I assume you're joking, but the UK at least does have a precedent for getting things fatally wrong, and considering events at the time (not to mention the troubled history of the country he was travelling to) this seems like a monumentally stupid thing to do. My guess is it was a PR thing that went wrong and they were meant to find all the bombs to show off how tight their security is. Yeah, about that...
People talk about religion being the basis of their morality but I can think of nothing more dangerous than basing your morality on fairy stories [which you believe to be true]
Fixed that for you - I don't think there's any problem with taking away from a story those parts which help form the basis of a strong moral code, it's what people do with their children all the time when they read them bedtime stories, but then they tell them at the end that ogres aren't real and there's no evil witch. The danger is telling people that the stories are true, and that they somehow have to peer through this theological mess - that 2000 years of religious scholars have been poring over and still not arrived at a definitive answer - and find the right path, that's the real headf**k.
Actually it's funny but all of the leaders you mentioned used the affectations of religion to affirm their power base: a religious structure (strong leader figure, demonisation of those outside the target audience), strong iconography, instilling a mission or doctrine in their followers, forcing out competing religions, the promise of a utopia (often at the cost of hardships today). Both religion and "political religion" also tend to have the same strong root in rule of law - pretty much the only thing missing is the deity figure, but often the leadership figure assumes that mantle, too.
"Violent people are going to find some excuse for their violence" - yes, history tells us that they either vent it on a small scale, or they invent religion, or something close enough that the layman wouldn't know the difference, and invite along lots of other people to vent it on a large scale.
Yeah, I got a DSi for Christmas, and the WPA wifi setup was a breeze, but even though it's always connected in the main menu, a bunch of games still specifically check for a WEP connection rather than an internet connection and tell me I can't download content etc.
Indeed, because if there's one thing governments have stressed continually the last ten years it's that our privacy is paramount. When they're not invading it, recording it or leaving it lying around on trains, that is.
These space cats are sitting on massive valuable resources, and when the mega-corps/military go in to liberate them and teach them the civilised way of life, they fight back with guerilla tactics in the name of religion. Our governments have spent the last decade telling us these indigenous people ARE the evil ones, so what does that mean in the real world? Doesn't sound like a happy ending...
On a side note, this "Unobtainium" is worth what, 400,000 times more than oil, and we're honestly expected to believe the humans will leave them alone after one beating? My bet is on the next visit they'll nuke the planet from orbit then send robots in to do the mining.
I'm surprised that, given they obviously tried to make this appeal to as wide an audience as possible (with good reason, if they want to recoup that half a billion), in the UK it released with a 12 certificate when it seems like it could have so easily been tweaked and released as a PG, snaring the whole peak Christmas kiddie market. I'm sure the DVD/Blu-Ray sales would have been better, too (although it's possible they'll edit it to this end anyway).
I saw it in 3D too, and while I totally agree that the effects were amazing, I just found the entire experience quite dull (and by about halfway in I'd even become blasé about the effects). Like watching a 2.5 hour long advertisement for the latest graphics card, or some video game cut-scene you just can't skip. It felt like half a billion dollars and the best they could manage was Fern Gully with space cats.
At the very least if you assume a support cost, this will increase as more users sign up. The hardware costs involved for the average user are pretty stable now and unlikely to fall much further in the next few years.
I kind of got the impression that "global warming" is political speak dressed up as green speak for "our economony is now almost entirely service based, the bottom has fallen out of the unsustainable credit market, what can we in the west sell to the emerging economic giants now that they have all the large industry... how about green technology?".
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but then back in the 80's I was saying that "nuclear is bad" was political speak dressed up as green speak for "big oil is good and cheap and currently abundant" and, in hindsight, if we'd built a ton of nuclear reactors back then the world would potentially be in a much better state today (no impending fuel crisis, potentially no big war in the middle east, no extra couple of decades of pumping pollutants directly into the skies, further development of nuclear technology allowing costs to decrease and making it more viable for emerging industrial countries, etc).
Hmm, I thought that too since there are a whole host of reasons why guys are more likely to casually pick up a pad and play without necessarily being more interested in games than girls - less stigma amongst their peers, highly competitive, more likely to know/be in the company of gamers as statistically more males play games, etc. I see the study was just on Everquest players, though, which I haven't played personally but gather is likely to attract more than the general casual gamer.
