Indeed, and to further drive the point home, it's been incredibly trivial to bypass copy protection on the NDS since almost day one, while the others enjoyed at least a little protection. In fact, there are even more reasons to do so on the NDS than for a home console - not having to carry around a case full of cartridges and instead having it all on one SD card, for instance. And yet, in the face of all this, sales have still been phenomenal. It's time we got away from this whole "piracy costs sales" argument and instead started thinking about the real reason people want to lock things down. The most obvious reason (when you "follow the money") is that they want to control where you buy from so that they have tighter control over prices, and if they can also do away with that pesky used game market at the same time, so much the better. I can't believe the industry would waste millions chasing the myth of "copying costs sales" when this is patently untrue, but I can believe they would invest millions in developing a system which gives them greater control over distribution channels and removes the possibility of resales.
There has effectively never been a way to prevent copying and distribution of games. When I was at school some 25-30 years ago people used to copy 5.25" floppy disks or tape-to-tape and share them with their friends. Then people started getting modems and BBSs were full of people sharing copied games. Then the internet arrived and suddenly it was trivial to find pretty much any game ever made, and all the DRM schemes so far have been massive failures, hurting only legitimate customers by making them jump through hoops to get things to work. So now, almost twenty years later - if your argument is sound - there should be no games being made, the entire market should have collapsed under the weight of mass copying. And yet the gaming market is bigger than ever, it dwarfs the other entertainment sectors, people are willing to pay four or five times as much for a game as they are for a movie or CD, even knowing that others are getting it free.
On a side note, I often hear the argument that the only way games would get made is if the developers got people to pre-pay in advance. I hate to break it to you but that's the way it already works, it's the way it has always worked. Of course, it's not individual customers that are paying, it's venture capital and investment, or the developer bankrolling it off previous profits, or even the publisher paying up front for the rights to distribute, etc. Filesharing is here, it's done nothing to stop the growth of the market and it will change nothing in the way that game development is funded. The best thing at this point would be to stop wasting resources trying to stop it and focus those resources on making the sector of people that are
paying happier, instead of burdening them with nonsense like DRM (and on that point, kudos in this instance for the lack of DRM, although saying you can only buy it from one source has much the same restricting effect on competition/resale/etc).
And looking at it from the other perspective, how happy would your employer be if you did one piece of work and told him you wanted to be paid for that same piece of work over and over again for your lifetime plus 70 years? The point is a lot of these file sharers wouldn't buy the product if they couldn't get it free. A good number might, a good number probably already do (apparently music filesharers actually buy more music than anyone else already, for instance), but lots wouldn't - therefore it's not hurting sales, which is where the "potential" part comes from. Going after those people for lost sales is pointless and self-defeating, it's like a restaurant suing the homeless for stealing food from their rubbish bins, claiming that if they're taking it for free, they could be buying it, therefore each one is a lost sale.
Okay, I get it, text shadow is the new 'thing' on the internet. But seriously, it makes your article harder to read. There is a time and a place people. And that time and place isn't everywhere all-the-time.
None of the links lead to anything that uses text-shadow. You may want to get your eyes checked.
Indeed, the only real difference between online and offline is that offline is a day late (and has the chance to crib people's comments for extra misinformation fuel to pour onto the fire). I would pay good money for a reliable, independent, fact-checking news source at this point, but I suspect there are too few others who would do the same that the cost would be prohibitive.
It might appear that way, but even something as simple as proof reading a one page document can be time consuming when it involves carrying out additional research external to that document to ensure it doesn't land you in trouble elsewhere. Essentially you're paying the lawyer for being thorough, and he's guaranteeing that the document is free of encumbrances that might land you in hot water. Would you really want to go with someone who skim reads and charges you less? Of course, that's not to say some lawyers don't skim read anyway, but at least if it's their screw up you'll be covered by their negligence insurance.
Actually, in the UK we have legal aid to help people on low incomes with legal fees. It doesn't cover all cases (libel and personal injury aren't covered - the latter attracting most of the contingency "no win, no fee" law firms), but it would certainly cover something like the above.
In this case it's not even that drastic. If it goes well, you'll make a ton of money and we'll nuke a few file sharers off the internet, if it goes badly you'll make a ton of money and probably get a slap on the wrist for your part in it.
It's not even extortion, it's marketing. They want to keep this in the news. Even if the news is "these idiots are suing the wrong people" they don't care, because enough of the "right" people will hear about it, and the "wrong" ones might still put pressure on their friends and relatives. They essentially want to make sharing an activity that society shuns, and they don't care who they have to harm to do it - even these stories probably help their cause, so long as they don't suffer any real repercussions for their actions.
