It's For the Childeren

Desert Bus for Hope is going on right now. Its part of the Child's Play charity holiday blitz.

Here at the Fringe Element we blog from Wisconsin and Ohio. I have also noticed that most of our readers come from Texas, or that's where you have your proxies. The point is that Child's Play has partner hospitals everywhere and you can give to whatever local children's hospital is in your area.

Go there and donate now.

Time Warner Seeks to Destroy the Internet

Like a cartoon villain, Time Warner has enacted a devious plan that promises to destroy something that brings joy to the people like you and I. If you haven't heard about this yet, Time Warner has begun testing a tiered system where they charge you by both the speed and total amount of bites you operate at in a month. If you aren't feeling outrage right now, then you don't understand what I just said.

Time Warner is attempting to take advantage of the average person's ignorance of how computers and the Internet operate by manipulating ambiguities in language to make it seem like there is somehow a finite amount of Internet out there. When operating under that vague understanding of resource use that is so obvious in the physical world, it seems reasonable that they would want to charge us for how much of something we use. The thing is that this is a deception. There is not a finite amount of internets out there that one day we might us up much like we might one day use up all the oil. There are just limits on how much can be delivered to a certain number of users at any given moment. Which is why the erroneous "tubes" analogy is so attractive.

It is helpful to think of this from the end of the ISP. Faced with the need to consistently upgrade their capacity to handle many more and more customers at the faster and faster speeds that are needed to run the more and more intensive operations we perform over the Internet the ISP decides, not that the costs will one day become prohibitive(because as the Wired graph shows, that simply isn't true. And simple logic tells you that if they faced a problem of overhead they could simply raise their rates. They are the cable company after all), but that since this technical reality creates users of different needs, using a different metric vastly changes your rate structure and you can balloon your revenue.

The simple capitalist, free market logic is obvious here. Where you have a monopoly in your individual markets you can charge whatever you want. Since most regions of the country are serviced by a single cable company or ISP they can all do this without fear of being out competed by the numerous other companies out there. The only customers that will be spared are those that live in competitive markets. And sure enough ATT has started testing this idea out themselves. Now Comcast, the big villains of the last bandwidth war are looking competitive because all they have is a cap.

The slightly less obvious reason that is highly compelling for a cable company to do something sinister like this is that they are a cable company. They are primarily in the business of offering TV entertainment and people going over to the Internet to get their shows whenever they want(even their own customers) deprives them of a customer for their other services, and of ad revenue since people are having difficulty finding satisfying advertising solutions on the Internet. Largely because you have accurate measures of how effective your ads are on the Internet where they are cheap, but have to pay top dollar for television ads that are widely believed to be entirely ineffective.

The tiered structure is basically Time Warner punishing online gamers and online movie watchers for getting their entertainment elsewhere.

The tiers are also very low. Or at least in the way we measure Internet use anymore. Time Warner points out that their first tier, 1G, satisfies the needs of a third of their customers. These are basically the people that don't use the Internet. I admit that these people will probably pay less for the same amount of Internet. Anything above your grandmas Internet use enters an onerous tiered system where you pay for each gigabyte you use. In a month.

Apart from the possibility of viruses and malware using Internet without your consent and beyond your control, this is an attack on the basic philosophy that has led to the Internet and computer use as we know it. We all converted over to cable Internet because it was fast and primarily because we didn't have to pay for every minute of Internet use through a dedicated phone line. It freed up so much of the initial cost barrier of the Internet and increased the speed to the point where it became the multi-media communications tool it had always promised to be. This type of Internet service created the concept of the computer as the always-on, always-connected Internet terminal. This philosophy of the personal computer is central to the way we think of computer use and central to how software operates. Going back to a tiered structure where one pays based on an almost arbitrary metric is an attack, an attack based in greed, but an attack on the philosophy that was foundational to Web 2.0. We will never be able to proceed to Web 3.0 with this albatross around our necks.

That is where monopolies hurt business. Even regional ones. This was a lesson we learned around the last great depression and hopefully with a Democratic congress it is not a lesson we will have to re-learn the hard way. There is at least one Congressman trying to fight back. He has proposed the interesting philosophical change of calling the Internet a utility. I like that. If phone service was essential to daily life enough to be called a utility then the Internet is as well.

You should write to your representatives at the state and federal level. Raising Cain on the Internet will only go so far to produce resistance to this move by Time Warner and Ma Bell. You have to get the honest perspective of the people to the government before the industry twists the story.

