We all know it's nit-picky to count pixels, but I am glad that someone called them on this.
Hear, hear! It's vital that gamers nitpick about issues that they can't see with the naked eye, especially if the game is a lot of fun! And, it's damned courageous to take shots across the bow of Microsoft. They've been pretty much immune from criticism for too damned long. KUDOS!
Oh, and your implication that HD console gaming sucks because it's not full-on 1080p? DEAD ON! I mean, it's not like people have been complaining since the release of the 360 that most gamers don't even have 720p/1080i HDTVs yet...
I haven't been in a guild for a while (I really like it to happen "naturally" in-game and it just hasn't happened in WoW or CoH/CoV where I've been doing my playing). That said, my experience has been that the question gets posed by either a total stranger or someone with whom I've been adventuring a lot one on one. When it's a total stranger (or a brief teammate), as you say the person seems disappointed and I usually never hear from them again. When it's someone with whom I've been playing a lot, it's just "Oh, cool. So, are you ready to head to Hinterlands?"
A few years ago, in my first City of Heroes stint, it was kind of funny when I joined a Super Group and joined the Ventrilo server. I was expecting some reaction to the fact that mine was a male voice in control of a female character, but no one - including the ladies in the SG and on Ventrilo (there were two!) - cared either way. I was Himalayan, the female stone/ice tanker, and that was that. The voice disparity didn't seem to change a thing.
I'll second that. I play female characters in MMOGs and don't ask for a single thing, nor do I look to entice anyone into any behavior. Usually, I just find the female models more interesting in visual terms (being a guy, that's not hard to understand) and I act exactly the same way I would if I was playing a male toon. In fact, my current MMOG of choice is City of Villains, and one of the coolest things about it is playing dress-up with your character, a procedure I find infinitely more entertaining when applied to a female body than a male one.
I'm fairly certain my preference isn't an indicator of some latent homosexuality (one would think that it would have come up before age 35). It's just a game preference.
Oh yeah, and when someone asks me if I'm really a guy or girl, I always answer honestly. After all, I'm not playing these games to make a love connection.
We can't have it both ways - either we need a law which states that all users have a right to be unlocked after their contract is over (paid off or expired) - or we can go along with this hokey hacker versus network approach with bricked phones.
OR, we can get a law that requires ALL phones to be unlocked from day one and end this phone/service bundling once and for all. At that point we might actually get some decent competition going in terms of both service and hardware. As it stands now, people get locked into contracts and the providers care more about the NEXT customer than they do about the current one, something obvious to anyone who watches a couple hours of commercial television where cell phone providers have taken over the expensive slots that used to be the domain of the soda companies.
I don't want to see little old ladies becoming hitmen just because society deems them immune from the law.
Man, I do! Or, at least, I want to see the movie. Finally, a good reason for a Golden Girls reunion! (And, yes, they are all still alive, though Estelle Getty is apparently in extremely poor health.)
This violates the sprit of the posse comitatus act, and probably the letter of the law as well.
Then you'd better quote some of this other "law," because local SWAT teams, no matter how they're equipped, have fuck-all to do with posse comitatus. That was enacted specifically to prevent federal troops - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines - from engaging in the enforcement of federal law on US soil. It has nothing to do with their equipment or their training, and everything to do with who's giving the orders.
12 hours is not a considerably long gaming session
12 hours is a very long gaming session if you don't get up and move around at all during that time. Further, the fact that you don't consider a full half-day "a considerably long gaming session" is indicative of a problem...
A deep vein thrombosis isn't going to kill you on its own, or quickly. It's when it takes a trip up to your lungs and becomes...a pulmonary embolus...that it's truly deadly. SOP for someone found to have a DVT is to do a ventilation-perfusion lung scan to find out if they have a pulmonary embolus since the latter often comes after the former.
Well, there are a couple of big factors that can cause problems. One, as I wondered about in my OP, is the possibility of chemicals used to stay awake. I don't know what the situation is like in China, so I can't even begin to make an educated guess as to the availability of particular drugs there. And, indeed you're correct about the dangers of sitting in the same position for that long. You can develop a deep venous thrombosis in your leg that can then migrate to your lung, and at that point you're just about SOL unless you can get medical attention quickly. This danger can be magnified by dehydration, which is a possible third problem as 3 days without enough water intake (and, obviously, other nutrition) can result in electrolyte abnormalities, which can also be life-threatening, causing things like kidney failure.
You're right that staying conscious (or, at least, semi-conscious) for 3 days isn't a life-threatening problem by itself. It's the lack of movement, lack of hydration, etc. that can put you into the dirt (or the crematorium, YMMV).
