Enoch

They are required for Sawyer's re-balancing mod, which is quite good.

Tonight, for the first time in 10 days, there will be none of my wife's relatives staying at our house. It has been rather exhausting.

I can't speak to the process for challenging takedowns (or, really, how the mechanics of monetization work at all on the site), but I'm not so certain that the majority of stuff taken down in this recent round aren't legitimate copyright infringements. Many of the folks who have complained the loudest have a good argument for their content being within the confines of Fair Use, but there is a huge amount of plainly infringing stuff up there on the youtubes. And, frankly, that is an enormous part of the popular appeal of the site-- I'm very thankful for whoever is uploading old Roland Kirk albums to help me decide which one I want to buy next, but I'm pretty sure that each of those uploads is a pretty blatant act of infringement. As to people having their own content flagged, I don't know how that is a sign of much other than that matching algorithms lack judgment. People often license their content through publishers or distributors, who employ IP-protection technologies. (Indeed, these creators/authors/whatever might not even have the right to post that content online, depending on the details of their contracts with their publisher.) If the algorithm wasn't made explicitly aware of who does and doesn't have the right to upload something, well, it's just one of the mistakes that sometimes happen with new technology. Bottom-line, I just don't think that copyright law is likely to change, or that the content identification algorithm bell can be un-rung. The future for uploading content that incorporates the IPs of others is probably one of negotiating explicit licensing rights. Some publishers might want to keep everything on their official channel. Some might blanket-license anyone to use their stuff. (I think Paradox has already done this for its games.) Others might license only particular 3rd parties or networks that they trust, and/or require a percentage of the revenue that those videos generate. I expect that Google will do what it can to make acquiring these rights as smooth as possible, but the content owners can always say no. It gets tricky where an uploader has no license but has a reasonable argument that their videos are within Fair Use. (E.g., reviews that show a little more of the game than the publisher would like.) The algorithms flag it, the uploader protests, and Youtube is put in the place of deciding whether the video can stay. That is not a position where Youtube wants to be. And their only logical way out of it (i.e., way that avoids the possibility of billion-dollar lawsuits) is to cave to the IP holders where there is any doubt. It sucks, but absent a change in the law, I doubt that they or any other video hosting site could do otherwise and stay in business for long.

The thing is, even if they did go elsewhere and take a reasonable portion of their viewership with them (dubious), wherever they end up is only going to stay in business so long as it takes for one of the more aggressive IP holders to bring the new host into court. The content bots on Youtube have now established that aggressive policing is possible-- they give the host specific knowledge of potentially infringing content, which Youtube successfully alleged had not been possible during the period covered by the Viacom suit. That technical facility makes it much harder to fit hosting this stuff into the DMCA safe harbor provision, particularly if considered in the light of prominent uploaders moving to the new site specifically to avoid IP rights enforcement. (Indeed, the best evidence that this is the case is that Youtube itself has done so. They would have no reason to do this if they weren't quite convinced that not doing so would lead to huge legal liabilities.)

I have to admit, if I'm not going with the industrial nature of PG Tips.. I will favour Lady Grey over Earl Grey... Although, as an American, I scarcely feel I can speak with much authority on the subject, I have always operated under the assumption that, regardless of the masculine or feminine variant, "Grey" was code for "somebody dumped a crock of awful potpourri into this tea."

Start in January, you fool. I am actually planning this. Both as solidarity measure with the wife, and as a weight loss tool.

The Fade was actually my favorite part of DA:O. I stayed up way past my bedtime on the night I was playing through that section. No other part of the game had that effect on me. However, the rest of the game wasn't satisfying enough for me to ever attempt a replay beyond dipping my toe into some of the other origin stories. (Overall, it was a good-not-great game that I'm glad to have purchased and played, but it was so ridiculously long that I was tired of it roughly 10 hours before it was over.)

In hopes that it may lift your spirits a bit, Nep: The other night, I was playing Mass Effect and sipping scotch from a cut crystal glass, and I thought of you.

Apologies in advance for the tangent, but I feel like I have to say at some point how bemused I am by the success of all this watching-other-people-play-games business. I get how somebody would want to watch a review or a selection of representative gameplay excerpts from a game to see if it's something they'd want to buy. I can understand watching some high-level play to pick up tips for strategy-type games. And short-ish novelty-type videos, like clever machinima or that insane Morrowind speed-run, can be entertaining from time to time. But watching a narrated feed of somebody just playing through a game? My patience runs out in under 5 minutes. It's tough for me to grasp how all this has gotten so popular. I submit that, apart from just being Old and Out of Touch, I may have used up my lifetime tolerance for watching other people play games in my next-door neighbor's basement when I was 12. He had a Nintendo, and I did not. If we wanted to make progress in difficult games, it made sense to have the stronger player (him) at the controls more often than not. So, most of the time, I was the spectator (and, often, the puzzle-solver).

