Guys like @quantumushroom,@Winstonfield_Pennypacker and @lantern53 are all Bigoted Privileged White Males who Idolize the Wealthy Privileged White Males:
The class/culture they most admire and would like to be a part of one day.


Doesn't this mean you're bigoted against Wealthy Privileged White Males? I don't know lantern and Pennypacker personally and have no idea what "color" they are or their levels of income. I like both, and rest assured, W. Pennypacker doesn't appreciate my incendiary rhetoric.


You know, they're like the humans that do the bidding of Vampires in the hopes they'll be made into immortals in exchange for their blind faith and service.
..but who are really just fodder for their political business masters.


Yeah, I've seen the Blade trilogy, thanks. The third one sucked, and I don't mean blood.

BTW, You nailed it. I'm secretly worshiping Gates, an unlikable nerd who released Windows Sh1tsa so Windows 7 would look good by comparison. I don't want him to pay higher taxes because I'm going to be as rich as him next week.


>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@ChaosEngine
You nailed it.
Guys like @quantumushroom,@Winstonfield_Pennypacker and @lantern53 are all Bigoted Privileged White Males who Idolize the Wealthy Privileged White Males:
The class/culture they most admire and would like to be a part of one day.
You know, they're like the humans that do the bidding of Vampires in the hopes they'll be made into immortals in exchange for their blind faith and service.
..but who are really just fodder for their political business masters.

@ChaosEngine

You nailed it.

Guys like @quantumushroom,@Winstonfield_Pennypacker and @lantern53 are all Bigoted Privileged White Males who Idolize the Wealthy Privileged White Males:
The class/culture they most admire and would like to be a part of one day.

You know, they're like the humans that do the bidding of Vampires in the hopes they'll be made into immortals in exchange for their blind faith and service.

..but who are really just fodder for their political business masters.

Ultimately, the service they would provide would be content before any of the knock offs. Plenty of companies have tried to make knockoffs of wow, some even with otherwise very compelling universes in the baggage (lord of the rings online, warhammer online), but no one has come close yet. Star Wars the Old Republic might, but I doubt it. A rose by any other name is still WoW. And right now they have a critical mass of users, which is all they need. They could shit in a shoebox and call it Mist of Pandaria and millions will buy it on the release day.

Sure, there exists private servers of Wow at this point too, and some people like to play on them, but for me? I wouldn't even want to. There's no challenge when everything is possible. I'm certain that even if a joint effort between developers of all sorts banded together to copy and create an MMO like wow, it would likely be crap, because they have no other incentive to make it than "because we can". Design decisions based on that are not good - look at linux. Even Mozilla is a company nowadays. A command structure is essential in creating a massive work of art in a reasonable time.

Making a copy of WoW isn't "just" making a copy of WoW, it's enormous. By the time someone has copied it to the finer details, the game will have moved on to something else; systems change all the time.

A good example of something happening like you say is Vampires: Bloodlines where the community made a huge amount of "community patches" to fix the game, after the developer went bankrupt. I like that, but they could do it because the things they were fixing were straight forward. If they wanted to make entirely new things, who decides which things are good and bad? Like wikipedia, they would need custodians. A private company like Blizzard does not have that problem.

I was certainly a little too broad when I said all intellectual property is bunk. First of all I have a problem with the umbrella term of IP. I don't think it's helpful. Different types of IP have different solutions and problems. Some are more bunk than others. (Wtf is with they way rights to music works? What is it now, 100 years after the artist dies? Crazy.)

Like you I am philosophically on the "you can't own ideas, man"-wagon, but practically I'm more loose with my morals - hell, morals are fluid baby.

I'll say this. I would rather have 50000 people playing my game and 50 people paying for it, than I would have 50 people playing my game and paying for it any day.

>> ^NetRunner:

