This doesn't take into account the fact that "zones" of profitability are subject to change over time. A sparsely populated area may be a thriving city in a few generations, but this won't happen without coverage by basic utilities allowing for expansion.
The argument isn't complete, because the monopoly institution/s will themselves enable greater population density, thus leading to more profits.
Many people of the radical left are ecological mindful, and employ what are known as "grey water" systems. This is the practice of disconnecting your sink drains from the sewage system, placing buckets beneath the drains, and reusing the water to flush toilets, clean something dirtier than the water, or water plants. It's actually quite common. That explains two buckets, which weren't urine at all
The third bucket was just a plain old piss bucket; maybe you should ask your grandparents about it. The house they were squatting didn't have a toilet(another common practice by radical punks/junkies/hippies/homeless/whatever).
What's your point? We also used to have legalized slavery in the United States. Does that mean we should "laugh" if someone tries to claim that racism is still an institutional problem?
You're missing the point, and focusing on some hypothetical intentions by the victims of these crimes, instead of the crimes themselves. First off, no evidence of relevant criminal wrongdoing has been supplied, thus a grievous infringement has occurred. Your own defense of the cops is self contradictory, since these groups obviously had their rights removed without just cause. No amount of prior or current criminal activity by citizens ever merits stripping the rights of other people based on similarity of the individuals alone. Do you believe that it should be fine to randomly invade the homes of certain racial minorities because they have a higher per capita crime rate? Generalizing people to a political creed, and supporting oppressive measures to restrict that creed, is bigotry. Furthermore, it is wrong to arrest people for crimes before they commit them, based purely on suspicion or hearsay. Again, point me to any hard evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the INDIVIDUALS arrested or otherwise detained, and you might have an argument; otherwise you're just practicing apologetics for fascist tactics.
By your explanation, we should be A OK with living in a totally preemptive police state, since political figures have been assassinated throughout our national history, and security should demand such precautions to prevent a relapse. Does the gestapo style assassination of Fred Hampton seem like a conspiracy NUT "mountain out of a molehill", because this is a fine, modern, example of what you get when you let legal authority operate unchecked to demolish dissent. People making a "big deal" out of this are doing so in the hopes that we don't become a country where totalitarian practices are tolerated, and you are a fine example of why we should be afraid.
Does anyone else find themselves in the predicament of liking Japanese video games, especially the FF series, but are also nauseated by modern Japanese anime pop culture? From the ostentatious mega-tech, convoluted melodrama, ridiculous attitude, the young porcelain models, extreme and obvious lack of physics, to, worst of all, the god damn hairdos, I'm really sick of it! It wasn't too noticeable in 7, but by 8 the crap was here to stay. Maybe I stand alone here, but hipster sunglasses and cell phones are two things I would like to never again see in a FF game (or any modern 21st century dress style for that matter). This kind of pop culture worship really cheapens the promised "fantasy" for me.
I remember hearing that the combat in this game was supposed to be modeled after the action sequences in "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children". Knowing this, they couldn't pay me to play it. It looks like they finally managed to rid the FF series of anything I ever liked about it with this one. I wonder if it's going to have another "garment grid". Maybe I'll pick them back up again if it ever looks like they're going to quit putting style over substance.
While I see your point, and completely agree concerning the gamecube (you forgot animal crossing), I don't think it's a completely fair comparison of peripherals. Most of these Wii attachments are cheap and optional, or a the very least flexible. The gamecube shenanigans would lock away game content that could otherwise be accessible within the necessary purchase of a relatively expensive GBA. I think that's way more of rip-off, personally. Nintendo received a fair amount of criticism for these tactics, and that could be why we haven't seen Wii/DS tie-ins from day one (easy enough with the wireless). By comparison, it would simply be impossible to play a game like WiiFit without the balance board. In this case, Nintendo isn't taking game content and hiding it away in some marketing scheme, they are presenting you with an entirely new gameplay interface (a bit more of a deal, I'd say).
Mario Kart or Smash Bros. can be played with just a Wiimote, or whatever hardware combination suits you. Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 both require a nunchuck, but one comes with your system. The gamecube controllers are obviously necessary if you want to play gamecube games. The zapper and wheel are just facades, and aren't necessary to play the games the come packed with. Again, I think it's somewhat admirable that Nintendo chose a cheap attachment as opposed to double charging us for a gun/wheel with built in sensors.
I'd say that Nintendo has done a fair, if not outright decent, job of keeping those of us that want to be cheap fully capable of playing our games, while allowing enthusiasts the room to cover their walls with Wii hardware. An advantage of this method, that you haven't addressed, is the ability to keep costs down by purchasing things in a modular fashion. Sure, if Nintendo bundled everything in a single super-pack you could probably shave a lot off the grand total, but you'd more than likely still spend more than is necessary for your individual gaming. What good are classic controllers if you don't like old-school games? Again, this advantage would fall apart if Nintendo wasn't flexible about the way you play their games. It would seem that every time a possible control scheme could be used, Nintendo gives you the option of doing so. For example, all virtual console games can be played with a gamecube controller, and the ones that require few enough buttons can also be played with a sideways wiimote. They could have easily required that all vc games require a classic controller, but they instead decided to be flexible.
A lack of choice could be a problem for a required peripheral, like this newfangled super motion sensor. They could offset this by making the attachments free for Wii owners (like the wrist strap/jacket offers), or inexpensive enough (@5-10 US$) to not outrage customers. More than likely, though, they'll just pack them in with the first game that needs them, then sell them for twenty bucks a piece afterwards. It would be nice, though, if this were a permanent "upgrade" to the Wiimote itself, and you got one free when you purchased an old wiimote, and new stock came with it packaged in. That being said, this is the embracing of experimentation that I've been waiting to see in the video game industry. I disagree with your choice in a better games/more hardware dichotomy. Opening up new windows into how we interface with our games can only be a good thing.
What? Are you remembering the same NES that I am? I think that all systems have equally bad games, but perhaps the NES/SNES's good titles are just impassable nowadays.
The NES had close to a 1000 games, and sure, the quality level was decent at first. The reason being that Nintendo had a very stringent quality control process, to the point that they were deemed authoritarian. Publishers were only allowed to produce a certain amount of titles a year, but a few got around this limitation by creating spin-off companies. For example, Konami created Ultra games, which included some ok titles (Metal Gear), but was mainly B list stuff (Rollergames?).