The thematic setting most yearning for an RPG is Interplanetary Blaxploitation. Start with a Flash-Gordon-style take on the technology, culture, and geopolitical situation of the Solar System, and add '70s Blaxploitation themes, characters, music, and art design. Playable classes include Bad Mutha-Shut-Yo-Mouth, Voodoo Mamajama, and Cosmic Prophet (see avatar). Solid. Gold.

My guess is a mausoleum of some kind. That'd provide the kind of density they would need to accomodate all these messages.

It sounds to me more like a justification of intrusive celebrity journalism. What can you find while rifling through [starlet of the Week]'s trash bin? Inquiring minds want to know!

Yeah, I played that for an hour or two, and my patience is already waning a bit. I get that there's a lot of exposition that the game needs to throw at you at the start, which is tiring but understandable. But then I was reminded of the inventory management system, and I am totally not looking forward to dealing with all that nonsense. This is the first time I've installed ME1 on this PC, so all my achievement data is empty, which means that I don't get any of the little benefits that you get on a re-play. I made a Sentinel, which makes me quite squishy at the start, and set the combat difficulty to Veteran. So I'm actually having a pretty tough time. That'll probably change once I unlock more powers and get my cooldowns lower.

Is it weird that I sorta want to play Mass Effect? I wonder if I can find the disc... Edit: I did! It was in a stack of bare discs on a shelf, right between Civ4: Beyond the Sword and BG2: ToB. Edit2: It says "Disc 1" on it. Not a good sign. Edit3: "Disc 1" is a lie. I found the box, with the manual and CD Key in it. According to the manual, there is no second disc. Attempting install. (Also, LOL at remembering that the video named "SarenSuicide" is one of the very first files that pops up in the installer!)

If there's any reliable research behind this, I'd love to see it. Anyhow, the rest of that post is the same glib justification for taking what you want without paying for it that folks have been offering since the late '90s. To a great degree, the industry has adapted since then-- see iTunes, Amazon MP3/video, Google Play, Pandora, Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, etc.

Ultimately, this little discussion is beside the point. There is no "you're managing your property stupidly therefore I get to break the law" exception. Rights holders get to decide the format, method, price point, etc., by which they want to share, license, sell, broadcast, etc., their IPs. If they do something dumb and alienate consumers via strict enforcement, well, that's their loss. Consumers can always buy something else instead. The pertinent exception is "Fair Use," which I'm no expert on, but which covers stuff like Orogun's point above about playing an album when people who didn't buy it are present. It almost certainly doesn't cover uploading something wholesale and profiting on the clicks it draws. The statute is a bit amorphous, and that ambiguity works against Youtube. They don't have the time to consider each upload on its merits, so they rely on the (often overly broad) assertions of rights holders.

Youtube would love it if they didn't have to do this. But they have to take a conservative approach. Being over-restrictive of what users can upload does produce some lost revenue, but that's nothing compared to the potential litigation losses they would face if they didn't apply their reasonable best-efforts at preventing infringement. Plus, the parties alleging infringement are pretty major "content creators," too. While arguably-infringing "ordinary joe" uploaded content is going to be hounded by the RIAA/MPAA/etc. wherever it goes, the content actually published by the RIAA/MPAA/etc. could easily be moved to a competing service (or in-house), drawing millions of eyeballs away from the Googles. Movie trailers, official music videos, promotional interviews, and other stuff like that is going to be heavily watched/shared/etc. across the web regardless of what video service hosts it. It sucks that they're sticking the uploaders with the burden of establishing Fair Use, but given the volume of video Youtube gets and the risks the company faces of turning a blind eye, I don't see how they have much of a choice.

Youtube won the Viacom suit in part because they could demonstrate that their systems were doing everything they could to police copyright violation. As more sophisiticated technology becomes available to let them do this, they've got to adopt it, or risk another lawsuit that could cost them millions. It's not really much more compicated than that. Uploaders moving to a different venue isn't going to change anything. Might work for a little while, but absent regular pirate-bay-type host-country migration, the alternative service is going to be subject to all the same legal threats, which will either force them under, or into similar policies as those you're seeing on youtube. The bottom line is that the law is pretty strongly in favor of the rights holders. And that isn't especially likely to change much. Intellectual properties are an area where the U.S. has a huge economic competitive advantage. Copyrighted products are a big American export, so of course the U.S. government throws its weight around to ensure that these products will continue to enrich their rights-holders. If Saudi Arabia could stop you from buying an electric car, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

Having the same issue. I think I'm going to try to say Hi to my Grandfather. We have a common interest in CRPGs, although he's migrated to WoW pretty exclusively lately. He did quite like the IE games, so I'm hoping that a spiritual successor can pull him back. (If I had been willing to go the full 1K to design a character, it would've been him.) I've been slowly testing the waters with my boss with regard to casual banter and nerd-culture fluency. Today I dropped some joking 1337SP34K into an email reply. No response yet.