This isn't a reason for games/console to remind players to take breaks. This is a reason to make even better games that will ensnare more of the world's obviously pathetic genetic material and flush it down the same toilet that this guy went down.
I've had VERY long gaming sessions, even ones where I (quite foolishly) remained sitting for 12 hours in a row. But, one of the reasons I've never gone much longer that is that there were warning signs that I should quit, from yawning to blurred vision. There's no doubt in my mind that people who die in this fashion suffer symptoms long before they keel over, and at the very least there are the symptoms that everyone suffers when they need sleep (like, you know, falling asleep).
Of course, there's plenty of blame to throw around to others as well. How about the staff of this cafe? What could possibly possess them to let this guy keep going? What was he ingesting in order to remain awake for that ridiculous period of time, and why didn't they either stop him ingesting it or stop serving him? Heck, after 24 hours I'd probably call an ambulance on spec! But, it's China, so who knows how people react...still, just the process of one human caring about the welfare of any other should have caused some reaction.
To reiterate my original point, though: Now that it's over, it's probably just as well that he's gone. Not only was he dumb as a half-bag of rocks, but the fact that he could do this to himself in a public place tells me that he's probably better off dead than living in his community.
Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, all that "live healthy" stuff is great up until the point where they tell you that with such-and-such 1:100,000,000,000-concentration solution you can cure an illness. And that's what makes them a homeopath. You may be confusing homeopathy with naturopathy - they're two very different things in that a naturopath will at least recommend doses of something that comes in a potentially effective concentration, which a homeopath will never do, and if they do then they're no longer a homeopath.
Listen, homeopaths claim that you can cure illnesses with their garbage. That should be enough right there to shut their nonsense down. The idea that government should be funding it at all is ludicrous. It lends legitimacy to something that is based on ZERO reality. Perhaps you think the government should fund churches (apart from tax exemptions), too, since many of them claim that prayer will cure illnesses? I mean, shit, most of the time it'll be harmless, right? Until someone with a treatable cancer is convinced to avoid scientific medical treatment because they've been convinced by someone that prayer will fix it, and it must be true because the government funds it.
Homeopathy is a fraud at this point, plain and simple. It's been demonstrated over and over again that homeopathic "medicine" does absolutely nothing. And just doing nothing is no reason to approve of it when it might prevent someone from getting real medicine because they're already "under treatment.
And if there's something to acupuncture, you're welcome to prove it. It's failed every rigorous test before it, but hey, keep on trucking. Granted it's pretty hard to do double-blind studies with people you're jabbing with needles, but I guess you could deliberately miss the "meridians" or target the wrong qi flow or whatever.
That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area.
If people want to believe in bullshit, they're welcome to it. The problem arrives when these poor, ignorant people have real medical crises and are going to their local homeoquack, chiroputz or acufaker instead of getting therapy that has undergone (or is undergoing, in the case of experimental treatments) scientific testing. If one of my family members looks to be falling into that trap, I'll be dragging them to medical doctors and force-feeding them real meds if I have to.
Kinda like why Block buster and NetFlix don't have Pron.
Sure, but there's a ton of porn (sexual, violent and otherwise) available on DVD, yet people don't boycott Toshiba, Panasonic, etc. over it. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime down the line a lawsuit didn't come from the OTHER direction: A company wanting to release an AO or unrated game, and suing the console manufacturers for keeping them out of the market. That's a case that would have to be fun for some already-rich attorney looking for a challenge.
Well, bully for you. Me, I'll pay no more than $20 for online delivery of an expansion pack and no more than $40 for online delivery of a full game. Considering how much Valve and company save by not having to produce the physical package and pay retailers to sell it, I don't think that's unreasonable. If it means I have to wait a bit to get in on the fun, well, that's not a crisis either. I've been obsessing over World of Warcraft lately so I'll hardly notice the TF2 gap in my life..."hardly" being the operative word since it looks awesome.:)
Sure, I am sorta miffed that the black box is not offered on Steam, but what ever, the Orange box is still cheaper then EP2/Portal/TF2.
Well, gee, I wonder how that happened! Such a shockingly great deal that one can't help but wonder why the damn things aren't $10 a piece in the first place...
You've got it right. Even live-action movies aim for PG/PG-13 so that they can bring in families with kids. An animated film rated R automatically reduces its audience by excluding the young (the ones too young to either sneak in or just pass as 17+ when they approach the minimum wage staff at the theater) and the old who "don't like cartoons." I suspect most studios would be ecstatic making $50 million on an R-rated animated feature - if they have the chocolate salty balls to make one, of course...
