I don't mean closely tied as in their code or their dependencies, I'm talking about their user base and workflow. Media and data travels heavily between these applications, and that's why there may be some advantage if they're all owned and developed by the same entity. Not that I'm condoning a monopoly...
Tens of games? To-date there's only been one AAA title made with UE3, and that's BioShock. Other have all been delayed, or in the case of Rainbow Six Vegas, switched engines (downgraded and then heavily hacked version of UE2). I'll admit, SK's track record is pretty lacklustre, but something definitely smells fishy from Epic's camp.
Interesting point. Defamation and libel only apply to lies, do they not? If someone is a convicted murderer, I can write that about him and he can't say crap - because it's all true. If, on the other hand, I falsely claim someone is a murderer, then clearly I'm liable for defamation suits.
Better yet, since these homosexual men felt the revelation of their orientation was defamatory, what does that say about how they feel about their own sexuality?
Nothing has changed. I don't know of any (commercial) web hosts that actively scan for illegal content. They go by the tried and true "if someone complains, we'll take it down" formula, and it works well. The ruling simply reinforces this - web hosts are not responsible for illicit content until someone notifies them, after which they have a reasonable amount of time to remove the illegal content before being *actually* legally responsible.
Well... Most shops that would need to use Adobe software in a Linux environment probably need to integrate OTHER apps into their workflow as well. IMHO it's not a great idea for Adobe to develop their own distro. Just release Photoshop that works with Debian/Ubuntu, and Red Hat, and you've already made a LOT of people very happy. All the other distros are just icing on the cake, since those are the primary distros I've seen in the industry.
Yes, this is also why Adobe Reader chugs like crap on even the fastest boxes (Windows OR Mac, same thing), and somehow Apple's own PDF reader runs like a dream, with no hiccups anywhere and lightning fast loading. Not to mention a much smaller memory footprint!
You've seen a very limited segment of Adobe's market then. In my industry (3D animation) an artist may have Photoshop, Illustrator, 3dsmax, Maya, or any number of other packages (much of it by Autodesk) open at once. Clearly they all need to be on the same OS. This is also why IMHO Adobe needs to look long and hard at porting their products to Linux - animation shops are now moving in a huge way towards Linux workstations (better integration with 'nix render farms, among other things). If anything Adobe wants to buy Autodesk (or the other way around), since those tools are so closely tied together.
Everyone is still ignoring the main (and only concrete) claim in the entire case: that the contract stipulated an exact date by which Epic must deliver a working Xbox 360 build of the engine. The contention here is that Epic did not. This claim is so trivially easy to prove/disprove that I have no doubt Epic missed the deadline, and honestly, on this alone Epic will be paying out to SK, no questions asked.
I know you're trying to be funny, but they probably would. Running a mile a minute for hours on end burns a lot of energy, and releases a LOT of heat. It's imaginable that these mice may be fast enough that overheating becomes an issue!
Why then we might as well just pull the network cable out of your machine then. DMG is a format that has been *widely* used for a number of years now. By your logic we should also prevent your browser from showing images (might be exploits in there!), or running javascript (that too!), or heck, we shouldn't even let you display HTML, 'cos who knows, there might be a buffer overflow vulnerability in your HTML rendering engine!
Automatically opening a file format that has no known exploits, and in fact has been devoid of exploits for the past... God knows how many years now... is really not a security risk, any more than showing a JPEG in your browser is.
You're basically turning the programmer into the artist.
Yes, artists need to be part-programmer, and likewise programmers need to be part-artist. This is already true to a lesser extent. Any self-respecting modeler will know about UVs, normals, and all the other technical jargon that's more to do with computational geometry than art itself. They are specialists at manipulating computer power for artistic means, no different than how a painter must be intimately familiar with the chemical nature of paints.
You have a limited view of procedural content. We're not talking about programs that draw textures with no artist input, nor are we talking about programs that can take "castle" and spit out a level.
Let's take a game for example - Brothers in Arms (or Call of Duty, or any other WW2 FPS out there). How many farm houses were in that game? How many hedgerows? How many stone walls and wooden fences? All of them was painstakingly and manually created. For simple things like barrels and carts we already use instanced geometry, but why can't a house be proceduralized? If you look at the common mapping tools out there, they are generic modeling tools, meant to spit out geometry and UV coordinates, along with any visibility data. These can be built upon, creating a layer that is highly customized to the game in question, allowing, for example, an artist to draw a line on the terrain and go "let there be hedgerows along this line". This is a simple concept, but it's not present in ANY world editor we have today.
