I agree with you. But I wanted to hang a TV on my wall and not have half my living room occupied by my old 27-inch behemoth Sears TV, so this was my solution. A new 28-inch, 1080p wall-mounted HDTV. A cheap, RCA 5-disc DVD player full of Chinese electronics that does DivX and upconverts to 1080p. A cheap, no-name brand HDMI cable that functions just as well as an "APPROVED" Monster cable or whatever. No Blu-Ray, no HD-DVD, no arcane nonsense. And all my DVDs look and sound awesome upconverted on my relatively small screen.
Plus, if I ever want to hook my computer up to the TV, the video card has an S-Video output. Done. No headaches, the whole setup cost less than $1,000 and I'm set for years to come. Because the day studios stop releasing standard DVDs is the day I stop buying them and really start taking advantage of the player's DivX feature (which, upconverted, looks pretty good.)
As for Windows, Vista offers nothing I need bad enough to have to upgrade just to have more horsepower to run all the DRM and other redundant crap running behind the scenes. I'm prepping for a dual-boot Linux system. My goal is to have my wife trained on using Linux by next year. When XP gets phased out, I'm phasing it out. I'll only be keeping it around for gaming. I'm with you - I don't want to have to deal with the headaches that come from supposedly better technology.
So they all came to Canada, instead! Thanks a lot for that. We've had royalty we don't care about on our strangely-coloured money ever since.
Seriously though, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The Mujahedeen (spelling?) were terrorists to the Soviets and heroes to the people of Afghanistan and to the US, which bankrolled them. Today, those same freedom fighters are now terrorists (Taliban.)
Good point about the moral choice thing. There are many other games that have offered morality choices with bigger consequences than "should I kill or rescue a little girl."
I still can't forget the effort it took -- in game and in my own mind -- to willfully corrupt my party members in Knights of the Old Republic to the Dark Side. Or the things you can do in Planescape: Torment to change your alignment and the effect it has on your party members. Even Arcanum offered a wide variety of moral choices and their effects.
This isn't new ground for FPS games, either. Granted, the choices are a little bit more limited, but there were a few moments in the Splinter Cell games which challenged the player to make a choice. Playing on the hardest difficulty level, to get 100 per cent, you cannot kill anyone, which is pretty difficult in some levels. I can't think of any others off the top of my head but I know Bioshock isn't the first, or best example of adding moral choice to a game.
Somebody mod parent up, that's the freaking funniest thing I've seen all day. And the other poster is right... sounds like a guy I met in Edmonton once, a transplanted Quebecker working in the oil fields.
TFA is an editorial, not an article. It is the opinion of the Montreal Gazette. No bureaucrat ever said "We've never done if before, so we can't." The quote was made up to make a point in the editorial. It's not real.
If you want to read the real article, go to the source (sorry, it is en francais. Run it through the Babelfish if you are desperate.)
I don't disagree that the city is being a bit obstinate, but I can see why they wouldn't want to change streetfronts on Apple's request. If they do it for them, they'll have to do it for every other downtown storefront. Besides, and I am not exaggerating, the $35,000 Apple is promising probably wouldn't even cover the cost of tasking a union city crew to remove the meters, rebuild the sidewalk and put the meters someplace else.
Crappy code or not, it works well on Windows and Mac machines. It's easy to set up. Its SkypeOut rates are extremely cheap and the call quality is pretty good. It also does video extremely well and works easily with most webcams. But it's going to have to clean up its act when it comes to security because there are some alternatives emerging -- like GizmoProject. GizmoProject is great, and uses an open standard, but does not do video nor does it show any intentions of adding it. So scratch that one for me for now, but if it ever adds video, watch out Skype.
I agree. And as a Canadian, I hope this will put the brakes on our federal government and keep them from changing our legislation to reflect the Patriot Act which has been slowly, quietly and insidiously happening since the Patriot Act was passed.
Thanks, I have done that, and even gone into the object manager to disable what I can in there, but a few times in the past, Messenger has just shown up again. Hasn't done it for a while, though.
I have Pidgin running, which is fantastic.
I sure hope this doesn't come as an auto-update, magically appearing on my XP machine one morning asking me to sign up for all these Live services I don't want. MSN Messenger is annoying enough, just deciding to be there one day after an update although I have tried to get rid of it many times.
