"They did. Warns of violence and sexual content."
Nah, it didn't use the proper warning, at least not with regards to the Hot Coffee 'scandal'. What annoys me about the whole thing was that somebody would have to go well out of their way to actually access the '18+' content. It shouldn't have been that big of contraversy. Oh well. Technically the content was still there on the disc, therefore it was inconsistent with the ESRB. I'm not happy with Take-Two getting busted for this, but I do agree that the ESRB needs to be fairly reliable. If game companies start playing games with the ratings system (i.e. by intentionally hiding content from the ratings board), we're likely to see stronger attempts to get some games banned.
This should be a NON-ISSUE because quite frankly, boobies GIVE LIFE to small children, they're a symbol of fertility in breeding age women, nothing more. I think teenagers can sort out what boobies are [even if they don't know how to manipulate them hehehehe] for.
I agree in the sense that my values are similar to yours. I disagree that you or I should enforce our sensitibilities on other people. If a parent doesn't want his/her kid seeing said polyboobies, who am I to tell that person they are wrong? Who am I to tell you what your kids can or cannot see? In this case, it's simply a matter of making the information available on the box. (as opposed to being about whether or not an 18 year old can buy the game.) The games should be advertised properly.
"Proves ONCE AGAIN the true power of the mind. If you're convinced you're taking something that will help you, it can and indeed does help, even if it is a sugar pill."
Heck, I think this applies outside of illness. I know lots of people (myself included) who are challenged to do something, and rationale will set in that it cannot be done, so it's deemed impossible. When it's known something can be done, even if it isn't proven, often times a solution can be found. I jokingly call that the 'power of ignorance'. I remember a couple of friends of mine discusssing one of the tests Microsoft has their potential employees do during the interview process. It involved getting several people to cross a bridge in the shortest amount of time. One of them said "Oh it cannot possibly be any faster than x minutes" because he had the fastest guy take every single person across and didn't bother going past that. Somebody else realized if you took the two slowest people and had them go, it shaved a couple of minutes off of his suggestion. (Apologies for not having the exact details, it was years ago.) He convinced himself of his own rationale and didn't look past it.
I'm sorry about going OT here, but your post reminded me of an interesting quirk of the human psyche. We sometimes set our own limits and won't go past them. It holds us back. I agree, placebo's are useful.
"DRM is required to have a "non-transferrable download". Once you do that, it's not an MP3 anymore. MP3 files are not encumbered by DRM and are transferable. You are going to have to ask: do you want MP3, or do you want DRM? You can't do both."
I think by 'non-transferable download' he means he doesn't want somebody to get the URL to the MP3, then paste it to all his friends on ICQ so they can get it too. In other words, he wants a unique download link per customer. I bumped into that problem myself when I worked on a Lightwave plugin a year ago. We were able to incorporate an unlock code into it, but that's not something that can be done with MP3. So the solution he needs has to be on the server end, not in the MP3 file.
Uh.. this raises a question: Would he go to a prison with rapists, murders, and other violent people or would he go somewhere where he'd sit and think about what he did instead of worrying for his life?
The summary was very clear about the cause of the drop in Sony's profits. This wasn't 'left-out' unless most people read that and thought it would happen every year. It's not Zonk's fault Sony's taken several mis-steps this year.
"The last time I used an ad-supported version of Opera (granted, it was a while ago, but I don't like using ad-supported programs, especially when there are several ad-free alternatives out there), they were full colour image ads, quite often animated, and took up a lot of screen real estate."
I agree with you about early version's ads. For a while there was an ad that was Flash based that had audio. You couldn't stop it from talking! However, Opera responded by banning that sort of ad with their service. Still, I can totally understand that turning people off. Heck, I damn near dropped it over that.
However, in version 7 they switched to the Google text ads. That was back in... oh.. I want to say 2003, but I don't recall too clearly. Opera had all the functionality on screen as Firefox, but the toolbar still only took the same number of pixels that FF and IE both used.
