The only thing you can conclude from this trailer is that video game trailers are now being generated by the same VoiceOver 3000 Random Voiceover Writing Machine that seems to generate every film trailer. All that's missing are the phrases, "In a world where..." and "Now, one man must..."
But to say that violent games have a bigger impact than smoking is just utterly ridiculous. Smoking worldwide causes more deaths than 9.11 every single day. In fact smoking killed more people in the 20th century than all the wars of the 20th century combined. To use smoking as a comparison demonstrates a profound indifference to the facts.
Actually, the writeup was misleading. Accord to TFA, the study does NOT claim that violent games are as dangerous as smoking. Instead, it claims "The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer."
This is an important distinction. They are not saying that the videogame-to-violence correlation is as dangerous as the smoking-to-cancer correlation. They are just saying that the two correlations can be measured with similar levels of certainty.
You could still accuse the study authors of sensationalism;maybe they threw in the smoking comparison knowing that it would make their study seem much scarier and more important. On the other hand, I've learned to never trust writeups of scientific studies in the popular press. They almost always simplify and sensationalize. It's entirely possible that the scientists gave a long and responsible explanation of correlation vs. causality, and the reporter just glommed onto the scariest soundbite.
You Philistine! I was merely proving my tortured artist status with a brilliant streak of James-Joyce-like stream-of-consciousness. You see, the repetition of "when we go on strike" echoes the circular path walked by a picketer in front of a studio gate and... um... foreshadows the subtextual deconstruction of... er...
The reason I have no sympathy for striking writers (aside from the fact that I don't think BOOK authors have unions and I don't want to hear a bunch of starving artists cry about being starving artists while the rest of us have REAL jobs for a living) is that there are very few writers who deserve to have their jobs. Much less negotiate stronger contracts.
First off, I should say that I'm a WGA member, but I'm not speaking for the WGA. This is all my opinion. That out of the way:
We aren't crying about being starving artists. We're engaged in a business negotiation with our employers. If your boss offers you a contract that you don't like, are you whining when you ask for better terms?
The difference is, writing for film and TV more public than many other jobs. Really dedicated fans will notice who wrote their favorite (or least favorite) episodes or movies, and even less obsessive viewers can tell you which movies or shows they think are well-written and which ones aren't. And when we go on strike, we when we go on strike, it screws up millions of peoples' leisure plans.
So the various public statements by the striking writers--the YouTube videos, the blog posts, etc--aren't meant to say, "Oh, boo hoo hoo! Weep, cruel world, for us poor starving geniuses!" Instead, they're meant to say, "We know our strike is screwing up your viewing, so we think we owe you an explanation of what's going on. If you want to take action to support us that's great, but if not, we hope you'll at least understand why we're doing what we're doing."
Why not have writers paid what their work is worth, rather than paying people when their work is terrible. I think this promotes the wrong thing. If your writing is really good and ends up creating a popular show, then you should get paid a lot.
Actually, this is kind of what the strike is about.
Right now, film and TV writers get paid "residuals", which are analogous to the royalties paid to a novelist. A TV show that is a huge hit and is constantly rerun generates more residuals than one that only airs once and then vanishes. And a film that sells a ton of DVDs generates more residuals than one that doesn't.
But...
Even a best-selling DVD doesn't generate much money for the writer. The writer gets about 4 cents per DVD sold. The studios literally spend more money on the cardboard box the DVD comes in than they give to the writer. One of the writers' big demands was, "We want another 4 cents on every DVD sold." This does not strike me as a crazy or extravagant demand, but the studios are refusing to budge.
And when it comes to Internet distribution, the studio position is basically, "Gosh, nobody is making any money on this Internet thing, and we're not sure anybody ever will. How does 'nothing' sound to you? Would 'nothing' be a good residual rate?"
If you think about the future of TV, it's pretty clear that one day, old-fashioned broadcasting will be less and less important, compared to Internet distribution. So from the WGA point of view, this negotiation is about making sure that the current residual system--which lets writers share in a tiny percentage of the profits of the movies and shows they create--won't get washed away.