I know it's inevitable, but I don't particularly like or need the constant link to information that Internet-everywhere would provide. I don't need to feel connected everywhere I go. I'm perfectly happy to go into my office and use the computer to type an e-mail, or sit on my couch and read news headlines and check local weather on my Nintendo Wii.
I think the urge to move everything to a constant, Internet-everywhere connection is driven by some kind of mental illness. I really don't want to have people constantly e-mailing me, phoning me, text messaging me, sending me stupid links, pictures and trying to get me to join Facebook. If they really want to talk to me, they can come over to my house, or meet me for a coffee, or invite me over. Or even use the telephone.
I also think that most of the information we want so bad to have at our fingertips within seconds of it happening is useless garbage anyway. I don't need my life and my mind crowded with terabytes of crap.
That's why I only browse Slashdot every couple days:D
Don't forget that the previous clones made by Motorola/StarMax were total junk and far inferior to Apple's own offerings (I know, I used one for work for several years). They made Apple look bad.
I don't think Apple's about to give up a monopoly on hardware and software just so people can take the OS and run it on crappy hardware that reveals its limitations.
Apple's OS has been easy to maintain because it's only going to run on a few hardware configurations. It doesn't have to run on a million different combinations, like Windows, which is probably one of the biggest reasons for Windows bugs and quirks.
Plus, the OS is the hardware's biggest selling feature -- like the cool OS? Then buy a Mac.
Their business model might not seem like it's that ambitious, but it's slow, steady and long-term, and doesn't give up any ground. It forgoes the quick bucks now in the anticipation that five years from now millions more people in the iPod generation will be buying Apple computers and accessories.
Making the accessories PC-compatible is brilliant -- you've gotta admit that while an AirPort station is really just a router in a pretty white box, it's got a lot more sex appeal than the clunky, blinky blocky routers made by other companies. If someone buys Apple accessories for their PC, they will be open to the possibility of eventually getting a Mac someday.
I wish I had got onto this one earlier. The topic is probably dead. Oh well.
I have a little girl (19 months) and I am amazed every day by the power images have on her. This evening we were watching a TV show and there was a close-up shot of one of the characters crying. My girl copied the gesture, the sound and the emotion exactly, then shot me a big grin afterwards. Everything she sees, teaches her something.
She learned how to distinguish eyes, ears, nose and mouth by watching a Baby Einstein video over and over. The powerful images taught her how, and quickly -- after only two or three viewings she had it figured out.
This weekend I was playing Halo. I was on a roll, massacring wave after wave of Covenant. There was blue blood everywhere. I looked down and my daughter was staring up at the screen, totally enthralled by what she was seeing. I can only imagine what she learned from that. I hope it was how to circle-strafe and that the needler is a piece of crap. But it got me thinking about what effect the images were having on me.
Images have a powerful influence on kids. They have a powerful influence on anyone. Certain images creep me out and give me nightmares, others inspire me and lift my spirits. I've seen a lot of movies and played a lot of violent video games and I'm still affected by powerful images, even if I know they're fake. To think that kids are immune to the imagery in video games is naive. I grew up playing the most violent games available (believe it or not, we were able to find plenty of violence in Oregon Trail) but these days violence bothers me in a way it never did -- probably because games are getting closer to photorealism each month. I still haven't played FEAR because of the bloody box art. Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 was fun, but disturbing, and I was glad to get out of it. I couldn't play a whole game like that.
I'm disturbed by some of the posters who are so numb they think that our kids are going to play violent video games, drink, screw, do drugs and do whatever they want, whenever they want, and there's nothing we can do about it except mitigate the effects. I think that's absolute nonsense and an attempt to dodge responsibility.
There is something we can do about it -- as some posters have suggested, we can teach our kids the difference between reality and fantasy. We can teach our kids the difference between right and wrong. We can teach them that some things are more beneficial than others, and guide them to make good choices. We can make home a loving, caring environment with rules. Good rules are not pointless confinements -- they allow kids to know their boundaries, and to be free within those boundaries. Free to be kids, not adults-in-training.
I'm sure some might argue that standards are arbitrary and that we should let kids find their own way. I would say that argument is again an attempt to avoid responsibility. The world is a scary place, it is unacceptable for a parent to turn their kids loose too early, and without a road map and some idea of what's ahead. Letting kids figure things out on their own is letting them destroy themselves.
