Here's a few options:

- Start treating the indies and non-"top 40 list" artists with respect.

- Stop putting out crap content that isn't worth the price they want to price-fix it at.

- Bring back the single (why do you think iTunes and similar do so well? Because most of the time only one song on the album is any good if it's a MafiAA-produced album).

- Start making the production value of CD's worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper. Also, stop pushing the normalized volume of the recording so fucking high that it clips out and sounds like crap. Master them lower and retain audio fidelity, thanks.

- Sign some fucking new artists for god's sakes.

There's also one thing I'd love to see happen from the government's end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies; the biggest and crappiest, "Clear Channel", owns over 50% of the market.

You want to know why your radio sucks today? Because you don't GET local shows any more. There are a small handful of local shows, and the rest is either national-syndicated talk radio (schlesinger, limbaugh, hannity, beck, savage, etc), "top 40" generic shit "music" stations with pre-recorded loops and a guy three states away "reading your local news" to you, or "niche top 40" crap we get down here based on exploiting some racial group (local stations we have here: "La Raza", aka "The Race", the vilest racist mexican Aztlan-movement shit you've ever heard, and "the Box", which is all (c)Rap music about killing cops and regularly features "guest" appearances of the local New Black Panthers leader).

Clear Channel moves into a city, cuts all the employees, pretty much just sets up the stations on automatic reproduction of their master feed, and forgets about you. They get an almost "captive audience" of commuters, and that's that. In many local markets, there is no such thing as "competition" any more because CC owns the entire area.

Reinstate the media ownership rules; make it so we get REAL local music stations again, with REAL DJ's who make their OWN daily playlists, occasionally spin a whole album, and maybe (just maybe) there will be a better chance for music to spread.

Of course, the MafiAA loves media consolidation. That way, they send just one gift basket to one person and get Britney Spears' latest pile of crap spinning on half the stations in the US for five weeks or more, and lock the independent artists completely out of the system much easier. Gyah.

This seems like the first viable solution to the radioactive waste problem of traditional nuclear reactors.

No, we've had a viable solution - breeder reactors and fuel recycling - for decades. We don't use them in the States because we had that fucktard president Jimmy Carter who insisted that if the US "led by example" and didn't refine nuclear fuel, other nations would follow our lead (how'd that work out for korea, india, pakistan...?)

Sadly, Barack Obama aka Jimmy Carter 2.0 is about to do it all again... right after he finishes saying "here take my lunch money please don't beat me up" to a nuclear-armed Iran.

What I find stupid is the fact that emotional states in games with any sneaking component revert way too quickly.

"Hey, I saw an intruder! Hey, he ran away and hid!"... 30 seconds later... "*whistling merrily on patrol back in 'no intruder' state*".

In many games, the enemy will walk right past a dead body, which is now an "object", over and over again.

Much more realistic would be, once you've been spotted once, for the "alert flag" in some radius (shout range, alarm range if they hit one, etc) to go to a default "middle alert" and simply stay there. It's your punishment for being seen, AND it'd be much more realistic. And it wouldn't, if implemented properly, require any more processing power either.

Free trade != Fair trade.

"Free" trade hurts abused workers and the environment. FAIR trade, where tariffs equalize the cost of producing goods locally with the cost of producing in countries where labor rights laws and environmental laws are lax and then importing, is what I ask for.

Face it. Those "cheap goods" you champion come at the cost of blood and the destruction of the environment worldwide.

Part of the ridiculous bullshit is the swinging of the US media leftward, too.

On the classic scale, "Left" = Open Borders: "Right" = Isolationism. The "Center" is the home of reasonable restrictions and policy on immigration (taking in only as many as can reasonably be absorbed, knowing who is entering your country with security of the borders, tuning your immigration to the jobs that need filling).

The US media, meanwhile, paints anything but woo-hoo racist/socialist "Open Borders Yay" nutjobbism as "hateful" because they're no longer even remotely objective.

Bullshit.

"Those you want to hire" for a skilled job, have responsibilities (family, mortgage, student loans, etc) that mean they can't work for the shit wages that you can pay to an H1-B holder.

Both the Republicans and Democrats are to blame for this, by the way. Democrats got us into the whole "free trade" bullshit (GATT/WTO/NAFTA/etc) that made it far cheaper for businesses to relocate overseas AND made it easier for big "multinational" corporations to snap up US companies. Republicans pushed economic policies that encouraged more and more big companies to snap up the smaller ones - look at how many companies "Altria group" owns for example, and refused to properly protect and secure our border even when American was screaming for it do be done (gee, thanks Prez Shrub). The result? Former "entry level" jobs (within $1-2 of minimum wage, etc) that used to be done by highschoolers/college kids to work their way up have all been taken over by semipermanent, paid-under-the-table-for-half-minimum-wage illegals and higher-level jobs (except for really high "management" elite) are constantly getting benefits cut and wages sliced (or at least not nearly keeping up with inflation).

Seriously, look at the situation.

On the one hand, you have an American worker, who's got student loans to pay back, who has a social life in America, probably a family and kids.

On the other hand, you have a H1-B holder who has no family, no kids, no significant roots, and thus not only can be paid $20k or more less than the American, but can also more easily be made to work 60-80 hour weeks of unpaid overtime because nobody will tell him he's being abused and is less likely to go to the authorities about it or the courts because if he loses the job, he loses the visa too.

I know people in several large companies that see the job rolls, interview people, send in recommendations, and then watch perfectly qualified American applicants get passed over for yet another H1-B every day.

Seen the same thing happen to a lot of people.