The eventual slackening of Nintendo's mandates created a flood of crappy licensed games (Total Recall, anyone?)that are on par, shit wise, with anything today. Some of the licensed games were good, but that's true of the systems you spoke of (Goldeneye is considered one of the best games ever). Going through the list of NES titles, however, will reveal an absolute horde of crap, even in it's day. The impression that the NES had a high level of relative quality is an illusion created by the sheer number of titles for the system (it's easier to remember the good ones, and forget all 4 "Wheel of Fortune" titles). Also, we must keep in mind that the NES had very little mass precedent to compare to, with so much pioneering being done on the system.
Of course, another contributing factor is the reality of modern game development. David Crane created the NES title, A Boy and His Blob, all by himself, and it happens to be a decent game. How many modern games do you think are created by only one, or even a handful, of persons? I think this means that our expectations are much higher, compared to when we used to be content with a few sprites sliding over pixels with a few beeping tunes thrown in for good measure.
This is a long post, but I think you can expand this argument to the SNES, which also had it's fair share of utter garbage.
Where is the nonfiction in general? It's not just science that got short-changed, but what about art, philosophy, technology (surely TECHNOLOGY has had a few "classic" texts in the past 25 years besides Nueromancer!), or politics?
They included "Fast Food Nation" and "Nickel and Dimed", but what about, say, Chomsky? Surely you can't include, "America: The Book", and not have a single piece by any real activists.
I mean, really, what a bunch of shit.
You general statements are correct. However, you leave out the possibility of progress and competition in your coal vs. petrol comparison. Oil will always be toxic to burn, and has little competitors in combustion engines. By shifting our vehicle/machinery fuel supply to alternative energy sources, even if it is temporarily coal for the most part, we are replacing a dead end high pollutant with the possibility of a better energy supply in the future. An electric or air powered car doesn't care what energy source generated the current or compressed the air that powers it, which would give people a real incentive to develop alternative methods of energy generation directly in competition with the coal/nuclear plants.
In the meantime, there are also largely ignored potential solutions for vehicles that rely on using vegetable/plant sources of combustible fuel, but somehow this doesn't seem to factor into people's arguments.
It would seem that most people commenting here are claiming that either violent media does not generally affect people negatively, or that if it does, so what, violence is an inescapable part of nature. The argument that human beings are somehow violent by nature is just crap. Dogs will be violent hunters in the wild, or a sweet, loving companions if domesticated. Capacity is not a justification for action. Under the right circumstances we are all capable of extreme violence or saintly behavior, and, unlike any of our animal peers, we also have a conscience with which we weigh our decisions abstractly. Free will undermines any argument that violence is simply a part of us, and especially as an excusable part of male behavior. The amount of sexist bullshit that got modded up here is disgusting, and shows how little supposedly educated people have progressed. You always have the opportunity to think before you act, and no amount of rhetorical posturing can strip people of their responsibility to be decent human beings. Besides, if you really thought that violence was simply an inherent part of human nature, you should be the ones most opposed to violent images in the media! What would be worse that some inescapable part of our psyche constantly being primed to action?
Why isn't anyone referring to evidence, as opposed to boisterous claims about being tough, etc.? I understand that the jury is still out concerning direct correlations, but it would seem that if you're going to make a strong claim that violent media does not affect people adversely, you should have some evidence to back that claim up. Meanwhile, I think the billions spent each year on advertising serve as pretty good evidence that media can influence behavior. But if consumer economics isn't your cup of tea, just take a look at your favorite state sponsored propaganda campaign to see how effectively media can manipulate people. Do you really think that massive media displays did not help the Nazis start WWII, and organize the Holocaust? Or get us into Iraq right now? I don't understand how people can so easily connect the dots between these obvious causes and effects, but somehow become dumbfoundingly obtuse otherwise.
We don't know the extent to which violent media affects people, and we keep looking for direct, Columbine style, correlations between violent media and behavior. However, these are not the only factors to look for, because people forget the extend to which violence saturates our normal lives. For example, violent media could make us more passive concerning other real world violence. If you accept that the world is saturated in violence, you may find yourself less offended when your friend beats his wife, your president bombs some remote village, or your neighbor down the street gets shot. Also, how many people become so accustomed to the idea of violence that they find themselves easily gravitating towards the more violent ends of our society, such as the military or police forces? There are plenty of problems that could arise from having people nursed on video games and action movies behind the scopes of real deadly weapons in real situations. How many soldiers suffering from PTSD do you think had a legitimate understanding of violence prior to their enlistment? Furthermore, violent media tends to help legitimize these agencies existence as primary methods of solving certain problems, even when atrocities are committed. Why else would the military help fund certain action movies (the ones with the right propaganda message), and why else would police and military personnel find themselves far less likely to be prosecuted for things that would put us behind bars/in the grave? These are more dangerous consequences than generating the occasional serial killer/s, in my opinion.
It's going to be pretty obvious to anyone that actually works in 3d that this article is a joke, and a tired one at that.
It gets a lot of things blatantly wrong; for instance, MentalRay is just as capable as Vray. It really depends on personal preference, speed, and skill level as to which one is prioritized in production. There is no such thing as the "killer" renderer, as their ups and down make them interchangeable, like the major 3d apps themselves. MentalRay has one advantage over Vray, Brazil, FinalRender, etc. in that it is integrated, from the ground up, into Max, Maya, and XSI. Learning this renderer will produce easily transferable knowledge into the other major apps.
Maya has fluids and cloth, and XSI has hair; they deceptively only compare base packages, without even mentioning that these options are available in their tiered pricing schemes. This is a huge omission in the case of Maya, because their Nucleus technology is absolutely jaw dropping. The "cloth" you get with XSI foundation is laughable, as Syflex Cloth (only available in XSI Essentials and up) is superior by far. How, then, Foundations got a "very good" rating in cloth, I don't know. 3dSMax does have limited compositing with Video Post, so it should have gotten the "Very Poor" or whatever, at least. XSI has some great compositing tools, but only with the more expensive versions.