So what about violent video games? I'm seeing them more through the eyes of a child -- my child -- and realizing I don't want to make compromises, or make complicated rules about what is and isn't acceptable in my house and when some games should be played just to protect my hobby. I'd rather give up playing some games altogether. I guess you could call that love.
Ha ha true!
Imagine if you will... a whole server full of troll avatars doing that stupid dance.
Ah wait it looks like that all the time in Orgrimmar anyways.
Good points.
I also thought I would add that laws protecting culture are different in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. French-language, home-grown entertainment is vigorously protected. Every year or so the province's "language police" make headlines for some stupid thing, like forcing a computer store to take down its website because it didn't conform to being bilingual enough, or forcing cities to change street signs to French.
http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/calgary-herald.16jun 97.htmlhttp://newquebec.blogspot.com/2006/07/beaconsfield -to-language-police-get.html
Quebec probably just doesn't care enough about protecting "outsider" entertainment which competes directly with its own culture, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the enforcement agencies were turning a blind eye to piracy in Quebec movie theatres for that reason.
But I think the idea that Canada is responsible for 50 per cent of movie piracy is a total load and a FUD attack by the movie companies on our copyright laws, which they hate because they still allow us to make legit copies and downloads of THINGS WE ALREADY OWN (better make that clear).
I hate having to pay a levy on every pack of blank DVDs and CDs I buy, but that's the law and I just look for the deals (discs are always on sale somewhere.)
And I find it freeing that if I buy a CD, and it's invested with rootkits and proprietary players and crap, well, I am within my rights to fire up Limewire or uTorrent and download the cracked version of the album I just bought so I can put it on my MP3 player without having to go through some nightmarish DRM scenario with Windows Media Player.
Good points chowderbags. But it should be pointed out it was a common practice at that time for both sides to kidnap each others' sailors and force them to serve. Also that it's not too surprising the British wouldn't want the Americans to trade with the French since they were pretty busy fighting Napoleon across the ocean. They would have done whatever they could to hurt Napoleon. And the Native American attacks in the frontier -- well, there's a whole lot more to that, including entire Indian nations siding with eiher British or Americans, or neither, while trying to defend their people from being swallowed by the settlers moving westward, but you're essentially right. However it was a lot more political than just the British encouraging Indians to attack American settlers.
The 1812 conflicts that spilled over from Europe into North America were pretty half-assed. Certainly nothing for Canadians (I am one) to puff up with pride over.
As for this game -- I think the real point is that maybe the American military puts too much faith in its high-tech weaponry and not enough in plain old tactics;)
Thanks for the personal attacks. They really lend some dignity and intelligence to your comments.
Also, I'm posting on Slashdot, so obviously I think technology is a good thing. You can stop with the fallacious attacks now.
I didn't want to even mention it, hoping that discussion could rise above "I'm smarter than you neener neener neener" arguments, but I have a degree in history. Do you? Sure, it's useless by the standards of "PROGRESS" but I am certain I have read more books about and primary sources from the "Dark Ages" than you. So who has a more informed opinion?
Who's romanticizing? I never said anything about how nice it would be to live in the "Dark Ages."
"Men lived in ignorance, fear and squalor."
How do you know? Have you ever read anything written during that period of time (Fall of the Roman Empire to the invasion of England in 1066, let's finally be specific)? Probably not, because there's not much to read other than religious texts. How do we know what it was like? We don't. I've read what I can and while the world at that time was in turmoil, the Roman Empire being carved up by other powers, it does not mean people lived in ignorance, fear and squalor.
And let me challenge an assumption that was made by almost every poster on this topic. Progress. Is technology progress? Have we progressed as human beings when we have better technology to make our lives easier? If that is all that counts, then yes, we have made great progress. But have we really progressed in any other way? Do we use that technology for anything other than our own self-gratification?
And how about some more obvious ones.
In North America we no longer have slavery to a master. Now we have slavery to credit card companies and banks.
We no longer have witchhunts. Instead we choose to make people in other countries the scapegoats of our ignorance and fear and mock them on our late-night comedy shows to make ourselves feel better.
We no longer go to war for religious reasons. Instead we go to war for resources and territory that we want from other nations (e.g. oil) and we have the technology to quickly kill mass amounts of people. We're better at killing than at any other time in history. Point out the crusades as an example of religious fanatacism at its worst, but you must also look at the wars of this century, which killed more people than all of the crusades put together.
It's easy to dismiss the "Dark Ages" as fear, ignorance and squalor, but there's more to history than the progress of technology. And let's be careful before we even call that a good thing.