Because of course, apart from education, every other aspect of life in the US and Africa is identical so it must be that they're doing the education stuff wrong...
On the real BBC, none of the shows have Gordon Ramsey in them! Locally he's contracted to a different Channel (C4), but yeah, on that channel he's almost omnipresent.
I have to say in relation to GP's post, although I think most TV is crap most of the time, when I do find myself watching it's probably in the region of 85% BBC, 10% Sky (for the Simpsons/Futurama) and then a mixture of the others. It might be crap but at least it's generally crap with decent production values, and the few must-watch shows I do have (Doctor Who, Have I Got News for You, Mock the Week, Top Gear, QI) are all on the BBC.
I keep seeing this same argument but it makes me wonder, aside from huge US producers (and there doesn't seem to be a lot of that on the BBC, it mostly goes to the commercial channels), who these companies are that they can wield such power over the Beeb. They're mostly small companies that would probably kill for the opportunity to get their output on the BBC, especially at a time when the BBC seems to be going against the grain of failing TV channels. I suspect this is a much-used smokescreen thrown up by those with an ulterior motive in pushing through these restrictions.
"Do you have a suggestion for a non half-assed solution to prevent copyright infringement?"
How about something along the lines of: you'll never fully eliminate copying and in many cases copying has been demonstrated to have positive benefits (exposing a wider audience to your product, allowing people a try-before-you-buy service, etc), while DRM and other prevention techniques have been shown to have many disadvantages and cause issues for legitimate customers (rootkits, WGA issues, software installation bugs etc) so stop wasting money chasing an impossible goal and improve your services to the point where people are happy to pay for them (or find an alternative revenue model which allows you to freely disseminate them).
The problem is, every time you reboot with a new engine, you raise expectations, and make no mistake expectations for this game were massively high from the very beginning. It's a hugely self-defeating cycle to tell a bunch of ultra-hyped users that the current gaming engines just don't do your game justice so you're switching to the latest bleeding edge engine, no way they could ever have released a game that lived up to its own hype. They would have been far better to release an average game, take the hit on the brand and then build on it for the next version (and by all accounts if they'd released at any time the game would have been more than average anyway, DN3D was never about graphics, they were superceded shortly after its initial release, it was about pure, unadulterated but often adult-based FPS fun).
Sounds like the guy at the top just cared too much about his baby - should have backed away and left it with a project manager.
Strippers... sushi...Oh, and the best confrontation of a giant end-of-game bad guy (so big you had to fight him in a football stadium) ever, "What, there's only one of you?"
And even the idea of duplicating 1,000 CDs is starting to look antiquated when you can go with a pure digital distribution method (and if you really need to get some physical media out there, just buy up some cheap USB sticks to pass around).
Just what I thought on reading this - sure they were super talented in '97, a decade later with nothing visible to show for their efforts, got to be tough to prove your worth. Especially if they were already working for below market rates. I hope they did manage to move onto better things.
Whooooosh. I think OP's point was, if Australia - a democratically elected gorvernment - are trying to pass censorship laws, what hope for anyone in China.
Have you considered the excuse might be justification for a big switch in how the internet is censored aimed at people outside rather than inside the country? They might not want to act like Western democracies, but they certainly want to do business with them, and it's much easier for our governments to justify doing business with a country with such harsh censorship if they give reasons our prudishness can more easily accept.
Maybe on censorship, but I'm expecting the west to be way ahead of the curve on commercialisation - with a system like that in place, how long until they start charging everyone an "admin" fee to appear on the whitelist...
Of course, as with all statistics, it's worth taking those 3-5% figures with a grain of salt - I wonder if it includes repeat failures of single units or if multiple failures of one unit only count as +1 to the failure rate. If some of the complainers are to be believed the same unit might have failed three or four times (and I've seen much higher claims) which would skew the official figures somewhat. Mind, there's no telling if these people are being entirely honest either! I agree anywhere near 50% failure is highly dubious though in any case.
Mine only failed once (and at another time destroyed one disk before I learned very quickly to always keep it positioned horizontally), outside of the original warranty but was repaired under the extended warranty offered for RRoD, which was a nice win for consumers for a change regardless that I would have preferred it didn't break.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you're joking, but the UK at least does have a precedent for getting things fatally wrong, and considering events at the time (not to mention the troubled history of the country he was travelling to) this seems like a monumentally stupid thing to do. My guess is it was a PR thing that went wrong and they were meant to find all the bombs to show off how tight their security is. Yeah, about that...