PS: I'm a WGA member, but obviously I'm not speaking for the WGA. This is just one member's opinion.
For all its ways in which DX:IW fell short, its moral universe was more realistically grey, and the choices were among parties that were *all* fairly ruthless and were asking for your allegiance not on the basis of warm cuddlies, but actually making a philosophical or ideological appeal.
I think you've described the difference between the two games very well. But, actually, I liked the way DX1 handled morality better.
The way I would put it is that DX1 was morally ambiguous; DX2 was amoral.
What I mean is that, in DX1, for any given moment of decision, you had a reason to believe that one choice was more moral than the other. In DX2,you tended to find yourself choosing between two morally neutral options (or two morally wrong options). In DX1, therefore, there was always room for surprise, when it turned out that your moral decision was wrong. By pretty much eliminating morality from the decision making process, DX2 also eliminated that moral surprise.
For me, everything that was so impressive about the original DX can be summed up in one moment of the game. (SPOILER coming for the original Deus Ex--although if you're reading this thread, I'm sure you've played it through.)
For the first part of the game, you spend a fair amount of time killing bad guys. Or, at least, you have the option of killing them; you also have the option of knocking them out. And, indeed, the NPC character of your brother urges you to take this non-lethal option. But if you're like me, you took the easy way out, and killed most of the bad guys.
Then comes a scene in a warehouse. As you enter, you banter with various friendly NPCs. And inside the warehouse, you discover that the folks you thought were the bad guys are actually the good guys. And those friendly NPCS you chatted with on the way in--they are now your enemies, and you are probably going to have to kill a bunch of them to escape.
Suddenly--for the first time ever in a videogame--I actually thought about all the people I was killing. In fact, I actually felt guilty about killing all those (entirely imaginary) people! Deus Ex had managed to make me question one of the fundamental tenets of videogaming--that it's OK to kill bad guys. And from that moment on, I found myself wrestling with the ethics of every choice I made in the game.
DX2 never managed to achieve that level of moral ambiguity. It never even came close. Sometimes it would make me ask, "Should I do the wrong thing?" But it never made me ask, "What is the right thing to do here?"
Well, OK, maybe not me--but you can find a NPC with my name. What happened is, one of the game designers is on another website I frequent, and as you can imagine, you have to name a LOT Of characters when you're writing an MMORPG. He asked for volunteers who were willing to donate their names to the cause. I stepped forward, and the result is that one Corporal Sager Weinstein can be found fighting for humanity, somewhere on the planet Areiki.
The best part: another friend of mine also has an NPC named after him, but he's a lowly Private. I outrank him.
The writeup kind of implies that the article will be all about how much influence game companies have over reviewers. In fact, the article is about how game companies try to influence reviews, but the article points out that they are often unsuccessful. For example, here is the context for the excerpt quoted in the writeup:
As part of the effort to personalize, Rockstar's PR department tracked scores for reviewers on a person-by-person basis, often hoping to influence which writers were selected to review their games. "Rockstar was big on trying to get specific people to review specific games," says Zuniga. "But it's a fine line--you can't just come out and ask, because it seems like you're trying to take away editorial control." They went so far as to track seemingly pointless personal details of some writers. "Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U. Shit like that," says Zuniga. "It was a weird f*cking place to work."
In the end, the efforts never earned the kind of scores head honchos wanted. "The score would never live up to the expectation," says Zuniga. "If it scored a 99, the expectation was for every other review to be 100." What the higher-ups wanted was what business tends to want: predictability, something that can be planned and executed. "They wanted to feel comfort," says Zuniga. "They wanted to know that when we went to Company A and talked with Person B that we could expect result C." As the article goes on to say, PR efforts can be actively counter-productive:
Veteran Laura Heeb Mustard says that, in the end, blackballing isn't an effective strategy for a publicist--that, in fact, it's bad PR. "While there are many ways to attempt to persuade a journalist to hold on a story, one way I would not recommend is by trying to bully them into not reporting the item," says Mustard. "While there are some outlets that may retreat in fear of being cut off, there are others that will retaliate against your threats. Now, they're in a position of scooping your news--with the added bonus of a juicy story about how you tried to strong-arm them. We've seen a number of different cases of this recently, and quite frankly, in each case there are more effective strategies that could have been applied."