No amount of tooling is going to change this, as each game needs to develop its own distinct look.
You're very right about the second part, but the first part just isn't true. I'm not talking about some pseudo-AI that can generate content for any game. No, I'm talking about parameterized geometry generation, which is the main bottleneck in level design today. Take the example I had from above, the sheer number of burnt out buildings in a WW2 shooters is immense, and takes a huge number of artist hours to create. You can create a few and instance them, but players are quite good at picking that sort of thing out. There are some VERY good ways to create burnt out buildings, smashed up furniture and all. If you look at your overall workload of creating, say, 1000 blown up buildings, it suddenly becomes advantageous to perform that procedurally.
Again, procedural does not mean lack of artistic input, nor does it mean there needs to be a programmer at the helm. There's a magical piece of software out there called Houdini that I'm personally familiar with. It's used widely in film and television effects, and it is an entirely procedural modeling/animation package - for artists. It is so ridiculously powerful that I do believe I can do the whole "proceduralize a blown up house" in a couple of days in that software, after which it's merely a matter of exporting to a format I can use.
Because not all genres are created equal. RTS games generally have lower dev costs than FPSes, due to the fact that FPS environments are scrutinized more closely, and tend to be disposable (once you've been through an area you don't go back). RPGs have the highest dev cost of all, due to players being accustomed to massive CG-quality cinematics and huge, epic storylines full of expensive voice acting, as WELL as non-recyclable maps.
I think the majority of the complaints here is that, the market's insatiable thirst for shinier graphics is ballooning the cost of content development, driving games to the edge where only "arena" based games like Sims, strategy games, and sports games, have a dev cost low enough to be profitable. HL1 was produced for a mere fraction of the cost to produce HL2, but somehow had a longer playtime. Before one blames Valve one should look at the level of workload difference between creating a scientist model in HL1, vs. the effort to do so in HL2.
One of the focuses right now for the industry is procedural content. How much can we reliably generate by machine without significantly impacting quality? Also we need to look at our toolchain, much of our tools are still too "dumb", exponentially increasing required artist hours for every extra little thing we add. The solution to our cost problem is technological - we need smarter tools that reduce man-hour cost, and we need procedural tools that can take a number of things away from humans entirely.
Licensing gives them far more sales than the licenses cost. If anything that's the *smartest* move they can make. Sports games, while no piece of cake to produce, have costs that are far less than, say, an RPG like Final Fantasy. How many stadiums do you have to make to satisfy your players, vs. how many entire WORLDS the RPG would need to have?
No, better spend $20M licensing + $5M producing mass-market game with millions of sales, than to spend $50M making an epic hardcore-gamer game that's going to top out a a few hundred thousand.
I don't think mounting DMGs automatically is necessarily insecure. There's nothing a malicious DMG can do even up to that point, and any user who was tricked into downloading this DMG will SURELY mount it for themselves and double click on the installer, even if Safari didn't do it for them. We're not talking about running an executable without user permission, we're talking more along the lines of extracting the contents for you.
Perhaps I should have linked something in my post. For information's sake, the mod is as follows (as near as I can tell without actually playing the game):
- Rockstar had very graphic/brutal animation sequences in the game, which got it the AO rating.
- To get around this they inserted graphic overlays to "white out" the screen as the worst of it was happening (which as another poster brought up, is probably psychologically scarier)
- For some reason the config for this feature was left in an INI file on the game disc. Deleting a few lines will remove the overlays altogether.
So... The content was definitely there. This is even easier that Hot Coffee, which involved altering the game script to access otherwise sealed off functions. This is a simple SWITCH.
A week at most, and this is from someone who's had experience developing games (albeit indie, but the same rules apply). Rockstar covered up the brutal parts with screen overlays, which was well enough, all they had to do was change the animation to something more benign during this "invisible" period. Heck, it's something so simple it could've been done in Maya, 3dsmax, or whichever tool they were using for animation. NO CODE CHANGES REQUIRED. You can do all of this in a day (a couple hours with multiple people), and have it QA'ed and ready to go days after that.