Aren't you more likely to need to extend the living room if you go with the Kinect? The optimal distance from the sensor is 6' for single player, 8' for two player (and that's not including the space you need to leave around yourself so you don't bump into things). I think that will be the single biggest issue with Kinect - the technology seems great and there is definitely potential there if it works as promises, but particularly here in Europe, just having the physical space to play is a problem.
And if it saves thousands of lives in the meantime, and then when the exception they didn't think of gets plugged so it can't happen again, it will STILL be a good idea. We can all play the "think of an exception" game. Seat belts are a bad idea if they trap you in the car and it's on fire. That doesn't alter the fact that they've saved many thousands of lives since they were introduced. When was the last time you heard of someone dying because they were wearing a seat belt? Same thing here - there are bound to be edge cases we've not thought of. People can raise those and we can look for answers. In the case you describe it would seem the answer is as simple as allowing the phone to work when the car is stationary. Let's not throw out the potential to save thousands of lives (and remember, I'm not just talking about the idiots who are driving while using phones, they arguably get what they deserve, I'm talking about everyone else who has to share the roads with them) just because it means a few people have to change the way they currently do things.
Considering everyone has a mobile these days, how do you prove what they were doing? Here in the UK it's been illegal for a while for people to use mobiles while driving, but largely the people who were already using their mobiles still are. Inconsiderate people don't care about the law when they know there's practically zero chance of being caught. I see drivers all the time talking on their mobiles while driving, if a police car happens along, they'll drop it out of view then carry right on seconds later. Legal measures don't work. Technology would. We had the exact same arguments about mandatory seat belts, and now most people wear them without even thinking. Changing attitudes is a difficult process and technology can make the process a little quicker and easier.
The difference is that most of those activities are momentary things, you can asses the best point to change the station or take a bite of your sandwich, and generally a sensible passenger will stop talking if they can see a dangerous road situation ahead. With a phone, it's an activity that goes on for potentially much longer periods. You're not momentarily dividing your attention between handing the child a toy and watching the road, you're spending several minutes with half your brain talking to someone who is completely oblivious to the situation outside the car. You can't fix stupid but you can block phone usage in cars, which, from what I've observed, is a not-insignificant subset of stupid.
Indeed - and it's not at all distracting for the driver to have someone sat next to him carrying out one half of a conversation. Seriously, if the point of preventing the driver using a phone is to minimise distraction, then that applies equally to passengers. Passengers are generally a good thing because they can engage the driver and keep them alert, yet respond in situations where the driver needs to focus on the task of driving by keeping quiet. If they're busy yapping away on a phone they're no longer an asset to the driver, they're a liability.
1. Unless you had the good fortune to crash into a pay phone, walking to the payphone is no different than walking a few feet until your mobile works (actually I'd still rather the mobile over ubiquitous payphones, since I don't have to hunt around or hope to find a non-vandalised phone).
2. People die because of phones being used while driving. If the number of people who die due to phone usage is higher than the number who used to die because they couldn't contact help (excluding people who would be unable to contact help even with a mobile phone, e.g. the unconscious or seriously injured) then it's still a good idea. Some people will die either way, so you choose the way where less people die.
I hardly think anecdotal evidence of one incident where this would have caused an accident can compare to all of the actual instances of phone usage causing accidents, but a system which could somehow recognise emergency service calls and temporarily disable the scrambler would be useful (even if it's a manual override with a huge fine unless you can provide evidence that it was done for the purposes of making said call).
Am I just mad that I tend to think, if I have to enter a password to be able to use this, I'd rather not have it and just carry on using my traditional cards (since they already work on a "password" basis), and in turn the phones will be cheaper to produce and I won't have to go through nonsense setting this up every time I buy a new phone?
Yeah, I can't wait to submit my cell-phone to retailers so they can access details of my social networking activities in order to try and sell me junk. It's not enough that they try and sell me goods and services I don't want when I'm already buying their stuff, now they want to data-mine my phone at the checkout as well.
In many games, finishing the main story is incidental to all the other things you can do. If people make up their own meta gaming experience and enjoy that (maybe you prefer playing poker in RDR to doing the stories, maybe your idea of "finishing" Fallout: New Vegas is levelling up your character to 30 by exploring and fighting in the wastes) then why do the producers even care. If you give someone a sprawling sandbox world to play in, don't be surprised if they find ways to have fun that don't correlate to following the "on the rails" story mode. With a lot of games these days, finishing the story is something that people race through to get it out of the way before the real fun of exploring the game world begins.