Why have a rating for Nurbs (hardly ever used), but exclude a rating for poly modeling (the industry standard)? Furthermore, why isn't there a rating for "performance", or how often the software craps out? Also, how is it that Max, whose "top unique feature" is biped, only scored a "very good" in the animation tools category? Maya Paint FX/Artisan are two different features, and Artisan (3d sculpting) once was, but now is not unique. There is no way that the fluids you achieve in Blender and those you can achieve with XSI are even comparable in production environments, underlining that fact that most of these "ratings" are completely arbitrary. I could go on and on, but I think anyone reading this gets the point by now.
The point of the/. post, however, is that Blender achieved a decent standing in this comparison chart. If the credibility of this article hasn't been questioned enough to make you second guess that conclusion, I'd reiterate the case that Blender falls far behind the major 3d apps for several reasons. Most of these "wow" features are buggy, and would never hold up in a production environment. They are great in concept, and could be great in practice, but bug testing is not something that Blender's OS community seems to spend as much effort on, as opposed to implementing new bells and whistles. What good are new features if they are broken? The documentation for Blender is horrible, and this is only compounded by Blender's notorious alien interface. Again, I feel like this is a problem with it's OS development; no one seems to want to spend the time doing the "grunt" work of making some decent documentation. Overall, the features feel very tacked on and isolated, a far cry from the streamlined powerhouses that Blender competes with. Contrary to what some people are claiming, the UI is not Blender's biggest problem. People will adopt an alien UI if the payoff is large enough; take the case of Zbrush. Most production environments do not exist in a vacuum, with a single piece of software serving all production needs. They are hodgepodges of various 3d and 2d software, so it's not as though there isn't room for Blender to take a few seats in a studio. Blender just doesn't make itself easily admissible into this kind of environment, by continuing to focus on shoddy feature implementation as opposed to usability, performance, interface, documentation, and integration with other 3d/2d apps.
Are you talking about "edu" versions like the completely free Maya Personal Learning Edition? All of the major software titles have an absolute wealth of free tutorial information on the web that renders most published books obsolete and inadequate.
Blender may have a lot of features, but what good are they if most of them are broken? People that use 3d for a living (like me) can't really hang with Blender because it isn't reliable, and horribly documented. When I pick up a new copy of Silo or Hexagon or Modo or whatever, I expect to be able to figure out any of it's features with a couple of clicks in a help manual. One gets the feeling that most of the energy into developing Blender goes into implementing new "wow" features, but little thought is given as to how these features will interact with each other. The UI is also a major concern, but people will adapt to an alien UI if the payoff is great enough; just take a look at Zbrush to see what I mean. That being said, Blender would have a lot more converts if they would quit intentionally excluding the vast majority of their potential user base and use a sensible interface.
It's not that some business, government entity, or individual is withholding certain information, it's that a controlling entity is withholding said information. Censorship matters directly in proportion with how much of the population receives their information from said group. Considering that most major retailers refuse to carry AO titles, and that most consumers purchase their games from major retails, there is a direct correlation between their policy and what types of games are made. Video game history has another great example of this, namely with Nintendo and Mortal Kombat. Nintendo's strict censorship policy led to the Genesis version of the game to heavily outsell the SNES port. By the time MKII came about, Nintendo had changed it's tune, and the age of mature gaming was born. The key here was competition; if not for Sega, Nintendo might never have changed its' ways. With no major retail player deviating from this policy, this breakthrough isn't possible right now for AO games. You can also watch "This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated" through Google Video to gain more insight into how this works with film.
Why are we breaking down his actions into numerical steps, when the core issue is that the police overreacted in the first place? This is like getting the cops called on you for being unruly in class, or being way too loud in a crowded theater. Obnoxious, sure, but is it really something that should involve the police? The speaker guidelines are just that, guidelines, as I don't think they'd be tazering Al Gore if he went over his alloted two minutes in a rude way. The police were the ones that brought physical violence into the equation, and the student is being blamed for "resisting arrest"? I think you have every right to "resist" those that violate your body, and whether or not they wear a badge should be irrelevant. As far as I know, it isn't yet illegal to be an asshole. If you want to charge him with a crime, however, you can easily ticket him after he ends his puerile rant.
There are a lot of interchangeable posts here detailing how he broke the law, blah, blah, blah, but I think they're all pretty heartless and draconian in spirit. It's discouraging to see people blindly support state power, no matter how thuggish it appears. The state is not always right, even if it has the law in its' back pocket. The university wouldn't exist without taxpayer revenue, despite its' status as "private property". I would argue, for this reason, that he has more of a right to rant at a university than in other so called private properties, like Wal-Mart. We tolerate far more obnoxious rantings on television every day, because they have the money to force people to put up with it. People that are claiming that he has every equal right to host his own lecture are conveniently leaving the power resulting from the inequality of wealth out of the equation. Such explosions of frustration are to be expected in a society where dissenting voices are marginalized. Duh.
You've made the mistake of assuming that most people that play video games are hardcore gamers. Oblivion and Bioshock would repulse my dad; who after playing my copy of Wii sports, purchased one himself. Saying that some complex and polished RPG or FPS is a million times better than games like Wii Sports is really missing the point, from a market perspective. To these people, who's opinions definitely matter from a sales and development perspective, games like the ones you mentioned are irrelevant; as different criteria are used to judge games from these non-hardcore perspectives. You make the mistake of assuming that these criteria don't really exist, and proceed to claim that games can't possibly drive system sales because the Wii doesn't have as many good hardcore games. I hope you understand how subjective such a statement is, and see that not all people like games like Halo 3 - and it is these people that responsible for the success of the Wii.
History tells a slightly different story. The original NES was able to outmatch the competition, namely SEGA and Atari, primarily through a tidal wave of software. The same story was true for Atari years before that. It's also well known that lack of third party support (lack of games, in other words) is primarily what ensured the lackluster performance of both the N64 and the Gamecube. If what you're saying was true, then why didn't the Gamecube perform better last generation? It certainly had the competition on price, and Nintendo had the budget to properly advertise.
The problem is that you're making a potentially false value judgment about the game libraries of the respective systems. "All things considered", the Wii's library may be "horribly outmatched" when it comes to hardcore games, but it would seem that the 360 and PS3 find themselves "horribly outmatched" when it comes to casual games, conversely. As people have pointed out, hardcore gamers are only partially responsible for the Wii's success. Your conclusion can only be accepted if we assume that hardcore gamers make up the overwhelming majority of the market, and I believe the Wii, and DS for that matter, are showing this to be patently false. It's entirely plausible that a substantial portion of the market does not care about Halo 3, Oblivion, etc. and is much more impressed by games like the lowly Wii sports. Where's their value judgment? In the Wii's sales, it would appear.