They were filled with people with hopes and dreams, making discoveries and learning new things just like people do today. Just because they didn't have computers to post on Slashdot or the wealth of scientific knowledge we have today doesn't mean they were "dark."
Science was progressing, albiet more slowly, and for different reasons. Many "natural philosophers" made scientific discoveries while they were looking to prove the bible, or learn more about the nature of God and creation.
The Scientific Revolution roughly 300 years ago was when people started doing research for the sake of expanding knowledge, not for anything else. Yes, scientific knowledge increased and technology became more advanced, but to assume that everything before that point was just darkness and ignorance is arrogant, uninformed and shortsighted.
I have a strong interest in science, which people should remember is not working closer and closer to a definite answer but to a broadening understanding. Scientific study often enough doesn't definitively answer questions, it just raises more questions. For example, quantum physics. 100 years ago scientists thought they could close the physics books. Then Quantum physics came along. Now every new discovery raises more questions. I think that's pretty exciting.
As for creation "science," which is deservedly flame bait, I wish people would distinguish between people who are fanatical about the politics of "Christendom" building ridiculous museums when the millions of dollars should have gone to house the homeless and feed the hungry, and those who are followers of Christ. I consider myself the latter -- simply, a Christian. I believe God created the universe. How he did it is a matter for science to explore.
Another SF writer, http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Wake-Space-Ken-MacLe od/dp/B000C4SFRE/sr=8-6/qid=1162740889/ref=pd_bbs_ 6/104-0751852-8763166?ie=UTF8&s=books/Ken McLeod, has had ideas similar to this in his books. In the last one I read, Newtons Wake, the characters often have to engage in combat archaeology, which mainly involves the aggressive hacking of ancient technology. He introduces the concepts with a sense of humour -- in one segment of the book, the characters' electronics are attacked by a virus beamed from a an advanced technological artifact. They are able to tell the virus is based on human-created code because once they go deep enough with their combat archaeology, it's east to spot the Microsoft patches in the virus code.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it let you see dead people?
I agree with you. But I wanted to hang a TV on my wall and not have half my living room occupied by my old 27-inch behemoth Sears TV, so this was my solution. A new 28-inch, 1080p wall-mounted HDTV. A cheap, RCA 5-disc DVD player full of Chinese electronics that does DivX and upconverts to 1080p. A cheap, no-name brand HDMI cable that functions just as well as an "APPROVED" Monster cable or whatever. No Blu-Ray, no HD-DVD, no arcane nonsense. And all my DVDs look and sound awesome upconverted on my relatively small screen.
Plus, if I ever want to hook my computer up to the TV, the video card has an S-Video output. Done. No headaches, the whole setup cost less than $1,000 and I'm set for years to come. Because the day studios stop releasing standard DVDs is the day I stop buying them and really start taking advantage of the player's DivX feature (which, upconverted, looks pretty good.)
As for Windows, Vista offers nothing I need bad enough to have to upgrade just to have more horsepower to run all the DRM and other redundant crap running behind the scenes. I'm prepping for a dual-boot Linux system. My goal is to have my wife trained on using Linux by next year. When XP gets phased out, I'm phasing it out. I'll only be keeping it around for gaming. I'm with you - I don't want to have to deal with the headaches that come from supposedly better technology.
So they all came to Canada, instead! Thanks a lot for that. We've had royalty we don't care about on our strangely-coloured money ever since.
Seriously though, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The Mujahedeen (spelling?) were terrorists to the Soviets and heroes to the people of Afghanistan and to the US, which bankrolled them. Today, those same freedom fighters are now terrorists (Taliban.)
So this is how long it takes for an article to make it through the Firehose.
Good point about the moral choice thing. There are many other games that have offered morality choices with bigger consequences than "should I kill or rescue a little girl."
I still can't forget the effort it took -- in game and in my own mind -- to willfully corrupt my party members in Knights of the Old Republic to the Dark Side. Or the things you can do in Planescape: Torment to change your alignment and the effect it has on your party members. Even Arcanum offered a wide variety of moral choices and their effects.
This isn't new ground for FPS games, either. Granted, the choices are a little bit more limited, but there were a few moments in the Splinter Cell games which challenged the player to make a choice. Playing on the hardest difficulty level, to get 100 per cent, you cannot kill anyone, which is pretty difficult in some levels. I can't think of any others off the top of my head but I know Bioshock isn't the first, or best example of adding moral choice to a game.