It's easy to question the validity of an economic argument that relies on the business generation of the Internet. If you are a moron, or have been living in a cave since 1990. It is easy to point out that many small businesses and individuals have been able to expand their sales and start new businesses because of the low overhead cost of the Internet and its ability to reach an international consumer base. But there are specific businesses that will be impacted by this kind of tiered Internet usage structure. Online gaming is the first that comes to mind. This is now the primary business model for game manufacturers. Every gaming platform is connected to the Internet. The single player content is often secondary in importance to the users of the games. And every gaming device now can download new titles entirely from the Internet. This new business model for the gaming industry that drastically reduces overhead and cuts out the middle man would be jeopardized by requiring gamers to engage in a cost benefit analysis of whether the game would be worth the additional tiered charges.


I currently use Time Warner service to access the Internet. But that will change as soon as I can find an alternate service provider. The only thing a corporation can understand is their own greedy, short term, self interest. So the only way to communicate with them is with money. So I will be taking mine away from the finks at Time Warner for even thinking about using the byte as a metric for billing.

Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility

For Christmas my wife and I decided to spend our Best Buy gift cards on the Harvest Moon game. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the game revolves around your character as you farm your ranch, raise livestock, get married, and have children. Its basically simulated farm life with some corny environmentalism thrown in as plot. As if working your farm by yourself isn't enough work.

This version has all the familiar elements from the previous games in the series. Cows and chickens, corn and tomatoes, picking stuff of the mountain to give as gifts to woo your intended. In this version there is a greater variety of crops and livestock to choose from. There are winter grains like buckwheat and you can raise an ostrich to ride around town.

However, the downsides to this version are much more profound. The first thing you notice is that the voice sound effects sound like adults in Charlie Brown cartoons and are just as intelligible. "Waa waa waa waa." You notice this because every time you start the game the muffeled trumpet sound attempts to say the games name and every time your character pets an animal it says, "there there." Which I guess is an artifact of poor translation from the Japanese version.

The most aggrivating part of the game is the first hour. Because it takes an hour to get through the introduction. The game forces you to wander around town and have an extended conversation involving gift giving with every citizen of the game before even beginning the toutorial. Like most games, the toutorial is entirely unnessary. Of course while trapped in the insultingly unnessary toutorial, the game's writers decided it was also necessary to force you to interact with the games most unplesant character who spends the toutorial insulting you even as you easily accomplish the tedious tasks he sets before you.

Once you get through the god awful plot and asanine toutorial the game is actually quite fun. Like all the games in the Harvest Moon series, its enjoyable to pretend to be farming your own ranch and the motion controls on the Wii enhance the feel of the game. Its got flow.

Game Review: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals My Life as King

Released two weeks ago with the first batch of Wii Ware FFCCMLAK is the most expensive Wii Ware title so far at 1500 Wii points, and it takes up a lot of space on the Wii's internal memory. That price tag can baloon because of the seperately purchaseable ad on content that ranges from 100 - 800 Wii points. Ad on content still feels like part of the game is being held for ransom away from me and I have to be fucked in the asshole by the people making the games availalbe in order to get a complete game. Personally I find the core game to be $15 dollars worth of entertainment but the ad on content does not add the value its price point demands. Especially if you consider that in order to get all the available dungeons, equipment, and jobs, the price of the game jumps up to become the most expensive Wii game yet available for the console. Its a clever marketing strategy but in a game like this where content that was available at launch is being kept seperate from the game it feels like a huge middle finger in the face of the consumer. Unlike a game like say Rock Band where one buys new songs that become available after launch.

Speaking of songs on Rock Band, you may have noticed that Motley Crue was the first group to realize the obvious, that selling music to an interactive experience greatly increases its appeal.

Apart from having a cold metal dildo shoved up my ass by Nintento and Square, FFCCMLAK is a highly entertaining game. It is a sim in that you reconstruct your fathers fallen kingdom from the memories of its people and it is an RPG in that you walk through this kingdom you are building as the young son of the king. You actually spend half of the game as a cheerleader for your subjects, raising the ir morale and improving their family relations, and you spend the other half of the game managing your adventurers.

Unlike most other Final Fantasy games you dont actually go out into the world and battle monsters. You can't even leave the walls of the castle. This combined with the mediocre graphics is where Square Enix obviously put together a cheap game to rake in some online cash. That said, the game isn't sloppy. The polygons are well shaped and are well contoured for what people have come to expect in a 3D video game.

