As the GP hinted, people tend to give stuff to those who (are|claim to be) female in online games. So if I use a feminine handle during a game of Counter strike and drop the word "boys" a lot as though I'm not included in that category, then mention that I can't afford a good weapon others have been more than happy to buy it for me for some reason. Works even better if I have a female friend talk into the mic, but alas that's not always an option.
While I expect your post had no other purpose than to be funny, what you propose is certainly research-worthy.
If an individual has racist tendencies I would have thought it a natural extension for them to have racist tendencies in a virtual world. However, it is not so clear that people would treat the opposite gender the same in a virtual world. There's no visual cues, no (or extremely little) chance of getting in bed with the other person. There's no pheromones to screw with you, no visual/physical distractions.
Also, in a game of Counter Strike when I'm short on cash and I need someone to buy me an AK or M4, I change my handle to "Flowerpower22" and the problem takes care of itself.
I'd be interested in seeing an actual scientific study into this.
Steam is okay with many largely because it's been broken forever and a half ago. All my (single-player) steam games are (cracked and) backed up on an external HDD. I don't need to contact VALVe's servers to install my (legitimately purchased, single-player) software.
It's like DVD's. They're DRM'd too but we've known for so long how to get around it and have become so accustomed to doing so that we don't really mind it so much.
Even so, that doesn't make it right. I shouldn't have to activate OR crack HalfLife2 to play it on my box after paying good monies.
Facebook users seem so confused. Facebook, Inc. *OWNS* the website facebook.com - they can do basically whatever they want with it. tough cookies.
While it is true that facebook.com is privately owned and not legally required to avoid doing things that piss of it's users/customers, it may still be financially advisable. If a sufficient number of users do become upset for one reason or another that $15B will no longer be growing - quite the opposite.
Of course, that's what I thought about things like DRM and WGA, and while they don't really accomplish much beyond pissing off consumers the companies which use them yet flourish.
People actually like the difficulties in controlling things in SC. It makes it challenging, competitive. For better or worse SC is just as much about skill in micromanagement and multitasking as it is strategy.
Blizzard is really trying to appeal to SC's hardcore crowd with SC2. They're purposefully doing things to force you to micromanage - like making you "refill" the Vespene Geysers.
They will not let you "zoom out" as you could in Supreme Commander. It would cause far, far to much of a change in the way the game is played.
It's more than just a little change here or an improvement there. There's some fundamental stuff it's doing differently (eg: new thread for each tab). I wouldn't be surprised if Google did talk to some people at Mozilla to see if they could implement such things in, say, fx4. I also wouldn't be surprised if Mozilla said no. They're choices were really limited to forking an existing browser or making one from scratch. With the number of changes it seems it may be easier to do the latter.
That's in part because Google Earth is closed source. I expect a fair number of people to help Google get the Linux version out a bit earlier because they're actually allowed to help this time around.
Firstly, while I'm opposed to copy protection of this flavour in general, SecuROM is one of the tamer options out there. Yes, it causes problems for some users, but really, there's far worse out there.
Just because it's not as bad as others doesn't make it somehow acceptable. "Theft is okay, at least they didn't also rape and murder"
I don't believe it's fair or at all reasonable to let Maxis suffer because of the inclusion of SecuROM
So, what, EA is holding some innocent people hostage? We have to pay the bad people at EA so they don't make the poor developers who have to stick with them starve? The individuals can quit and join other companies or start up their own. I'm not going to demonize them for it (just the people who actually made the choice to put in the DRM) but I'm not going to fund them, either, if I know a substantial chunk of the money is going to people who are actively doing things that piss me off.
For the most part I agree. There are a cases where companies did remove or lessen DRM thanks to complaints and boycotts such as mine (See: Bioshock, Mass Effect), but they're few and far between. I'm hoping against the odds that more people will join in to make these few cases more common - I recognize that we're a long way off from revolutionizing the industry. I have no intention of demonizing people who don't care enough to do the same - the problem is caused by the companies, not their consumers. If it doesn't bother you, enjoy. It sure bothers me, though ):
If there is some technical reason - if it doesn't work properly on your hardware - then, of course, you should not get it. My point was not to avoid it on principle. A functioning but lazy port to such a small market should still be encouraged.
Sorry but my money will go to Blizzard
What is this comment for? I love Blizzard and, to quote teh_pwnerer, "EA can suck my balls." I'd much prefer $random_person do business with companies like Blizzard rather than EA.
That's a bit of a brain-dead decision on EA's part to drop maybe a third of Mac users, given that we're supposed to be about 8% of gamers at most (if we believe the usual numbers).
