... is that Australia, unlike the US, does not have the right to free speech enshrined in its constitution. We have no Bill of Rights. Aside from a few things that have been explicitly spelt out - freedom of religion, right to trial by jury, just compensation and a few others, essentially our rights in Australia are whatever the government says they are.
Crows have been observed to construct tools as well. In fact, they fashion more complex tools than chimps. They've learned different designs by copying other birds, and they pass their tool-building knowledge down through the generations.
Tool construction and use is not a uniquely human trait, it's not even unique to primates.
Devil May Cry 4 is Multiplatform. Haze is multi-platform with PS3 having an exclusivity period of currently unknown length, and Unreal Tournament 3 is multi-platform PC and PS3 in November and 360 some time in 2008.
PS3 does have a strong lineup going into Christmas, but take out the multi-platform titles and the 360's lineup is undoubtedly stronger. PS3 needs a Halo or a Mass Effect or something which, rather than being a game you rush out to buy if you have a PS3, is a game you rush out to buy a PS3 to play. The games which will have that impact (MGS4, Final Fantasy XIII, and probably a few others) won't be around until next year. It's entirely possible that Uncharted may be one of these big system-sellers, but to be honest we've seen so little of it at this point that they've got a long way to go to get interest in it to that level.
Hopefully Sony are smart enough that they handle the Christmas rush so that they manage to push a lot of units out regardless. Otherwise Microsoft is going to get so much of a lead up that the PS3 will be physically unable to catch up. That would be bad for the whole market. Competition is a good thing.
All that has to happen is that they record whatever they seed their random number generator with. If the RNG is seeded with the same initial value, then the same inputs will always produce the same results. Technically speaking you should then be able to jump in at any point, and when you take over your input will change and then things will play differently.
I don't think it would be very fun, though. Not to mention completely cheapen the gameplay as you could essentially rewind things until you win. The more interesting aspects of the saved films is that the camera data won't be part of what they record, so technically you should be able to watch the action from any angle you want. Must be a godsend for testing.
Acorn didn't really die. The part of the company that really mattered became ARM, and now their processors are in practically every handheld electronic device on the market.
Personally, one of the high schools I attended used Acorn computers exclusively and I found them immensely frustrating to use, but that's a perception that is very likely influenced by the fact that I grew up using Apple.
You would have to wait for 50 years before you could distribute it if you made the recording now. This decision was about the length of copyright for the physical recordings of songs. I believe you'll find that the length of copyright for the actual music and lyrics is life of the composer and writer + 70 years.
You mean 'just look at Gears of War' because that seems to be your entire basis for your argument.
To date, as far as I'm aware only three games have shipped using UE3: - Gears of War - Rainbow Six: Vegas - Roboblitz (Xbox Live Arcade game)
Only one of these games features "inane looking bald space marines".
If we look at the near future there's a pile of UE3 games releasing, for example - Stranglehold - Bioshock - Blacksite: Area 51 - Fury - Huxley - Lost Odyssey - Mass Effect - Medal of Honor: Airborne - Undertow - Unreal Tournament 3
Of those, only UT3, Huxley and maybe Mass Effect and Blacksite are likely to have "inane looking bald space marines". Now, you might have tried a better troll, maybe pointing out that UE3 seems to be mainly used for FPS, but I think the list above (which features two single-player RPGs, one MMORPG and two third-person action games) seems to run contrary to that.
And even if every UE3 game featured "inane looking bald space marines" that would hardly be a reflection on the engine. It wouldn't be Epic's fault if every developer using the engine was so lacking in creativity that they only made bald space marines. That would actually be a reflection of a much greater malaise in the industry in general. So it's just as well that your assertion is crap.
According to CVG the reason that the Assassin's Creed demo was a bit buggy and underwhelming in the press conference demonstration was that they were asked to show it off at last minute because Bungie were unable to get a single player demo of Halo 3 ready in time.
My first video game was Dark Castle on my Dad's Mac SE in 1987. I was three at the time, and I've played video games ever since. My first games console was a Sega Master System II (I lived in New Zealand, where Sega was generally bigger than Nintendo). Since then I've owned a lot of systems. I generally play FPS and RPGs, though I'll happily play other genres provided the game is good. While I haven't upgraded to a PS3 or Wii yet (lack of software I want) I currently have a 360, Gamecube and PS2 hooked up to my HDTV. My collection of games playable on the three systems (including Xbox games) numbers at least 120. I have a high-end gaming PC as well.