To be honest, I liked the idea that they were generating revenue from the browser. It encouraged them to keep making interesting releases, plus Opera has had a really good track record when it comes to exploits. I wouldn't argue with the rationale that Opera's obscurity has helped with that. In my experience, though, I've read a few times now where there were exploits that Opera was immmune to. For example, there was a way to form an FTP url that hid the true domain name from the navigation bar. When attempted on Opera, it would display a message saying "This might be an exploit, here's where you're realy going..." Their dev team stayed on top of that.
In any event, simply being ad supported is not a strong argument, in my opinion. We all use ad supported stuff we love. You like FF's adblock better? Great reason. Google Maps works better in FF than in Opera? Good reason. FF has extensions I use a lot. Great reason. 3 years ago, Opera was ad supported... Huh?
"Slight difference between adware and adsupported sites. Not saying that Opera was or was not adware, but you'd be a fool to not recognize the difference."
Um, okay. I'm a fool, then. Opera used Google Text Ads in a small area at the top of the screen. Google uses the same text-ads in their searches. Slashdot uses both flash and animated.gifs covering a good deal of screen real estate. Slashdot's being used to bitch about Opera using Text ads 2 years ago. No, I don't get it. I apologize for being a fool.
Slashdot Mirror
"do they run Linux?"
Yes. Instead of MIPS they measure execution speed in parsecs.
"There's a "kiss" button combination, so if you stand in front of a girl and press it, you grab her and you kiss."
Not exactly. You have 'positive' and 'negative' button pushes. With most guys, if you walk up and hit the positive one, he'll say "whassup?" and the dude'll either say something nice back or insult you. With the femmes, you'll say something like "You sure are pretty!", and if that works, you have the option to give them flowers. I haven't bumped into the gay student yet, but I imagine it workst he same way. Instead of the "whassup?" icon you'll get the heart icon.
"Is there anything Rockstar won't do to attract a little press attention?"
If Jack Thompson wasn't such an asshat, Rockstar wouldn't be able to have something as simple as a boy-kisses-boy feature in the game to attract press attention.
I bought the game last week. I haven't found the boy you can kiss. So far, though, my impression is that the 'controversy' here is laughable at best. When you target people options appear indicating what you can do with them. With some females, for example, you can profess your attraction to them and potentially woo them into smooching. My guess is that there's a boy floating around you can walk up and the heart icon will appear. Wee. Polish those pitchforks.
I have to be honest: I think it's more controversial that Bully is described as having 'gay sexual content that deserves a higher rating' than it is to have the option to kiss a boy in the game. Nice little double-standard there.
"Where are our flying cars predicted 50 years ago? They should have been here 10 years ago already."
That's more of a driver problem than a hardware issue.
"How do you not have an interface?"
Though I get your point, the implication is that it's gesture based instead of requiring on-screen input. It's a misappropriate use of the term, but the idea is effectively communicated.
Is it possible that you went to click on an image, but instead of sending you an image, it sent you re-directed HTML? You can all point and laugh at me for admitting this if you like, but this often happens to me with porn searches. You get this really nice thumbnail that claims to be a good res, then ya click on it, and instead of being met with a nice high-res image you're met with a web page saying "Gimme a credit card number!" Is it possible that IE7 has protection against this? Is this considered an exploit or a form of phishing?
Has anybody tested porn image searching with IE7? (Ha!)
"Yet sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice..."
On the other hand, caterpillars turn into butterflies...
"There's not even any pretense of this not being a Slashvertisement."
Ah, I get it now. Any time Slashdot posts a story about something you can go buy, it's a slashvertisement. Do you keep your pitchfork really shiney?
"I don't know where the submitter lives, but in the U.S. Halloween falls on October 31, which is not tonight."
Most nerds don't think Tuesdays are a great party night because of work/school. (That's typically when the new Star Trek aired!)
"I'm not understanding why that's significant. Are you certain that GTA3/Vice City didn't contain disabled content that would go against the ESRB rating if it were enabled?"
Okay, let's clarify something here: I'm not saying the rating should have been changed in the first place. Honestly, I'm still on the fence about that. The key ingredients for me here are: 1. The content was on the disc. 2. It was easy to find and enable the content. 3. That franchise was under close scrutiny in the first place. Remove ANY of those points and I'd just shut right up. Does that clarify my views a bit?
"Of course they're modable, or you wouldn't have been able to modify the bits necessary to enable the content. The modding capabilities are reduced, but obviously existant."
