The sets were meant to be cheap and nasty and grey. The whole premise was that these guys were living what would seem to be the dream life to many, visiting faraway planets on a mining ship the size of a city with advanced AI, yet to them it was just a tedious day job. The original plan was to tone it down even more - you wouldn't even know they were on a spaceship, it was meant to just look like any corridor in any office in the country. The mental jarring between the boring scenery inside and the stunning space scenes outside was always intentional and the juxtaposition of "these guys could be having this exact conversation in the coffee room where I work... and now suddenly they're being chased by a murderous polymorph" was the source of at least some of the humour.
Totally agree on Back to Earth - it just didn't feel Red Dwarf, although I can understand what they were trying to do (apparently an homage to Blade Runner as it was one of the key inspirations to the series). I have a muted sense of apprehension about any future series being closer to Back to Earth than the early-to-mid series.
Or maybe every Tom, Dick and Harry want-to-be hacker already knew about this (it's hardly a great leap from a voice recognition-enabled phone to scanning calls for important information) and these guys have brought it to the public's attention by publishing this.
Why would the government go to the cost and effort of trying to get a few people to install this on their phones when they are almost certainly already listening to everyone's calls at the exchange.
I've definitely found myself doing this more often, even as a longtime stalwart of owning the physical media. Previously I'd hear a song I liked, search the lyrics, find the name, read some reviews and unless I could find a really good deal on the album online, I'd wait and look for it cheap in the local music stores. Now within seconds of hearing the song I can have bought it for less than a quid (without having to buy the rest of the filler from the album if I don't want it) and be listening to it. It's just so damn convenient, I'd buy even more if it was cheaper (a quid seems like nothing so I'll impulse buy, but seven or eight pounds for an album makes me still think I'd be better off looking for bargains on the physical media, a price mark of maybe £3-4 would probably get me buying a lot more albums).
Not only that, but it's sales of DVDs and games that are keeping the store going - sales of music have dropped off a cliff (as evidenced by the fact that in most HMV stores you'll have one or two shelves of the latest chart music front of store, the rest is buried right away in the back corner or on a different floor while the rest of the shop front is given over to DVD/BluRay). Meanwhile Zavvi and Woolies, the biggest physical music competitors, already died out in the high street.
Tell me about it. Game and Gamestation do the same thing over here, as well as a bunch of the other usual retailers - HMV, the superstores, etc. and it was the final nail in me just not buying from them any more. It's bad enough that I have to worry about the fact that they stick the disk in some crappy cardboard sleeve tossed in a drawer (they don't seem to take particular care handling these things and they're a pain to return disks for scratches so you basically have to micro-inspect the disk in the store before you take it away), or that they've forgot to include all the manuals, DLC codes, etc that are meant to be with the game, and that's without even considering the fact that a less ethical employee might be selling multiplayer serials and such online - they're meant to be sealed for a reason! There's only one of the big high street retailers I can buy from now without them pre-opening everything (Argos, in case you wondered).
Not to mention with items like Microsoft gamer points or Farmville credits or whatever, many game stores are as good as storing cash on the premises - easy to move, have the appearance of being anonymous (I don't know if they scan these before taking them from stock so they can trace them/cancel them, so I'm guessing the average thief doesn't know either, which must make them a tempting target).
Apple aren't in the market of innovation, they're in the market of aspiration. Nothing they've done has been "innovative", every product they've release in at least the last ten years has already been done, but they package it in a format that makes people desire it. They're pretty much like a top clothes designer. A top designer can charge a premium way above the cost of his materials or the price of his competitors because people want to be seen in his clothes. If he loses the ability to design, he can still sell mass-produced pants, but they lose their elite appeal and have to compete purely on price, that's a downward spiral. Don't underestimate just how closely linked the health of Jobs and the health of Apple actually are.
It might even be a positive thing - we don't have the figures to show how those people fit into society previously. I find it difficult to believe that, before the advent of games, such people set aside their mental issues and slotted into society without a hitch. More likely they found worse ways to sate their addictive behaviours - drugs, drink, cigarettes, self harm. Without knowing all the facts, who is to say that it's not a good thing that games are helping to identify people who can benefit from support without sending them off down a route that will marr them for the rest of their lives, destroying relationships or landing them with a criminal record, etc. and making it much more difficult to re-integrate when they do get help.