For me, the most important thing is intellectual engagement. I play piles of RPGs primarily because I like stories. A lot of the games I have enjoyed have been purely due to the quality of the art (and this does not at all imply that I like flashy graphics!). I like my games to have depth to their gameplay. I don't care if the gameplay is not vastly different and unique - some of the best games I've played have been very conventional. In fact, I like the conventional nature of the gameplay, I find it reassuring and I appreciate the fact that due to my previous knowledge I can easily jump straight into a new game and begin to play and enjoy it without re-learning everything. I like conventional gameplay because I am easily able to tell whether the game is a type which will interest me without having to purchase it.
I don't consider myself to be a hardcore gamer. I just like playing certain types of games. However, I suspect that I am exactly what the industry considers to be part of their 'hardcore' market. What is it that makes me different from someone who plays Wii sports for several hours every day? Or someone who plays DS games for half an hour every morning and evening during their commute to and from work on public transport? What about the people who clock up dozens of hours playing Pokemon, building spreadsheets to track statistics and optimise their gameplay? Are they hardcore, or casual? Are they more or less hardcore than me? If they're casual, what makes one more casual than the other? If I was to collect piles of games but hardly ever play them, am I a hardcore gamer?
The whole act of compartmentalizing gamers into two seemingly opposed factions and then attempting to set them off against each other seems pointless to me. Especially when the two factions are so nebulous. Neither side seems to have a clear definition, and there is no reason why they can't both coexist. About the only real distinction that I can see is a purely mercenary one - casual players are numerous, but generally don't buy many games, where hardcore gamers are willing to sink more money into it. Casual vs Hardcore seems to be a fabrication created by marketing and the media.
In reality, gaming is more akin to music. There's different instruments that are played in different ways. Some are more accessible, and some are less accessible. There are people who aren't interested in playing an instrument. There are people who picked up a cheap guitar and learned a few chords. There are professional musicians, for whom playing their instruments is a full time passion. There are people who design and build instruments. It's not two diametrically opposed camps - professionals and amateurs or something - it's a whole continuum of different levels of interest, skill and engagement. In gaming, there seems to be this feeling that somehow higher availability of cheap, simple, accessible casual games will somehow lead to the more 'hardcore' games disappearing. It's like proclaiming that being able to buy cheap mass produced guitars from China is going to put Fender out of business or somehow stop them from making professional-level instruments. Nonsense. As long as there's a viable market for enthusiast-level equipment, they're not going to go anywhere. On the other side, a lot of casual gamers tend to deride people for playing the more 'h
I think whoever wrote TFA has confused themselves and created 'swarm behavior' as some kind of strange blend of swarm intelligence (the actual name of the field) and collective and/or emergent behavior. It threw me out until I realised this - when I read 'swarm behavior' I was expecting to see some discussion of flocking, but the author went straight into talking about ant behavior, which is generally considered a different part of the field.
I'm stunned that Pacman isn't in the top ten. While it's true that some classic arcade games (eg Pong) haven't dated well, the same cannot be said about Pacman. Simple, addictive and surprisingly deep gameplay, extremely accessible, and I'd argue that the yellow pie-with-a-slice-missing is at least as recognisable to the average Joe as Mario. Possibly even more so.
I found the most frustrating thing in Return to Zork aside from the game's propensity to kill you if you made a mistake was the bloody bog maze. Every area looked alike, you had to check every direction with the stick to find solid ground, and the whole thing was randomly generated. Just a pain in the ass. Eventually I gave up on it and instead figured out how to get through one of the other mazes (you were supposed to use the bats that you got from the witch in the bogs to show you the solution to said maze), grabbed the magnet, and was then able to teleport out of the bog without going through that horrible maze. Saved me hours of frustration.
Also, regarding the bonding plant (I don't think we need to censor spoilers from a game from 1993) I always liked that the game didn't bat an eye if you ate the plant. In fact I seem to vaguely recall that if you did things right you could go back to the area at the start of the game and get a replacement.
I'm probably an ungodly heathen or something for even suggesting this, but I found I enjoyed Zork Zero and Beyond Zork a lot more than the original trilogy.
I think that, at least for me, it all comes down to a price/convenience tradeoff. The reason that online sales are growing so much is simply that MP3 and similar formats are convenient. On a single hard drive you can fit the sort of music that, on separate CDs, takes a huge amount of storage space. And they're right there at your fingertips. Couple the advantages with the ability to buy music without having to leave your chair and you can see that the traditional CD, while better quality, has a general feeling of being less convenient. The difference is subtle, but enough that people would prefer to download the music rather than go to a store, buy the CD, and then take it home. And let's be honest, the first thing most people would do with it is rip the CD and throw the music onto their iPod. Relative sound quality doesn't even come into it for the average joe.