Often, she says, such strong-arm tactics are not born in the PR department, but further up the chain of command, where executives have less experience in the trenches with the media and more power to wield. "While it may be the PR person that is ultimately tasked with carrying out the threat, you should dig deeper into where the actual threat is coming from. I bet it's from someplace in management," says Mustard. "Execs have a hard time reading bad press because they very quickly see the negative impact of it. And because they usually have the authority to do so, they often come down on PR to either 'fix the problem' or to punish the outlet. However, because they aren't involved in day-to-day media relations, they often fail to see the long term negative impact of retaliation against the media."
he means being able to type things like 'wp slashdot' to go to the wikipedia slashdot page. It's incredibly useful and is one of the reasons I can't even consider using safari in real life. If that's all that's holding you back, just install Saft. Works like a charm, and has a ton of other useful features.
Doesn't copyright expire a certain number of years after the death of the creator? If you want to claim the religious imagery of the church is in the public domain, I think you'll need to call Nietzche as an expert witness.
How about we wait until they've sold *one* until we predict that they'll sell 20 million 2 years from now.
I predict that nobody will do this.
In fact, I predict that by June 26--three days before the phone launches--iPhone-related predictions will be a $30 million dollar business, capturing a 5% market share in the fast-growing and lucrative Pulling Predictions Out Of Your Ass Industry. By June 27, market penetration will grow to 38.6%, and by 11:59PM on June 28, it will be at 110%: not only will every man, woman, and child on the planet will have a prediction about initial iPhone salesfigures. but so will most dogs and many goldfish.
More reliably, I predict that if anybody is right in their predictions, they will crow about it every time they make a future prediction. If they are wrong, they will gloss over the fact and go back to pulling more predictions out of their ass.
You're absolutely right that this is a common personality type. I'm reading The Hound of the Baskervilles and I just found this passage, which (though of course fictional) suggests that this personality type was around during the Victorian era as well:
One other neighbour I have met since I wrote last. This is Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, who lives some four miles to the south of us. He is an elderly man, red-faced, white-haired, and choleric. His passion is for the British law, and he has spent a large fortune in litigation. He fights for the mere pleasure of fighting and is equally ready to take up either side of a question, so that it is no wonder that he has found it a costly amusement. Sometimes he will shut up a right of way and defy the parish to make him open it. At others he will with his own hands tear down some other man's gate and declare that a path has existed there from time immemorial, defying the owner to prosecute him for trespass. He is learned in old manorial and communal rights, and he applies his knowledge sometimes in favour of the villagers of Fernworthy and sometimes against them, so that he is periodically either carried in triumph down the village street or else burned in effigy, according to his latest exploit. He is said to have about seven lawsuits upon his hands at present, which will probably swallow up the remainder of his fortune and so draw his sting and leave him harmless for the future. Apart from the law he seems a kindly, good-natured person...
One quick question. If you've got a slingbox hooked up to your Tivo at home, and you're watching from the road, is it possible for somebody back home to watch something else simultaneously on the TiVo? EG, if I'm watching a TiVo'd episode of The SImpsons on the road via Slingbox, can somebody simultaneously sit in my living room and watch a TiVo'd Survivor?
As another adult who took piano lessons as a kid but then gave them up... I really wish somebody would come up with Guitar-Hero-style music game that used an actual keyboard and actual notes, thereby teaching you piano while you played. I've played a lot of DDR and Guitar Hero, and reading the "notes" on them is now second nature to me. I wish I still had that sight-reading capacity at the piano.
And before you say the piano is too complicated to teach in this way... Like a lot of people I know, I learned touch typing from a video game. Admittedly, a piano has 88 keys while a typing tutor only teaches you to use a 26-key device--but a piano simulator that restricted you to 26 keys would still give you a three-octave range.
