On one hand, everyone being spied on means everyone has standing (but since it's a secret program noone can prove it).
On the other hand, allowing discovery to prove standing allows for fishing expeditions of the type that IP holders would love to use to catch every act of copyright infringement (which judges are now getting wise to).
Zug.com snuck into the super bowl using social engineering as well.
Details here
All Internet 'speech' is hosted by third parties, if you go far enough up the chain. Even if you avoid Youtube etc., and post a video/article to your website, someone can complain to your webhost and get your hosting yanked. Colocate or own a blade in a datacenter? Datacenter owner can yank you. Use Akamai or another CDN? They can yank you. If they're getting DDoSed because of 'speech' on your site, they'll find an excuse in their EULA to justify dropping you.
Now let's say you own a datacenter. Your BGP peers can disconnect from you, stranding you from the Internet. If you find a webhost that cares about free speech, people can jump over them and get their provider to disconnect the entire webhost (this has happened before).
P2P infrastructure depends on peers wanting to connect to you. If you're seen as 'toxic' then noone will.
If someone actually does the research to find what game mechanics are the most pleasurable, that likely won't lead to other games usurping shooters as being the genre that publishers feel safe pumping $50 million into each.
It's also not just a matter of the intensity of pleasure, but also the frequency. If a shooter is very pleasurable when you're shooting things, but a puzzle game is only very pleasurable when you solve a puzzle, then you get more pleasure per minute from shooting.
Those making manipulative 'social games' who have studied psychology to understand how people feel rewarded already understand this (in theory), and have made games with a variety of methods of pleasing the player. It will probably be found that the theory matches the results of the experiments. This means instant rewards, periodic rewards, sparse rewards, novelty, and different game modes.
What would be interesting is to use fMRI to figure out why certain people consider a game fun and others don't. Then, those elements which prevent people from enjoying your game can be alleviated so that the game's audience can be widened. The trick is doing this without dumbing the game down, of course.
Unfortunately one of the first votes the generalists agree on is to delegate power to specialists, including leaders. It's the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
If your unit gets surprise attacked by the enemy, do you want to spend 5 minutes (at least) calling an online vote on whether to counterattack or retreat, or do you want a commander to give an immediate order?
In forums it seems everyone wanted the 3DS Lite, with better battery life and form-factor, ideally with built-in second circle pad.
Nintendo hasn't announced how much better the battery life of the 3DS XL is compared to the original, just that it's 'better'. Better than the available aftermarket batteries?
The XL is now arguably too large to fit in a pocket. This is crucial, since once you get past 'pocket size' you have less reason not to go with a PS Vita or a tablet.
The larger size makes touch controls easier to nail, especially with the finger, which is useful for some games. Deemphasizing the circle pad pro is probably due to the games utilizing it mostly being shooters, and they don't want it to become a 'shooter system'. The people who buy a system for shooters would get a PS Vita, and trying to compete toe-to-toe with the Vita could be a big problem (the original PSP sold well but its games were mostly in different styles/genres from what the DS had.) In other words, market differentiation.
Something I was hoping for from a redesign would be better viewing angle for the 3d effect, as you have to look at it pretty head-on or else you lose the effect -- not good considering the system utilizes gyroscopes and cameras in games that require you to move the system around. And if you're on a bus or something, (I speculate) you'd lose the effect as you bounce around.
I see this as a move to give them an excuse to sell the system at a (probably profitable) $200.
I'd rather type in www.blah or ftp.blah instead of having to remember if it's blah.com, blah.co.uk etc.
The TLD indicating if the site is commercial, organization or a network stopped being accurate once they allowed anyone to get
Country-code TLDs have been subverted, with sites like bit.ly using other country's TLDs than the country they're based out of.
The main reason for TLDs to exist is so that different organizations around the world can manage their own little slice of the DNS system. Considering how much this is being abused (or about to be) with governments mandating DNS blocks, this suggests a peer-to-peer solution would be superior, or something managed by a central authority not beholden to any government which has the health of the internet as its primary concern (like the EFF).
Years ago I worked at an ISP, and one of our websites was defaced. The FBI traced the vandal back to his AIM account name and left it at that. One of my coworkers checked the AIM profile, which contained some personally identifying information. One phone book later we had a phone number, and some phone calls were made of an, err, 'intimidating' nature. We weren't defaced again (setting a Frontpage password probably helped, too).
The new business model is:
1. Hold onto IP
2. Wait for someone to violate it
3. Sue grandmothers and small business startups
4. Profit!
Seriously though, the article doesn't suggest that legal avenues aren't worth creating, simply that they're inadequate in eliminating piracy and that legislation is needed. The research mentioned is that 86% of 'persistent downloaders' pirate 'because of cost' although the article is unclear if this means that cost is merely a factor or if it's the biggest factor; it's even less clear if this means 'at any price'. This research was commissioned by a pro-IP group, of course, and has yet to be publicly released or validated. Incidentally, the people surveyed were Australians, the same ones frequently charged 100-500% markup for 'digital downloads' (god I hate that term).
More studies have to be done to see how the correlation relates to the time interval between observation and choice, the current setup was just a few nanoseconds' delay.
n/t
Rice is a staple food in China, any unforseen problems with a strain of genetically-engineered rice could lead to a massive famine, which would likely be (attempted to be) covered up similar to the previous Chinese famine. Poor rural people would be unable to afford the expensive imported rice, or the remaining good domestic rice, due to shortages.
Imagine a monoculture of cheap rice that had only previously been grown in small quantities for a couple decades, which is overtaken by a fungus (like in the Irish potato famine). Due to new communications infrastructure, China could have a serious uprising on their hands.
Then there's the problem of IP. Chinese industry is notorious for not respecting IP laws whenever possible; even if counterfeiters weren't making 'counterfeit' rice, their government could simply nullify the patent for being vital to the country's interests. Monsanto would be wasting their money. American farms are up in arms over Monsanto lawsuits and 'terminator genes', and they're much more modernized than Chinese farms, so imagine how much respect an American company would get there.
That line is crossed once you start handing prewritten bills to paid-for congressmen, and complain that 'your bill' received too much scrutiny from the people and should've been pushed through quicker and quieter.
I had a conversation with my father (a professional musician with a few CDs released) about SOPA. He's not very technically adept, but he seemed to understand and accept that the vast majority of copyright infringement is done in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and other places where his music can't be legally obtained. Furthermore, American legislation wouldn't stop these people in other countries from being able to access foreign websites that have infringing copies of his work.
Finally, tech-savvy Americans could easily get around the proposed measures.
I didn't even get into how the legislation is bad for DNS or legitimate businesses, this seemed to convince him that the bills would have no positive effect.
It seems developers can't win with day-1 DLC. If they release it normally, it's content that should've been released on the disc (even if it was gold or content locked before the DLC was finished). In this case, they're including a one-time-use code to get the DLC for free; isn't that better than asking ALL players to buy the DLC?
I don't see how this is worse than the other "project 10-dollar" schemes of having players of used games pay for a DLC that unlocks multiplayer or something, especially if the content isn't already on the disc (as the game developers claim).
Perhaps if they provided an online code generator that anyone could use to redeem for a free copy of the DLC, that'd suffice? It's worth noting that the PC version comes with this DLC already included, no code required, although there isn't much market for used PC games.
System going down in 5 minutes.