People talk about religion being the basis of their morality but I can think of nothing more dangerous than basing your morality on fairy stories [which you believe to be true]
Fixed that for you - I don't think there's any problem with taking away from a story those parts which help form the basis of a strong moral code, it's what people do with their children all the time when they read them bedtime stories, but then they tell them at the end that ogres aren't real and there's no evil witch. The danger is telling people that the stories are true, and that they somehow have to peer through this theological mess - that 2000 years of religious scholars have been poring over and still not arrived at a definitive answer - and find the right path, that's the real headf**k.
Actually it's funny but all of the leaders you mentioned used the affectations of religion to affirm their power base: a religious structure (strong leader figure, demonisation of those outside the target audience), strong iconography, instilling a mission or doctrine in their followers, forcing out competing religions, the promise of a utopia (often at the cost of hardships today). Both religion and "political religion" also tend to have the same strong root in rule of law - pretty much the only thing missing is the deity figure, but often the leadership figure assumes that mantle, too.
"Violent people are going to find some excuse for their violence" - yes, history tells us that they either vent it on a small scale, or they invent religion, or something close enough that the layman wouldn't know the difference, and invite along lots of other people to vent it on a large scale.
"And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also"
Was he part of RIAA by any chance?
Yeah, I got a DSi for Christmas, and the WPA wifi setup was a breeze, but even though it's always connected in the main menu, a bunch of games still specifically check for a WEP connection rather than an internet connection and tell me I can't download content etc.
Indeed, because if there's one thing governments have stressed continually the last ten years it's that our privacy is paramount. When they're not invading it, recording it or leaving it lying around on trains, that is.
Spoilers ahead
These space cats are sitting on massive valuable resources, and when the mega-corps/military go in to liberate them and teach them the civilised way of life, they fight back with guerilla tactics in the name of religion. Our governments have spent the last decade telling us these indigenous people ARE the evil ones, so what does that mean in the real world? Doesn't sound like a happy ending...
On a side note, this "Unobtainium" is worth what, 400,000 times more than oil, and we're honestly expected to believe the humans will leave them alone after one beating? My bet is on the next visit they'll nuke the planet from orbit then send robots in to do the mining.
I'm surprised that, given they obviously tried to make this appeal to as wide an audience as possible (with good reason, if they want to recoup that half a billion), in the UK it released with a 12 certificate when it seems like it could have so easily been tweaked and released as a PG, snaring the whole peak Christmas kiddie market. I'm sure the DVD/Blu-Ray sales would have been better, too (although it's possible they'll edit it to this end anyway).
Considering I fell asleep halfway through for a couple minutes then woke up wanting popcorn, that's probably the best analogy yet.
I saw it in 3D too, and while I totally agree that the effects were amazing, I just found the entire experience quite dull (and by about halfway in I'd even become blasé about the effects). Like watching a 2.5 hour long advertisement for the latest graphics card, or some video game cut-scene you just can't skip. It felt like half a billion dollars and the best they could manage was Fern Gully with space cats.
At the very least if you assume a support cost, this will increase as more users sign up. The hardware costs involved for the average user are pretty stable now and unlikely to fall much further in the next few years.
I kind of got the impression that "global warming" is political speak dressed up as green speak for "our economony is now almost entirely service based, the bottom has fallen out of the unsustainable credit market, what can we in the west sell to the emerging economic giants now that they have all the large industry... how about green technology?".
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but then back in the 80's I was saying that "nuclear is bad" was political speak dressed up as green speak for "big oil is good and cheap and currently abundant" and, in hindsight, if we'd built a ton of nuclear reactors back then the world would potentially be in a much better state today (no impending fuel crisis, potentially no big war in the middle east, no extra couple of decades of pumping pollutants directly into the skies, further development of nuclear technology allowing costs to decrease and making it more viable for emerging industrial countries, etc).
Hmm, I thought that too since there are a whole host of reasons why guys are more likely to casually pick up a pad and play without necessarily being more interested in games than girls - less stigma amongst their peers, highly competitive, more likely to know/be in the company of gamers as statistically more males play games, etc. I see the study was just on Everquest players, though, which I haven't played personally but gather is likely to attract more than the general casual gamer.