Agreed - I have no issue with making things easy for those who are wary of technology, my only worry is when it comes at the cost of limiting the device for everyone else. If you make the user jump through some trivial complexity hoops to install a rival package manager, it's not like the average user will fall into it by mistake (and you can always have a big fat reset option somewhere so the phone vendor isn't stuck supporting this stuff). I know there's the option of jailbreaking the device, but really you shouldn't need to, the whole "making things easier" thing is just an excuse (since, for a subset of users, they're making things more difficult). I'm broadly in favour of anything that means I don't spend all my family reunions doing tech support, but don't take our geek toys away in the process!
Oh the crime has been committed, don't you worry about that. They've just not invented a name for the crime and the requisite paperwork to go along with it yet, but most certainly the crime was committed.
If you have a beef with the gravity gun, how about the portal gun? Now, don't get me wrong, I love Portal, but it always really bugged me that there are certain surfaces you can't create a portal on. Why? What possible reason is there that this shiny metal surface is any more resistent to a portable wormhole than that sturdy granite surface? For that matter why do I even need a wall, what's wrong with creating a portal in the air? Things like spikes and fire, fair enough, I can almost accept that that's not a limitation of the weapon but of common sense on behalf of the in game character, but everything else should be fair game.
Which is odd because it's completely counter to the entire paragon route in the second game, which is that you can work with the nasty xenophobic organisation when needs must in pursuit of a goal which is not evil. I agree with GP - I saved the council for my "carry on" game save, but the next two times I let them roast, it just felt the "good" choice was still to side with the military (after all, this was the same council that spent the whole game calling me a liar for telling them a giant space monster was coming - the galaxy need strong leadership to recover from the attack and these idiots were too blinded by their own xenophobia to even see what was right in front of them), even though the game refused to acknowledge it. I guess even that's a nice mirror held up to life, you don't always get hailed the hero even when you make what feel like the right choices for the right reasons.
Dead Space is a good game for this kind of experience. I love nursing my ammo and health through such games, it would be nice to see this kind of behaviour rewarded more in games. Usually it's the opposite, you get blatantly punished with weapon/ammo/health resets. Halo Reach was the latest that bugged me with this, if I go out of my way to find the best equipment and to save a bunch of heavy ammo to the end of a level, don't take them all away from me and start me out again with a pistol just because your game isn't robust enough to cope with different play styles!
It's a pity that in almost all cases the direct impact this time around was so limited. It's nice that my actions affect the world my character is running around in, but a really gutsy move would be to change the main story arc on a much bigger level based on decisions in ME1. Imagine if "good" characters stayed on with the military, got a better ship so didn't get nuked by the collectors at the beginning and you experienced the whole story from a completely different viewpoint (and got to team up with Ashley again), while "bad" characters were pushed down the Cerberus route. Sure it would be a hell of a lot more complex, but it might even get me to dig out my copy of ME1 and replay it for a fourth time if the impact was so huge. Maybe they have bigger plans for ME3 - after all it's possible to lose a lot of team members this time around which, unless they start you from scratch next time out with an all new team, will have a much more direct impact on the game.
Apparently even if you have all the upgrades you still can lose a lot of people by choosing wrong people for different team members at the end game.
True, but so long as you've done everything else right you'd probably have to make really stupid choices (like sending the Krogan to do the complex technical re-routing, or the thief as the team leader for the strike force) to lose anyone. The key things are a) buy all the upgrades and b) complete everyone's "loyalty" mission successfully. If you've done that, the game actually lets you choose from 3 or 4 characters for each end game choice without losing anyone, which makes it pretty hard to fail.
I played through the first time and saved everyone without even realising it was possible to influence that aspect of the game - just by exploring and playing everything to its logical conclusion. The second time (on Insanity) I lost Legion, but I hadn't done his or a couple of the others' loyalty missions so I was expecting casualties to be much worse, I just wanted to try the boss fight on Insanity and wasn't too concerned with losses, I'll be carrying my other save over to ME3. A lot of people who struggled to keep everyone alive end-game seemed to have just run through the main game without doing the side quests, which meant they missed a lot of the backstory (or maybe they just got sick of mining planets for resources - have to admit, though it was better than ME1, that aspect is still a bit of a grind - would be nice later in the game to have some way to automate it).