From the comments I've seen here, it seems a bit of a brain-dead decision on EA's part to actually take the time and money to get a mac port at all.
I just view companies like EA as I do children, or maybe dogs. These ideas, justified or not, are too complicated for them.
Child does good you praise it, child does bad you put it in time out. Dog does good you give it a treat, dog does bad you stuff it's face in the mess it made and yell "bad dog." EA does over-all net good you buy their game, EA does bad you boycott it and maybe yell on their forums. Don't try to say "Making for mac is good but [details]." Details are confusing while they're still struggling with the whole Mac-good or Mac-bad thing.
Again, like children or dogs it may take a good number of reward-punishment cycles before these ideas start sinking in and you can try to teach it something else. Don't be discouraged when yet another game is released with DRM or Cider.
Too bad it works on 99% of home users without causing problems.
From what I've seen it does not work for 99% of home users without causing problems. It's just they don't realize it's causing problems or don't care when they can just phone up the techy kid across the street or when Geek Squad tells them they just need more RAM. Don't confuse a lack of understanding or care with a lack of problems.
SecuROM is just how you're justifying to yourself receiving the software they paid money to produce, without paying for it.
Perhaps that would be true if people who were boycotting this because of the DRM pirated DRM-free games like (non-GOTY edition) Oblivion, which was a highly successful game. In some cases that may have happened, but it's certainly not what happened across the board. I am not the only one who actually purchased Oblivion but won't get this because of the DRM.
Your argument reminds me of those who say that anyone who supports gay marriage must be themselves gay. It has the same level of even-though-you-make-perfect-sense-you're-still-the-bad-guy-here-for-no-good-reason.
Not buying it because of SecuROM is certainly justified, but not buying it because EA is using Cider rather than making a real Mac port is just silly. The only thing EA is going to actually understand from this is that they're not getting Mac sales and they wasted time and money getting this thing cross-platform on PC's.
Unless you *don't* want them making it on the Mac at all - or if it just plain doesn't work well under Cider - than don't let the fact it's not native stop you from getting it. While making games for the Mac is still so uncommon this kind of thing should be encouraged, not discouraged. Later when it's considered SOP to make games of the Mac you can go ahead and complain about such things.
Do you disagree that an ideal state would have enough police, or that this is impractical?
The fear of neighbors is really a fear of the police by proxy - has to be some police. For it to be "ideal" it would have to be "enough", no?
At what point does reporting crimes become fascist?
It's not the action of reporting the crime that would be fascist - it'd be the government's encouragement thereof. It would be certainly justified to report your neighbor playing their music to loudly at 3:00AM, or vandalizing near by property. This isn't because of the government that one would do this though - it would be of their own volition for their own good. It becomes fascist when you do it because the state wants you too more than because you would want too. This can be because the government rewards you (most likely monetarily), although ideally one should do it out of fear.
I disagree. It isn't as though governments in and of themselves necessarily want to appease the rich. It's just being rich means that individual has sufficient power to bend such things. If you'll allow me to personify Fascism, it doesn't *want* to let the wealth to get around it's control. It would view this as one of it's own weaknesses, one of it's flaws. Fascism wants everybody, wealthy or otherwise.
In an ideally policed state, there would be sufficient police employed to witness or prevent every deliberate crime but this is impractical.
I disagree. In an ideally police state, there will not be a huge need for police. Fear will keep people in their place. The fear of knowing your neighbor is right next door nigh 24/7, for example.
The main thing about this that keeps it from being overly fascist is the lack of punishment for failing to report on your neighbor. This is only a little bit fascist.
It's best known for it's community. It's not unusual for a new member of the Linux community to be directed to Ubuntu's forums or wiki. While it's possible to get official support a la RHEL, many (I expect the majority?) of it's users treat it as though it's a "Community" Linux Distro. I sure do.
From having RTFA it does seem that he was assassinated for his anti-government stance. However it was also stated that the region was (1) "volatile" and (2) most Muslim. From the "volatile" we can presume many others have died there who were not necessarily outspoken and anti-government. There could easily be a relation between this fact and the largely Muslim population and the fact that this individual was also Muslim.
It's not entirely unlikely the cop had a friend who was harmed in the line of duty (especially if the area was volatile). If the particular area is largely of any particular denomination, it's likely that should, say, the cop's partner be killed it would be done by someone of that denomination irrelevant of what it is. So if he wanted to take his frustration out on someone, it's possible he picked a Muslim for that reason alone. The whole webmaster thing could just be an excuse for getting the guy alone in the cop car.