The game itself is plenty entertaining if you like the thought of managing an army of adventurers. FFCCMLAK also gives an interisting perspective on towns in the Final Fantasy universe. If you have ever wondered why there are towns in the middle of a monster infested wilderness with weapon and magic shops and aparently no other commerce, this game gives some perspective. Managing your adventurers gets a bit annoying when the individual you intended to give a job just won't show up to to the job, and at times its difficult to understand why completely healthy adventurers flee from combat while low level adventurers throw themselves into fights twice their level.

The Walk of Shame

Jack Thompson is a lawyer in Florida who spends his time acting as an attention whore screaming about the gaming or pornography industries interchangably. Its easy to hate him, but I am compelled to feel sorry for someone who is obviously an extreme result of the psychological pathology of our society. Where we childishly glorify violence and adress sex with a bizarre characture, Thompson lashes out at attempts to profit from this communal tendancy. This man is a symptom of our collective social mental illness. Fortunately for the legal profession, he faces sanctions for his outlandish behavior.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/lawyer_threatened_with_sanctions_after_putting_images_of_kangaroos_swastika/#When:08:10:00Z

The FBI abused its power under the Patriot Act? I'm schocked, schocked! Well maybe not that schocked.

Lastly, for anyone who is somehow so unaware that they may be compared to a cave dwelling hermit and in keeping with our mockery of hypocratical politicians; Elliot Spitzer.

The Child-Man

Not long ago a shrill bitter woman published an op-ed decrying the contemporary propencity of men in their late twentys to delay marriage and career advancement. Many outlets of the old media recognized the inflamitory nature of her insult and decided to piggyback on its ratings generation powers by printing articles like this. (freedom hating British!)

Most responce to the author has been either an attempt to counter the assumptions in the article or to simply disagree with the author or the traditional notions of success. My contention is that her position is immoral.

This is best explained from a Kantian perspective; Hymowitz is treating all western males as means to an end rather than ends in themselves. To use the language of feminism, she is objectifying men. Or to describe my own moral outrage; Hymowitz has no right to declare that I be of use to her.

Space: The Public Relations Frontier

NASA is seeking input from the gamer community on a space MMORPG. Initially this strikes me as pretty awesome. I would be totally interisted in a realistic depiction of contamporary space exploration. Thats why I play with Celestia. My second thought is that this is an effort by NASA to build up public support in light of the bad press they have been getting in the last few years. I find it hard to be too upset for them being savvy and pragmatic about P.R. but I can't help but feel like they could better spend their efforts on making improvements where things have been going wrong rather than allocating resources to seeming cool to the nerds.

From My Cold, Dead Hands

http://www.channel3000.com/news/14916807/detail.html

If you parents are having such problems raising your children to be non-violent, or at least not criminal members of society, maybe you should try a different tact. Allowing or asking for the government to regulate what your children are exposed to is not going to ameliorate the very influences that you consider worst for your child. Instead, I would recommend that you talk to your kids and find out what they think about the things that you're trying to keep them from. Instead of categorically banning an activity, as that is not likely to work, talk to your kids and then if they have mistaken notions or are confused about something, you can view it as an opportunity to be a good parent and give your children a bit of truth that the schools won't give them.

In regulating ethics, government policy is a poor panacea for the perceived ills of society. If the government had any say into what you do, then the things that are declared illegal would actually not be committed because of the fear of the results or because of the respect an individual holds for the government. Usually, though, the most important consideration into doing something that is considered illegal, is whether or not you will get caught.

Of course, during an election year, it is easy to grab headlines by attacking a small fraction of society that, because of its very nature, does not have any effective organization to meaningfully resist attempts to oppress them for political points. Gamers are, at turns, obnoxious, profane, and passionate, but they are citizens of the country who are not deserving of this discrimination.

Furthermore, I would go so far as to say that this proposed legislation from Sen. Jon Erpenbach is at best misinformed or misguided. I admit that it would be a good idea to move 17 year criminal offenders as the juveniles that they still are, but I think it is rather dubious that a simple tax on video games is going to raise enough money to cover the proposed expenses. Personally, I see this as a problem of definition. In this case, the definition of what is, exactly, a non violent offense. For instance, how much would the cost go down if, instead of holding children for having a small amount of Marijuana, why not confiscate their pot and take them home to their parents? Instead of having the state teach a lesson, why not let the responsibilities of parenting fall upon the parents?

Besides, this tax is just going to pull money out of the state coffers, as people will just go online, to amazon.com and such, and buy their video games without an extra insipid tax.