There's a big difference between flipping a bit here and there and actually adding the new content to the game. Show me somebody who's made their own level for any of the GTA games for the XBOX and PS2 and I'll be happy to reconsider my view. (I mean this. I'm not challenging you because I think it doesn't exist. With the XBOX's hard drive, maybe it's been done and I'm just unaware of it.)
"Saying that San Andreas should be rated based on what this mod did is silly."
In a generic set of circumstances I'd totally agree with you. I couldn't believe it when they went after the Sims because of a totally independent mod.
"In hindsight, maybe, but when designing the game they left it on the disc most likely as a testing issue..."
Um, no, it was stupid hindsight or not. By then, Rockstar had already dealt with two previous GTA games.
"As far as it being "just a bit change", a single bit can change everything. What would be the practical difference between the existing Hot Coffee mod, and a mod which itself contained nude models/skins? The answer is the file size of the patch."
It means the traditionally non-mod'able version on the PS2 and XBOX could see the content. It wasn't just the PC version that was affected. I doubt this whole thing would have blown up otherwise.
"The sex scene exposed by Hot Coffee was not in the game, and hence there was no need to notify you of it."
The content was on the disc. The 'mod' simply unlocked it. I'm not saying I agree that they should have changed the rating, but I can certainly understand why it was contraversial and why Take Two drew fire over it.
"I can't think of any way of wording this that doesn't sound snarky and condescending, because it's so bloody obvious."
I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree that it's so 'bloody obvious'. The hack to unlock it was basically just a bit change, and the 'naughty' bits were made by Rockstar. It was remarkably stupid of them to leave it in. Regardless of what you believe about what the rating should have been, nobody that knew about that content of the game had any right to act surprised at the result.
"Unless you're arguing that the Hot Coffee mod actually influences kids to go out and get teen-pregnant, I fail to see the relevance of your argument."
Nope. I'm saying teen-pregnancy has contributed to sex in video games being more contraversial than violence in video games. I'm talking about why parents would be concerned, not the actual effect.
"The only ones doing that are Jack Thompson types."
Each parent has their own idea of what is and isn't appropriate for their kids. Sadly, I know people who won't let their kids read Harry Potter. I don't agree with that, but it's their kids and their perogative. As long as the game in question is properly labeled, they cannot blame the game publishers if they purchase something questionable. That's pretty much what's preventing some games from being flat out banned. It puts the responsibility of parenting on the parents instead of the publishers.
"They did. Warns of violence and sexual content."
Nah, it didn't use the proper warning, at least not with regards to the Hot Coffee 'scandal'. What annoys me about the whole thing was that somebody would have to go well out of their way to actually access the '18+' content. It shouldn't have been that big of contraversy. Oh well. Technically the content was still there on the disc, therefore it was inconsistent with the ESRB. I'm not happy with Take-Two getting busted for this, but I do agree that the ESRB needs to be fairly reliable. If game companies start playing games with the ratings system (i.e. by intentionally hiding content from the ratings board), we're likely to see stronger attempts to get some games banned.
"Chances are if your kid can't handle polyboobies, they can't handle a game in which you steal cars, drive recklessly and MURDER HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE!"
Considering that teen pregnancy is far more likely than a murderous rampage, then no, the chances aren't that similar.
"What I hate is how they then enforce their values on others."
By notifying you of what's in the game? Oh those value imposing bastards.
I agree in the sense that my values are similar to yours. I disagree that you or I should enforce our sensitibilities on other people. If a parent doesn't want his/her kid seeing said polyboobies, who am I to tell that person they are wrong? Who am I to tell you what your kids can or cannot see? In this case, it's simply a matter of making the information available on the box. (as opposed to being about whether or not an 18 year old can buy the game.) The games should be advertised properly.
"Proves ONCE AGAIN the true power of the mind. If you're convinced you're taking something that will help you, it can and indeed does help, even if it is a sugar pill."