Or maybe the cop was just flat-out prejudiced? While I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about the region to know how likely that may be, I do know that if a black outspoken anti-government individual was killed in the southern US while in a cop car the fact he is black would certainly be taken into consideration.
Without more information it's not really possible to be sure as to whether the fact he is Muslim is related, but it's certainly plausible. This factoid has plenty to do with this news. The Russian government may have a history of killing off people it doesn't like - even it's own citizens - but it's a large country and plenty of people are going to die for other reasons. We just don't hear about them on/. if they're not sufficiently tech-related.
When they get things up to speed. At the moment, as much as I want to support burgeoning FOSS movements, their Linux drivers are still pretty weak. I'm working on a project now which will require a mini-ITX board, so my first natural choice to consider was VIA. While I don't need super-beefy hardware, TV-out and 3D (and Linux) needs to be supported for what I'm doing. I'm right now looking at mini-ITX boards with Intel chipsets, or I'll even consider closed-source nVidia drivers - but sadly VIA is still not an option. Not yet.
Has BD+ been cracked yet? I've heard tons about it early on (especially on slashdot), but nothing at all in the last few months. Is it possible to play a Blu-ray disk on Linux?
Does this remind anyone else of the 'rules' behind FTL drive in most sci-fi books? Ya-da ya-da gravity well means no FTL but once you move away from the singularity... zooooooooom. Granted I'm now comparing sci-fi "physics" with a minor observed variation in real life....but shhhh!
Can you name a few books with those 'rules'? I can't think of any, and my sci-fi reading list is dangerously small at the moment.
The Republicans freed the slaves, and so as a black man I'm going to vote Republican this time around. *rolls eyes*
Please do not put much value on what a given party did historically, but rather what the party's leading candidates are most likely going to do given their own personal history. Yes, the Democrats were in charge as we jumped into a number of wars. However at the moment the Democrats want the support of those who are upset about the whole Iraq thing. Therefore they're playing the anti-war card. It's not that complicated.
There is some merit to your mention of the fact that many of the anti-war claims from the Democrats aren't quite what they were a number of months ago. This is not, however, even remotely related to the fact they were in charge as we went into WWI.
Slashdot Mirror
As the GP hinted, people tend to give stuff to those who (are|claim to be) female in online games. So if I use a feminine handle during a game of Counter strike and drop the word "boys" a lot as though I'm not included in that category, then mention that I can't afford a good weapon others have been more than happy to buy it for me for some reason. Works even better if I have a female friend talk into the mic, but alas that's not always an option.
While I expect your post had no other purpose than to be funny, what you propose is certainly research-worthy.
If an individual has racist tendencies I would have thought it a natural extension for them to have racist tendencies in a virtual world. However, it is not so clear that people would treat the opposite gender the same in a virtual world. There's no visual cues, no (or extremely little) chance of getting in bed with the other person. There's no pheromones to screw with you, no visual/physical distractions.
Also, in a game of Counter Strike when I'm short on cash and I need someone to buy me an AK or M4, I change my handle to "Flowerpower22" and the problem takes care of itself.
I'd be interested in seeing an actual scientific study into this.
Steam is okay with many largely because it's been broken forever and a half ago. All my (single-player) steam games are (cracked and) backed up on an external HDD. I don't need to contact VALVe's servers to install my (legitimately purchased, single-player) software.
It's like DVD's. They're DRM'd too but we've known for so long how to get around it and have become so accustomed to doing so that we don't really mind it so much.
Even so, that doesn't make it right. I shouldn't have to activate OR crack HalfLife2 to play it on my box after paying good monies.
Facebook users seem so confused. Facebook, Inc. *OWNS* the website facebook.com - they can do basically whatever they want with it. tough cookies.
While it is true that facebook.com is privately owned and not legally required to avoid doing things that piss of it's users/customers, it may still be financially advisable. If a sufficient number of users do become upset for one reason or another that $15B will no longer be growing - quite the opposite.
Of course, that's what I thought about things like DRM and WGA, and while they don't really accomplish much beyond pissing off consumers the companies which use them yet flourish.
Durability and longevity.
I would use funpidgin if they would change the stupid name. Maybe if someone forks it...
People actually like the difficulties in controlling things in SC. It makes it challenging, competitive. For better or worse SC is just as much about skill in micromanagement and multitasking as it is strategy.
Blizzard is really trying to appeal to SC's hardcore crowd with SC2. They're purposefully doing things to force you to micromanage - like making you "refill" the Vespene Geysers.