Oh, I have no doubt Rockstar will benefit from this. Manhunt sales will jump, and achieve sales far better than it deserves (almost all reviews have universally judged it mediocre at best). It's the blatant disregard for the rest of the industry that pisses me off. This is the type of irresponsible "me" thinking that will get this industry censored by the guys on the hill. The *rest* of us are fine releasing M games, and AO games, and T games, and E games, why does Rockstar deliberately have to generate the media frenzy and even FURTHER undermine the authority of the ESRB?
If the nude textures were already on the disc, and all that took to unlock it was EDITING A TEXT FILE (INI in this case), sure, Barbie can expect to be horrifyingly owned by the press and subsequently pulled.
Sadly, due to the atmosphere around gaming these days, I think more developers will choose to encrypt their game content, so they have at least some legal leg to stand on if something like this happens to them. While I would like to be quick to blame Congress for this sad situation, I believe the modders have to share some blame for being so fscking stupid, and refusing to self-regulate.
Didn't you people learn *anything* from the Hot Coffee debacle? Heck, the Hot Coffee components of San Andreas weren't even *well publicized* and people s till managed to dig it up. What did you THINK was going to happen? You've already got congress breathing down the necks of the entire industry and STILL you think layering gruesome, brutal scenes that would have resulted in a higher rating over a simple... screen flash?
I realize this shouldn't be as big of an issue, society and violence, blah blah, but the truth remains that the industry remains under tight scrutiny, and Rockstar isn't doing anybody any favours.
Wow, really? I'll stick to those corporate virus-free e-mail accounts from now on. Are they also completely free of spam? That would be nice too.
The difference is that if opening a work email infected your machine, your ass is more or less covered (blame it on the obviously incompetent IT department!), whereas if you were using your personal email at the time, you are totally boned.
HL1 isn't the pinnacle of storytelling either. Yes, you retained control of Gordon the whole time, but there's a difference between full freedom and "oh hey, you're stuck in this room until this scripted scene has played through, then this door will magically be unlocked". I like Splinter Cell's storytelling because at least I'm actively doing *something*, as opposed to watching something happen through a bulletproof window.
The data shows attach rate on 360 doubles the PS3, and more than doubles the Wii. At an average of $60 a game for this gen, that's some extra $120 spent per console that's going towards (most probably) 3rd party publishers.
I call bullshit on that one - thats just FUD that you 360 owners love spreading - if the attach rate of the 360 was so brilliant, why has it only ever made profit in 1 quarter, even though its been out for nearly 8 quarters?
Because it's not great enough? This is especially true given the massive FUBAR MS committed with 360 hardware. They're spending an ass-load of cash repairing crapped out 360s, and that's hitting their bottom line. That, however, doesn't change the fact that 360 owners are buying *far* more games than the competition, which for publishers can only mean good things. In the end a console lives and dies by its 3rd party publisher support, which is why Nintendo isn't quite out of the woods yet - if they can't get 3rd party games on the platform the Wii's popularity will peak sooner than later.
The 360 isn't *all* doom and gloom. The attach rate (games sold per box) is huge compared to either of its competitors, compared with the Wii where attach rates are pretty dismal. MS *needs* a high attach rate due to their loss-per-box, whereas Nintendo will rake it in from selling hardware alone. Game publishers, on the other hand, rely on attach rate, because hardware sales mean nothing if everyone is still playing Wii Sports and not the *other* games. The 360 is getting all that publisher love for a very good reason - it is the platform that promises to help the people that prop a console up - the developers and publishers.
The PS3 is undoubtedly doing well in Japan, though my question would still be... what exactly are they playing? I've perused the shelves at the local Best Buy numerous times, and I'm hard pressed to find any game I want to play on PS3 that isn't available elsewhere. RE4 on Wii is very cool, and there are a *slew* of 360 games (Mass Effect being the big one for the next month) that I'm looking forward to. The PS3... besides MGS4 there isn't much on the horizon, and sadly that is even further away now.
State-side, it's pretty clear that Wii and 360 will wipe the floor with PS3 this holiday season. Of that I have no doubt, considering Sony doesn't have a single compelling (non-timed) exclusive coming out this holiday season.
Actually I've always thought that MGS4's storyline continues from the themes of MGS2 - that an information society makes warfare a very scary proposition, and individuality is compromised.