I would have liked to see much more focus on the interaction with the Illusive Man in the story. I think it was kind of a casualty of the fact that the game can be played down two lines (broadly for or against IM, although in both cases you're stuck doing his missions when he tells you) that we didn't see more of this. Butting up against the council in the first game seemed much more involved. I understand what GP says, after you are "reborn" and find out evil characters X are behind everything, the game marches inevitably towards the encounter with evil characters X, and the only other "revelation" is that original evil characters Y from the first game are behind the actions of evil characters X.
You could monitor incoming traffic to identify the referrer. It's not perfect but it is quite possible to know if a file is pirated if the link came from a forum with the thread title "Britney Spears - Greatest Hits" even if the files are in a password protected RAR file. No opening required.
Trivial to defeat - the referrer just bounces all links via an interim "safe" page, or just point blank doesn't send a referer [sic] header with the request. You could refuse all users that don't come with a referer if you don't mind losing some legitimate traffic, but then the site just puts the links on a "safe" site and links to that (pretty soon RS would see all sites as unsafe) or they use a URL shortener, or then send the links via email.>/li>
Costly - you will get false positives. The link to some guy's video rant about how awful Britney's latest CD is, posted to a forum with the title "Britney Spears - Greatest Hits" is perfectly legal. You either accept you will ban legal content or you pay someone to investigate false positives. And once the piracy sites figure out it's costing you to investigate false positives, they can trivially make it prohibitively expensive for you to do so by generating thousands of them.
Your explanation fails the idiot test. As icebraining said - firstly Youtube have full access to the unencrypted data, it's relatively trivial to run some algorithm to compare it to a stored video/audio stream and you know what format the file is in to begin with. Rapidshare not only have the issue that users could just encrypt their files, but even unencrypted they'd need a reliable method to compare vastly more types of files. That's both technically complicated and incredibly costly. The alternative is that the people with a vested interest in preventing the sharing of illegal materials (the rights holders) do the police work and RS remove it when asked and... oh, wouldn't you know, that's what they already do. It's a much better situation, RIAA admittedly have to invest a little in chasing the content down, but compared to the millions they tell us in court this is costing them, it's a drop in the ocean to have some student checking download sites, meanwhile the rest of us get to use hosting sites for legitimate purposes without them being crushed by an unfair financial burden.
Facilitating copyright infringement is doing something that helps others infringe copyright? Well then Sony need to get theirown house in order before they go after anyone else.
I know if it was me sitting on that information, dragging me through court would definitely prevent me releasing it. I certainly wouldn't be making any anonymous uploads to various torrent sites on my way to court. Seriously, if they wanted to keep a lid on him I'm sure they could just buy him out for a lot less than the cost of a court action (and that way they can get him to sign a contract and NDA so they have something a little more solid to sue him for if he did still release it). No, I think this is as said elsewhere, a pure bullying tactic to send a message (and if it ever looks like they're losing they'll drop the charges and give him a settlement to stop him counter suing).
Of course there's a valid reason for Apple to try and retain this trademark - but it's not what you suggest (I have a 3.5" disk from circa '91 at home labelled "apps" so my usage of the term predates your 1999 example by almost a decade), it's money pure and simple. Apple have spent a lot of money popularising the term App Store - they obviously don't want their competitors to piggyback, but really I think they're fighting a losing battle. I already hear people calling the other stores "app stores" (most frequently I hear the android marketplace referred to as such but that could be because almost everyone here has either an iPhone or an Android-enabled handset, I've even done it a couple of times myself without thinking ), so basically they took a word that's been pretty common usage for 20+ years, they used it not in some new or novel way that would make it distinct, they just appended "store" to indicate they were selling said apps, and already the term is ubiquitous to other application stores. That doesn't sound like very firm footing for a valid trademark claim.