They will not let you "zoom out" as you could in Supreme Commander. It would cause far, far to much of a change in the way the game is played.
It's more than just a little change here or an improvement there. There's some fundamental stuff it's doing differently (eg: new thread for each tab). I wouldn't be surprised if Google did talk to some people at Mozilla to see if they could implement such things in, say, fx4. I also wouldn't be surprised if Mozilla said no. They're choices were really limited to forking an existing browser or making one from scratch. With the number of changes it seems it may be easier to do the latter.
That's in part because Google Earth is closed source. I expect a fair number of people to help Google get the Linux version out a bit earlier because they're actually allowed to help this time around.
Firstly, while I'm opposed to copy protection of this flavour in general, SecuROM is one of the tamer options out there. Yes, it causes problems for some users, but really, there's far worse out there.
Just because it's not as bad as others doesn't make it somehow acceptable. "Theft is okay, at least they didn't also rape and murder"
I don't believe it's fair or at all reasonable to let Maxis suffer because of the inclusion of SecuROM
So, what, EA is holding some innocent people hostage? We have to pay the bad people at EA so they don't make the poor developers who have to stick with them starve? The individuals can quit and join other companies or start up their own. I'm not going to demonize them for it (just the people who actually made the choice to put in the DRM) but I'm not going to fund them, either, if I know a substantial chunk of the money is going to people who are actively doing things that piss me off.
For the most part I agree. There are a cases where companies did remove or lessen DRM thanks to complaints and boycotts such as mine (See: Bioshock, Mass Effect), but they're few and far between. I'm hoping against the odds that more people will join in to make these few cases more common - I recognize that we're a long way off from revolutionizing the industry. I have no intention of demonizing people who don't care enough to do the same - the problem is caused by the companies, not their consumers. If it doesn't bother you, enjoy. It sure bothers me, though ):
Sorry but my money will go to Blizzard
What is this comment for? I love Blizzard and, to quote teh_pwnerer, "EA can suck my balls." I'd much prefer $random_person do business with companies like Blizzard rather than EA.
That's a bit of a brain-dead decision on EA's part to drop maybe a third of Mac users, given that we're supposed to be about 8% of gamers at most (if we believe the usual numbers).
From the comments I've seen here, it seems a bit of a brain-dead decision on EA's part to actually take the time and money to get a mac port at all.
I just view companies like EA as I do children, or maybe dogs. These ideas, justified or not, are too complicated for them.
Child does good you praise it, child does bad you put it in time out. Dog does good you give it a treat, dog does bad you stuff it's face in the mess it made and yell "bad dog." EA does over-all net good you buy their game, EA does bad you boycott it and maybe yell on their forums. Don't try to say "Making for mac is good but [details]." Details are confusing while they're still struggling with the whole Mac-good or Mac-bad thing. Again, like children or dogs it may take a good number of reward-punishment cycles before these ideas start sinking in and you can try to teach it something else. Don't be discouraged when yet another game is released with DRM or Cider.
Too bad it works on 99% of home users without causing problems.
From what I've seen it does not work for 99% of home users without causing problems. It's just they don't realize it's causing problems or don't care when they can just phone up the techy kid across the street or when Geek Squad tells them they just need more RAM. Don't confuse a lack of understanding or care with a lack of problems.
SecuROM is just how you're justifying to yourself receiving the software they paid money to produce, without paying for it.
Perhaps that would be true if people who were boycotting this because of the DRM pirated DRM-free games like (non-GOTY edition) Oblivion, which was a highly successful game. In some cases that may have happened, but it's certainly not what happened across the board. I am not the only one who actually purchased Oblivion but won't get this because of the DRM.
Your argument reminds me of those who say that anyone who supports gay marriage must be themselves gay. It has the same level of even-though-you-make-perfect-sense-you're-still-the-bad-guy-here-for-no-good-reason.
Not buying it because of SecuROM is certainly justified, but not buying it because EA is using Cider rather than making a real Mac port is just silly. The only thing EA is going to actually understand from this is that they're not getting Mac sales and they wasted time and money getting this thing cross-platform on PC's.
Unless you *don't* want them making it on the Mac at all - or if it just plain doesn't work well under Cider - than don't let the fact it's not native stop you from getting it. While making games for the Mac is still so uncommon this kind of thing should be encouraged, not discouraged. Later when it's considered SOP to make games of the Mac you can go ahead and complain about such things.
Do you disagree that an ideal state would have enough police, or that this is impractical?