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Indeed, and to further drive the point home, it's been incredibly trivial to bypass copy protection on the NDS since almost day one, while the others enjoyed at least a little protection. In fact, there are even more reasons to do so on the NDS than for a home console - not having to carry around a case full of cartridges and instead having it all on one SD card, for instance. And yet, in the face of all this, sales have still been phenomenal. It's time we got away from this whole "piracy costs sales" argument and instead started thinking about the real reason people want to lock things down. The most obvious reason (when you "follow the money") is that they want to control where you buy from so that they have tighter control over prices, and if they can also do away with that pesky used game market at the same time, so much the better. I can't believe the industry would waste millions chasing the myth of "copying costs sales" when this is patently untrue, but I can believe they would invest millions in developing a system which gives them greater control over distribution channels and removes the possibility of resales.
There has effectively never been a way to prevent copying and distribution of games. When I was at school some 25-30 years ago people used to copy 5.25" floppy disks or tape-to-tape and share them with their friends. Then people started getting modems and BBSs were full of people sharing copied games. Then the internet arrived and suddenly it was trivial to find pretty much any game ever made, and all the DRM schemes so far have been massive failures, hurting only legitimate customers by making them jump through hoops to get things to work. So now, almost twenty years later - if your argument is sound - there should be no games being made, the entire market should have collapsed under the weight of mass copying. And yet the gaming market is bigger than ever, it dwarfs the other entertainment sectors, people are willing to pay four or five times as much for a game as they are for a movie or CD, even knowing that others are getting it free.
On a side note, I often hear the argument that the only way games would get made is if the developers got people to pre-pay in advance. I hate to break it to you but that's the way it already works, it's the way it has always worked. Of course, it's not individual customers that are paying, it's venture capital and investment, or the developer bankrolling it off previous profits, or even the publisher paying up front for the rights to distribute, etc. Filesharing is here, it's done nothing to stop the growth of the market and it will change nothing in the way that game development is funded. The best thing at this point would be to stop wasting resources trying to stop it and focus those resources on making the sector of people that are
paying happier, instead of burdening them with nonsense like DRM (and on that point, kudos in this instance for the lack of DRM, although saying you can only buy it from one source has much the same restricting effect on competition/resale/etc).
And looking at it from the other perspective, how happy would your employer be if you did one piece of work and told him you wanted to be paid for that same piece of work over and over again for your lifetime plus 70 years? The point is a lot of these file sharers wouldn't buy the product if they couldn't get it free. A good number might, a good number probably already do (apparently music filesharers actually buy more music than anyone else already, for instance), but lots wouldn't - therefore it's not hurting sales, which is where the "potential" part comes from. Going after those people for lost sales is pointless and self-defeating, it's like a restaurant suing the homeless for stealing food from their rubbish bins, claiming that if they're taking it for free, they could be buying it, therefore each one is a lost sale.
Okay, I get it, text shadow is the new 'thing' on the internet. But seriously, it makes your article harder to read. There is a time and a place people. And that time and place isn't everywhere all-the-time.
None of the links lead to anything that uses text-shadow. You may want to get your eyes checked.
Actually this one does: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/uncertainty-nonlocality.html - it's faint (depending on your monitor I guess, and obviously whether your browser supports it) and above the text, the style is inherited from the body thus:
body { text-shadow:0 -1px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.41); }
Oh well now you've ruined it!
I think maybe this?
Indeed, the only real difference between online and offline is that offline is a day late (and has the chance to crib people's comments for extra misinformation fuel to pour onto the fire). I would pay good money for a reliable, independent, fact-checking news source at this point, but I suspect there are too few others who would do the same that the cost would be prohibitive.
It might appear that way, but even something as simple as proof reading a one page document can be time consuming when it involves carrying out additional research external to that document to ensure it doesn't land you in trouble elsewhere. Essentially you're paying the lawyer for being thorough, and he's guaranteeing that the document is free of encumbrances that might land you in hot water. Would you really want to go with someone who skim reads and charges you less? Of course, that's not to say some lawyers don't skim read anyway, but at least if it's their screw up you'll be covered by their negligence insurance.
Actually, in the UK we have legal aid to help people on low incomes with legal fees. It doesn't cover all cases (libel and personal injury aren't covered - the latter attracting most of the contingency "no win, no fee" law firms), but it would certainly cover something like the above.
In this case it's not even that drastic. If it goes well, you'll make a ton of money and we'll nuke a few file sharers off the internet, if it goes badly you'll make a ton of money and probably get a slap on the wrist for your part in it.
It's not even extortion, it's marketing. They want to keep this in the news. Even if the news is "these idiots are suing the wrong people" they don't care, because enough of the "right" people will hear about it, and the "wrong" ones might still put pressure on their friends and relatives. They essentially want to make sharing an activity that society shuns, and they don't care who they have to harm to do it - even these stories probably help their cause, so long as they don't suffer any real repercussions for their actions.
