There are no "macros" per se. What happens during CoH costume creation is that you have three basic skeletons (male, female and "huge"), three body areas (head, upper body and chest) and multiple areas within those three areas to customize the look. Now, you can create, say, a character that looks exactly like Hulk by giving him the huge skeleton, green skin and hair, the closest face available and purple pants - that would be the absolute easiest ripoff to pull. You could make Cyclops by choosing the partial mask or mask with hair, a visor and his blue/yellow costume (with some tech accoutrements depending on which era you're shooting for) - again, a very easy one. The more complicated costumes could take a lot of time to build but you can get close to most of them.
Of course, all that being said, NCSoft does NOT provide templates for making ripoff characters easily (like being able to choose "Wolverine yellow/blue" or "Wolverine brown") and a player has to go to some effort to make a ripoff character - in most cases, it would be far easier to make an original design. Further, they specify in the terms of service that ripoff characters are not permitted, and when they are reported/caught they are forced to change names and/or costumes.
I don't know if Marvel is trying to shut CoH down or cripple it (like by making NCSoft remove particular costume traits so that customers can no longer make costumes that look like Marvel heroes). It seems to me that if Cryptic and company are making a good faith effort to police the ripoffs, that SHOULD be enough to get them off the hook. Of course, nobody ever said the law always made sense.
Oregon does mail-in voting and it seems to work just fine. Get the ballot in the mail, spend a bit of time figuring out who to vote for, mark up the ballot, drop it in the mailbox. I don't see a single problem with it.
Of course, I don't buy into your "undue influence" argument, either. Like the woman who was wearing a Bush/Cheney shirt and wasn't allowed to vote (don't recall the location) until she took it off. What's the undue influence of seeing a candidate's name? After all, you're going to see it on the ballot in just a minute anyway. Now, having someone standing over your shoulder and "advising" you on your vote is going too far (and obviously active campaigning shouldn't be permitted at polling places), but that kind of thing is easy to avoid with mail-in ballots by simply filling them out when nobody else is around.
The punch card garbage has to be eliminated completely. It's archaic and doesn't do anything better than a simple pen and paper followed by an optical scan, not to mention the fact that a ballot marked with a pen is easier to read in a hand recount. I find it quite understandable, especially with the machine punchers, that people can screw up their ballots on the punch system. With pen and paper, virtually all excuses - apart maybe from Parkinson's or similar tremor problems - go right out the window.
The only reason savegames for some Xbox titles are ridiculously huge is that they didn't have to spend any time optimizing - they had the luxury of a hard drive and they used it. There are many PS2 RPGs that have to keep track of similar amounts of information (sometimes even more) and the developers simply have to factor in the optimization to fit their saves into 8MB or less - if the PS2 had come stock with a hard drive, I guarantee you would have many PS2 games with "humongous" save files.
You probably could have saved at least $165 by not continuing to play the "mundane grind bullshit" so long. MMOG players who whine about playing a game that they dislike for months or years are, to put it simply and crudely, tools.
They've also added alignment changes that apply to the whole party instead of just the main character. Hopefully, this will result in some extra challenge since, if you chose to go dark side in KOTOR you could still access all the light side powers with no penalty through party selection.
Besides conspiracy nutcases, who says we don't count every vote? While there may be errors (almost inevitable when you're talking about a hundred million individual ballots), state and county elections people do count every ballot they have before certifying an election. The only thing I was talking about was the media practice of announcing winners based on statistical likelihood which, obviously, isn't a government function.
Let's see...The differences between voting and boarding an airplane. Well, the airplane is owned by a non-governmental company - that's a pretty big one. One can travel via car, bus or train in addition to flying an airplane; while the only way to elect representatives, vote on taxes, etc. is to vote. Flying in an airplane isn't a constitutionally protected right, while voting is...
Not just a *little* too careful. I was on MSNBC through the night (politics aside, I'm a Chris Matthews fan) and kept waiting for them to call another state which would have pushed Bush over 270 (counting Ohio, of course) and would possibly have resulted in Bush coming out to speak. After staying up all night with nothing happening, I then continued to watch Imus in the Morning (radio show simulcast on MSNBC). The NBC folks then revealed that they made the conscious decision NOT to call any more states after Ohio to avoid any sniping at them about the process. To me, this was going too far the other way in an effort to avoid controversy. If you're going to "call" states for a particular candidate according to certain criteria at 10:00 p.m., you should be ready to make the same calls at 1:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. If a network isn't willing to do that, then I think they should get out of that business entirely and just report the numbers, letting the commentators provide analysis without making the "calls."
Yes, you might be able to hit dozens of polling places (you'd still need to have names of registered voters in these "dozens" of places), and it still wouldn't be more than a tiny statistical blip, not to mention risking going to jail if caught. If photo IDs were a requirement, then any organized fraud would simply include making up fake IDs, a particularly trivial concern since the fake ID would only have to stand up to a cursory inspection unless they want lines around the block. As the day wears on, less and less attention would be paid and there would barely be glances at the IDs. Even if they did pay close attention, what about that guy who shaved his beard and lost 30 pounds since his picture was taken? Should they then turn him away since he doesn't look like his picture anymore? There's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
The bottom line is that if someone wants to commit fraud, there's always a way to do it. Elections are scrutinized (see this article) in such a way, though, that getting away with it is another thing entirely.