The fear of neighbors is really a fear of the police by proxy - has to be some police. For it to be "ideal" it would have to be "enough", no?
At what point does reporting crimes become fascist?
It's not the action of reporting the crime that would be fascist - it'd be the government's encouragement thereof. It would be certainly justified to report your neighbor playing their music to loudly at 3:00AM, or vandalizing near by property. This isn't because of the government that one would do this though - it would be of their own volition for their own good. It becomes fascist when you do it because the state wants you too more than because you would want too. This can be because the government rewards you (most likely monetarily), although ideally one should do it out of fear.
I disagree. It isn't as though governments in and of themselves necessarily want to appease the rich. It's just being rich means that individual has sufficient power to bend such things. If you'll allow me to personify Fascism, it doesn't *want* to let the wealth to get around it's control. It would view this as one of it's own weaknesses, one of it's flaws. Fascism wants everybody, wealthy or otherwise.
In an ideally policed state, there would be sufficient police employed to witness or prevent every deliberate crime but this is impractical.
I disagree. In an ideally police state, there will not be a huge need for police. Fear will keep people in their place. The fear of knowing your neighbor is right next door nigh 24/7, for example.
The main thing about this that keeps it from being overly fascist is the lack of punishment for failing to report on your neighbor. This is only a little bit fascist.
From my experience, if there are some really bad things happening, neighbour will not report, being too scared.
Which is why governments would want you to be more scared of them than your neighbo[u]r. Fear is powerful stuff.
It's best known for it's community. It's not unusual for a new member of the Linux community to be directed to Ubuntu's forums or wiki. While it's possible to get official support a la RHEL, many (I expect the majority?) of it's users treat it as though it's a "Community" Linux Distro. I sure do.
From having RTFA it does seem that he was assassinated for his anti-government stance. However it was also stated that the region was (1) "volatile" and (2) most Muslim. From the "volatile" we can presume many others have died there who were not necessarily outspoken and anti-government. There could easily be a relation between this fact and the largely Muslim population and the fact that this individual was also Muslim.
/. if they're not sufficiently tech-related.
It's not entirely unlikely the cop had a friend who was harmed in the line of duty (especially if the area was volatile). If the particular area is largely of any particular denomination, it's likely that should, say, the cop's partner be killed it would be done by someone of that denomination irrelevant of what it is. So if he wanted to take his frustration out on someone, it's possible he picked a Muslim for that reason alone. The whole webmaster thing could just be an excuse for getting the guy alone in the cop car.
Or maybe the cop was just flat-out prejudiced? While I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about the region to know how likely that may be, I do know that if a black outspoken anti-government individual was killed in the southern US while in a cop car the fact he is black would certainly be taken into consideration.
Without more information it's not really possible to be sure as to whether the fact he is Muslim is related, but it's certainly plausible. This factoid has plenty to do with this news. The Russian government may have a history of killing off people it doesn't like - even it's own citizens - but it's a large country and plenty of people are going to die for other reasons. We just don't hear about them on
When they get things up to speed. At the moment, as much as I want to support burgeoning FOSS movements, their Linux drivers are still pretty weak. I'm working on a project now which will require a mini-ITX board, so my first natural choice to consider was VIA. While I don't need super-beefy hardware, TV-out and 3D (and Linux) needs to be supported for what I'm doing. I'm right now looking at mini-ITX boards with Intel chipsets, or I'll even consider closed-source nVidia drivers - but sadly VIA is still not an option. Not yet.
Has BD+ been cracked yet? I've heard tons about it early on (especially on slashdot), but nothing at all in the last few months. Is it possible to play a Blu-ray disk on Linux?
Does this remind anyone else of the 'rules' behind FTL drive in most sci-fi books? Ya-da ya-da gravity well means no FTL but once you move away from the singularity ... zooooooooom. Granted I'm now comparing sci-fi "physics" with a minor observed variation in real life....but shhhh!
Can you name a few books with those 'rules'? I can't think of any, and my sci-fi reading list is dangerously small at the moment.
The Republicans freed the slaves, and so as a black man I'm going to vote Republican this time around. *rolls eyes*
Please do not put much value on what a given party did historically, but rather what the party's leading candidates are most likely going to do given their own personal history. Yes, the Democrats were in charge as we jumped into a number of wars. However at the moment the Democrats want the support of those who are upset about the whole Iraq thing. Therefore they're playing the anti-war card. It's not that complicated.
There is some merit to your mention of the fact that many of the anti-war claims from the Democrats aren't quite what they were a number of months ago. This is not, however, even remotely related to the fact they were in charge as we went into WWI.