You cannot have evidence of a crime that was not comitted.
Sure you can. It's called "circumstantial" evidence, and while it might not be enough by itself to get you the death penalty, if there's enough of it you can definitely be convicted of a crime. I won't say that it applies here, but it is definitely possible for there to be evidence of a crime where none was committed.
It would appear that we the people want some changes.
Now where the hell do you get that idea? From the shrill minority who populate Slashdot, the relatively small group that supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the huge number of people who pay $100/month for cable and buy DVDs every other week?
I'd like to think that people are up in arms over the fact that "Steamboat Willie" is still covered by copyright, but the truth is that most people don't care, or even know, about the situation. If "we the people" actually cared that much about getting US copyright laws fixed, it would come up in the mainstream media more than once or twice a year, and politicians would probably address the issue. As it is, "the people" probably think that the copy of Tale of Two Cities they bought from the bookstore last week is covered by copyright, and they don't care.
I've downloaded a lot of Sims stuff in the past (haven't played in a couple years) for free and there was a LOT more going on than simple "recolors." Everything from elevators to some (turning in a "man card" here) ridiculously nice fashions were available. I remember the original stuff at 7 Deadly Sims and there were some excellent designs with full new furniture sets and the like. It may not have been your cup of tea (and I never paid myself), but people have done a lot more work on those downloads than you're giving them credit for.
First off, I've got to hit you on grammar: It's "should HAVE" or "should've," not "should of" - the latter might be one of the more annoying typing tics on the Internet (heck, it's annoying to me in speech as well).
Second, I would just ask this: How hard is it to AVOID buying something that costs between $100 and $200? There's nothing about a new video card - even a DX10-capable part - that encourages a gamer to move to Vista right now. There isn't a big pile of hot new games that look wildly different in DX10, and there are none (until Crysis is released next month, and apart from a couple Microsoft offerings, which hardly count) that actually require it. So, what would be the incentive for someone buying a new video card to also upgrade to Vista?
As I pointed out in another reply above, I did great gaming in Windows 98 for over a year into the life of Windows XP, and I probably could have made it another. I remember the same things were said about gaming in XP - there were games with compatibility problems, there were games with performance issues, etc. The resistance was particularly significant before service pack 2. Yet, everybody (except those with serious 2000 fetishes) loves Windows XP now...as much as one can love a Microsoft product, anyway. There's no reason to think the same won't happen with Vista, and certainly the Steam numbers don't tell me anything except what might be happening right now. If we see a similar lack of, or slow, growth this time next year, then it'll be newsworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm pretty sure I got your point even if I didn't address it directly with my sarcasm. It's still a stupid point of view.
Hear, hear! It's vital that gamers nitpick about issues that they can't see with the naked eye, especially if the game is a lot of fun! And, it's damned courageous to take shots across the bow of Microsoft. They've been pretty much immune from criticism for too damned long. KUDOS!
Oh, and your implication that HD console gaming sucks because it's not full-on 1080p? DEAD ON! I mean, it's not like people have been complaining since the release of the 360 that most gamers don't even have 720p/1080i HDTVs yet...
I haven't been in a guild for a while (I really like it to happen "naturally" in-game and it just hasn't happened in WoW or CoH/CoV where I've been doing my playing). That said, my experience has been that the question gets posed by either a total stranger or someone with whom I've been adventuring a lot one on one. When it's a total stranger (or a brief teammate), as you say the person seems disappointed and I usually never hear from them again. When it's someone with whom I've been playing a lot, it's just "Oh, cool. So, are you ready to head to Hinterlands?"
A few years ago, in my first City of Heroes stint, it was kind of funny when I joined a Super Group and joined the Ventrilo server. I was expecting some reaction to the fact that mine was a male voice in control of a female character, but no one - including the ladies in the SG and on Ventrilo (there were two!) - cared either way. I was Himalayan, the female stone/ice tanker, and that was that. The voice disparity didn't seem to change a thing.
I'll second that. I play female characters in MMOGs and don't ask for a single thing, nor do I look to entice anyone into any behavior. Usually, I just find the female models more interesting in visual terms (being a guy, that's not hard to understand) and I act exactly the same way I would if I was playing a male toon. In fact, my current MMOG of choice is City of Villains, and one of the coolest things about it is playing dress-up with your character, a procedure I find infinitely more entertaining when applied to a female body than a male one.
I'm fairly certain my preference isn't an indicator of some latent homosexuality (one would think that it would have come up before age 35). It's just a game preference.