Eh, I worry about work because it's the only life I've had for the past 2-3 years. This place hasn't been conducive to changing that aspect of my life, which is why I'm looking at getting back to an actual city instead of an old market square with a couple of buildings around it. No market square is complete without a disaffected lawyer pickin' at a banjo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczWDQmKQtA

It's not so easy. Imagine telling an average American that his next trips to Walmart are going to cost $25 extra because America is taking issue with China's ADIZ. You think Americans are up for this? That they're willing to pay extra $ in everyday life to send a message to China about its ADIZ? Of course not. The bulk of Americans don't even know what an ADIZ is, much less care that China put one up. Economic sanctions are useful when the country is currently providing you jack, but with China, they're the source of income for a huge amount of American companies and of lower prices for the American consumer. Hitting China financially hurts them, but it also hurts us. That's why it doesn't happen over small issues. The WTO is also a major factor-- the structure of the agreement makes it very tough to carry on any kind of trade sanctions against another member unless you have an exceedingly good reason.

Let's see... I played at least some of both 1&2 when they were released in a single GBA cartridge. I liked the first one better, as the second one had some rather tedious learn-by-doing mechanics. There was a FF game I played a little bit on my neighbor's SNES in the early '90s, but I have no idea what number it is and don't really remember it much. I started reading a "let's play" of FF7 once, but I Nope'd the heck out of there pretty quickly. Feh. There's just something wrong with a game with the word "final" in its title having a dozen-plus sequels. I'm having a chronic Civ restart cycle. Start a game of Civ5; play for about 20 turns; decide that this isn't setting up as precisely the flavor of Civ game I feel like playing; go back to the main menu and change something miniscule in the settings; repeat until bedtime.

The government of the People's Republic (I'd call it an oligarchy more than anything else) has figured a few things out. 1) How to play the game of 21st-century mercantilism via the manipulation of currency prices. (All the major players do this to differing extents-- the U.S. gets ultra-cheap government borrowing and other perks because of its status as the primary global reserve currency; the northern Eurozoners use the Southern EZ as a captive market for exports, etc.) 2) That its oligarchic structure carries some competitive advantages. They can have stable governance and respect for contractual commitments (with measurable-but-tolerable corruption levels, relative to the West) without suffering any threat of reforms that affect labor costs or environmental costs in the industries they most care about. 3) That the combination of the above two points with the nature of the Chinese labor force make it ideal as an export-driven manufacturing power. 4) That the viability of export-driven manufacturing is very dependent on the cost and safety of international shipping. 5) That international shipping is safeguarded primarily by the U.S. Navy, and that this represents a huge strategic threat to the PRC. If the USN were to, say, withdraw its fleet from the protection of Indian Ocean trade routes (a move which is made more plausible by the internal energy boom in the U.S.), the Chinese economy would be in danger of being cut off from a great deal of its energy and raw material inputs. 6) As such, it is important for the PRC to develop as a naval power strong enough to safeguard the supply lines of the Chinese economy, in the event that U.S. support weakens or fails. All of this has happened rather quickly after the economic reforms and the achievement of full WTO/GATT membership in the '90s. Given the long lead times in military R&D and procurement (especially true in shipbuilding), Chinese military development is lagging the needs of their economic well-being. And before they can project power across Pacific and Indian trade routes, they need to establish that they can project power in their own backyard.

Why should I avoid crafting? Does it make you too powerful...also when you say "invo" what exactly do you mean? I found the crafting in Skyrim pretty consistently enjoyable, in that it was an incentive for exploration and a reason to really engage with the landscape. There's excitement in seeing a new type of plant and wondering what you can make with it, or delving into a silver mine or Dwemer ruin to get the raw material you need for your forge. The personal balance-preserving rule I would impose on crafting is this: Craft all you want, but never ever buy any crafting supplies. Use only what you can harvest, loot, or steal yourself. (Also-- and this probably goes without saying-- don't look up alchemy recipies on the internet. Discover reagent properties via experimentation, reading the in-game books and recipes you sometimes find, and/or by investing Feats in the Alchemy tree.) Hunting elk for hides and processing them into Bracers for skill development and cash value is rewarding and usually quite consistent with the role-playing of your character. Plus, it's unlikely that you'll get any game-breaking loot "too early" with just this method-- it'll help, but not overly so. On the other hand, buying hides, clicking on a few things to upgrade them, and selling them back to the merchant is incredibly lame, gamey, and un-fun. Parallel statements for Alchemy (find, taste, and experiment) and Enchanting (although purchasing some soul gems might be necessary to level this one up sufficiently, buy only the empty ones and go fill them yourself) are equally true.