Shortly after making my post I found an article that offered an explanation. They told the victim that they weren't going to kill him because he wasn't American, and the guy found an opportunity to flee. It's still pretty dumb, but it does make some sense on an emotional level.
What other details are you thinking about? What seems obvious to me is that these guys should have warn disguises, and not having done that, fled long before once all the stories about the pictures and suspects came about. All in all they were pretty dumb.
***EVERY*** reason in the world to believe that he would continue his attempts at murdering more people until the moment he was captured or killed.
Actually, if there's one thing I don't understand is why they let the guy whose car they hijacked go. Because they didn't kill him the police were notified of the car they were driving soon afterwards, which lead to their eventual death/capture.
You're an idiot. First you call a historic blizzard a "typical winter storm". Now you want supernatural beings for them to close the roads? The reason they closed the roads was because of lessons learned from 1978, where highways full of people were trapped in the snow for days and the road clearing crews couldn't do their jobs. Pull your head out of your ass and realize sometimes emergency measures need to be taken.
I don't think Lucas is just trying to make stuff that appeals to kids without any concern for whether it's a good idea or not.
The problem started when he got kids of his own, and started thinking about what was appropriate for them to see. That's why the whole "Han shot first!" fiasco came about.
Tokyo was hit very very hard during World War II (1944). So, even though Tokyo has been around for centuries, an awful lot of it is new.
However, they weren't laying down high-speed Internet in the 50 years post World War II. Government policy is a much more likely cause:
"[Lennett] argued that broadband policy in recent years has been based on the "really flawed assumption that telephone companies and cable companies are going to compete with each other." Instead, he said, we've gotten a "negotiated truce" in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms. "The consumer is going to lose from that," Lennett said.
Lennett suggested two policies that might rejuvenate the US broadband market. First, he suggested that policymakers should re-evaluate the 2005 decision to abandon line-sharing rules. In many other countries, incumbent firms are required to lease their facilities to competitors at regulated rates."
The second policy he mentions is having the city pay for rollouts, but that usually ends up blocked by court battles in the US.
They forget that the companies that buy their OS do so because they can upgrade their OS once a decade, run that ERP system they spend 5 billion dollars on for two decades, and not have to completely retool their entire enterprise in a week when they roll out an upgrade of their OS.
To play devil's advocate, Microsoft can still do that. Windows 7 is the new XP and will be around for a long, long time (a quick search shows support till at least 2020). Business will be very slow to update, and it's obvious that Windows 8 is the failed experiment that most businesses will ignore. It will be very interesting to see where Microsoft goes from here.
I keep saying that they're trying to move towards Metro and away from the old desktop, as a desktop where they can dictate what you can run, and that they get 30% of the price of is much more attractive to them even if they love a lot of 'customers'. They figure if it worked for Apple, it will work for them.
This was obvious from the beginning. The real question is if they are going to stick to their guns. I'm sure there's a huge debate going on internally right now.
All right, so I picked up System Shock 2 and have gotten through most of the way. I stand by my original response to the poster -- way too much fan nostalgia here.
From what I've read on Wikipedia, many of the elements that were novel in this game made it into others, and I can see many of the same fingerprints in BioShock. And what you say is true, there is a lot of tension, as the game really makes you scrounge for resources and the enemies are tough. So yes, it's a classic. But that doesn't mean that other games that came after are shit just because they don't follow the exact same mold.
Given a choice, a find BioShock to be a better and more fun game. Too much frustration in System Shock 2. Too much stuff to micro-manage. If weapons didn't degrade and implants didn't require constant recharging I'd be a lot less frustrated, along with some configurable hotkeys for psi spells.
As a side effect. Those games aren't online just for the sake of DRM.
Making money is the primary concern. If you can charge a premium because the game cannot be pirated, then that is what the industry will flock to in a culture like China, You can't just dismiss this reasoning out of hand.
You're really just trying to argue up a strawman, going after China and ignoring Japan or Korea, who do have their AAA single player games, coming out of their countries, and marketed to their own markets.
And you apparently didn't read the post I was replying to before you jumped in late, which is surprising considering how deep into the thread it was. My tolerance for annoying Anonymous Cowards has reached its limits. No more replies after this.
And again, I must stress about profits. Fighting piracy is nice and all, but at the end of the day, are you making more money? Not even Ubisoft thinks so [slashdot.org]. The guys who made Witcher 2 don't think so
Ubersoft was the poster child for annoying DRM. Why would you need to always be on for a single player campaign? They'll probably switch to a lighter version of online registration DRM.
As for Witcher 2, good for them, but they're just one company. You can't run the experiment twice to see how things would have turned out differently.