Oh yeah, and when someone asks me if I'm really a guy or girl, I always answer honestly. After all, I'm not playing these games to make a love connection.
OR, we can get a law that requires ALL phones to be unlocked from day one and end this phone/service bundling once and for all. At that point we might actually get some decent competition going in terms of both service and hardware. As it stands now, people get locked into contracts and the providers care more about the NEXT customer than they do about the current one, something obvious to anyone who watches a couple hours of commercial television where cell phone providers have taken over the expensive slots that used to be the domain of the soda companies.
Man, I do! Or, at least, I want to see the movie. Finally, a good reason for a Golden Girls reunion! (And, yes, they are all still alive, though Estelle Getty is apparently in extremely poor health.)
Then you'd better quote some of this other "law," because local SWAT teams, no matter how they're equipped, have fuck-all to do with posse comitatus. That was enacted specifically to prevent federal troops - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines - from engaging in the enforcement of federal law on US soil. It has nothing to do with their equipment or their training, and everything to do with who's giving the orders.
12 hours is a very long gaming session if you don't get up and move around at all during that time. Further, the fact that you don't consider a full half-day "a considerably long gaming session" is indicative of a problem...
A deep vein thrombosis isn't going to kill you on its own, or quickly. It's when it takes a trip up to your lungs and becomes...a pulmonary embolus...that it's truly deadly. SOP for someone found to have a DVT is to do a ventilation-perfusion lung scan to find out if they have a pulmonary embolus since the latter often comes after the former.
Well, there are a couple of big factors that can cause problems. One, as I wondered about in my OP, is the possibility of chemicals used to stay awake. I don't know what the situation is like in China, so I can't even begin to make an educated guess as to the availability of particular drugs there. And, indeed you're correct about the dangers of sitting in the same position for that long. You can develop a deep venous thrombosis in your leg that can then migrate to your lung, and at that point you're just about SOL unless you can get medical attention quickly. This danger can be magnified by dehydration, which is a possible third problem as 3 days without enough water intake (and, obviously, other nutrition) can result in electrolyte abnormalities, which can also be life-threatening, causing things like kidney failure.
You're right that staying conscious (or, at least, semi-conscious) for 3 days isn't a life-threatening problem by itself. It's the lack of movement, lack of hydration, etc. that can put you into the dirt (or the crematorium, YMMV).
This isn't a reason for games/console to remind players to take breaks. This is a reason to make even better games that will ensnare more of the world's obviously pathetic genetic material and flush it down the same toilet that this guy went down.
I've had VERY long gaming sessions, even ones where I (quite foolishly) remained sitting for 12 hours in a row. But, one of the reasons I've never gone much longer that is that there were warning signs that I should quit, from yawning to blurred vision. There's no doubt in my mind that people who die in this fashion suffer symptoms long before they keel over, and at the very least there are the symptoms that everyone suffers when they need sleep (like, you know, falling asleep).
Of course, there's plenty of blame to throw around to others as well. How about the staff of this cafe? What could possibly possess them to let this guy keep going? What was he ingesting in order to remain awake for that ridiculous period of time, and why didn't they either stop him ingesting it or stop serving him? Heck, after 24 hours I'd probably call an ambulance on spec! But, it's China, so who knows how people react...still, just the process of one human caring about the welfare of any other should have caused some reaction.
To reiterate my original point, though: Now that it's over, it's probably just as well that he's gone. Not only was he dumb as a half-bag of rocks, but the fact that he could do this to himself in a public place tells me that he's probably better off dead than living in his community.
Yeah, all that "live healthy" stuff is great up until the point where they tell you that with such-and-such 1:100,000,000,000-concentration solution you can cure an illness. And that's what makes them a homeopath. You may be confusing homeopathy with naturopathy - they're two very different things in that a naturopath will at least recommend doses of something that comes in a potentially effective concentration, which a homeopath will never do, and if they do then they're no longer a homeopath.
Listen, homeopaths claim that you can cure illnesses with their garbage. That should be enough right there to shut their nonsense down. The idea that government should be funding it at all is ludicrous. It lends legitimacy to something that is based on ZERO reality. Perhaps you think the government should fund churches (apart from tax exemptions), too, since many of them claim that prayer will cure illnesses? I mean, shit, most of the time it'll be harmless, right? Until someone with a treatable cancer is convinced to avoid scientific medical treatment because they've been convinced by someone that prayer will fix it, and it must be true because the government funds it.
Homeopathy is a fraud at this point, plain and simple. It's been demonstrated over and over again that homeopathic "medicine" does absolutely nothing. And just doing nothing is no reason to approve of it when it might prevent someone from getting real medicine because they're already "under treatment.