True, there's nothing stopping me from buying a MIDI and practicing an hour a day until I relearn the piano on my own. But videogames are engineered to be addictive, and to give you sensory rewards for every improvement you make to your skills. I'd love to have that feedback loop applied to my dream of re-learning the piano.
Well, that was close. The trilogy that killed my father almost killed me, but fortunately, I was saved by a bunch of fuzzy, cute merchandising opportunities that had absolutely nothing to do with the tone or content of my first two posts. Whew!
The advantage of a well-done trilogy is that the first film sets up certain expectations regarding characters and plot. The second film then plays with those expectations in a surprising and suspenseful way. And when the third film wraps everything up, you feel a satisfaction that can only come from having lived with the characters in your imagination for several years.
After writing up that long post, I just thought of a much better way of explaining this.
You know how sometimes people who are dieting will shift around while they're standing on a scale, trying to make it register less weight, even though they know it's completely irrational to do so?
Paying to inflate your Amazon sales ranking is just like that. (Only $10,000 more expensive.)
If I were an author (or a musician, or someone selling anything else on Amazon), I wouldn't care too much about the Amazon rankings. I have been shopping at Amazon since it opened, and have never bothered looking at any of the "Top Ranked" for suggestions.
Rationally speaking, you are absolutely correct.
However, the fact is that publishing a book is not an entirely rational act. My co-author and I have had two books published by a well-respected publisher, who was pleased enough with our sales to buy a third book from us. (The third book hits the stands in a week or two--see my sig if you're curious.) Yet if you add up the money we made, and divide it by the hours we spent writing, re-writing, selling, and publicizing the books... well, let's just say we did better than minimum wage, but both of us could be getting quite a bit more per hour in our day jobs.
So, why would anybody write a book? Part of it is the slim change that you'll write a bestseller and suddenly get a huge payday. But most of the motivation is (a) the fun of writing it, and (b) the fun of knowing that people are reading and enjoying it.
(B) means that, when the book comes out, you want to know how many people actually are reading it. Eventually, you will get sales reports from your publisher, but those take months and months to trickle in. And so the Amazon sales ranking takes on a psychological importance far out of proportion to its actual importance. I check mine regularly.. In fact, with a new book coming out--and I'm not too proud to admit this--I've been checking Charteous at least once a day to see how pre-orders of my book are doing. Rationally, I know the number is meaningless. But when you write a book, so much of your ego gets tied up in its success that it's hard to be completely objective about it. It's kind of like an ongoing video game score.
And this author egotism is what the sales-rank manipulators in TFA are exploiting. Rationally speaking, if 10,000 people are going to buy your book, it doesn't matter whether they buy it all at once or over the course of a year. Irrationally, if somebody can orchestrate a simultaneous purchase to artificially inflate an Amazon sales rank, I can see where that would be an ego boost.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending the guys who are selling this service. They're exploiting the emotions of new authors for profit, and that pisses me off. I'm just trying to analyze the emotions that they're exploiting.
To remember pi, just memorize this post!
on
Wednesday Is Pi Day
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Now I make a reply involving my clever trick for rusty memories. Mnemonics usually challenge one; my own Slashdot post offers an easier path. You can memorize, and my account retrieves karma!
There is actually a word for this: piphilology, the art of coming up with mnemonics to remember pi. Like the poem in the parent post, these tend to be phrases or poems in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit of pi.
One common mnemonic (which I've seen attributed to Isaac Asimov) is "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!"
If you want to get really fancy, the Wikipedia entry lists a full sonnet, in more-or-less iambic pentameter:
Now I defy a tenet gallantly
Of circle canon law: these integers
Importing circles' quotients are, we see,
Unwieldy long series of cockle burs
Put all together, get no clarity;
Mnemonics shan't describeth so reformed
Creating, with a grammercy plainly,
A sonnet liberated yet conformed.
Strangely, the queer'st rules I manipulate
Being followéd, do facilitate
Whimsical musings from geometric bard.
This poesy, unabashed as it's distressed,
Evolvéd coherent - a simple test,
Discov'ring poetry no numerals jarred.