LAN is not DRM. And the online requirements of SC2 is very light. You can actually play single player offline.
Lack of LAN is a form of DRM. To think it isn't is naive. And that single player was limited with "bugs" that got fixed later. And even "light DRM" is still DRM, people bitched about it, and they still bought it anyways.
The burden of proof is on the pro-DRM side to show that it works, to justify its continued existence.
As you say, it's really about maximizing profit, so there is no "burden of proof" to one particular side or not. Unless you can come up with hard numbers you go with what you feel works best.
China has its own industry as well, they're very big in online gaming like Korea.
Online is built-in DRM. Where's the AAA, single-player campaign game coming out of China, marketed to China? Mega-bonus points if you can find one targeted to PC sales and not console. Do you really think such a game can be supported in a market so pervasive with a copy culture?
All of this further points to that DRM has very little to do with piracy. Why? Because there's just so many games out there.
And yet there are games that people need to pirate. I hear them all the time justifying it. And there's the class of people that will casually copy but not hardcore pirate, and that will fork out bucks to play a game they would otherwise casually copy.
If in the event I do buy your game
Which many people have, see StarCraft 2 as one example, despite all the bitching about the removal of LAN play and online requirements.
, but you pull a SimCity? I demand a refund. You not only not get a new sale, but suffer the cost of giving me my refund, as well as the negative press.
It wasn't the DRM, as that was known upfront, but their failure to handle the post-launch load. And to give some credit to the pubs/devs, they actually tried to build a game with meaningful online features -- an MMO, which requires lots of data sharing. If all they wanted was DRM they probably could have handled it.
In other words, DRM does not bring in much, if any, additional money from the pirate market.
It's really a big unknown. You can make arguments for either side.
It's profitable because localization is a small part of the budget. Everything else is already paid for. There's a reason the other markets are second class, because they don't pay first class money.
And in the United States such markets are uncommon, yet I've known many people to casually copy games among friends and family when there is no protection. What happens in your corner of the world isn't representative of the whole.
While the mission is noble, I think that spamhaus' abuse of power is unacceptable!
If the courts aren't going to fix it, I'll glady have Spamhaus doing what they do to combat spam, so long as the remain diligent and true to their mission. You even admit the guy at A2B is "well known for supporting spammers and running their networks". Blacklists to the rescue.
I'll have to check it out. Still, that doesn't make the sequels "pure crap and a giant cashgrab without a care for quality.", just more mainstream. The quality artwork, nifty story elements, and attention to detail is what I liked most about the original BioShock.
The expense was part of my original point. Ignoring it while talking about songs is bullshit.
Movies cost at least as much to produce, and they're still making tons of those every year despite "piracy". Also, the distribution model there is changing too: Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc.
They still rely on money from theaters (including premium 3D and IMAX prices), and they also delay streaming until they give discs get a chance to sell. They also hit the streaming services up for more money. And finally, if they really start to lose out on movie sales, they're going to shift to cheaper budget films.
For video games, there's Steam.
Which is DRM, the whole reason we are talking about this in the first place, for fuck's sake. They also sell games at a premium at launch, and then rely on sales later. Don't expect any more replies to such stupid arguments.
Once you get enough of a premium paying audience, you can make extra money by selling cheaper versions to smaller markets. There's a reason AAA games target the consoles first, much to the annoyance of PC gamers.
Massive piracy? Time to lower prices, reduce/remove DRM and make content as accessible as possible.
Rationalizing bullshit.
Massive piracy? Instead of making a AAA single-player campaign game like BioShock, turn yourself into the next Zynga and make cheap games with low-risk, high-reward. Or even better, since BioShock will sell well on consoles, just skip the PC version altogether.
It means anybody can read the history of this particular thread and know what the asshole behind the razorshark account said. That you feel the need to run away from your past conversations says a lot about you.
Don't be dumb yourself. If people are paying, they must have some objection. The dirtbag I replied to couldn't make up his mind about how he felt or why he was doing it, clearly conflicted. And game companies go out of business all the time. If everybody justified their pirating, Blizzard would decide AAA games are too expensive and stick to World of Warcraft.
Slashdot Mirror
Shortly after making my post I found an article that offered an explanation. They told the victim that they weren't going to kill him because he wasn't American, and the guy found an opportunity to flee. It's still pretty dumb, but it does make some sense on an emotional level.
What other details are you thinking about? What seems obvious to me is that these guys should have warn disguises, and not having done that, fled long before once all the stories about the pictures and suspects came about. All in all they were pretty dumb.
***EVERY*** reason in the world to believe that he would continue his attempts at murdering more people until the moment he was captured or killed.