Just curious, what are American rates for data? Up here in Canada-land, we pay $217 USD for 500MB of data. Hard to imagine getting worse than that, but I'm curious.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean closely tied as in their code or their dependencies, I'm talking about their user base and workflow. Media and data travels heavily between these applications, and that's why there may be some advantage if they're all owned and developed by the same entity. Not that I'm condoning a monopoly...
Tens of games? To-date there's only been one AAA title made with UE3, and that's BioShock. Other have all been delayed, or in the case of Rainbow Six Vegas, switched engines (downgraded and then heavily hacked version of UE2). I'll admit, SK's track record is pretty lacklustre, but something definitely smells fishy from Epic's camp.
Interesting point. Defamation and libel only apply to lies, do they not? If someone is a convicted murderer, I can write that about him and he can't say crap - because it's all true. If, on the other hand, I falsely claim someone is a murderer, then clearly I'm liable for defamation suits.
Better yet, since these homosexual men felt the revelation of their orientation was defamatory, what does that say about how they feel about their own sexuality?
Nothing has changed. I don't know of any (commercial) web hosts that actively scan for illegal content. They go by the tried and true "if someone complains, we'll take it down" formula, and it works well. The ruling simply reinforces this - web hosts are not responsible for illicit content until someone notifies them, after which they have a reasonable amount of time to remove the illegal content before being *actually* legally responsible.
Well... Most shops that would need to use Adobe software in a Linux environment probably need to integrate OTHER apps into their workflow as well. IMHO it's not a great idea for Adobe to develop their own distro. Just release Photoshop that works with Debian/Ubuntu, and Red Hat, and you've already made a LOT of people very happy. All the other distros are just icing on the cake, since those are the primary distros I've seen in the industry.
Yes, this is also why Adobe Reader chugs like crap on even the fastest boxes (Windows OR Mac, same thing), and somehow Apple's own PDF reader runs like a dream, with no hiccups anywhere and lightning fast loading. Not to mention a much smaller memory footprint!
You've seen a very limited segment of Adobe's market then. In my industry (3D animation) an artist may have Photoshop, Illustrator, 3dsmax, Maya, or any number of other packages (much of it by Autodesk) open at once. Clearly they all need to be on the same OS. This is also why IMHO Adobe needs to look long and hard at porting their products to Linux - animation shops are now moving in a huge way towards Linux workstations (better integration with 'nix render farms, among other things). If anything Adobe wants to buy Autodesk (or the other way around), since those tools are so closely tied together.
Everyone is still ignoring the main (and only concrete) claim in the entire case: that the contract stipulated an exact date by which Epic must deliver a working Xbox 360 build of the engine. The contention here is that Epic did not. This claim is so trivially easy to prove/disprove that I have no doubt Epic missed the deadline, and honestly, on this alone Epic will be paying out to SK, no questions asked.
I know you're trying to be funny, but they probably would. Running a mile a minute for hours on end burns a lot of energy, and releases a LOT of heat. It's imaginable that these mice may be fast enough that overheating becomes an issue!
Why then we might as well just pull the network cable out of your machine then. DMG is a format that has been *widely* used for a number of years now. By your logic we should also prevent your browser from showing images (might be exploits in there!), or running javascript (that too!), or heck, we shouldn't even let you display HTML, 'cos who knows, there might be a buffer overflow vulnerability in your HTML rendering engine!
Automatically opening a file format that has no known exploits, and in fact has been devoid of exploits for the past... God knows how many years now... is really not a security risk, any more than showing a JPEG in your browser is.
Yes, artists need to be part-programmer, and likewise programmers need to be part-artist. This is already true to a lesser extent. Any self-respecting modeler will know about UVs, normals, and all the other technical jargon that's more to do with computational geometry than art itself. They are specialists at manipulating computer power for artistic means, no different than how a painter must be intimately familiar with the chemical nature of paints.
You have a limited view of procedural content. We're not talking about programs that draw textures with no artist input, nor are we talking about programs that can take "castle" and spit out a level.
Let's take a game for example - Brothers in Arms (or Call of Duty, or any other WW2 FPS out there). How many farm houses were in that game? How many hedgerows? How many stone walls and wooden fences? All of them was painstakingly and manually created. For simple things like barrels and carts we already use instanced geometry, but why can't a house be proceduralized? If you look at the common mapping tools out there, they are generic modeling tools, meant to spit out geometry and UV coordinates, along with any visibility data. These can be built upon, creating a layer that is highly customized to the game in question, allowing, for example, an artist to draw a line on the terrain and go "let there be hedgerows along this line". This is a simple concept, but it's not present in ANY world editor we have today.