Admittedly, it's not a very good sonnet, but, hey, what do you want?
The equipment would cost as much as $200M to install per hospital. Treating 2000 patients a year for ten years would cost about $10K per patient just for the equipment, not including labor, overhead, etc!
Yes, but based on my extensive study of results published in the peer-reviewed medical journals of Marvel and DC, a large percentage of those 2000 patients would not only be cured but would develop uncanny superpowers. If only one of those patients then goes on to prevent terrorists from a fictional-but-realistic-sounding Middle Eastern country from blowing up a $300 million dam, the program will have paid for itself!
The only tricky part is, before treating patients with brain conditions, we'd have to make sure that none of them had taken damage to the crucial Not Being An Evil Genius portions of the brain. We wouldn't want a situation where the very same incident that creates a hero also happens to create his villainous arch enemy.
I agree with everybody who says the problem with all the DRM-free music by unsigned bands is that most of it is crap. Sturgeon's Law strikes again.
The solution, I've found, is to find an MP3 blog by somebody whose taste you share. That way, they will do the filtering for you. Personally, I'm a big fan of 3Hive. A couple times a week, they post free MP3s made available by bands who want publicity. But they listen to all MP3s before posting them, and only post stuff they think is worth listening to. They have pretty eclectic taste, so you won't like the genre of everything they post--but they have GOOD taste, so everything they post will be among the better stuff within its genre.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing you can conclude from this trailer is that video game trailers are now being generated by the same VoiceOver 3000 Random Voiceover Writing Machine that seems to generate every film trailer. All that's missing are the phrases, "In a world where..." and "Now, one man must..."
Actually, the writeup was misleading. Accord to TFA, the study does NOT claim that violent games are as dangerous as smoking. Instead, it claims "The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer."
This is an important distinction. They are not saying that the videogame-to-violence correlation is as dangerous as the smoking-to-cancer correlation. They are just saying that the two correlations can be measured with similar levels of certainty.
You could still accuse the study authors of sensationalism;maybe they threw in the smoking comparison knowing that it would make their study seem much scarier and more important. On the other hand, I've learned to never trust writeups of scientific studies in the popular press. They almost always simplify and sensationalize. It's entirely possible that the scientists gave a long and responsible explanation of correlation vs. causality, and the reporter just glommed onto the scariest soundbite.
You Philistine! I was merely proving my tortured artist status with a brilliant streak of James-Joyce-like stream-of-consciousness. You see, the repetition of "when we go on strike" echoes the circular path walked by a picketer in front of a studio gate and... um... foreshadows the subtextual deconstruction of... er...
You're not buying it, are you?
Ah, well. Worth a try.
We aren't crying about being starving artists. We're engaged in a business negotiation with our employers. If your boss offers you a contract that you don't like, are you whining when you ask for better terms?
The difference is, writing for film and TV more public than many other jobs. Really dedicated fans will notice who wrote their favorite (or least favorite) episodes or movies, and even less obsessive viewers can tell you which movies or shows they think are well-written and which ones aren't. And when we go on strike, we when we go on strike, it screws up millions of peoples' leisure plans.
So the various public statements by the striking writers--the YouTube videos, the blog posts, etc--aren't meant to say, "Oh, boo hoo hoo! Weep, cruel world, for us poor starving geniuses!" Instead, they're meant to say, "We know our strike is screwing up your viewing, so we think we owe you an explanation of what's going on. If you want to take action to support us that's great, but if not, we hope you'll at least understand why we're doing what we're doing."
Right now, film and TV writers get paid "residuals", which are analogous to the royalties paid to a novelist. A TV show that is a huge hit and is constantly rerun generates more residuals than one that only airs once and then vanishes. And a film that sells a ton of DVDs generates more residuals than one that doesn't.
But...
Even a best-selling DVD doesn't generate much money for the writer. The writer gets about 4 cents per DVD sold. The studios literally spend more money on the cardboard box the DVD comes in than they give to the writer. One of the writers' big demands was, "We want another 4 cents on every DVD sold." This does not strike me as a crazy or extravagant demand, but the studios are refusing to budge.