Somebody mod parent up, that's the freaking funniest thing I've seen all day. And the other poster is right... sounds like a guy I met in Edmonton once, a transplanted Quebecker working in the oil fields.
TFA is an editorial, not an article. It is the opinion of the Montreal Gazette. No bureaucrat ever said "We've never done if before, so we can't." The quote was made up to make a point in the editorial. It's not real.
If you want to read the real article, go to the source (sorry, it is en francais. Run it through the Babelfish if you are desperate.)
I don't disagree that the city is being a bit obstinate, but I can see why they wouldn't want to change streetfronts on Apple's request. If they do it for them, they'll have to do it for every other downtown storefront. Besides, and I am not exaggerating, the $35,000 Apple is promising probably wouldn't even cover the cost of tasking a union city crew to remove the meters, rebuild the sidewalk and put the meters someplace else.
Crappy code or not, it works well on Windows and Mac machines. It's easy to set up. Its SkypeOut rates are extremely cheap and the call quality is pretty good. It also does video extremely well and works easily with most webcams. But it's going to have to clean up its act when it comes to security because there are some alternatives emerging -- like GizmoProject. GizmoProject is great, and uses an open standard, but does not do video nor does it show any intentions of adding it. So scratch that one for me for now, but if it ever adds video, watch out Skype.
I agree. And as a Canadian, I hope this will put the brakes on our federal government and keep them from changing our legislation to reflect the Patriot Act which has been slowly, quietly and insidiously happening since the Patriot Act was passed.
Thanks, I have done that, and even gone into the object manager to disable what I can in there, but a few times in the past, Messenger has just shown up again. Hasn't done it for a while, though. I have Pidgin running, which is fantastic.
I sure hope this doesn't come as an auto-update, magically appearing on my XP machine one morning asking me to sign up for all these Live services I don't want. MSN Messenger is annoying enough, just deciding to be there one day after an update although I have tried to get rid of it many times.
I know it's inevitable, but I don't particularly like or need the constant link to information that Internet-everywhere would provide. I don't need to feel connected everywhere I go. I'm perfectly happy to go into my office and use the computer to type an e-mail, or sit on my couch and read news headlines and check local weather on my Nintendo Wii.
:D
I think the urge to move everything to a constant, Internet-everywhere connection is driven by some kind of mental illness. I really don't want to have people constantly e-mailing me, phoning me, text messaging me, sending me stupid links, pictures and trying to get me to join Facebook. If they really want to talk to me, they can come over to my house, or meet me for a coffee, or invite me over. Or even use the telephone.
I also think that most of the information we want so bad to have at our fingertips within seconds of it happening is useless garbage anyway. I don't need my life and my mind crowded with terabytes of crap.
That's why I only browse Slashdot every couple days
Don't forget that the previous clones made by Motorola/StarMax were total junk and far inferior to Apple's own offerings (I know, I used one for work for several years). They made Apple look bad.
I don't think Apple's about to give up a monopoly on hardware and software just so people can take the OS and run it on crappy hardware that reveals its limitations.
Apple's OS has been easy to maintain because it's only going to run on a few hardware configurations. It doesn't have to run on a million different combinations, like Windows, which is probably one of the biggest reasons for Windows bugs and quirks.
Plus, the OS is the hardware's biggest selling feature -- like the cool OS? Then buy a Mac. Their business model might not seem like it's that ambitious, but it's slow, steady and long-term, and doesn't give up any ground. It forgoes the quick bucks now in the anticipation that five years from now millions more people in the iPod generation will be buying Apple computers and accessories.
Making the accessories PC-compatible is brilliant -- you've gotta admit that while an AirPort station is really just a router in a pretty white box, it's got a lot more sex appeal than the clunky, blinky blocky routers made by other companies. If someone buys Apple accessories for their PC, they will be open to the possibility of eventually getting a Mac someday.
It's 1984 and 1985 all over again!
Well said.
I wish I had got onto this one earlier. The topic is probably dead. Oh well.
I have a little girl (19 months) and I am amazed every day by the power images have on her. This evening we were watching a TV show and there was a close-up shot of one of the characters crying. My girl copied the gesture, the sound and the emotion exactly, then shot me a big grin afterwards. Everything she sees, teaches her something.