CD sales would go up a lot if their prices were adjusted to reflect the fact that the market has radically changed over the last ten years. I'm not sure how much the average album is going for in the US, but here in Australia you'd expect to pay around $25 AUD. Personally I would love to be able to afford to buy a pile of CDs, but at that sort of price I'm not even going to consider it. If they were closer to $10, I'd be buying a heck of a lot more, because at that price the slight inconvenience of the media is balanced out. Heck, I'd consider picking up entire discographies.
How about we wait until we've set up a permanent presence on the moon before we start making grandiose and probably impractical claims about what we'll do a century from now? There's nothing wrong with having goals and vision, but talking about terraforming Mars as an absolute certainty at this point in our development as a species is like announcing you're going to be the first person to climb Everest when you've only just learned to crawl. We're not even sure that terraforming Mars is possible, let alone practical.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I really hope they modernise the gameplay. I never played Fallout back when it was fresh and current, I was playing all the games based off Bioware's engine - Planescape, Baldur's Gate, etc. I decided to dig up a copy of Fallout a few years back and give it a go since it's such a well-loved game.
The setting is absolutely fantastic, and generally I liked most of the concepts behind it. The gameplay, however, felt incredibly clunky. So much so that I ended up giving up on the game. I can see why people would find the concept so compelling, but the actual execution of the gameplay was like running into a brick wall for me.
any comparison of lotr to ww2, ww1 or Europe at the time of the writing would come up seriously lacking
Tolkien was a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought in the Battle of the Somme in WW1. He started writing some of the Middle Earth backstories (the fall of Gondolin for example) while recovering from trench fever. His experience in trench warfare in WW1 definitely had an impact on his writing - that's the sort of trauma which stays with people for life.
Re:Can someone who actually played the beta...
on
Halo, Nothing But Halo
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Additionally, beta implicitly tells us that the game isn't finished. Good game developers focus on getting the whole game finished and playable, then they add the polish at the end. It's still 3 months away from shipping, and the beta was probably ready to go at least a month ago, so that's a fair amount of extra time to go. I imagine a lot of the graphical effects they're intending on are simply unfinished and probably completely chew the framerate. Bungie would get even more negative feedback if the game looked really pretty but played at 10fps.
The sad thing is that had Obsidian been allowed to actually finish KotOR2 it would have definitely been remembered fondly. It has a much stronger storyline and the characters are a lot deeper and better written than they were in the original. The problem is that you have to use your imagination a bit to figure them all out, since whole chunks of what they planned were dumped due to Lucasarts forcing them to push it out the door for Christmas.
When you say 'based on C', do you mean that the compiler / interpreter is written in C, or that the language itself is derived from C? Because technically Ruby is based off Perl and Smalltalk, not C. The Perl side of things can be traced back to C, but Smalltalk's origins are in Lisp.
However they are all implemented in C, as is PHP. In fact, I'm reasonably confident you'll find all of the web languages that the article declares are taking over are implemented using C. As is Apache, which is the backbone of the majority of internet servers. In fact, pretty much everything that provides important infrastructure is written in C.
There may be demand right now for programmers that know the latest fad high-level language, but the demand for competent C programmers has hardly disappeared. The only reason that C would die is if another fast, portable, general-purpose language like it came along that offered significant benefits over C. I can't personally see that happening any time soon.
It was Halo's multiplayer which created the hype, and from the sounds of things you haven't played that. Judged just off single player and co-op it's reasonably average.
Voting is mandatory in Australia, so the comparison isn't quite apples-to-apples. Personally I've always wondered if a system where you vote for the person you don't want might not work better.
A lot of laptops now are using Matsushita drives which are built so that all CSS-related decryption is handled by the hardware. I'm not technically versed enough to explain exactly what's going on, but the end result is that there is no way to break the encryption, because the drive will simply not allow you to read the encrypted data. This means that none of the region work-arounds for legitimate discs works. I've got a laptop (Acer) with one of the offending drives in it, and I know that a lot of Apple's products were using them a while back. Not sure if it's still the case. Basically the only way to get around it is if some intrepid individual has managed to get hold of the firmware and patched it, and apparently it's pretty much impossible to retrieve the firmware off those drives too.