And when it comes to Internet distribution, the studio position is basically, "Gosh, nobody is making any money on this Internet thing, and we're not sure anybody ever will. How does 'nothing' sound to you? Would 'nothing' be a good residual rate?"
If you think about the future of TV, it's pretty clear that one day, old-fashioned broadcasting will be less and less important, compared to Internet distribution. So from the WGA point of view, this negotiation is about making sure that the current residual system--which lets writers share in a tiny percentage of the profits of the movies and shows they create--won't get washed away.
PS: I'm a WGA member, but obviously I'm not speaking for the WGA. This is just one member's opinion.
I think you've described the difference between the two games very well. But, actually, I liked the way DX1 handled morality better.
The way I would put it is that DX1 was morally ambiguous; DX2 was amoral.
What I mean is that, in DX1, for any given moment of decision, you had a reason to believe that one choice was more moral than the other. In DX2,you tended to find yourself choosing between two morally neutral options (or two morally wrong options). In DX1, therefore, there was always room for surprise, when it turned out that your moral decision was wrong. By pretty much eliminating morality from the decision making process, DX2 also eliminated that moral surprise.
For me, everything that was so impressive about the original DX can be summed up in one moment of the game. (SPOILER coming for the original Deus Ex--although if you're reading this thread, I'm sure you've played it through.)
For the first part of the game, you spend a fair amount of time killing bad guys. Or, at least, you have the option of killing them; you also have the option of knocking them out. And, indeed, the NPC character of your brother urges you to take this non-lethal option. But if you're like me, you took the easy way out, and killed most of the bad guys.
Then comes a scene in a warehouse. As you enter, you banter with various friendly NPCs. And inside the warehouse, you discover that the folks you thought were the bad guys are actually the good guys. And those friendly NPCS you chatted with on the way in--they are now your enemies, and you are probably going to have to kill a bunch of them to escape.
Suddenly--for the first time ever in a videogame--I actually thought about all the people I was killing. In fact, I actually felt guilty about killing all those (entirely imaginary) people! Deus Ex had managed to make me question one of the fundamental tenets of videogaming--that it's OK to kill bad guys. And from that moment on, I found myself wrestling with the ethics of every choice I made in the game.
DX2 never managed to achieve that level of moral ambiguity. It never even came close. Sometimes it would make me ask, "Should I do the wrong thing?" But it never made me ask, "What is the right thing to do here?"
You can find me in this game.
Well, OK, maybe not me--but you can find a NPC with my name. What happened is, one of the game designers is on another website I frequent, and as you can imagine, you have to name a LOT Of characters when you're writing an MMORPG. He asked for volunteers who were willing to donate their names to the cause. I stepped forward, and the result is that one Corporal Sager Weinstein can be found fighting for humanity, somewhere on the planet Areiki.
The best part: another friend of mine also has an NPC named after him, but he's a lowly Private. I outrank him.
I do not intend to let him forget this.
As part of the effort to personalize, Rockstar's PR department tracked scores for reviewers on a person-by-person basis, often hoping to influence which writers were selected to review their games. "Rockstar was big on trying to get specific people to review specific games," says Zuniga. "But it's a fine line--you can't just come out and ask, because it seems like you're trying to take away editorial control." They went so far as to track seemingly pointless personal details of some writers. "Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U. Shit like that," says Zuniga. "It was a weird f*cking place to work."
In the end, the efforts never earned the kind of scores head honchos wanted. "The score would never live up to the expectation," says Zuniga. "If it scored a 99, the expectation was for every other review to be 100." What the higher-ups wanted was what business tends to want: predictability, something that can be planned and executed. "They wanted to feel comfort," says Zuniga. "They wanted to know that when we went to Company A and talked with Person B that we could expect result C." As the article goes on to say, PR efforts can be actively counter-productive: Veteran Laura Heeb Mustard says that, in the end, blackballing isn't an effective strategy for a publicist--that, in fact, it's bad PR. "While there are many ways to attempt to persuade a journalist to hold on a story, one way I would not recommend is by trying to bully them into not reporting the item," says Mustard. "While there are some outlets that may retreat in fear of being cut off, there are others that will retaliate against your threats. Now, they're in a position of scooping your news--with the added bonus of a juicy story about how you tried to strong-arm them. We've seen a number of different cases of this recently, and quite frankly, in each case there are more effective strategies that could have been applied."