Actually, if there's one thing I don't understand is why they let the guy whose car they hijacked go. Because they didn't kill him the police were notified of the car they were driving soon afterwards, which lead to their eventual death/capture.
You're an idiot. First you call a historic blizzard a "typical winter storm". Now you want supernatural beings for them to close the roads? The reason they closed the roads was because of lessons learned from 1978, where highways full of people were trapped in the snow for days and the road clearing crews couldn't do their jobs. Pull your head out of your ass and realize sometimes emergency measures need to be taken.
Yet [Roddenberry] made plenty of dark and edgy Trek, Wrath of Kahn being one example.
Roddenberry was forced out into an "executive consultant" position, and was against the film. It was good because they went against his wishes.
I don't think Lucas is just trying to make stuff that appeals to kids without any concern for whether it's a good idea or not.
The problem started when he got kids of his own, and started thinking about what was appropriate for them to see. That's why the whole "Han shot first!" fiasco came about.
Did anybody here actually eat any C3P-Os in the 1980s?
No, but I had an R2-D2 cake made for my birthday. I was pretty psyched about it.
Tokyo was hit very very hard during World War II (1944). So, even though Tokyo has been around for centuries, an awful lot of it is new.
However, they weren't laying down high-speed Internet in the 50 years post World War II. Government policy is a much more likely cause:
"[Lennett] argued that broadband policy in recent years has been based on the "really flawed assumption that telephone companies and cable companies are going to compete with each other." Instead, he said, we've gotten a "negotiated truce" in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms. "The consumer is going to lose from that," Lennett said.
Lennett suggested two policies that might rejuvenate the US broadband market. First, he suggested that policymakers should re-evaluate the 2005 decision to abandon line-sharing rules. In many other countries, incumbent firms are required to lease their facilities to competitors at regulated rates."
The second policy he mentions is having the city pay for rollouts, but that usually ends up blocked by court battles in the US.
Because Slashdot is always breaking basic functionality that used to work in the name of progress.
They forget that the companies that buy their OS do so because they can upgrade their OS once a decade, run that ERP system they spend 5 billion dollars on for two decades, and not have to completely retool their entire enterprise in a week when they roll out an upgrade of their OS.
To play devil's advocate, Microsoft can still do that. Windows 7 is the new XP and will be around for a long, long time (a quick search shows support till at least 2020). Business will be very slow to update, and it's obvious that Windows 8 is the failed experiment that most businesses will ignore. It will be very interesting to see where Microsoft goes from here.
I keep saying that they're trying to move towards Metro and away from the old desktop, as a desktop where they can dictate what you can run, and that they get 30% of the price of is much more attractive to them even if they love a lot of 'customers'. They figure if it worked for Apple, it will work for them.
This was obvious from the beginning. The real question is if they are going to stick to their guns. I'm sure there's a huge debate going on internally right now.
All right, so I picked up System Shock 2 and have gotten through most of the way. I stand by my original response to the poster -- way too much fan nostalgia here.
From what I've read on Wikipedia, many of the elements that were novel in this game made it into others, and I can see many of the same fingerprints in BioShock. And what you say is true, there is a lot of tension, as the game really makes you scrounge for resources and the enemies are tough. So yes, it's a classic. But that doesn't mean that other games that came after are shit just because they don't follow the exact same mold.
Given a choice, a find BioShock to be a better and more fun game. Too much frustration in System Shock 2. Too much stuff to micro-manage. If weapons didn't degrade and implants didn't require constant recharging I'd be a lot less frustrated, along with some configurable hotkeys for psi spells.
As a side effect. Those games aren't online just for the sake of DRM.
Making money is the primary concern. If you can charge a premium because the game cannot be pirated, then that is what the industry will flock to in a culture like China, You can't just dismiss this reasoning out of hand.
You're really just trying to argue up a strawman, going after China and ignoring Japan or Korea, who do have their AAA single player games, coming out of their countries, and marketed to their own markets.
And you apparently didn't read the post I was replying to before you jumped in late, which is surprising considering how deep into the thread it was. My tolerance for annoying Anonymous Cowards has reached its limits. No more replies after this.
And again, I must stress about profits. Fighting piracy is nice and all, but at the end of the day, are you making more money? Not even Ubisoft thinks so [slashdot.org]. The guys who made Witcher 2 don't think so
Ubersoft was the poster child for annoying DRM. Why would you need to always be on for a single player campaign? They'll probably switch to a lighter version of online registration DRM.
As for Witcher 2, good for them, but they're just one company. You can't run the experiment twice to see how things would have turned out differently.
LAN is not DRM. And the online requirements of SC2 is very light. You can actually play single player offline.