She learned how to distinguish eyes, ears, nose and mouth by watching a Baby Einstein video over and over. The powerful images taught her how, and quickly -- after only two or three viewings she had it figured out.
This weekend I was playing Halo. I was on a roll, massacring wave after wave of Covenant. There was blue blood everywhere. I looked down and my daughter was staring up at the screen, totally enthralled by what she was seeing. I can only imagine what she learned from that. I hope it was how to circle-strafe and that the needler is a piece of crap. But it got me thinking about what effect the images were having on me.
Images have a powerful influence on kids. They have a powerful influence on anyone. Certain images creep me out and give me nightmares, others inspire me and lift my spirits. I've seen a lot of movies and played a lot of violent video games and I'm still affected by powerful images, even if I know they're fake. To think that kids are immune to the imagery in video games is naive. I grew up playing the most violent games available (believe it or not, we were able to find plenty of violence in Oregon Trail) but these days violence bothers me in a way it never did -- probably because games are getting closer to photorealism each month. I still haven't played FEAR because of the bloody box art. Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 was fun, but disturbing, and I was glad to get out of it. I couldn't play a whole game like that.
I'm disturbed by some of the posters who are so numb they think that our kids are going to play violent video games, drink, screw, do drugs and do whatever they want, whenever they want, and there's nothing we can do about it except mitigate the effects. I think that's absolute nonsense and an attempt to dodge responsibility.
There is something we can do about it -- as some posters have suggested, we can teach our kids the difference between reality and fantasy. We can teach our kids the difference between right and wrong. We can teach them that some things are more beneficial than others, and guide them to make good choices. We can make home a loving, caring environment with rules. Good rules are not pointless confinements -- they allow kids to know their boundaries, and to be free within those boundaries. Free to be kids, not adults-in-training.
I'm sure some might argue that standards are arbitrary and that we should let kids find their own way. I would say that argument is again an attempt to avoid responsibility. The world is a scary place, it is unacceptable for a parent to turn their kids loose too early, and without a road map and some idea of what's ahead. Letting kids figure things out on their own is letting them destroy themselves.
So what about violent video games? I'm seeing them more through the eyes of a child -- my child -- and realizing I don't want to make compromises, or make complicated rules about what is and isn't acceptable in my house and when some games should be played just to protect my hobby. I'd rather give up playing some games altogether. I guess you could call that love.
Ha ha true! Imagine if you will... a whole server full of troll avatars doing that stupid dance. Ah wait it looks like that all the time in Orgrimmar anyways.
Yeah, because then the next thing you know World of Warcraft servers will suddenly be overpopulated with dwarves.
Good points. I also thought I would add that laws protecting culture are different in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. French-language, home-grown entertainment is vigorously protected. Every year or so the province's "language police" make headlines for some stupid thing, like forcing a computer store to take down its website because it didn't conform to being bilingual enough, or forcing cities to change street signs to French. http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/calgary-herald.16jun 97.html
http://newquebec.blogspot.com/2006/07/beaconsfield -to-language-police-get.html
Quebec probably just doesn't care enough about protecting "outsider" entertainment which competes directly with its own culture, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the enforcement agencies were turning a blind eye to piracy in Quebec movie theatres for that reason.
But I think the idea that Canada is responsible for 50 per cent of movie piracy is a total load and a FUD attack by the movie companies on our copyright laws, which they hate because they still allow us to make legit copies and downloads of THINGS WE ALREADY OWN (better make that clear).
I hate having to pay a levy on every pack of blank DVDs and CDs I buy, but that's the law and I just look for the deals (discs are always on sale somewhere.)
And I find it freeing that if I buy a CD, and it's invested with rootkits and proprietary players and crap, well, I am within my rights to fire up Limewire or uTorrent and download the cracked version of the album I just bought so I can put it on my MP3 player without having to go through some nightmarish DRM scenario with Windows Media Player.
Good points chowderbags.
;)
But it should be pointed out it was a common practice at that time for both sides to kidnap each others' sailors and force them to serve. Also that it's not too surprising the British wouldn't want the Americans to trade with the French since they were pretty busy fighting Napoleon across the ocean. They would have done whatever they could to hurt Napoleon. And the Native American attacks in the frontier -- well, there's a whole lot more to that, including entire Indian nations siding with eiher British or Americans, or neither, while trying to defend their people from being swallowed by the settlers moving westward, but you're essentially right. However it was a lot more political than just the British encouraging Indians to attack American settlers.