Often, she says, such strong-arm tactics are not born in the PR department, but further up the chain of command, where executives have less experience in the trenches with the media and more power to wield. "While it may be the PR person that is ultimately tasked with carrying out the threat, you should dig deeper into where the actual threat is coming from. I bet it's from someplace in management," says Mustard. "Execs have a hard time reading bad press because they very quickly see the negative impact of it. And because they usually have the authority to do so, they often come down on PR to either 'fix the problem' or to punish the outlet. However, because they aren't involved in day-to-day media relations, they often fail to see the long term negative impact of retaliation against the media."
Doesn't copyright expire a certain number of years after the death of the creator? If you want to claim the religious imagery of the church is in the public domain, I think you'll need to call Nietzche as an expert witness.
I predict that nobody will do this.
In fact, I predict that by June 26--three days before the phone launches--iPhone-related predictions will be a $30 million dollar business, capturing a 5% market share in the fast-growing and lucrative Pulling Predictions Out Of Your Ass Industry. By June 27, market penetration will grow to 38.6%, and by 11:59PM on June 28, it will be at 110%: not only will every man, woman, and child on the planet will have a prediction about initial iPhone salesfigures. but so will most dogs and many goldfish.
More reliably, I predict that if anybody is right in their predictions, they will crow about it every time they make a future prediction. If they are wrong, they will gloss over the fact and go back to pulling more predictions out of their ass.
One quick question. If you've got a slingbox hooked up to your Tivo at home, and you're watching from the road, is it possible for somebody back home to watch something else simultaneously on the TiVo? EG, if I'm watching a TiVo'd episode of The SImpsons on the road via Slingbox, can somebody simultaneously sit in my living room and watch a TiVo'd Survivor?
As another adult who took piano lessons as a kid but then gave them up... I really wish somebody would come up with Guitar-Hero-style music game that used an actual keyboard and actual notes, thereby teaching you piano while you played. I've played a lot of DDR and Guitar Hero, and reading the "notes" on them is now second nature to me. I wish I still had that sight-reading capacity at the piano.
And before you say the piano is too complicated to teach in this way... Like a lot of people I know, I learned touch typing from a video game. Admittedly, a piano has 88 keys while a typing tutor only teaches you to use a 26-key device--but a piano simulator that restricted you to 26 keys would still give you a three-octave range.
True, there's nothing stopping me from buying a MIDI and practicing an hour a day until I relearn the piano on my own. But videogames are engineered to be addictive, and to give you sensory rewards for every improvement you make to your skills. I'd love to have that feedback loop applied to my dream of re-learning the piano.
Am I the only one hungry for a Classical Guitar Hero?
Huh. Guess I am.
Well, it was worth asking.
Basically, my dream Guitar Hero would be half classical and half Aerosmith.
(I KNOW I'm the only one there. I don't even need to ask.)
Well, that was close. The trilogy that killed my father almost killed me, but fortunately, I was saved by a bunch of fuzzy, cute merchandising opportunities that had absolutely nothing to do with the tone or content of my first two posts. Whew!
...or at least, that's what I used to think. Then I found out that A TRILOGY KILLED MY FATHER--and it's COMING AFTER ME NEXT!!!!!
The advantage of a well-done trilogy is that the first film sets up certain expectations regarding characters and plot. The second film then plays with those expectations in a surprising and suspenseful way. And when the third film wraps everything up, you feel a satisfaction that can only come from having lived with the characters in your imagination for several years.
After writing up that long post, I just thought of a much better way of explaining this.