That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area.
If people want to believe in bullshit, they're welcome to it. The problem arrives when these poor, ignorant people have real medical crises and are going to their local homeoquack, chiroputz or acufaker instead of getting therapy that has undergone (or is undergoing, in the case of experimental treatments) scientific testing. If one of my family members looks to be falling into that trap, I'll be dragging them to medical doctors and force-feeding them real meds if I have to.
Sure, but there's a ton of porn (sexual, violent and otherwise) available on DVD, yet people don't boycott Toshiba, Panasonic, etc. over it. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime down the line a lawsuit didn't come from the OTHER direction: A company wanting to release an AO or unrated game, and suing the console manufacturers for keeping them out of the market. That's a case that would have to be fun for some already-rich attorney looking for a challenge.
Well, bully for you. Me, I'll pay no more than $20 for online delivery of an expansion pack and no more than $40 for online delivery of a full game. Considering how much Valve and company save by not having to produce the physical package and pay retailers to sell it, I don't think that's unreasonable. If it means I have to wait a bit to get in on the fun, well, that's not a crisis either. I've been obsessing over World of Warcraft lately so I'll hardly notice the TF2 gap in my life..."hardly" being the operative word since it looks awesome. :)
Well, gee, I wonder how that happened! Such a shockingly great deal that one can't help but wonder why the damn things aren't $10 a piece in the first place...
You've got it right. Even live-action movies aim for PG/PG-13 so that they can bring in families with kids. An animated film rated R automatically reduces its audience by excluding the young (the ones too young to either sneak in or just pass as 17+ when they approach the minimum wage staff at the theater) and the old who "don't like cartoons." I suspect most studios would be ecstatic making $50 million on an R-rated animated feature - if they have the chocolate salty balls to make one, of course...
Sure you can. It's called "circumstantial" evidence, and while it might not be enough by itself to get you the death penalty, if there's enough of it you can definitely be convicted of a crime. I won't say that it applies here, but it is definitely possible for there to be evidence of a crime where none was committed.
Now where the hell do you get that idea? From the shrill minority who populate Slashdot, the relatively small group that supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the huge number of people who pay $100/month for cable and buy DVDs every other week?
I'd like to think that people are up in arms over the fact that "Steamboat Willie" is still covered by copyright, but the truth is that most people don't care, or even know, about the situation. If "we the people" actually cared that much about getting US copyright laws fixed, it would come up in the mainstream media more than once or twice a year, and politicians would probably address the issue. As it is, "the people" probably think that the copy of Tale of Two Cities they bought from the bookstore last week is covered by copyright, and they don't care.
Click the link under my handle, watch that video and then ask that again. =P
One can only hope that version 2 will play a Kris Kross clip every time it makes it's prediction.
I've downloaded a lot of Sims stuff in the past (haven't played in a couple years) for free and there was a LOT more going on than simple "recolors." Everything from elevators to some (turning in a "man card" here) ridiculously nice fashions were available. I remember the original stuff at 7 Deadly Sims and there were some excellent designs with full new furniture sets and the like. It may not have been your cup of tea (and I never paid myself), but people have done a lot more work on those downloads than you're giving them credit for.
Yes, but movies don't turn children into homicidal maniacs. Don't tell me you can't understand the difference!
First off, I've got to hit you on grammar: It's "should HAVE" or "should've," not "should of" - the latter might be one of the more annoying typing tics on the Internet (heck, it's annoying to me in speech as well).
Second, I would just ask this: How hard is it to AVOID buying something that costs between $100 and $200? There's nothing about a new video card - even a DX10-capable part - that encourages a gamer to move to Vista right now. There isn't a big pile of hot new games that look wildly different in DX10, and there are none (until Crysis is released next month, and apart from a couple Microsoft offerings, which hardly count) that actually require it. So, what would be the incentive for someone buying a new video card to also upgrade to Vista?
As I pointed out in another reply above, I did great gaming in Windows 98 for over a year into the life of Windows XP, and I probably could have made it another. I remember the same things were said about gaming in XP - there were games with compatibility problems, there were games with performance issues, etc. The resistance was particularly significant before service pack 2. Yet, everybody (except those with serious 2000 fetishes) loves Windows XP now...as much as one can love a Microsoft product, anyway. There's no reason to think the same won't happen with Vista, and certainly the Steam numbers don't tell me anything except what might be happening right now. If we see a similar lack of, or slow, growth this time next year, then it'll be newsworthy.