No amount of tooling is going to change this, as each game needs to develop its own distinct look.You're very right about the second part, but the first part just isn't true. I'm not talking about some pseudo-AI that can generate content for any game. No, I'm talking about parameterized geometry generation, which is the main bottleneck in level design today. Take the example I had from above, the sheer number of burnt out buildings in a WW2 shooters is immense, and takes a huge number of artist hours to create. You can create a few and instance them, but players are quite good at picking that sort of thing out. There are some VERY good ways to create burnt out buildings, smashed up furniture and all. If you look at your overall workload of creating, say, 1000 blown up buildings, it suddenly becomes advantageous to perform that procedurally.
Again, procedural does not mean lack of artistic input, nor does it mean there needs to be a programmer at the helm. There's a magical piece of software out there called Houdini that I'm personally familiar with. It's used widely in film and television effects, and it is an entirely procedural modeling/animation package - for artists. It is so ridiculously powerful that I do believe I can do the whole "proceduralize a blown up house" in a couple of days in that software, after which it's merely a matter of exporting to a format I can use.
Because not all genres are created equal. RTS games generally have lower dev costs than FPSes, due to the fact that FPS environments are scrutinized more closely, and tend to be disposable (once you've been through an area you don't go back). RPGs have the highest dev cost of all, due to players being accustomed to massive CG-quality cinematics and huge, epic storylines full of expensive voice acting, as WELL as non-recyclable maps.
I think the majority of the complaints here is that, the market's insatiable thirst for shinier graphics is ballooning the cost of content development, driving games to the edge where only "arena" based games like Sims, strategy games, and sports games, have a dev cost low enough to be profitable. HL1 was produced for a mere fraction of the cost to produce HL2, but somehow had a longer playtime. Before one blames Valve one should look at the level of workload difference between creating a scientist model in HL1, vs. the effort to do so in HL2.
One of the focuses right now for the industry is procedural content. How much can we reliably generate by machine without significantly impacting quality? Also we need to look at our toolchain, much of our tools are still too "dumb", exponentially increasing required artist hours for every extra little thing we add. The solution to our cost problem is technological - we need smarter tools that reduce man-hour cost, and we need procedural tools that can take a number of things away from humans entirely.
Licensing gives them far more sales than the licenses cost. If anything that's the *smartest* move they can make. Sports games, while no piece of cake to produce, have costs that are far less than, say, an RPG like Final Fantasy. How many stadiums do you have to make to satisfy your players, vs. how many entire WORLDS the RPG would need to have?
No, better spend $20M licensing + $5M producing mass-market game with millions of sales, than to spend $50M making an epic hardcore-gamer game that's going to top out a a few hundred thousand.
I don't think mounting DMGs automatically is necessarily insecure. There's nothing a malicious DMG can do even up to that point, and any user who was tricked into downloading this DMG will SURELY mount it for themselves and double click on the installer, even if Safari didn't do it for them. We're not talking about running an executable without user permission, we're talking more along the lines of extracting the contents for you.
Perhaps I should have linked something in my post. For information's sake, the mod is as follows (as near as I can tell without actually playing the game):
- Rockstar had very graphic/brutal animation sequences in the game, which got it the AO rating.
- To get around this they inserted graphic overlays to "white out" the screen as the worst of it was happening (which as another poster brought up, is probably psychologically scarier)
- For some reason the config for this feature was left in an INI file on the game disc. Deleting a few lines will remove the overlays altogether.
So... The content was definitely there. This is even easier that Hot Coffee, which involved altering the game script to access otherwise sealed off functions. This is a simple SWITCH.
A week at most, and this is from someone who's had experience developing games (albeit indie, but the same rules apply). Rockstar covered up the brutal parts with screen overlays, which was well enough, all they had to do was change the animation to something more benign during this "invisible" period. Heck, it's something so simple it could've been done in Maya, 3dsmax, or whichever tool they were using for animation. NO CODE CHANGES REQUIRED. You can do all of this in a day (a couple hours with multiple people), and have it QA'ed and ready to go days after that.