You know how sometimes people who are dieting will shift around while they're standing on a scale, trying to make it register less weight, even though they know it's completely irrational to do so?
Paying to inflate your Amazon sales ranking is just like that. (Only $10,000 more expensive.)
If I were an author (or a musician, or someone selling anything else on Amazon), I wouldn't care too much about the Amazon rankings. I have been shopping at Amazon since it opened, and have never bothered looking at any of the "Top Ranked" for suggestions.
Rationally speaking, you are absolutely correct.
However, the fact is that publishing a book is not an entirely rational act. My co-author and I have had two books published by a well-respected publisher, who was pleased enough with our sales to buy a third book from us. (The third book hits the stands in a week or two--see my sig if you're curious.) Yet if you add up the money we made, and divide it by the hours we spent writing, re-writing, selling, and publicizing the books... well, let's just say we did better than minimum wage, but both of us could be getting quite a bit more per hour in our day jobs.
So, why would anybody write a book? Part of it is the slim change that you'll write a bestseller and suddenly get a huge payday. But most of the motivation is (a) the fun of writing it, and (b) the fun of knowing that people are reading and enjoying it.
(B) means that, when the book comes out, you want to know how many people actually are reading it. Eventually, you will get sales reports from your publisher, but those take months and months to trickle in. And so the Amazon sales ranking takes on a psychological importance far out of proportion to its actual importance. I check mine regularly.. In fact, with a new book coming out--and I'm not too proud to admit this--I've been checking Charteous at least once a day to see how pre-orders of my book are doing. Rationally, I know the number is meaningless. But when you write a book, so much of your ego gets tied up in its success that it's hard to be completely objective about it. It's kind of like an ongoing video game score.
And this author egotism is what the sales-rank manipulators in TFA are exploiting. Rationally speaking, if 10,000 people are going to buy your book, it doesn't matter whether they buy it all at once or over the course of a year. Irrationally, if somebody can orchestrate a simultaneous purchase to artificially inflate an Amazon sales rank, I can see where that would be an ego boost.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending the guys who are selling this service. They're exploiting the emotions of new authors for profit, and that pisses me off. I'm just trying to analyze the emotions that they're exploiting.
Now I make a reply involving my clever trick for rusty memories. Mnemonics usually challenge one; my own Slashdot post offers an easier path. You can memorize, and my account retrieves karma!
There is actually a word for this: piphilology, the art of coming up with mnemonics to remember pi. Like the poem in the parent post, these tend to be phrases or poems in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit of pi.
One common mnemonic (which I've seen attributed to Isaac Asimov) is "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!" If you want to get really fancy, the Wikipedia entry lists a full sonnet, in more-or-less iambic pentameter:
Now I defy a tenet gallantly
Of circle canon law: these integers
Importing circles' quotients are, we see,
Unwieldy long series of cockle burs
Put all together, get no clarity;
Mnemonics shan't describeth so reformed
Creating, with a grammercy plainly,
A sonnet liberated yet conformed.
Strangely, the queer'st rules I manipulate
Being followéd, do facilitate
Whimsical musings from geometric bard.
This poesy, unabashed as it's distressed,
Evolvéd coherent - a simple test,
Discov'ring poetry no numerals jarred.
Admittedly, it's not a very good sonnet, but, hey, what do you want?
The only tricky part is, before treating patients with brain conditions, we'd have to make sure that none of them had taken damage to the crucial Not Being An Evil Genius portions of the brain. We wouldn't want a situation where the very same incident that creates a hero also happens to create his villainous arch enemy.
I agree with everybody who says the problem with all the DRM-free music by unsigned bands is that most of it is crap. Sturgeon's Law strikes again.
The solution, I've found, is to find an MP3 blog by somebody whose taste you share. That way, they will do the filtering for you. Personally, I'm a big fan of 3Hive. A couple times a week, they post free MP3s made available by bands who want publicity. But they listen to all MP3s before posting them, and only post stuff they think is worth listening to. They have pretty eclectic taste, so you won't like the genre of everything they post--but they have GOOD taste, so everything they post will be among the better stuff within its genre.