If what you're saying is true, that makes any trademark claim even weaker as far as I can tell. The whole point of trademarks is that they are meant to prevent customer confusion, saying that there are things called "apps" that are like but different to "applications" and that this difference apparently rests wholly on the complexity of the code or the size of the program sounds like an incredibly confusing situation. If he really believed that, he should have chosen a name for this new categorisation of software that had no room for confusion with the existing, well established term application that has already been abbreviated to "app" for 20+ years.
Slashdot Mirror
The sets were meant to be cheap and nasty and grey. The whole premise was that these guys were living what would seem to be the dream life to many, visiting faraway planets on a mining ship the size of a city with advanced AI, yet to them it was just a tedious day job. The original plan was to tone it down even more - you wouldn't even know they were on a spaceship, it was meant to just look like any corridor in any office in the country. The mental jarring between the boring scenery inside and the stunning space scenes outside was always intentional and the juxtaposition of "these guys could be having this exact conversation in the coffee room where I work... and now suddenly they're being chased by a murderous polymorph" was the source of at least some of the humour.
Totally agree on Back to Earth - it just didn't feel Red Dwarf, although I can understand what they were trying to do (apparently an homage to Blade Runner as it was one of the key inspirations to the series). I have a muted sense of apprehension about any future series being closer to Back to Earth than the early-to-mid series.
Or maybe every Tom, Dick and Harry want-to-be hacker already knew about this (it's hardly a great leap from a voice recognition-enabled phone to scanning calls for important information) and these guys have brought it to the public's attention by publishing this.
Why would the government go to the cost and effort of trying to get a few people to install this on their phones when they are almost certainly already listening to everyone's calls at the exchange.
I've definitely found myself doing this more often, even as a longtime stalwart of owning the physical media. Previously I'd hear a song I liked, search the lyrics, find the name, read some reviews and unless I could find a really good deal on the album online, I'd wait and look for it cheap in the local music stores. Now within seconds of hearing the song I can have bought it for less than a quid (without having to buy the rest of the filler from the album if I don't want it) and be listening to it. It's just so damn convenient, I'd buy even more if it was cheaper (a quid seems like nothing so I'll impulse buy, but seven or eight pounds for an album makes me still think I'd be better off looking for bargains on the physical media, a price mark of maybe £3-4 would probably get me buying a lot more albums).
Not only that, but it's sales of DVDs and games that are keeping the store going - sales of music have dropped off a cliff (as evidenced by the fact that in most HMV stores you'll have one or two shelves of the latest chart music front of store, the rest is buried right away in the back corner or on a different floor while the rest of the shop front is given over to DVD/BluRay). Meanwhile Zavvi and Woolies, the biggest physical music competitors, already died out in the high street.
Tell me about it. Game and Gamestation do the same thing over here, as well as a bunch of the other usual retailers - HMV, the superstores, etc. and it was the final nail in me just not buying from them any more. It's bad enough that I have to worry about the fact that they stick the disk in some crappy cardboard sleeve tossed in a drawer (they don't seem to take particular care handling these things and they're a pain to return disks for scratches so you basically have to micro-inspect the disk in the store before you take it away), or that they've forgot to include all the manuals, DLC codes, etc that are meant to be with the game, and that's without even considering the fact that a less ethical employee might be selling multiplayer serials and such online - they're meant to be sealed for a reason! There's only one of the big high street retailers I can buy from now without them pre-opening everything (Argos, in case you wondered).
Not to mention with items like Microsoft gamer points or Farmville credits or whatever, many game stores are as good as storing cash on the premises - easy to move, have the appearance of being anonymous (I don't know if they scan these before taking them from stock so they can trace them/cancel them, so I'm guessing the average thief doesn't know either, which must make them a tempting target).
Apple aren't in the market of innovation, they're in the market of aspiration. Nothing they've done has been "innovative", every product they've release in at least the last ten years has already been done, but they package it in a format that makes people desire it. They're pretty much like a top clothes designer. A top designer can charge a premium way above the cost of his materials or the price of his competitors because people want to be seen in his clothes. If he loses the ability to design, he can still sell mass-produced pants, but they lose their elite appeal and have to compete purely on price, that's a downward spiral. Don't underestimate just how closely linked the health of Jobs and the health of Apple actually are.