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... is that Australia, unlike the US, does not have the right to free speech enshrined in its constitution. We have no Bill of Rights. Aside from a few things that have been explicitly spelt out - freedom of religion, right to trial by jury, just compensation and a few others, essentially our rights in Australia are whatever the government says they are.
Crows have been observed to construct tools as well. In fact, they fashion more complex tools than chimps. They've learned different designs by copying other birds, and they pass their tool-building knowledge down through the generations.
Tool construction and use is not a uniquely human trait, it's not even unique to primates.
Devil May Cry 4 is Multiplatform. Haze is multi-platform with PS3 having an exclusivity period of currently unknown length, and Unreal Tournament 3 is multi-platform PC and PS3 in November and 360 some time in 2008.
PS3 does have a strong lineup going into Christmas, but take out the multi-platform titles and the 360's lineup is undoubtedly stronger. PS3 needs a Halo or a Mass Effect or something which, rather than being a game you rush out to buy if you have a PS3, is a game you rush out to buy a PS3 to play. The games which will have that impact (MGS4, Final Fantasy XIII, and probably a few others) won't be around until next year. It's entirely possible that Uncharted may be one of these big system-sellers, but to be honest we've seen so little of it at this point that they've got a long way to go to get interest in it to that level.
Hopefully Sony are smart enough that they handle the Christmas rush so that they manage to push a lot of units out regardless. Otherwise Microsoft is going to get so much of a lead up that the PS3 will be physically unable to catch up. That would be bad for the whole market. Competition is a good thing.
All that has to happen is that they record whatever they seed their random number generator with. If the RNG is seeded with the same initial value, then the same inputs will always produce the same results. Technically speaking you should then be able to jump in at any point, and when you take over your input will change and then things will play differently.
I don't think it would be very fun, though. Not to mention completely cheapen the gameplay as you could essentially rewind things until you win. The more interesting aspects of the saved films is that the camera data won't be part of what they record, so technically you should be able to watch the action from any angle you want. Must be a godsend for testing.
Acorn didn't really die. The part of the company that really mattered became ARM, and now their processors are in practically every handheld electronic device on the market.
Personally, one of the high schools I attended used Acorn computers exclusively and I found them immensely frustrating to use, but that's a perception that is very likely influenced by the fact that I grew up using Apple.
You would have to wait for 50 years before you could distribute it if you made the recording now. This decision was about the length of copyright for the physical recordings of songs. I believe you'll find that the length of copyright for the actual music and lyrics is life of the composer and writer + 70 years.
You mean 'just look at Gears of War' because that seems to be your entire basis for your argument.
To date, as far as I'm aware only three games have shipped using UE3:
- Gears of War
- Rainbow Six: Vegas
- Roboblitz (Xbox Live Arcade game)
Only one of these games features "inane looking bald space marines".
If we look at the near future there's a pile of UE3 games releasing, for example
- Stranglehold
- Bioshock
- Blacksite: Area 51
- Fury
- Huxley
- Lost Odyssey
- Mass Effect
- Medal of Honor: Airborne
- Undertow
- Unreal Tournament 3
Of those, only UT3, Huxley and maybe Mass Effect and Blacksite are likely to have "inane looking bald space marines". Now, you might have tried a better troll, maybe pointing out that UE3 seems to be mainly used for FPS, but I think the list above (which features two single-player RPGs, one MMORPG and two third-person action games) seems to run contrary to that.
And even if every UE3 game featured "inane looking bald space marines" that would hardly be a reflection on the engine. It wouldn't be Epic's fault if every developer using the engine was so lacking in creativity that they only made bald space marines. That would actually be a reflection of a much greater malaise in the industry in general. So it's just as well that your assertion is crap.
According to CVG the reason that the Assassin's Creed demo was a bit buggy and underwhelming in the press conference demonstration was that they were asked to show it off at last minute because Bungie were unable to get a single player demo of Halo 3 ready in time.
What is a 'hardcore' gamer?
My first video game was Dark Castle on my Dad's Mac SE in 1987. I was three at the time, and I've played video games ever since. My first games console was a Sega Master System II (I lived in New Zealand, where Sega was generally bigger than Nintendo). Since then I've owned a lot of systems. I generally play FPS and RPGs, though I'll happily play other genres provided the game is good. While I haven't upgraded to a PS3 or Wii yet (lack of software I want) I currently have a 360, Gamecube and PS2 hooked up to my HDTV. My collection of games playable on the three systems (including Xbox games) numbers at least 120. I have a high-end gaming PC as well.