Oh, I have no doubt Rockstar will benefit from this. Manhunt sales will jump, and achieve sales far better than it deserves (almost all reviews have universally judged it mediocre at best). It's the blatant disregard for the rest of the industry that pisses me off. This is the type of irresponsible "me" thinking that will get this industry censored by the guys on the hill. The *rest* of us are fine releasing M games, and AO games, and T games, and E games, why does Rockstar deliberately have to generate the media frenzy and even FURTHER undermine the authority of the ESRB?
If the nude textures were already on the disc, and all that took to unlock it was EDITING A TEXT FILE (INI in this case), sure, Barbie can expect to be horrifyingly owned by the press and subsequently pulled.
Sadly, due to the atmosphere around gaming these days, I think more developers will choose to encrypt their game content, so they have at least some legal leg to stand on if something like this happens to them. While I would like to be quick to blame Congress for this sad situation, I believe the modders have to share some blame for being so fscking stupid, and refusing to self-regulate.
Didn't you people learn *anything* from the Hot Coffee debacle? Heck, the Hot Coffee components of San Andreas weren't even *well publicized* and people s till managed to dig it up. What did you THINK was going to happen? You've already got congress breathing down the necks of the entire industry and STILL you think layering gruesome, brutal scenes that would have resulted in a higher rating over a simple... screen flash?
I realize this shouldn't be as big of an issue, society and violence, blah blah, but the truth remains that the industry remains under tight scrutiny, and Rockstar isn't doing anybody any favours.
The difference is that if opening a work email infected your machine, your ass is more or less covered (blame it on the obviously incompetent IT department!), whereas if you were using your personal email at the time, you are totally boned.
HL1 isn't the pinnacle of storytelling either. Yes, you retained control of Gordon the whole time, but there's a difference between full freedom and "oh hey, you're stuck in this room until this scripted scene has played through, then this door will magically be unlocked". I like Splinter Cell's storytelling because at least I'm actively doing *something*, as opposed to watching something happen through a bulletproof window.
Here ya go
The data shows attach rate on 360 doubles the PS3, and more than doubles the Wii. At an average of $60 a game for this gen, that's some extra $120 spent per console that's going towards (most probably) 3rd party publishers.
I call bullshit on that one - thats just FUD that you 360 owners love spreading - if the attach rate of the 360 was so brilliant, why has it only ever made profit in 1 quarter, even though its been out for nearly 8 quarters?Because it's not great enough? This is especially true given the massive FUBAR MS committed with 360 hardware. They're spending an ass-load of cash repairing crapped out 360s, and that's hitting their bottom line. That, however, doesn't change the fact that 360 owners are buying *far* more games than the competition, which for publishers can only mean good things. In the end a console lives and dies by its 3rd party publisher support, which is why Nintendo isn't quite out of the woods yet - if they can't get 3rd party games on the platform the Wii's popularity will peak sooner than later.
Give some actual proof or shut the fuck up.Deal, can we get *you* to shut the fuck up now? :)
The 360 isn't *all* doom and gloom. The attach rate (games sold per box) is huge compared to either of its competitors, compared with the Wii where attach rates are pretty dismal. MS *needs* a high attach rate due to their loss-per-box, whereas Nintendo will rake it in from selling hardware alone. Game publishers, on the other hand, rely on attach rate, because hardware sales mean nothing if everyone is still playing Wii Sports and not the *other* games. The 360 is getting all that publisher love for a very good reason - it is the platform that promises to help the people that prop a console up - the developers and publishers.
The PS3 is undoubtedly doing well in Japan, though my question would still be... what exactly are they playing? I've perused the shelves at the local Best Buy numerous times, and I'm hard pressed to find any game I want to play on PS3 that isn't available elsewhere. RE4 on Wii is very cool, and there are a *slew* of 360 games (Mass Effect being the big one for the next month) that I'm looking forward to. The PS3... besides MGS4 there isn't much on the horizon, and sadly that is even further away now.
State-side, it's pretty clear that Wii and 360 will wipe the floor with PS3 this holiday season. Of that I have no doubt, considering Sony doesn't have a single compelling (non-timed) exclusive coming out this holiday season.
Actually I've always thought that MGS4's storyline continues from the themes of MGS2 - that an information society makes warfare a very scary proposition, and individuality is compromised.
Just curious, what are American rates for data? Up here in Canada-land, we pay $217 USD for 500MB of data. Hard to imagine getting worse than that, but I'm curious.