Aren't you more likely to need to extend the living room if you go with the Kinect? The optimal distance from the sensor is 6' for single player, 8' for two player (and that's not including the space you need to leave around yourself so you don't bump into things). I think that will be the single biggest issue with Kinect - the technology seems great and there is definitely potential there if it works as promises, but particularly here in Europe, just having the physical space to play is a problem.
And if it saves thousands of lives in the meantime, and then when the exception they didn't think of gets plugged so it can't happen again, it will STILL be a good idea. We can all play the "think of an exception" game. Seat belts are a bad idea if they trap you in the car and it's on fire. That doesn't alter the fact that they've saved many thousands of lives since they were introduced. When was the last time you heard of someone dying because they were wearing a seat belt? Same thing here - there are bound to be edge cases we've not thought of. People can raise those and we can look for answers. In the case you describe it would seem the answer is as simple as allowing the phone to work when the car is stationary. Let's not throw out the potential to save thousands of lives (and remember, I'm not just talking about the idiots who are driving while using phones, they arguably get what they deserve, I'm talking about everyone else who has to share the roads with them) just because it means a few people have to change the way they currently do things.
Considering everyone has a mobile these days, how do you prove what they were doing? Here in the UK it's been illegal for a while for people to use mobiles while driving, but largely the people who were already using their mobiles still are. Inconsiderate people don't care about the law when they know there's practically zero chance of being caught. I see drivers all the time talking on their mobiles while driving, if a police car happens along, they'll drop it out of view then carry right on seconds later. Legal measures don't work. Technology would. We had the exact same arguments about mandatory seat belts, and now most people wear them without even thinking. Changing attitudes is a difficult process and technology can make the process a little quicker and easier.
The difference is that most of those activities are momentary things, you can asses the best point to change the station or take a bite of your sandwich, and generally a sensible passenger will stop talking if they can see a dangerous road situation ahead. With a phone, it's an activity that goes on for potentially much longer periods. You're not momentarily dividing your attention between handing the child a toy and watching the road, you're spending several minutes with half your brain talking to someone who is completely oblivious to the situation outside the car. You can't fix stupid but you can block phone usage in cars, which, from what I've observed, is a not-insignificant subset of stupid.
Indeed - and it's not at all distracting for the driver to have someone sat next to him carrying out one half of a conversation. Seriously, if the point of preventing the driver using a phone is to minimise distraction, then that applies equally to passengers. Passengers are generally a good thing because they can engage the driver and keep them alert, yet respond in situations where the driver needs to focus on the task of driving by keeping quiet. If they're busy yapping away on a phone they're no longer an asset to the driver, they're a liability.
1. Unless you had the good fortune to crash into a pay phone, walking to the payphone is no different than walking a few feet until your mobile works (actually I'd still rather the mobile over ubiquitous payphones, since I don't have to hunt around or hope to find a non-vandalised phone).
2. People die because of phones being used while driving. If the number of people who die due to phone usage is higher than the number who used to die because they couldn't contact help (excluding people who would be unable to contact help even with a mobile phone, e.g. the unconscious or seriously injured) then it's still a good idea. Some people will die either way, so you choose the way where less people die.
I'd still rather deal with a stationary moron than one in charge of a heavy vehicle travelling at speed.
I hardly think anecdotal evidence of one incident where this would have caused an accident can compare to all of the actual instances of phone usage causing accidents, but a system which could somehow recognise emergency service calls and temporarily disable the scrambler would be useful (even if it's a manual override with a huge fine unless you can provide evidence that it was done for the purposes of making said call).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think perhaps it's much easier to prevent cell phone usage than driver stupidity.
Am I just mad that I tend to think, if I have to enter a password to be able to use this, I'd rather not have it and just carry on using my traditional cards (since they already work on a "password" basis), and in turn the phones will be cheaper to produce and I won't have to go through nonsense setting this up every time I buy a new phone?
I think that's only for transactions over a certain value, otherwise it would be no more convenient than just digging out your credit/debit card.
Community cash, everyone just throws £10 into the pot every day and then things that would usually be micro-transactions are just free instead :)
Yeah, I can't wait to submit my cell-phone to retailers so they can access details of my social networking activities in order to try and sell me junk. It's not enough that they try and sell me goods and services I don't want when I'm already buying their stuff, now they want to data-mine my phone at the checkout as well.
In many games, finishing the main story is incidental to all the other things you can do. If people make up their own meta gaming experience and enjoy that (maybe you prefer playing poker in RDR to doing the stories, maybe your idea of "finishing" Fallout: New Vegas is levelling up your character to 30 by exploring and fighting in the wastes) then why do the producers even care. If you give someone a sprawling sandbox world to play in, don't be surprised if they find ways to have fun that don't correlate to following the "on the rails" story mode. With a lot of games these days, finishing the story is something that people race through to get it out of the way before the real fun of exploring the game world begins.