Heck, I think this applies outside of illness. I know lots of people (myself included) who are challenged to do something, and rationale will set in that it cannot be done, so it's deemed impossible. When it's known something can be done, even if it isn't proven, often times a solution can be found. I jokingly call that the 'power of ignorance'. I remember a couple of friends of mine discusssing one of the tests Microsoft has their potential employees do during the interview process. It involved getting several people to cross a bridge in the shortest amount of time. One of them said "Oh it cannot possibly be any faster than x minutes" because he had the fastest guy take every single person across and didn't bother going past that. Somebody else realized if you took the two slowest people and had them go, it shaved a couple of minutes off of his suggestion. (Apologies for not having the exact details, it was years ago.) He convinced himself of his own rationale and didn't look past it.
I'm sorry about going OT here, but your post reminded me of an interesting quirk of the human psyche. We sometimes set our own limits and won't go past them. It holds us back. I agree, placebo's are useful.
"DRM is required to have a "non-transferrable download". Once you do that, it's not an MP3 anymore. MP3 files are not encumbered by DRM and are transferable. You are going to have to ask: do you want MP3, or do you want DRM? You can't do both."
I think by 'non-transferable download' he means he doesn't want somebody to get the URL to the MP3, then paste it to all his friends on ICQ so they can get it too. In other words, he wants a unique download link per customer. I bumped into that problem myself when I worked on a Lightwave plugin a year ago. We were able to incorporate an unlock code into it, but that's not something that can be done with MP3. So the solution he needs has to be on the server end, not in the MP3 file.
Uh.. this raises a question: Would he go to a prison with rapists, murders, and other violent people or would he go somewhere where he'd sit and think about what he did instead of worrying for his life?
"One time 'zonked' tag, left out one-time costs"
The summary was very clear about the cause of the drop in Sony's profits. This wasn't 'left-out' unless most people read that and thought it would happen every year. It's not Zonk's fault Sony's taken several mis-steps this year.
Seriously man, pick your battles.
"DRM Rootkit Lik Sang Arrogance Emotion Engine Massive Damage"
599
"The last time I used an ad-supported version of Opera (granted, it was a while ago, but I don't like using ad-supported programs, especially when there are several ad-free alternatives out there), they were full colour image ads, quite often animated, and took up a lot of screen real estate."
I agree with you about early version's ads. For a while there was an ad that was Flash based that had audio. You couldn't stop it from talking! However, Opera responded by banning that sort of ad with their service. Still, I can totally understand that turning people off. Heck, I damn near dropped it over that.
However, in version 7 they switched to the Google text ads. That was back in... oh.. I want to say 2003, but I don't recall too clearly. Opera had all the functionality on screen as Firefox, but the toolbar still only took the same number of pixels that FF and IE both used.
To be honest, I liked the idea that they were generating revenue from the browser. It encouraged them to keep making interesting releases, plus Opera has had a really good track record when it comes to exploits. I wouldn't argue with the rationale that Opera's obscurity has helped with that. In my experience, though, I've read a few times now where there were exploits that Opera was immmune to. For example, there was a way to form an FTP url that hid the true domain name from the navigation bar. When attempted on Opera, it would display a message saying "This might be an exploit, here's where you're realy going..." Their dev team stayed on top of that.
In any event, simply being ad supported is not a strong argument, in my opinion. We all use ad supported stuff we love. You like FF's adblock better? Great reason. Google Maps works better in FF than in Opera? Good reason. FF has extensions I use a lot. Great reason. 3 years ago, Opera was ad supported... Huh?
"Slight difference between adware and adsupported sites. Not saying that Opera was or was not adware, but you'd be a fool to not recognize the difference."
.gifs covering a good deal of screen real estate. Slashdot's being used to bitch about Opera using Text ads 2 years ago. No, I don't get it. I apologize for being a fool.
Um, okay. I'm a fool, then. Opera used Google Text Ads in a small area at the top of the screen. Google uses the same text-ads in their searches. Slashdot uses both flash and animated
"It's hard to call me a fanboy of any one browser."
I use FF and Opera frequently, yet you called me one.
"Also, what ads? I don't see any on this site."
Uh huh. I suppose you'll tell me you don't use an ad-supported search engine, either.
"To the main thrust: I didn't really rebut your point, because you didn't really make one."
I wasn't trying to. I was challenging him to complete his thought. It's ad-supported. BFD, so's a lot of other things we use daily.