Who cares?
I'm glad that you can prove to everyone that you were privileged enough to get a nice education, but I think everyone knew what meaning was intended. I find petty nitpickers like yourself to be far more obnoxious than the occasional grammatical error. Hell, if everyone communicated in perfect proper English, we'd have a pretty boring English speaking world.
I'd imagine that award would actually go to Blender or Zbrush, but that's just me. I have a lot of experience with Max and I think it's a great program, but all three of the majors are pretty much interchangeable for a majority of work. Most people that have a problem with app X have grown accustomed to the workings of app Y, but, as anyone will tell you, knowing how to use as many packages as possible is a great incentive to get hired.
While I would agree that Adobe dominates the 2D DCC market, domination is a far cry from being a monopoly. You have not made a strong case that any barriers exist to impede anyone from releasing a superior product. This charge easily applies to Microsoft - they even went to court over it.
Here's a quick video visually displaying one of Microsoft's SIGGRAPH papers. I especially like the part with a dancing frog and dinosaur. It's unclear to me as to whether or not this is an entirely different way to deform a SubD surface, or an augmentation to traditional bones and skin rigs. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I actually hope they eventually move into the 3d market, if only to spur on the production of the big three, 3dSMax, XSI, and Maya. The major 3d applications have been in a slump recently feature wise, including this year's SIGGRAPH announcements, and more serious competition would be welcome.
You're of course forgetting that ISPs, especially local ones, are already pressured to bow to governmental wishes. All broadband networks must give access to the NSA, if so requested. This includes web logs, e-mail transcripts, and general wiretapping privileges. You're also forgetting that a major reason a city municipality would want to institute their own broadband network is to remedy the woeful service being provided by unaccountable private ISPs, not necessarily just to undercut their prices. The article mentions three cities in particular, New Orleans, Seattle, and Philadelphia, where major ISPs refuse to lay more fiber, but also refuse to allow the cities to do such things themselves. This also comes after the fact that the infrastructure of the internet, like roads, phone lines, and railroad tracks before it, is heavily or entirely subsidized by the government in the first place. If you have no one else to turn to, what would you do if you're dissatisfied with your service? Personally, I'd be far more concerned about a private teleco becoming the only game in town as opposed to our government. A government agency is only going to allow as much intrusion into privacy as we, the people of a democratic nation, allow it to. It's just as foreseeable, given your example of a filtering service, to see federal law banning just such a policy. It all really depends on what we do.
I have to say that I agree with you that in the case of Bush and Gore there surely would have been some pretty big differences, some of which I think you nailed. These aren't the only important issues that an executive can impact, however. Most of your points are hypothetical reactions to events that couldn't have been foretold before the election, but what about the things we knew Bush/Gore would have to deal with? I'm sure they both would have supported the drug war, been pro big business, for tighter media control, tough on crime, etc. (all of which Gore displayed his support for during his vice-presidency, such as with NAFTA and Plan Columbia - despite his supposed care for the environment). Real social/economic issues, the staying issues that have been problems for decades if not centuries, is where there is little difference between the candidates. They may hike or lower taxes, but no president will ever introduce sweeping changes to change to class structures that fracture the US; furthermore no president will ever throw off the shackles of their corporate masters to truly do right for our country - their interests will always be above ours, as any politician would tell you.
A state of Pareto efficiency is by no means the "the most efficient form a market can hope to attain", unless we adopt very contorted and alienated views of the market in the first place. Just because no "individual" is worse off from an exchange doesn't mean that we can't all suffer dire consequences from those things not being measured by a short sighted economic system. Your "prisoner's dilemma" is a bit more of a problem than you make it out to be, considering that the earth is not an infinite garbage can or strip mine. You would have us wait until market conditions dictate what should be a proper way to deal with environmental or social catastrophes, but by then who knows how much irreversible damage has occurred? We don't have a true free market in place right now, and we still are teetering on the edge of destruction; should we really exacerbate this problem even further by taking away any incentive to care about anything besides money? Be it nukes flying, pandemic diseases (plenty of which are industry related), or melting glaciers engulfing the world, your free market will turn a blind eye to "externalities" until there's money to be made from the affair. We're already in that boat on multiple fronts, and I for one am sick of hearing about how the market is going to take care of everything - when the market is causing the problems in the first place!. Any thinking feeling person cannot possibly support an ideology that is completely without morals. The free market would support some of the worst crimes in history; everything from Native American genocide to slavery to child labor, to name a few, would be defendable under free market rhetoric. Your economic theories may look good on paper, but the real world will fall to rubble in the process of carrying them out.
Someone joked that the author sounded a bit like Nietzsche, but I think he really sounds like G.W.F. Hegel. From Hegel's Wikipedia entry...
"Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called 'the absolute idea' or 'absolute knowledge'."
This concept is also known as the "world spirit", and this teleology attempted to synthesize the world's successes and failures into a positive betterment of humankind. A Hegelian will argue that the Holocaust has a potentially positive effect on the world, ultimately; because we have suffered a single holocaust, the world spirit will advance beyond the conditions that would allow such a thing to happen again - thus bettering the world. Hegel is notoriously abstruse in his writing, but it is clear that the author of this article has only a cursory understanding of his philosophy. First off, it is entirely unclear as to whether or not any of these "advances" in video games are actually leading to a better video game experience. I think a strong argument can be maintained that console/generation x was the pinnacle of gaming enjoyment, and subsequent generations are simply decadent. Also, Hegel was comparing the actions of nation states; by evolving this scheme to include corporations we are inclined to accept more than the straightforward conclusions presented. Hegel was notorious for defending the existence of the nation state as being entirely rational and necessary, and for this reason he was highly admired by Frederick William III, and a major boon to the budding concept of nationalism. This focus on the nation state completely deemphasizes the individual, a main criticism of Hegelianism and nationalism. Corporations and nations are not real people; to focus only on the achievements of "Nintendo" or "Sony" is essentially a dehumanizing insult to worth of the individual and a reiteration of the complete modern acceptance of corporate fascism.