The 1812 conflicts that spilled over from Europe into North America were pretty half-assed. Certainly nothing for Canadians (I am one) to puff up with pride over.
As for this game -- I think the real point is that maybe the American military puts too much faith in its high-tech weaponry and not enough in plain old tactics
Thanks for the personal attacks. They really lend some dignity and intelligence to your comments. Also, I'm posting on Slashdot, so obviously I think technology is a good thing. You can stop with the fallacious attacks now. I didn't want to even mention it, hoping that discussion could rise above "I'm smarter than you neener neener neener" arguments, but I have a degree in history. Do you? Sure, it's useless by the standards of "PROGRESS" but I am certain I have read more books about and primary sources from the "Dark Ages" than you. So who has a more informed opinion?
Who's romanticizing? I never said anything about how nice it would be to live in the "Dark Ages."
"Men lived in ignorance, fear and squalor."
How do you know? Have you ever read anything written during that period of time (Fall of the Roman Empire to the invasion of England in 1066, let's finally be specific)? Probably not, because there's not much to read other than religious texts. How do we know what it was like? We don't. I've read what I can and while the world at that time was in turmoil, the Roman Empire being carved up by other powers, it does not mean people lived in ignorance, fear and squalor.
And let me challenge an assumption that was made by almost every poster on this topic. Progress. Is technology progress? Have we progressed as human beings when we have better technology to make our lives easier? If that is all that counts, then yes, we have made great progress. But have we really progressed in any other way? Do we use that technology for anything other than our own self-gratification?
And how about some more obvious ones.
In North America we no longer have slavery to a master. Now we have slavery to credit card companies and banks.
We no longer have witchhunts. Instead we choose to make people in other countries the scapegoats of our ignorance and fear and mock them on our late-night comedy shows to make ourselves feel better.
We no longer go to war for religious reasons. Instead we go to war for resources and territory that we want from other nations (e.g. oil) and we have the technology to quickly kill mass amounts of people. We're better at killing than at any other time in history. Point out the crusades as an example of religious fanatacism at its worst, but you must also look at the wars of this century, which killed more people than all of the crusades put together.
It's easy to dismiss the "Dark Ages" as fear, ignorance and squalor, but there's more to history than the progress of technology. And let's be careful before we even call that a good thing.
The Dark Ages weren't all that dark.
They were filled with people with hopes and dreams, making discoveries and learning new things just like people do today. Just because they didn't have computers to post on Slashdot or the wealth of scientific knowledge we have today doesn't mean they were "dark."
Science was progressing, albiet more slowly, and for different reasons. Many "natural philosophers" made scientific discoveries while they were looking to prove the bible, or learn more about the nature of God and creation.
The Scientific Revolution roughly 300 years ago was when people started doing research for the sake of expanding knowledge, not for anything else. Yes, scientific knowledge increased and technology became more advanced, but to assume that everything before that point was just darkness and ignorance is arrogant, uninformed and shortsighted.
I have a strong interest in science, which people should remember is not working closer and closer to a definite answer but to a broadening understanding. Scientific study often enough doesn't definitively answer questions, it just raises more questions. For example, quantum physics. 100 years ago scientists thought they could close the physics books. Then Quantum physics came along. Now every new discovery raises more questions. I think that's pretty exciting.
As for creation "science," which is deservedly flame bait, I wish people would distinguish between people who are fanatical about the politics of "Christendom" building ridiculous museums when the millions of dollars should have gone to house the homeless and feed the hungry, and those who are followers of Christ. I consider myself the latter -- simply, a Christian. I believe God created the universe. How he did it is a matter for science to explore.
And I'm more interested in the why.
Another SF writer, http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Wake-Space-Ken-MacLe od/dp/B000C4SFRE/sr=8-6/qid=1162740889/ref=pd_bbs_ 6/104-0751852-8763166?ie=UTF8&s=books/Ken McLeod, has had ideas similar to this in his books. In the last one I read, Newtons Wake, the characters often have to engage in combat archaeology, which mainly involves the aggressive hacking of ancient technology. He introduces the concepts with a sense of humour -- in one segment of the book, the characters' electronics are attacked by a virus beamed from a an advanced technological artifact. They are able to tell the virus is based on human-created code because once they go deep enough with their combat archaeology, it's east to spot the Microsoft patches in the virus code.