Lack of LAN is a form of DRM. To think it isn't is naive. And that single player was limited with "bugs" that got fixed later. And even "light DRM" is still DRM, people bitched about it, and they still bought it anyways.
The burden of proof is on the pro-DRM side to show that it works, to justify its continued existence.
As you say, it's really about maximizing profit, so there is no "burden of proof" to one particular side or not. Unless you can come up with hard numbers you go with what you feel works best.
China has its own industry as well, they're very big in online gaming like Korea.
Online is built-in DRM. Where's the AAA, single-player campaign game coming out of China, marketed to China? Mega-bonus points if you can find one targeted to PC sales and not console. Do you really think such a game can be supported in a market so pervasive with a copy culture?
All of this further points to that DRM has very little to do with piracy. Why? Because there's just so many games out there.
And yet there are games that people need to pirate. I hear them all the time justifying it. And there's the class of people that will casually copy but not hardcore pirate, and that will fork out bucks to play a game they would otherwise casually copy.
If in the event I do buy your game
Which many people have, see StarCraft 2 as one example, despite all the bitching about the removal of LAN play and online requirements.
, but you pull a SimCity? I demand a refund. You not only not get a new sale, but suffer the cost of giving me my refund, as well as the negative press.
It wasn't the DRM, as that was known upfront, but their failure to handle the post-launch load. And to give some credit to the pubs/devs, they actually tried to build a game with meaningful online features -- an MMO, which requires lots of data sharing. If all they wanted was DRM they probably could have handled it.
In other words, DRM does not bring in much, if any, additional money from the pirate market.
It's really a big unknown. You can make arguments for either side.
It's profitable because localization is a small part of the budget. Everything else is already paid for. There's a reason the other markets are second class, because they don't pay first class money.
And in the United States such markets are uncommon, yet I've known many people to casually copy games among friends and family when there is no protection. What happens in your corner of the world isn't representative of the whole.
While the mission is noble, I think that spamhaus' abuse of power is unacceptable!
If the courts aren't going to fix it, I'll glady have Spamhaus doing what they do to combat spam, so long as the remain diligent and true to their mission. You even admit the guy at A2B is "well known for supporting spammers and running their networks". Blacklists to the rescue.
Which is why DRM isn't really about piracy. DRM rarely works against pirates
It's about casual piracy. There's a class of people who will gladly copy from their friends, but not bother with illicit sites.
The more reasonable justification for DRM is to go after resalers (i.e GameStop)
That's part of it too, sure.
I'll have to check it out. Still, that doesn't make the sequels "pure crap and a giant cashgrab without a care for quality.", just more mainstream. The quality artwork, nifty story elements, and attention to detail is what I liked most about the original BioShock.
What's that have to do with anything?
The expense was part of my original point. Ignoring it while talking about songs is bullshit.
Movies cost at least as much to produce, and they're still making tons of those every year despite "piracy". Also, the distribution model there is changing too: Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc.
They still rely on money from theaters (including premium 3D and IMAX prices), and they also delay streaming until they give discs get a chance to sell. They also hit the streaming services up for more money. And finally, if they really start to lose out on movie sales, they're going to shift to cheaper budget films.
For video games, there's Steam.
Which is DRM, the whole reason we are talking about this in the first place, for fuck's sake. They also sell games at a premium at launch, and then rely on sales later. Don't expect any more replies to such stupid arguments.
Once you get enough of a premium paying audience, you can make extra money by selling cheaper versions to smaller markets. There's a reason AAA games target the consoles first, much to the annoyance of PC gamers.
Who needs AAA titles anymore anyway?
The same people who are keen on pirating it in the first place.
However, you're definitely wrong about something: after what happened to Napster, iTunes rose to become a new legitimate music source
The amount of money (and collaboration) it takes to produce a song isn't comparable to a AAA game.
This smacks of first-experience nostalgia that nothing could ever live up to.
Massive piracy? Time to lower prices, reduce/remove DRM and make content as accessible as possible.
Rationalizing bullshit.
Massive piracy? Instead of making a AAA single-player campaign game like BioShock, turn yourself into the next Zynga and make cheap games with low-risk, high-reward. Or even better, since BioShock will sell well on consoles, just skip the PC version altogether.
You really think accounts here mean anything?
It means anybody can read the history of this particular thread and know what the asshole behind the razorshark account said. That you feel the need to run away from your past conversations says a lot about you.
Don't be dumb yourself. If people are paying, they must have some objection. The dirtbag I replied to couldn't make up his mind about how he felt or why he was doing it, clearly conflicted. And game companies go out of business all the time. If everybody justified their pirating, Blizzard would decide AAA games are too expensive and stick to World of Warcraft.