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This doesn't take into account the fact that "zones" of profitability are subject to change over time. A sparsely populated area may be a thriving city in a few generations, but this won't happen without coverage by basic utilities allowing for expansion.
The argument isn't complete, because the monopoly institution/s will themselves enable greater population density, thus leading to more profits.
Many people of the radical left are ecological mindful, and employ what are known as "grey water" systems. This is the practice of disconnecting your sink drains from the sewage system, placing buckets beneath the drains, and reusing the water to flush toilets, clean something dirtier than the water, or water plants. It's actually quite common. That explains two buckets, which weren't urine at all
The third bucket was just a plain old piss bucket; maybe you should ask your grandparents about it. The house they were squatting didn't have a toilet(another common practice by radical punks/junkies/hippies/homeless/whatever).
What's your point? We also used to have legalized slavery in the United States. Does that mean we should "laugh" if someone tries to claim that racism is still an institutional problem?
You're missing the point, and focusing on some hypothetical intentions by the victims of these crimes, instead of the crimes themselves. First off, no evidence of relevant criminal wrongdoing has been supplied, thus a grievous infringement has occurred. Your own defense of the cops is self contradictory, since these groups obviously had their rights removed without just cause. No amount of prior or current criminal activity by citizens ever merits stripping the rights of other people based on similarity of the individuals alone. Do you believe that it should be fine to randomly invade the homes of certain racial minorities because they have a higher per capita crime rate? Generalizing people to a political creed, and supporting oppressive measures to restrict that creed, is bigotry. Furthermore, it is wrong to arrest people for crimes before they commit them, based purely on suspicion or hearsay. Again, point me to any hard evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the INDIVIDUALS arrested or otherwise detained, and you might have an argument; otherwise you're just practicing apologetics for fascist tactics.
By your explanation, we should be A OK with living in a totally preemptive police state, since political figures have been assassinated throughout our national history, and security should demand such precautions to prevent a relapse. Does the gestapo style assassination of Fred Hampton seem like a conspiracy NUT "mountain out of a molehill", because this is a fine, modern, example of what you get when you let legal authority operate unchecked to demolish dissent. People making a "big deal" out of this are doing so in the hopes that we don't become a country where totalitarian practices are tolerated, and you are a fine example of why we should be afraid.
Does anyone else find themselves in the predicament of liking Japanese video games, especially the FF series, but are also nauseated by modern Japanese anime pop culture? From the ostentatious mega-tech, convoluted melodrama, ridiculous attitude, the young porcelain models, extreme and obvious lack of physics, to, worst of all, the god damn hairdos, I'm really sick of it! It wasn't too noticeable in 7, but by 8 the crap was here to stay. Maybe I stand alone here, but hipster sunglasses and cell phones are two things I would like to never again see in a FF game (or any modern 21st century dress style for that matter). This kind of pop culture worship really cheapens the promised "fantasy" for me.
I remember hearing that the combat in this game was supposed to be modeled after the action sequences in "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children". Knowing this, they couldn't pay me to play it. It looks like they finally managed to rid the FF series of anything I ever liked about it with this one. I wonder if it's going to have another "garment grid". Maybe I'll pick them back up again if it ever looks like they're going to quit putting style over substance.
While I see your point, and completely agree concerning the gamecube (you forgot animal crossing), I don't think it's a completely fair comparison of peripherals. Most of these Wii attachments are cheap and optional, or a the very least flexible. The gamecube shenanigans would lock away game content that could otherwise be accessible within the necessary purchase of a relatively expensive GBA. I think that's way more of rip-off, personally. Nintendo received a fair amount of criticism for these tactics, and that could be why we haven't seen Wii/DS tie-ins from day one (easy enough with the wireless). By comparison, it would simply be impossible to play a game like WiiFit without the balance board. In this case, Nintendo isn't taking game content and hiding it away in some marketing scheme, they are presenting you with an entirely new gameplay interface (a bit more of a deal, I'd say).
Mario Kart or Smash Bros. can be played with just a Wiimote, or whatever hardware combination suits you. Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 both require a nunchuck, but one comes with your system. The gamecube controllers are obviously necessary if you want to play gamecube games. The zapper and wheel are just facades, and aren't necessary to play the games the come packed with. Again, I think it's somewhat admirable that Nintendo chose a cheap attachment as opposed to double charging us for a gun/wheel with built in sensors.
I'd say that Nintendo has done a fair, if not outright decent, job of keeping those of us that want to be cheap fully capable of playing our games, while allowing enthusiasts the room to cover their walls with Wii hardware. An advantage of this method, that you haven't addressed, is the ability to keep costs down by purchasing things in a modular fashion. Sure, if Nintendo bundled everything in a single super-pack you could probably shave a lot off the grand total, but you'd more than likely still spend more than is necessary for your individual gaming. What good are classic controllers if you don't like old-school games? Again, this advantage would fall apart if Nintendo wasn't flexible about the way you play their games. It would seem that every time a possible control scheme could be used, Nintendo gives you the option of doing so. For example, all virtual console games can be played with a gamecube controller, and the ones that require few enough buttons can also be played with a sideways wiimote. They could have easily required that all vc games require a classic controller, but they instead decided to be flexible.
A lack of choice could be a problem for a required peripheral, like this newfangled super motion sensor. They could offset this by making the attachments free for Wii owners (like the wrist strap/jacket offers), or inexpensive enough (@5-10 US$) to not outrage customers. More than likely, though, they'll just pack them in with the first game that needs them, then sell them for twenty bucks a piece afterwards. It would be nice, though, if this were a permanent "upgrade" to the Wiimote itself, and you got one free when you purchased an old wiimote, and new stock came with it packaged in. That being said, this is the embracing of experimentation that I've been waiting to see in the video game industry. I disagree with your choice in a better games/more hardware dichotomy. Opening up new windows into how we interface with our games can only be a good thing.
What? Are you remembering the same NES that I am? I think that all systems have equally bad games, but perhaps the NES/SNES's good titles are just impassable nowadays.
The NES had close to a 1000 games, and sure, the quality level was decent at first. The reason being that Nintendo had a very stringent quality control process, to the point that they were deemed authoritarian. Publishers were only allowed to produce a certain amount of titles a year, but a few got around this limitation by creating spin-off companies. For example, Konami created Ultra games, which included some ok titles (Metal Gear), but was mainly B list stuff (Rollergames?).