Because of course, apart from education, every other aspect of life in the US and Africa is identical so it must be that they're doing the education stuff wrong...
On the real BBC, none of the shows have Gordon Ramsey in them! Locally he's contracted to a different Channel (C4), but yeah, on that channel he's almost omnipresent.
I have to say in relation to GP's post, although I think most TV is crap most of the time, when I do find myself watching it's probably in the region of 85% BBC, 10% Sky (for the Simpsons/Futurama) and then a mixture of the others. It might be crap but at least it's generally crap with decent production values, and the few must-watch shows I do have (Doctor Who, Have I Got News for You, Mock the Week, Top Gear, QI) are all on the BBC.
I keep seeing this same argument but it makes me wonder, aside from huge US producers (and there doesn't seem to be a lot of that on the BBC, it mostly goes to the commercial channels), who these companies are that they can wield such power over the Beeb. They're mostly small companies that would probably kill for the opportunity to get their output on the BBC, especially at a time when the BBC seems to be going against the grain of failing TV channels. I suspect this is a much-used smokescreen thrown up by those with an ulterior motive in pushing through these restrictions.
"Do you have a suggestion for a non half-assed solution to prevent copyright infringement?"
How about something along the lines of: you'll never fully eliminate copying and in many cases copying has been demonstrated to have positive benefits (exposing a wider audience to your product, allowing people a try-before-you-buy service, etc), while DRM and other prevention techniques have been shown to have many disadvantages and cause issues for legitimate customers (rootkits, WGA issues, software installation bugs etc) so stop wasting money chasing an impossible goal and improve your services to the point where people are happy to pay for them (or find an alternative revenue model which allows you to freely disseminate them).
The problem is, every time you reboot with a new engine, you raise expectations, and make no mistake expectations for this game were massively high from the very beginning. It's a hugely self-defeating cycle to tell a bunch of ultra-hyped users that the current gaming engines just don't do your game justice so you're switching to the latest bleeding edge engine, no way they could ever have released a game that lived up to its own hype. They would have been far better to release an average game, take the hit on the brand and then build on it for the next version (and by all accounts if they'd released at any time the game would have been more than average anyway, DN3D was never about graphics, they were superceded shortly after its initial release, it was about pure, unadulterated but often adult-based FPS fun).
Sounds like the guy at the top just cared too much about his baby - should have backed away and left it with a project manager.
Strippers... sushi...Oh, and the best confrontation of a giant end-of-game bad guy (so big you had to fight him in a football stadium) ever, "What, there's only one of you?"
And even the idea of duplicating 1,000 CDs is starting to look antiquated when you can go with a pure digital distribution method (and if you really need to get some physical media out there, just buy up some cheap USB sticks to pass around).
Just what I thought on reading this - sure they were super talented in '97, a decade later with nothing visible to show for their efforts, got to be tough to prove your worth. Especially if they were already working for below market rates. I hope they did manage to move onto better things.
Whooooosh. I think OP's point was, if Australia - a democratically elected gorvernment - are trying to pass censorship laws, what hope for anyone in China.
Have you considered the excuse might be justification for a big switch in how the internet is censored aimed at people outside rather than inside the country? They might not want to act like Western democracies, but they certainly want to do business with them, and it's much easier for our governments to justify doing business with a country with such harsh censorship if they give reasons our prudishness can more easily accept.
Maybe on censorship, but I'm expecting the west to be way ahead of the curve on commercialisation - with a system like that in place, how long until they start charging everyone an "admin" fee to appear on the whitelist...
Of course, as with all statistics, it's worth taking those 3-5% figures with a grain of salt - I wonder if it includes repeat failures of single units or if multiple failures of one unit only count as +1 to the failure rate. If some of the complainers are to be believed the same unit might have failed three or four times (and I've seen much higher claims) which would skew the official figures somewhat. Mind, there's no telling if these people are being entirely honest either! I agree anywhere near 50% failure is highly dubious though in any case.
Mine only failed once (and at another time destroyed one disk before I learned very quickly to always keep it positioned horizontally), outside of the original warranty but was repaired under the extended warranty offered for RRoD, which was a nice win for consumers for a change regardless that I would have preferred it didn't break.