For me, the most important thing is intellectual engagement. I play piles of RPGs primarily because I like stories. A lot of the games I have enjoyed have been purely due to the quality of the art (and this does not at all imply that I like flashy graphics!). I like my games to have depth to their gameplay. I don't care if the gameplay is not vastly different and unique - some of the best games I've played have been very conventional. In fact, I like the conventional nature of the gameplay, I find it reassuring and I appreciate the fact that due to my previous knowledge I can easily jump straight into a new game and begin to play and enjoy it without re-learning everything. I like conventional gameplay because I am easily able to tell whether the game is a type which will interest me without having to purchase it.
I don't consider myself to be a hardcore gamer. I just like playing certain types of games. However, I suspect that I am exactly what the industry considers to be part of their 'hardcore' market. What is it that makes me different from someone who plays Wii sports for several hours every day? Or someone who plays DS games for half an hour every morning and evening during their commute to and from work on public transport? What about the people who clock up dozens of hours playing Pokemon, building spreadsheets to track statistics and optimise their gameplay? Are they hardcore, or casual? Are they more or less hardcore than me? If they're casual, what makes one more casual than the other? If I was to collect piles of games but hardly ever play them, am I a hardcore gamer?
The whole act of compartmentalizing gamers into two seemingly opposed factions and then attempting to set them off against each other seems pointless to me. Especially when the two factions are so nebulous. Neither side seems to have a clear definition, and there is no reason why they can't both coexist. About the only real distinction that I can see is a purely mercenary one - casual players are numerous, but generally don't buy many games, where hardcore gamers are willing to sink more money into it. Casual vs Hardcore seems to be a fabrication created by marketing and the media.
In reality, gaming is more akin to music. There's different instruments that are played in different ways. Some are more accessible, and some are less accessible. There are people who aren't interested in playing an instrument. There are people who picked up a cheap guitar and learned a few chords. There are professional musicians, for whom playing their instruments is a full time passion. There are people who design and build instruments. It's not two diametrically opposed camps - professionals and amateurs or something - it's a whole continuum of different levels of interest, skill and engagement. In gaming, there seems to be this feeling that somehow higher availability of cheap, simple, accessible casual games will somehow lead to the more 'hardcore' games disappearing. It's like proclaiming that being able to buy cheap mass produced guitars from China is going to put Fender out of business or somehow stop them from making professional-level instruments. Nonsense. As long as there's a viable market for enthusiast-level equipment, they're not going to go anywhere. On the other side, a lot of casual gamers tend to deride people for playing the more 'h
I think whoever wrote TFA has confused themselves and created 'swarm behavior' as some kind of strange blend of swarm intelligence (the actual name of the field) and collective and/or emergent behavior. It threw me out until I realised this - when I read 'swarm behavior' I was expecting to see some discussion of flocking, but the author went straight into talking about ant behavior, which is generally considered a different part of the field.
I'm stunned that Pacman isn't in the top ten. While it's true that some classic arcade games (eg Pong) haven't dated well, the same cannot be said about Pacman. Simple, addictive and surprisingly deep gameplay, extremely accessible, and I'd argue that the yellow pie-with-a-slice-missing is at least as recognisable to the average Joe as Mario. Possibly even more so.
Yeah, it's from the opening cinematic.
I found the most frustrating thing in Return to Zork aside from the game's propensity to kill you if you made a mistake was the bloody bog maze. Every area looked alike, you had to check every direction with the stick to find solid ground, and the whole thing was randomly generated. Just a pain in the ass. Eventually I gave up on it and instead figured out how to get through one of the other mazes (you were supposed to use the bats that you got from the witch in the bogs to show you the solution to said maze), grabbed the magnet, and was then able to teleport out of the bog without going through that horrible maze. Saved me hours of frustration.
Also, regarding the bonding plant (I don't think we need to censor spoilers from a game from 1993) I always liked that the game didn't bat an eye if you ate the plant. In fact I seem to vaguely recall that if you did things right you could go back to the area at the start of the game and get a replacement.
I'm probably an ungodly heathen or something for even suggesting this, but I found I enjoyed Zork Zero and Beyond Zork a lot more than the original trilogy.
I think that, at least for me, it all comes down to a price/convenience tradeoff. The reason that online sales are growing so much is simply that MP3 and similar formats are convenient. On a single hard drive you can fit the sort of music that, on separate CDs, takes a huge amount of storage space. And they're right there at your fingertips. Couple the advantages with the ability to buy music without having to leave your chair and you can see that the traditional CD, while better quality, has a general feeling of being less convenient. The difference is subtle, but enough that people would prefer to download the music rather than go to a store, buy the CD, and then take it home. And let's be honest, the first thing most people would do with it is rip the CD and throw the music onto their iPod. Relative sound quality doesn't even come into it for the average joe.