The eventual slackening of Nintendo's mandates created a flood of crappy licensed games (Total Recall, anyone?)that are on par, shit wise, with anything today. Some of the licensed games were good, but that's true of the systems you spoke of (Goldeneye is considered one of the best games ever). Going through the list of NES titles, however, will reveal an absolute horde of crap, even in it's day. The impression that the NES had a high level of relative quality is an illusion created by the sheer number of titles for the system (it's easier to remember the good ones, and forget all 4 "Wheel of Fortune" titles). Also, we must keep in mind that the NES had very little mass precedent to compare to, with so much pioneering being done on the system.
Of course, another contributing factor is the reality of modern game development. David Crane created the NES title, A Boy and His Blob, all by himself, and it happens to be a decent game. How many modern games do you think are created by only one, or even a handful, of persons? I think this means that our expectations are much higher, compared to when we used to be content with a few sprites sliding over pixels with a few beeping tunes thrown in for good measure.
This is a long post, but I think you can expand this argument to the SNES, which also had it's fair share of utter garbage.
Where is the nonfiction in general? It's not just science that got short-changed, but what about art, philosophy, technology (surely TECHNOLOGY has had a few "classic" texts in the past 25 years besides Nueromancer!), or politics?
They included "Fast Food Nation" and "Nickel and Dimed", but what about, say, Chomsky? Surely you can't include, "America: The Book", and not have a single piece by any real activists. I mean, really, what a bunch of shit.
You general statements are correct. However, you leave out the possibility of progress and competition in your coal vs. petrol comparison. Oil will always be toxic to burn, and has little competitors in combustion engines. By shifting our vehicle/machinery fuel supply to alternative energy sources, even if it is temporarily coal for the most part, we are replacing a dead end high pollutant with the possibility of a better energy supply in the future. An electric or air powered car doesn't care what energy source generated the current or compressed the air that powers it, which would give people a real incentive to develop alternative methods of energy generation directly in competition with the coal/nuclear plants.
In the meantime, there are also largely ignored potential solutions for vehicles that rely on using vegetable/plant sources of combustible fuel, but somehow this doesn't seem to factor into people's arguments.
It would seem that most people commenting here are claiming that either violent media does not generally affect people negatively, or that if it does, so what, violence is an inescapable part of nature. The argument that human beings are somehow violent by nature is just crap. Dogs will be violent hunters in the wild, or a sweet, loving companions if domesticated. Capacity is not a justification for action. Under the right circumstances we are all capable of extreme violence or saintly behavior, and, unlike any of our animal peers, we also have a conscience with which we weigh our decisions abstractly. Free will undermines any argument that violence is simply a part of us, and especially as an excusable part of male behavior. The amount of sexist bullshit that got modded up here is disgusting, and shows how little supposedly educated people have progressed. You always have the opportunity to think before you act, and no amount of rhetorical posturing can strip people of their responsibility to be decent human beings. Besides, if you really thought that violence was simply an inherent part of human nature, you should be the ones most opposed to violent images in the media! What would be worse that some inescapable part of our psyche constantly being primed to action?
Why isn't anyone referring to evidence, as opposed to boisterous claims about being tough, etc.? I understand that the jury is still out concerning direct correlations, but it would seem that if you're going to make a strong claim that violent media does not affect people adversely, you should have some evidence to back that claim up. Meanwhile, I think the billions spent each year on advertising serve as pretty good evidence that media can influence behavior. But if consumer economics isn't your cup of tea, just take a look at your favorite state sponsored propaganda campaign to see how effectively media can manipulate people. Do you really think that massive media displays did not help the Nazis start WWII, and organize the Holocaust? Or get us into Iraq right now? I don't understand how people can so easily connect the dots between these obvious causes and effects, but somehow become dumbfoundingly obtuse otherwise.
We don't know the extent to which violent media affects people, and we keep looking for direct, Columbine style, correlations between violent media and behavior. However, these are not the only factors to look for, because people forget the extend to which violence saturates our normal lives. For example, violent media could make us more passive concerning other real world violence. If you accept that the world is saturated in violence, you may find yourself less offended when your friend beats his wife, your president bombs some remote village, or your neighbor down the street gets shot. Also, how many people become so accustomed to the idea of violence that they find themselves easily gravitating towards the more violent ends of our society, such as the military or police forces? There are plenty of problems that could arise from having people nursed on video games and action movies behind the scopes of real deadly weapons in real situations. How many soldiers suffering from PTSD do you think had a legitimate understanding of violence prior to their enlistment? Furthermore, violent media tends to help legitimize these agencies existence as primary methods of solving certain problems, even when atrocities are committed. Why else would the military help fund certain action movies (the ones with the right propaganda message), and why else would police and military personnel find themselves far less likely to be prosecuted for things that would put us behind bars/in the grave? These are more dangerous consequences than generating the occasional serial killer/s, in my opinion.
It's going to be pretty obvious to anyone that actually works in 3d that this article is a joke, and a tired one at that.
/. post, however, is that Blender achieved a decent standing in this comparison chart. If the credibility of this article hasn't been questioned enough to make you second guess that conclusion, I'd reiterate the case that Blender falls far behind the major 3d apps for several reasons. Most of these "wow" features are buggy, and would never hold up in a production environment. They are great in concept, and could be great in practice, but bug testing is not something that Blender's OS community seems to spend as much effort on, as opposed to implementing new bells and whistles. What good are new features if they are broken? The documentation for Blender is horrible, and this is only compounded by Blender's notorious alien interface. Again, I feel like this is a problem with it's OS development; no one seems to want to spend the time doing the "grunt" work of making some decent documentation. Overall, the features feel very tacked on and isolated, a far cry from the streamlined powerhouses that Blender competes with. Contrary to what some people are claiming, the UI is not Blender's biggest problem. People will adopt an alien UI if the payoff is large enough; take the case of Zbrush. Most production environments do not exist in a vacuum, with a single piece of software serving all production needs. They are hodgepodges of various 3d and 2d software, so it's not as though there isn't room for Blender to take a few seats in a studio. Blender just doesn't make itself easily admissible into this kind of environment, by continuing to focus on shoddy feature implementation as opposed to usability, performance, interface, documentation, and integration with other 3d/2d apps.
