And, in other news...
The Pope was today sued by God for GPL violations of the Bible. The complaint submitted by God claimed that all material published by the Holy Father was required to be released under the GNU General Public Licence because it was a derivative work of the scriptures.
I couldn't help but notice the dept name in the
In any case, we have exactly the same problem in Germany. We do indeed have an 18 rating for games here (there's 0, 6, 12, 18). The problem is that a hell of a lot of games that would have received an MA 15+ in Australia usually get an 18 in Germany or are completely refused classification. If they're refused classification, there's a good chance the title will be "indexed" - placed on a list of media that the government considers to be harmful to young people. I think there's only been one occasion in the past five years where classification was refused but the game was not placed on the index - Clive Barker's Jericho. After that, the USK relented and gave it an 18 rating. Games that have been placed on the index include Carmageddon, El Matador, Shellshock, Dark Forces, Little Britain, Quake 1-4 etc. Castrated versions of these games are sometimes released.
The problem is as follows - in my experience, the decision to place a game on the index in Germany makes it a hot property. If USK classification is refused, there is a rush to buy the game before it is indexed, regardless of the quality. It makes for a highly desirable property and increases the popularity of a title in Germany. A lot of teenagers, too, seek out games on the basis of their "cool" factor - usually on the basis that the game is indexed. I know at the very least of 20-30 kids here in my neighbourhood here that do this. I've seen kids with Call of Duty 5 uncut (which I already have original TYVM), Manhunt 2, Dead RIsing and more. I caught a 10-year-old playing Dead Rising on his 360 a while back and I asked my friend (his old man) what he was doing playing it. He had no idea, but it didn't happen again. I still don't know where he got it from, but we only have one games store around here that deals in indexed games.
Fact is, banning a title doesn't prevent it getting into the hands of children - on the contrary, it makes the game more desirable to children and increases its popularity. On the PC, it causes the titles to be pirated more frequently, so the games are more widespread but the publisher loses money. I suspect the situation is the same in Australia - a game refused classification is more than likely a hot property for kids.
It is very true that the idea of a two-party system being by definition "democratic" to be propaganda. Many countries do indeed have two or three mainstream parties that are more or less identical to one another. Sure, they curse and criticise each other, but ultimately a regime change is usually little more than a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". Parties offering genuine alternatives are often pushed to the fringes of politics and branded "radical" or "extremist" (for the record, I'd like to mention that there are truly radical parties that would be dangerous - Nazism and extremer forms of communism are, in my eyes, dangerous).
The fact of the matter is that most capitalist countries, including America, UK, France, Germany etc. do not truly have the government at the reins. Governments allow themselves to be controlled (or in some cases, even have direct influence over them) by major economic entities. Effectively, the market "governs", with the government existing to merely fulfil the wishes of the market.
I think it's worth really thinking about how people really choose their browsers. Firefox, as good as it may be, primarily owes its popularity to the quality of Internet Explorer, or lack thereof. Firefox was, at the time, a much more lightweight and considerably more secure browser than Internet Exploder, and there were few other alternatives. Mozilla hadn't been updated in ages and was considered bloatware, Netscape was all but dead, Opera was also highly bloated. Not to mention it provided Linux users with a decent, expandable and up-to-date browser (I'd used Epiphany before FF). This provided the incentive to switch and this is the reason why FF enjoys such a high market share.
Nowadays, though, people see little reason to switch. Clueless IE users won't switch whatever you tell them, and users of Firefox, Opera, Iceweasel Epiphany et al. are for the most part quite content with their browsers.
Just imagine getting infected with bacteria of this kind:
"Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your illness, should you decide to accept it, will be a nasty flu bug. This bacteria will self-destruct in ten seconds."
It's certainly disgraceful that this game should be released in this state, given than around half of PC gamers use ATI cards. That said, I find it a little unfair to single out this game or even EA for the problems. Yes, most EA titles are highly buggy upon release (I was fuming about the problems with ATI cards and Sims 3), but I don't think many other publishers do much of a better job. Most games released over the past 10 years on the PC have been highly buggy. Just off hand I can name Sims 3, The Golden Compass, LA Rush, GTA 4, GTA San Andreas, Kane and Lynch.
