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Comment Re:Or parents... (Score 1) 355

The answer is not much. No one has been killed by swear words, no one has been killed by watching porn, no one has been raped by watching R rated movies, etc.

I don't know about that last one. I felt pretty violated after seeing Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Comment Same as usual here. (Score 1) 408

Mine main system is built from parts. I add in new parts as needed. This seems to amount to getting stuff like video cards, or CPU and Motherboard every two years or so. Althought not all at once. I've found that getting a video card one year and the CPU, and motherboard if necessary, the next keep the system feeling current. Additionally, less strain on the wallet at one time. Stuff like hard drives are added as needed.

The Internet

Domain Tasting "Officially Dead" Thanks To Cancellation Policy 102

Ars Technica is reporting that domain tasting has been all but eradicated now that the full penalty for excessive cancellations has taken effect. "In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009. The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent."

Comment Re:Old concepts for team ratings? (Score 1) 52

So, there are things where if you win a game, that's how you gain experience points. If you win against a higher level opponent, you get more experience points; if you bottom feed and you take advantage of lower-level players, you don't get as much, and so on.

Isn't that a somewhat old and fairly standard team rating/ranking system? I'm fairly sure that various sports games already do that kind of system so that you can't do as well by just beating low teams.

If not then half of Games Workshop's sideline table-top 'skirmish' games already do it, and Blood Bowl has already been made in to a game (once with license, and before that without a license).

Bloodbowl has actually been made with license twice. There's licensed games from 1995 and 2009 as well as the unlicensed 2004 Chaos League.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Bowl_(1995_video_game)

Comment Re:Bard's Tale and Ultima (Score 1) 1120

It was a decent action adventure type game. Nothing remotely like the originals. It was also a parody of the genre. The main character was voice acted by Cary Elwes and was somewhat amusing. It DID include all of the other Bard's Tale games in a format usable on modern systems, which was a definite plus. As far as being true to the originals, from what the wiki said, the company that produced the game had no rights to the originals IP, that's all locked up by EA, so they could only make vague references.

The Courts

Patent Trolls Target Small East Texas Companies 281

An anonymous reader writes "In a sign that patent trolls are getting desperate to keep their cases in East Texas — long known as the friendliest venue for their claims — some have taken to suing tiny, no-name companies that are run by East Texas residents. The hope is that, if at least one defendant is located in East Texas, the judge will keep the entire case there. Nate Neel, a Longview, Texas resident with a small open source software company called CitiWare, was sued by Bedrock Computer Technologies in June despite (he claims) having no customers or other meaningful operations of any kind. In response, Mr. Neel has posted a strongly worded letter to Bedrock's attorneys on his Web site. It will be interesting to see how East Texas judges respond to this abuse of process perpetrated against their own residents."
Government

We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago 152

An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle has a blog post comparing the recording industry's arguments in 1909 to those of 2009, with some lovely Google book links to the originals. Favorite quote: 'Many and numerous classes of public benefactors continue ceaselessly to pour forth their flood of useful ideas, adding to the common stock of knowledge. No one regards it as immoral or unethical to use these ideas and their authors do not suffer themselves to be paraded by sordid interests before legislative committees uttering bombastic speeches about their rights and representing themselves as the objects of "theft" and "piracy."' Industry flaks were more impressive 100 years ago. In that debate the recording industry was the upstart, battling the entrenched power of the publishers of musical scores. Also check out the cameo appearance by John Philip Sousa, comparing sound recordings to slavery. Ironically, among the subjects mentioned as clearly not the subject of property rights were business methods and seed varieties." Boyle concludes: "...one looks back at these transcripts and compares them to today's hearings — with vacuous rantings from celebrities and the bloviation of bad economics and worse legal theory from one industry representative after another — it is hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia. In 1900, it appears, we were better at understanding that copyright was a law that regulated technology, a law with constitutional restraints, that property rights were not absolute and that the public would not automatically be served by extending rights out to infinity."

Comment Re:Ghostbusters (Score 1) 202

I very much enjoyed the new Ghostbusters game. It was definitely the movie sequal most of us wanted back in the late 80s/early 90s. The amount of dialogue and just little features in the game was very impressive. I spent about 20 minutes clicking on the Viggo the Carpathean painting and very rarely got repeat dialogue. I was somewhat disturbed when he threatened to 'Wear me like a pair of pants.'.

Games

Why Video Games Are Having a Harder Time With Humor 202

Kotaku is running an opinion piece discussing why video games are having a harder time being funny as they've shifted away from text-driven adventures and toward graphics-intensive environments. "As technology improved, things began to get more serious. With the rise of 3D technology a strong focus was put on making games look good, delivering a more realistic — and often darker — experience to the player. Cartoonish comedic games became more of a novelty than the norm. Few titles, such as Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64, fully embraced humor." The article also talks about how the trend could soon reverse itself. LucasArts' Dave Grossman said, "As the games get smarter and start paying attention to more things about what the player is actually doing, using that ability not just to create challenges but to create humorous moments will be pretty cool. Eventually I expect to be out of a job over that."
Role Playing (Games)

The Essentials of RPG Design 241

simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."
Windows

One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong 538

snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."

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