Some troll gets 5 mod points, they see someone who they don't like or a comment that they don't like... they can only mod the comment down once. But they can ALSO jump backwards in the person's history and downmod their other comments.

It's a bare attack on a person's karma rating; modding "troll" once is a single karma hit. Modding "troll" 5 times is worse and makes the person have to pray that they manage to get upmodded that much more elsewhere.

I've seen a comment manage to go from "5, insightful" (2 days old) down to "-1, Troll" (3 days old) based on the commenter making a negative, but true, comment towards someone like Jimmy Wales or Barack Obama or another darling of the left. Welcome to the "new slashdot", where the mod system is up for grabs and easily abused.

Link farms don't have content

Neither does your average wikipedia page, unless you're being very charitable about defining "content".

Link farms deceive people into going there

And this differs from Wikipedia (which makes sweetheart deals to up their search rankings beyond what they should be in an honest environment) how?

People choose to go to Wikipedia

Debatable. People "choose" to visit the occasional linkfarm that google/etc haven't properly downgraded, too... sorta like wikipedia except it never gets treated like it should.

The number of links isn't relevant to anything.

Randomly making links out of words on a page doesn't make for relevance. Wikipedia's no different from any other linkfarm, or any other site running a linkfarm/dictionaryword/"adword" plugin.

Apparently a bunch of wiki-trolls decided that anyone telling the truth about wikipedia is "trolling." Sad, but true.

Slashdot needs to get rid of the "-1 Troll" function altogether. If it gets modded up, great; if not, modding "troll" for mere disagreement (or merely becuase a particular troll got mod points that day) only hurts the system.

Yesterday, I was at +5 Insightful.

Today, somehow I've been modded "overrated" 4 times and "Troll" once. I wonder how many of them happened to be M$ employees?

*Gasp* you mean the MafiAA's business model is predicated on the customer being too stupid/uninformed to know when what they are buying is worth the money?

For Shame! I would never have known... well actually I would, because I make it a point not to purchase anything without doing the research first.

but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason.

No you didn't. And yes, I've had to use Vista.

Depending on the game, that works. I've been known to raid the bargain bins for games 4-5 years old, picking up some "gems" for $5-10 apiece.

On the other hand, you run the risk of not being able to find a used/discounted copy of the game easier, if there were less in the original print run than they forecasted. Plenty of "platinum hits" titles are actually shit games that just had a lot of prerelease hype and then get reprinted forever (like Brute Force and MechAssault), and plenty of other stellar games have a smaller print run, lesser marketing budget, and become rare or impossible to find even 6 months down the road.

Try to find a copy of Einhander (playstation1) for example. Go ahead. You'll have a hell of a time.

The question was: "Do Game Demos Have An Adverse Effect On Sales?"

The answer is: "Only if the game in question sucks, is mediocre, or is a one-joke wonder."

A better question would be: "If they don't think their gameplay holds up, why won't they release a demo?"

Compare Doom, for example. Doom, on the face of it, rocked for its time. Giving away an entire 1/3 of the game, far from "having an adverse effect on sales", helped make it a sales king. Even when id software released Doom2, they had a demo out, and the demo still kicked ass and drove sales.

Now think of a lot of games with a demo that "hurt" sales. What games are these? They're mediocre titles. They're titles that just plain aren't worth $50-60 to buy in.

They're the titles that the companies have to trick you into buying. A flashy set of screenshots on the box (that may or may not be representative of the game at all, or may be images of the pre-rendered cutscenes masquerading as "gameplay footage"), a paid-for (or threatened-for) review in a few magazines to garner an award or catchy phrase on the box (how many "best XXX of XXX - XXX magazine" blurbs do we see every year?), "managed review scores" that embargo any site giving below X% so as to trick the early-comers into thinking the game is hot (watch how many games drop from 90% to below 70% aggregate within a month or two of release, when the REAL gamers have their say) and so on.

Kick out a demo of a stinker, and the demo will still be a stinker. Kick out a demo of a mediocre title, and you'll probably turn off those who don't have money (or time) to burn on mediocre titles. Kick out a demo of something that kicks ass, and you'll draw sales.

Examples: I bought Doom on the strength of the "demo." I bought Descent on the strength of the demo. I bought Portal for the 360 on the strength of the demo. I bought the first episode of the Penny Arcade games on the strength of the demo (ok, so I bought episode 2 on the strength of episode 1).

I dropped Rocky & Bullwinkle, N+, and Marathon:Durandal after deciding the demo proved they weren't for me. I might have bought Guitar Hero: World Tour but it's almost exactly the same as Rock Band, and I already burned two months' gaming budget buying Rock Band songs. I don't need to burn another two months' budget on the same exact songs (even if I just use the RB controllers) for GH:WT just to play an almost identical game.

Video games may be "fairly inexpensive as far as luxuries go", but I still budget myself. $120 a month = 2 games, now. I think that's pretty extravagant. Plus working full-time and spending time out with friends (you know, enjoying natural light, social contact, girls, the real world and all), I don't have the time to buy 6 games/month and play them all anyways. I have to pick and choose. If there are demos, it helps me pick out the good ones. If a game doesn't have a demo, then my rent-before-buy policy will serve the same purpose.

Lesson to the game purveyors: you're competing for $120 of my budget and 40 hours of my time each month. If you can't bring a demo to the table, then you've got one strike against you, because I know you don't think your gameplay will grip me enough to buy the game.

Power corrupts

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

Petty power corrupts all out of proportion to the real amount of power.

Politicians are endowed with a special mix of petty and absolute power such that they are all 100% corrupt while not being absolutely powerful.