Developers and publishers will tell you that this tendency towards more bugginess is a result of the more complex development procedure arising from the games themselves becoming more and more complex. This is, of course, utter tripe. They will also tell you that the wide variety of PC configurations makes it impossible to cater for all. While there may be some truth to this, there is absolutely no excuse for bugs arising from highly common hardware or logic errors in the game.
The reason that console games are less buggy than their PC counterparts is simple - money. Tight deadlines and budget constraints mean that developers and publishers are not sufficiently inclined to release a game on the PC with proper testing because they know that they will be able to subsequently release a patch to address the inevitable uproar. The consequences for releasing a buggy game on consoles are much more severe. On consoles like the PS2, GameCube and XBox, this would have meant a full-scale recall. And not every PS3 or XBox 360 gamer has an internet connection. Remember the farce that was Need for Speed Undercover on PS3...?
The rules were never the problem - their enforcement was.
You could easily argue that vandalism makes these rules necessary, but vandalism has been a plague of Wikipedia ever since it started. Its anarchic nature was a necessary evil in the face of the highly open nature of the contribution system. Groups such as the vandalism watchers were a natural development over the course and, by and large, it worked fine. You could compare Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Where we have laws of the state that govern precisely how we may and may not act in public, the EB has strict submission regulations. Where we have customs, traditions and common decency, Wikipedia has its own set of rules. People by and large followed them with the exception of an active minority, and this minority was often dealt with by a dedicated team.
Now where creative spirit once reigned, we now have a set of cast-iron rules which, although nothing particularly bad in itself, leaves a dreadful amount to be desired. It is very rare that one of your contributions will remain there for more than an hour these days without some editor almost robotically adhering to the rules, sometimes with dreadfully hilarious results, including [citation needed] being placed after some of the most blatantly obvious statements these days, it being removed with accusations of vandalism or bias (by someone who is themselves biased). Another frequent problem is bots, innocuously going about their monitoring tasks and indifferently erasing hours of creative work just because an entry didn't meet the bots' strict criteria. Some decent articles are deleted because Articles for Deletion is filled with obsessive deletionists who have very strange ideas of notability. All this makes people feel that there is no point in contributing if their work is in danger of being irrevocably deleted.
Rules are there to be applied with common sense, not religiously in the sense of a bible.
Until very recently, I had a 32GB USB flash card formatted with FAT32. Not that I find FAT32 particularly nice, but it was practical, as it enabled me to easily swap my stuff between my home Windows game PC, my Linux PC, my work Linux laptop and my work Windows PC. The problem was never Linux - the problem was Windows and a lack of ext3 support (I develop under Linux and need the chmod permissions, which all turns to crap when I copy it over to FAT32, which doesn't retain them)
Focus on the WAS. It WAS practical, until I was faced with the rather interesting prospect of copying an 7.5GB dual-layer DVD master image onto the stick. As we know, FAT32 has a file size limit of 6GB which causes all kinds of interesting problems.
Seriously - how many non-tech private users of PCs do you know that use Windows and actually know what Windows is beyond the word that appears on the boot-up splash screen? For them, a PC is a PC and the thought of having anything other than Windows or IE on their computers is as alien to them as having Bing Crosby sing the Rockafeller Skank. It's not a matter of them wanting or not wanting to use Windows or wanting to use IE - it's a combination of spoon-feeding, resignation, habit and resistance to change. As I see it, while you can debate the ins and outs of using Windows, there is no excuse for anyone, tech or non-tech to be using IE6, and yet almost every non-tech I see is still using it.
I teach English at a local college and I get asked again and again how I got my PC to look like it does - of course, they assume I'm using Windows when, in fact, I'm using Ubuntu Jaunty.
This is a key example of why downloads will continue to be a niche product and will probably not replace physical media for at least the next couple of decades. Content providers are refusing to release their media without strict DRM controls, and customers are refusing to "purchase" this media at purchase price when it is technically a rental.
Even five years after music downloads have entered the market, they are still a niche market, covering less than 20% in the US and even less here in Europe, even though most people listen to their music on MP3 players (ripped from CD or downloaded illegally, of course - most people I know do the former). The record labels are finally being forced to give way because they know that DRM encumbered music does not sell anywhere near as well as they would like it to).
I personally will never pay for a video or music download with DRM controls - knowing that I am limited in where I can watch or listen to the media, I would much rather pay a much smaller rental fee for a DVD. I tried download rentals once, and I was not at all enthusiastic about the quality of the video either.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