CD sales would go up a lot if their prices were adjusted to reflect the fact that the market has radically changed over the last ten years. I'm not sure how much the average album is going for in the US, but here in Australia you'd expect to pay around $25 AUD. Personally I would love to be able to afford to buy a pile of CDs, but at that sort of price I'm not even going to consider it. If they were closer to $10, I'd be buying a heck of a lot more, because at that price the slight inconvenience of the media is balanced out. Heck, I'd consider picking up entire discographies.
How about we wait until we've set up a permanent presence on the moon before we start making grandiose and probably impractical claims about what we'll do a century from now? There's nothing wrong with having goals and vision, but talking about terraforming Mars as an absolute certainty at this point in our development as a species is like announcing you're going to be the first person to climb Everest when you've only just learned to crawl. We're not even sure that terraforming Mars is possible, let alone practical.
Isn't torture already illegal in the EU?
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I really hope they modernise the gameplay. I never played Fallout back when it was fresh and current, I was playing all the games based off Bioware's engine - Planescape, Baldur's Gate, etc. I decided to dig up a copy of Fallout a few years back and give it a go since it's such a well-loved game.
The setting is absolutely fantastic, and generally I liked most of the concepts behind it. The gameplay, however, felt incredibly clunky. So much so that I ended up giving up on the game. I can see why people would find the concept so compelling, but the actual execution of the gameplay was like running into a brick wall for me.
any comparison of lotr to ww2, ww1 or Europe at the time of the writing would come up seriously lacking
Tolkien was a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought in the Battle of the Somme in WW1. He started writing some of the Middle Earth backstories (the fall of Gondolin for example) while recovering from trench fever. His experience in trench warfare in WW1 definitely had an impact on his writing - that's the sort of trauma which stays with people for life.
Additionally, beta implicitly tells us that the game isn't finished. Good game developers focus on getting the whole game finished and playable, then they add the polish at the end. It's still 3 months away from shipping, and the beta was probably ready to go at least a month ago, so that's a fair amount of extra time to go. I imagine a lot of the graphical effects they're intending on are simply unfinished and probably completely chew the framerate. Bungie would get even more negative feedback if the game looked really pretty but played at 10fps.
The sad thing is that had Obsidian been allowed to actually finish KotOR2 it would have definitely been remembered fondly. It has a much stronger storyline and the characters are a lot deeper and better written than they were in the original. The problem is that you have to use your imagination a bit to figure them all out, since whole chunks of what they planned were dumped due to Lucasarts forcing them to push it out the door for Christmas.
When you say 'based on C', do you mean that the compiler / interpreter is written in C, or that the language itself is derived from C? Because technically Ruby is based off Perl and Smalltalk, not C. The Perl side of things can be traced back to C, but Smalltalk's origins are in Lisp.
However they are all implemented in C, as is PHP. In fact, I'm reasonably confident you'll find all of the web languages that the article declares are taking over are implemented using C. As is Apache, which is the backbone of the majority of internet servers. In fact, pretty much everything that provides important infrastructure is written in C.
There may be demand right now for programmers that know the latest fad high-level language, but the demand for competent C programmers has hardly disappeared. The only reason that C would die is if another fast, portable, general-purpose language like it came along that offered significant benefits over C. I can't personally see that happening any time soon.
It was Halo's multiplayer which created the hype, and from the sounds of things you haven't played that. Judged just off single player and co-op it's reasonably average.
Make it even more inconvenient to buy legitimate copies. That'll sure encourage people to buy them instead of resorting to piracy.
Voting is mandatory in Australia, so the comparison isn't quite apples-to-apples. Personally I've always wondered if a system where you vote for the person you don't want might not work better.
A lot of laptops now are using Matsushita drives which are built so that all CSS-related decryption is handled by the hardware. I'm not technically versed enough to explain exactly what's going on, but the end result is that there is no way to break the encryption, because the drive will simply not allow you to read the encrypted data. This means that none of the region work-arounds for legitimate discs works. I've got a laptop (Acer) with one of the offending drives in it, and I know that a lot of Apple's products were using them a while back. Not sure if it's still the case. Basically the only way to get around it is if some intrepid individual has managed to get hold of the firmware and patched it, and apparently it's pretty much impossible to retrieve the firmware off those drives too.