It might even be a positive thing - we don't have the figures to show how those people fit into society previously. I find it difficult to believe that, before the advent of games, such people set aside their mental issues and slotted into society without a hitch. More likely they found worse ways to sate their addictive behaviours - drugs, drink, cigarettes, self harm. Without knowing all the facts, who is to say that it's not a good thing that games are helping to identify people who can benefit from support without sending them off down a route that will marr them for the rest of their lives, destroying relationships or landing them with a criminal record, etc. and making it much more difficult to re-integrate when they do get help.
Agreed - I have no issue with making things easy for those who are wary of technology, my only worry is when it comes at the cost of limiting the device for everyone else. If you make the user jump through some trivial complexity hoops to install a rival package manager, it's not like the average user will fall into it by mistake (and you can always have a big fat reset option somewhere so the phone vendor isn't stuck supporting this stuff). I know there's the option of jailbreaking the device, but really you shouldn't need to, the whole "making things easier" thing is just an excuse (since, for a subset of users, they're making things more difficult). I'm broadly in favour of anything that means I don't spend all my family reunions doing tech support, but don't take our geek toys away in the process!
Oh the crime has been committed, don't you worry about that. They've just not invented a name for the crime and the requisite paperwork to go along with it yet, but most certainly the crime was committed.
If you have a beef with the gravity gun, how about the portal gun? Now, don't get me wrong, I love Portal, but it always really bugged me that there are certain surfaces you can't create a portal on. Why? What possible reason is there that this shiny metal surface is any more resistent to a portable wormhole than that sturdy granite surface? For that matter why do I even need a wall, what's wrong with creating a portal in the air? Things like spikes and fire, fair enough, I can almost accept that that's not a limitation of the weapon but of common sense on behalf of the in game character, but everything else should be fair game.
Which is odd because it's completely counter to the entire paragon route in the second game, which is that you can work with the nasty xenophobic organisation when needs must in pursuit of a goal which is not evil. I agree with GP - I saved the council for my "carry on" game save, but the next two times I let them roast, it just felt the "good" choice was still to side with the military (after all, this was the same council that spent the whole game calling me a liar for telling them a giant space monster was coming - the galaxy need strong leadership to recover from the attack and these idiots were too blinded by their own xenophobia to even see what was right in front of them), even though the game refused to acknowledge it. I guess even that's a nice mirror held up to life, you don't always get hailed the hero even when you make what feel like the right choices for the right reasons.
Dead Space is a good game for this kind of experience. I love nursing my ammo and health through such games, it would be nice to see this kind of behaviour rewarded more in games. Usually it's the opposite, you get blatantly punished with weapon/ammo/health resets. Halo Reach was the latest that bugged me with this, if I go out of my way to find the best equipment and to save a bunch of heavy ammo to the end of a level, don't take them all away from me and start me out again with a pistol just because your game isn't robust enough to cope with different play styles!
It's a pity that in almost all cases the direct impact this time around was so limited. It's nice that my actions affect the world my character is running around in, but a really gutsy move would be to change the main story arc on a much bigger level based on decisions in ME1. Imagine if "good" characters stayed on with the military, got a better ship so didn't get nuked by the collectors at the beginning and you experienced the whole story from a completely different viewpoint (and got to team up with Ashley again), while "bad" characters were pushed down the Cerberus route. Sure it would be a hell of a lot more complex, but it might even get me to dig out my copy of ME1 and replay it for a fourth time if the impact was so huge. Maybe they have bigger plans for ME3 - after all it's possible to lose a lot of team members this time around which, unless they start you from scratch next time out with an all new team, will have a much more direct impact on the game.
Apparently even if you have all the upgrades you still can lose a lot of people by choosing wrong people for different team members at the end game.
True, but so long as you've done everything else right you'd probably have to make really stupid choices (like sending the Krogan to do the complex technical re-routing, or the thief as the team leader for the strike force) to lose anyone. The key things are a) buy all the upgrades and b) complete everyone's "loyalty" mission successfully. If you've done that, the game actually lets you choose from 3 or 4 characters for each end game choice without losing anyone, which makes it pretty hard to fail.