I think this is the most plausible way I've seen anyone square this circle. I'm just not sure it really holds up to scrutiny.
Philosophically, I'm in the "information isn't property" camp, but I also put food on the table by creating intellectual property.
The confluence of my own philosophical tastes on this topic would be that not only should "making copies" be legalized, it should actually be criminal to withhold any sort of scientific or engineering advance from the broader public, especially for selfish gain.
But, I think that would essentially destroy software companies as we know them. I think Blizzard & WoW would have trouble making the case to people that their service is worth $140/yr. That's especially true in the kind of world in which any content they generate can just be copied by a knockoff service provider just as easily as the original copy of WoW was in the first place.
I have trouble even imagining what sort of service they'd be able to compete on in that world. Uptime? In-game customer service? Best policing of player misbehavior? It can't be bugfixes (copyable), and it can't be content (also copyable).
I think ultimately WoW would have to become something more like an open source project -- the community provides all bugfixes and content gratis. Blizzard ultimately would have to give up any kind of creative or engineering control at that point, and also give up on having a revenue stream of millions of dollars a month, too. They'd just be a glorified hosting company. Companies like Microsoft probably wouldn't even be that.
It'd probably be better for the whole world that way, but not so awesome for incumbents in the industry.
You know, people like you and me.
>> ^gwiz665:
Essentially you couldn't. You would not be able to provide a better service without spending a very very large amount of money and effort into doing it. An MMO is a service, and you have to provide more than just stable servers for it to work, you also have to create new content, bug fixes etc to maintain the integrity of the product.
You can design your way out of it easily. Free to play is one way of doing it, which we have a lot of success with on iOS and the big shots on PC are waking up to as well, finally. Apple in general have their app rejection policy which keeps the most things at bay, but of course there is jailbreaks, which I don't much care for.
I don't have a problem with people copying, although I would of course prefer they give me lots of money. If they corrupt our product however, with map hacks, cheats etc. then it's a much different issue.
I think it's a problem that many different types of media is lumped together under "intellectual property", because I do think things like Art, music etc should be protected from forgeries and that the original artist should be compensated for his time, otherwise we would have no art at all.
The industry is changing to provide a better service still though. Look at music - who buys CDs anymore? We have things like Spotify and Grooveshark who stream just about any music easily supported by commercials.
Any Blizzard game, and all their future games, will need a persistent internet connection, both for piracy issues but also for better service - instant patching, social networking etc. Same with steam.

I wow... she really bought this? Really? Even with the Home Depot line? No wonder sparkly vampires get so much traction these days...

I'm sensing a theme here. First we had John F. Kennedy fighting an Egyptian Mummy in "Bubba Ho-Tep". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281686/

Now we've got FDR fighting Werewolf Nazis in this flick http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1811315/

And opening soon is "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1611224/

What is it with Dead Presidents and undead monsters?

If neutrinos are the "vampires of physics" then does their skin sparkle in the sun when they take their shirts off?

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Buffy and Blade teaming up to kill the Vampires and Werewolves of Twilight? Brilliant.


Funny or Die MUST listen to you...

Just checking. We can't be too careful. There are sparkly vampires about.
>> ^ant:

>> ^FlowersInHisHair:
But not Twilight, right? Right?
stern glare
>> ^ant:
I love both scifi series!


How is Twilight a scifi?

Buffy and Blade teaming up to kill the Vampires and Werewolves of Twilight? Brilliant.

*length=27

Oops. Sorry. Meant to do this. Enjoy the vampire teeth.

>> ^bamdrew:

>> ^EMPIRE:
>>
I'm not morbidly obese. I'm just lazy and a bit overweight lol

Thass about what I figured. What you probably want is intestinal parasites. Thats a pretty lazy way to loose weight... and the pale vampire look is totally hot right now.


I said absolutely safe. I don't think looking like a cadaver is exactly a sign of health

>> ^EMPIRE:

>>
I'm not morbidly obese. I'm just lazy and a bit overweight lol


Thass about what I figured. What you probably want is intestinal parasites. Thats a pretty lazy way to loose weight... and the pale vampire look is totally hot right now.

Fucking yogurt vampire.

Lingere zombies/vampires? It's cool, there's boobs.

Good chart, makes my long winded explanations unneeded, I can just link the chart!

>> ^hpqp:

@Boise_Lib
The term "agnostic" is often used by people who are atheists for all intents and purposes, but fear the stigma that comes with the word atheist, or (worse) think that being atheist means believing no god(s) exist(s).
Gnostic/Agnostic is about one's position towards the knowledge (gnosis="knowledge") of god(s)(and the metaphysical in general); theism/atheism is about one's belief/lack of belief in god(s).
Here's a helpful chart: http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/09/25/8419/
I agree with Richard Dawkins' two categories of agnosticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism#Atheist
If you meet a self-proclaimed agnostic, ask them whether they are agnostic about vampires, fairies, goblins or Santa Claus. If the answer is a categorical "no", then you can assume that person's "agnosticism" is really just the result of their fear of being rejected/stigmatised as an atheist by religious people.