It gets a lot of things blatantly wrong; for instance, MentalRay is just as capable as Vray. It really depends on personal preference, speed, and skill level as to which one is prioritized in production. There is no such thing as the "killer" renderer, as their ups and down make them interchangeable, like the major 3d apps themselves. MentalRay has one advantage over Vray, Brazil, FinalRender, etc. in that it is integrated, from the ground up, into Max, Maya, and XSI. Learning this renderer will produce easily transferable knowledge into the other major apps.
Maya has fluids and cloth, and XSI has hair; they deceptively only compare base packages, without even mentioning that these options are available in their tiered pricing schemes. This is a huge omission in the case of Maya, because their Nucleus technology is absolutely jaw dropping. The "cloth" you get with XSI foundation is laughable, as Syflex Cloth (only available in XSI Essentials and up) is superior by far. How, then, Foundations got a "very good" rating in cloth, I don't know. 3dSMax does have limited compositing with Video Post, so it should have gotten the "Very Poor" or whatever, at least. XSI has some great compositing tools, but only with the more expensive versions.
Why have a rating for Nurbs (hardly ever used), but exclude a rating for poly modeling (the industry standard)? Furthermore, why isn't there a rating for "performance", or how often the software craps out? Also, how is it that Max, whose "top unique feature" is biped, only scored a "very good" in the animation tools category? Maya Paint FX/Artisan are two different features, and Artisan (3d sculpting) once was, but now is not unique. There is no way that the fluids you achieve in Blender and those you can achieve with XSI are even comparable in production environments, underlining that fact that most of these "ratings" are completely arbitrary. I could go on and on, but I think anyone reading this gets the point by now.
The point of the
Are you talking about "edu" versions like the completely free Maya Personal Learning Edition? All of the major software titles have an absolute wealth of free tutorial information on the web that renders most published books obsolete and inadequate. Blender may have a lot of features, but what good are they if most of them are broken? People that use 3d for a living (like me) can't really hang with Blender because it isn't reliable, and horribly documented. When I pick up a new copy of Silo or Hexagon or Modo or whatever, I expect to be able to figure out any of it's features with a couple of clicks in a help manual. One gets the feeling that most of the energy into developing Blender goes into implementing new "wow" features, but little thought is given as to how these features will interact with each other. The UI is also a major concern, but people will adapt to an alien UI if the payoff is great enough; just take a look at Zbrush to see what I mean. That being said, Blender would have a lot more converts if they would quit intentionally excluding the vast majority of their potential user base and use a sensible interface.
You are misunderstanding the issue of censorship.
It's not that some business, government entity, or individual is withholding certain information, it's that a controlling entity is withholding said information. Censorship matters directly in proportion with how much of the population receives their information from said group. Considering that most major retailers refuse to carry AO titles, and that most consumers purchase their games from major retails, there is a direct correlation between their policy and what types of games are made. Video game history has another great example of this, namely with Nintendo and Mortal Kombat. Nintendo's strict censorship policy led to the Genesis version of the game to heavily outsell the SNES port. By the time MKII came about, Nintendo had changed it's tune, and the age of mature gaming was born. The key here was competition; if not for Sega, Nintendo might never have changed its' ways. With no major retail player deviating from this policy, this breakthrough isn't possible right now for AO games. You can also watch "This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated" through Google Video to gain more insight into how this works with film.
Why are we breaking down his actions into numerical steps, when the core issue is that the police overreacted in the first place? This is like getting the cops called on you for being unruly in class, or being way too loud in a crowded theater. Obnoxious, sure, but is it really something that should involve the police? The speaker guidelines are just that, guidelines, as I don't think they'd be tazering Al Gore if he went over his alloted two minutes in a rude way. The police were the ones that brought physical violence into the equation, and the student is being blamed for "resisting arrest"? I think you have every right to "resist" those that violate your body, and whether or not they wear a badge should be irrelevant. As far as I know, it isn't yet illegal to be an asshole. If you want to charge him with a crime, however, you can easily ticket him after he ends his puerile rant.
There are a lot of interchangeable posts here detailing how he broke the law, blah, blah, blah, but I think they're all pretty heartless and draconian in spirit. It's discouraging to see people blindly support state power, no matter how thuggish it appears. The state is not always right, even if it has the law in its' back pocket. The university wouldn't exist without taxpayer revenue, despite its' status as "private property". I would argue, for this reason, that he has more of a right to rant at a university than in other so called private properties, like Wal-Mart. We tolerate far more obnoxious rantings on television every day, because they have the money to force people to put up with it. People that are claiming that he has every equal right to host his own lecture are conveniently leaving the power resulting from the inequality of wealth out of the equation. Such explosions of frustration are to be expected in a society where dissenting voices are marginalized. Duh.
You've made the mistake of assuming that most people that play video games are hardcore gamers. Oblivion and Bioshock would repulse my dad; who after playing my copy of Wii sports, purchased one himself. Saying that some complex and polished RPG or FPS is a million times better than games like Wii Sports is really missing the point, from a market perspective. To these people, who's opinions definitely matter from a sales and development perspective, games like the ones you mentioned are irrelevant; as different criteria are used to judge games from these non-hardcore perspectives. You make the mistake of assuming that these criteria don't really exist, and proceed to claim that games can't possibly drive system sales because the Wii doesn't have as many good hardcore games. I hope you understand how subjective such a statement is, and see that not all people like games like Halo 3 - and it is these people that responsible for the success of the Wii.
History tells a slightly different story. The original NES was able to outmatch the competition, namely SEGA and Atari, primarily through a tidal wave of software. The same story was true for Atari years before that. It's also well known that lack of third party support (lack of games, in other words) is primarily what ensured the lackluster performance of both the N64 and the Gamecube. If what you're saying was true, then why didn't the Gamecube perform better last generation? It certainly had the competition on price, and Nintendo had the budget to properly advertise.
The problem is that you're making a potentially false value judgment about the game libraries of the respective systems. "All things considered", the Wii's library may be "horribly outmatched" when it comes to hardcore games, but it would seem that the 360 and PS3 find themselves "horribly outmatched" when it comes to casual games, conversely. As people have pointed out, hardcore gamers are only partially responsible for the Wii's success. Your conclusion can only be accepted if we assume that hardcore gamers make up the overwhelming majority of the market, and I believe the Wii, and DS for that matter, are showing this to be patently false. It's entirely plausible that a substantial portion of the market does not care about Halo 3, Oblivion, etc. and is much more impressed by games like the lowly Wii sports. Where's their value judgment? In the Wii's sales, it would appear.