I played through the first time and saved everyone without even realising it was possible to influence that aspect of the game - just by exploring and playing everything to its logical conclusion. The second time (on Insanity) I lost Legion, but I hadn't done his or a couple of the others' loyalty missions so I was expecting casualties to be much worse, I just wanted to try the boss fight on Insanity and wasn't too concerned with losses, I'll be carrying my other save over to ME3. A lot of people who struggled to keep everyone alive end-game seemed to have just run through the main game without doing the side quests, which meant they missed a lot of the backstory (or maybe they just got sick of mining planets for resources - have to admit, though it was better than ME1, that aspect is still a bit of a grind - would be nice later in the game to have some way to automate it).
I would have liked to see much more focus on the interaction with the Illusive Man in the story. I think it was kind of a casualty of the fact that the game can be played down two lines (broadly for or against IM, although in both cases you're stuck doing his missions when he tells you) that we didn't see more of this. Butting up against the council in the first game seemed much more involved. I understand what GP says, after you are "reborn" and find out evil characters X are behind everything, the game marches inevitably towards the encounter with evil characters X, and the only other "revelation" is that original evil characters Y from the first game are behind the actions of evil characters X.
You could monitor incoming traffic to identify the referrer. It's not perfect but it is quite possible to know if a file is pirated if the link came from a forum with the thread title "Britney Spears - Greatest Hits" even if the files are in a password protected RAR file. No opening required.
Your explanation fails the idiot test. As icebraining said - firstly Youtube have full access to the unencrypted data, it's relatively trivial to run some algorithm to compare it to a stored video/audio stream and you know what format the file is in to begin with. Rapidshare not only have the issue that users could just encrypt their files, but even unencrypted they'd need a reliable method to compare vastly more types of files. That's both technically complicated and incredibly costly. The alternative is that the people with a vested interest in preventing the sharing of illegal materials (the rights holders) do the police work and RS remove it when asked and... oh, wouldn't you know, that's what they already do. It's a much better situation, RIAA admittedly have to invest a little in chasing the content down, but compared to the millions they tell us in court this is costing them, it's a drop in the ocean to have some student checking download sites, meanwhile the rest of us get to use hosting sites for legitimate purposes without them being crushed by an unfair financial burden.
Facilitating copyright infringement is doing something that helps others infringe copyright? Well then Sony need to get their own house in order before they go after anyone else.
I know if it was me sitting on that information, dragging me through court would definitely prevent me releasing it. I certainly wouldn't be making any anonymous uploads to various torrent sites on my way to court. Seriously, if they wanted to keep a lid on him I'm sure they could just buy him out for a lot less than the cost of a court action (and that way they can get him to sign a contract and NDA so they have something a little more solid to sue him for if he did still release it). No, I think this is as said elsewhere, a pure bullying tactic to send a message (and if it ever looks like they're losing they'll drop the charges and give him a settlement to stop him counter suing).
Of course there's a valid reason for Apple to try and retain this trademark - but it's not what you suggest (I have a 3.5" disk from circa '91 at home labelled "apps" so my usage of the term predates your 1999 example by almost a decade), it's money pure and simple. Apple have spent a lot of money popularising the term App Store - they obviously don't want their competitors to piggyback, but really I think they're fighting a losing battle. I already hear people calling the other stores "app stores" (most frequently I hear the android marketplace referred to as such but that could be because almost everyone here has either an iPhone or an Android-enabled handset, I've even done it a couple of times myself without thinking ), so basically they took a word that's been pretty common usage for 20+ years, they used it not in some new or novel way that would make it distinct, they just appended "store" to indicate they were selling said apps, and already the term is ubiquitous to other application stores. That doesn't sound like very firm footing for a valid trademark claim.
If what you're saying is true, that makes any trademark claim even weaker as far as I can tell. The whole point of trademarks is that they are meant to prevent customer confusion, saying that there are things called "apps" that are like but different to "applications" and that this difference apparently rests wholly on the complexity of the code or the size of the program sounds like an incredibly confusing situation. If he really believed that, he should have chosen a name for this new categorisation of software that had no room for confusion with the existing, well established term application that has already been abbreviated to "app" for 20+ years.
You can also try any of these replacing App with Soft
Soft Outlet sounds more like a stool loosener, though. Still, at least then the whole squirting thing starts to make sense.
And when they say there's an app for that, they actually mean there's an apple for that?