Yeah, look at how Iraq's giant oil reserves have given them such a high standard of living.
Who cares? I'm glad that you can prove to everyone that you were privileged enough to get a nice education, but I think everyone knew what meaning was intended. I find petty nitpickers like yourself to be far more obnoxious than the occasional grammatical error. Hell, if everyone communicated in perfect proper English, we'd have a pretty boring English speaking world.
I'd imagine that award would actually go to Blender or Zbrush, but that's just me. I have a lot of experience with Max and I think it's a great program, but all three of the majors are pretty much interchangeable for a majority of work. Most people that have a problem with app X have grown accustomed to the workings of app Y, but, as anyone will tell you, knowing how to use as many packages as possible is a great incentive to get hired.
While I would agree that Adobe dominates the 2D DCC market, domination is a far cry from being a monopoly. You have not made a strong case that any barriers exist to impede anyone from releasing a superior product. This charge easily applies to Microsoft - they even went to court over it.
Here's a quick video visually displaying one of Microsoft's SIGGRAPH papers. I especially like the part with a dancing frog and dinosaur. It's unclear to me as to whether or not this is an entirely different way to deform a SubD surface, or an augmentation to traditional bones and skin rigs. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I actually hope they eventually move into the 3d market, if only to spur on the production of the big three, 3dSMax, XSI, and Maya. The major 3d applications have been in a slump recently feature wise, including this year's SIGGRAPH announcements, and more serious competition would be welcome.
You're of course forgetting that ISPs, especially local ones, are already pressured to bow to governmental wishes. All broadband networks must give access to the NSA, if so requested. This includes web logs, e-mail transcripts, and general wiretapping privileges. You're also forgetting that a major reason a city municipality would want to institute their own broadband network is to remedy the woeful service being provided by unaccountable private ISPs, not necessarily just to undercut their prices. The article mentions three cities in particular, New Orleans, Seattle, and Philadelphia, where major ISPs refuse to lay more fiber, but also refuse to allow the cities to do such things themselves. This also comes after the fact that the infrastructure of the internet, like roads, phone lines, and railroad tracks before it, is heavily or entirely subsidized by the government in the first place. If you have no one else to turn to, what would you do if you're dissatisfied with your service? Personally, I'd be far more concerned about a private teleco becoming the only game in town as opposed to our government. A government agency is only going to allow as much intrusion into privacy as we, the people of a democratic nation, allow it to. It's just as foreseeable, given your example of a filtering service, to see federal law banning just such a policy. It all really depends on what we do.
I have to say that I agree with you that in the case of Bush and Gore there surely would have been some pretty big differences, some of which I think you nailed. These aren't the only important issues that an executive can impact, however. Most of your points are hypothetical reactions to events that couldn't have been foretold before the election, but what about the things we knew Bush/Gore would have to deal with? I'm sure they both would have supported the drug war, been pro big business, for tighter media control, tough on crime, etc. (all of which Gore displayed his support for during his vice-presidency, such as with NAFTA and Plan Columbia - despite his supposed care for the environment). Real social/economic issues, the staying issues that have been problems for decades if not centuries, is where there is little difference between the candidates. They may hike or lower taxes, but no president will ever introduce sweeping changes to change to class structures that fracture the US; furthermore no president will ever throw off the shackles of their corporate masters to truly do right for our country - their interests will always be above ours, as any politician would tell you.
A state of Pareto efficiency is by no means the "the most efficient form a market can hope to attain", unless we adopt very contorted and alienated views of the market in the first place. Just because no "individual" is worse off from an exchange doesn't mean that we can't all suffer dire consequences from those things not being measured by a short sighted economic system. Your "prisoner's dilemma" is a bit more of a problem than you make it out to be, considering that the earth is not an infinite garbage can or strip mine. You would have us wait until market conditions dictate what should be a proper way to deal with environmental or social catastrophes, but by then who knows how much irreversible damage has occurred? We don't have a true free market in place right now, and we still are teetering on the edge of destruction; should we really exacerbate this problem even further by taking away any incentive to care about anything besides money? Be it nukes flying, pandemic diseases (plenty of which are industry related), or melting glaciers engulfing the world, your free market will turn a blind eye to "externalities" until there's money to be made from the affair. We're already in that boat on multiple fronts, and I for one am sick of hearing about how the market is going to take care of everything - when the market is causing the problems in the first place!. Any thinking feeling person cannot possibly support an ideology that is completely without morals. The free market would support some of the worst crimes in history; everything from Native American genocide to slavery to child labor, to name a few, would be defendable under free market rhetoric. Your economic theories may look good on paper, but the real world will fall to rubble in the process of carrying them out.
Someone joked that the author sounded a bit like Nietzsche, but I think he really sounds like G.W.F. Hegel. From Hegel's Wikipedia entry... "Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called 'the absolute idea' or 'absolute knowledge'." This concept is also known as the "world spirit", and this teleology attempted to synthesize the world's successes and failures into a positive betterment of humankind. A Hegelian will argue that the Holocaust has a potentially positive effect on the world, ultimately; because we have suffered a single holocaust, the world spirit will advance beyond the conditions that would allow such a thing to happen again - thus bettering the world. Hegel is notoriously abstruse in his writing, but it is clear that the author of this article has only a cursory understanding of his philosophy. First off, it is entirely unclear as to whether or not any of these "advances" in video games are actually leading to a better video game experience. I think a strong argument can be maintained that console/generation x was the pinnacle of gaming enjoyment, and subsequent generations are simply decadent. Also, Hegel was comparing the actions of nation states; by evolving this scheme to include corporations we are inclined to accept more than the straightforward conclusions presented. Hegel was notorious for defending the existence of the nation state as being entirely rational and necessary, and for this reason he was highly admired by Frederick William III, and a major boon to the budding concept of nationalism. This focus on the nation state completely deemphasizes the individual, a main criticism of Hegelianism and nationalism. Corporations and nations are not real people; to focus only on the achievements of "Nintendo" or "Sony" is essentially a dehumanizing insult to worth of the individual and a reiteration of the complete modern acceptance of corporate fascism.