Except that US citizens are NOT required to have photo ID. Requiring photo ID to vote would mean such a requirement.
I'll also give the requirements for perpetrating a fraud such as you're proposing and making it statistically significant:
1) You would have to have many individuals involved in the fraud because voting twice in the same precinct would be too dangerous - a person could easily be recognized as voting multiple times and possibly arrested.
2) Once you have the people, you now have to have access to multiple registered identities, one per precinct per person involved in the fraud.
2a) You need to be certain that those multiple registered identities aren't going to vote, either by registering nonexistant people or somehow figuring out who is not going to show up.
3) Now, you have to have each person travel to every precinct to be defrauded and vote.
3a) Absentee ballots could simplify this process but given how few elections have turned on these ballots over the years it hardly seems credible that this could be done without detection.
Bottom line? Your "undoubtable fact" is very much in doubt and would be difficult to perpetrate under ideal circumstances. Far easier (though I've gotta think still difficult) would be coopting election officials themselves and taking that more direct route to fixing an election.
Re:And? The real console FPS is coming out later
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
Actually, it's what makes the internet able to show so many people AS social tools.
You know why I've already decided your opinion is shit? Because, like the majority of the comments in this topic, you've decided that other opinions are shit. You're telling the "truth," huh? Is it the truth or your opinion? The answer, of course, is the latter.
People should mark these words carefully: Just because you believe something doesn't make it true. Having an opinion, whatever it is, doesn't make you unique or special. Playing video games for a long period of time doesn't differentiate you that much, either.
Me? I didn't enjoy Halo that much. Then again, I'm not a big FPS player. If I were to score it as a reviewer Halo would have received about a 7 - that wouldn't, however, be the "truth"...It would be my opinion.
Re:Not as good as the oldies....
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
Whilst I would have thought that the idiots out there had learned that opinions are just like assholes.
Re:All our hopes are on Halo 2
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
You're high, right? I mean, that's cool and everything, but you should probably wait until you come down before hitting the submit button.
Console FPSs DO have the "up-down dimension." They also have the right-left dimension and the forward-back dimension. They are indeed fully featured in the dimensional respect.
Wow. So, somehow it's chilling that Slashdot editors and readers are ready to believe the worst about the US government without any evidence whatsoever? I call it pathetic and a sign of how many people are living inside of their own paranoid little worlds instead of getting out into the real one.
Marvel does indeed have a fairly prominent super-speed character: Quicksilver - son of Magneto, former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, The Avengers and X-Factor.
They also have "The Whizzer" but I won't try to describe him any further since there are too many versions of him in alternate realities.
If you'll excuse me, I need to crawl back under my rock.
Here's my question, which none of the tinfoil responses I've read so far (no way can I read them all) address adequately: What would Google's MOTIVE be to remove the pictures from their image index? Everyone seems to be railing on and on about censorship, pandering to the government, etc. but none of those explanations make any sense. The idea that the executive branch sent some kind of request to Google to remove the images is ridiculous on its face since that kind of trail would lead to embarrassment (and probably an EFF lawsuit). The idea that Google is pushing a political agenda is ridiculous because there would be so many better ways to do it (you can still get to said pictures through Google "Proper").
In short, this proves once again that paranoid, imaginary conspiracies are more fun for some people than the truth.
Re:Evil Genius vs. DK2 + an revivew of the former
on
Review: Evil Genius
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· Score: 1
Who have ever heard about an evil genius that DESTROYED an diamond mine (WITH DIAMONDS IN!)
Actually, an evil genius who was already sitting on a pile of diamonds would be very well advised to destroy any diamond mine he comes across since his diamonds will appreciate rapidly in value. Destroying to make money is much easier than creating to make money, and explosives are much cheaper than diamonds.
Yeah, see, here's the thing: It IS an industry. It is a large number of people and corporations all engaged in producing products which they then sell for a profit. Further, NO game sold for the PS2, Xbox or Gamecube is the product entirely of one person. Even low-budget games have staffs of at least 20 people and usually many more. I recall that even during the time Sid Meier was making games for Commodore 64 (and the other home-computer platforms with 64k RAM or less to work with), he had a lot of other people working with him on his games.
We're long past the days when you could isolate a single person and identify them as the sole creator of a game, responsible for every nuance. There are still some great individual designers and they're just as well known in this industry as Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton are in theirs (though obviously the film industry receives wider recognition), but the truth is that without the rest of the people on their staffs their games wouldn't be what they are.
EB tried to hose me that way with Star Wars KOTOR on release day. They told me to come back in three hours and check if they had any extra copies available for people who didn't preorder. Their mistake, of course, was that there is a Gamestop only 15 feet (plus escalator) away and they were happy to sell me a copy of KOTOR - as a bonus for them, because I decided I wanted to support a game shop not having anti-customer policies, I picked up the strategy guide at the same time (something I very rarely do considering the availability of DSL in the house).
Probably because if Microsoft does this, then suddenly, inexplicably, Xbox merchandise in retail outlets is moved to a single shelf, right next to that bathroom that's never cleaned. If you ask for an Xbox game, the store will have it, but you'll take hours trying to find the "display." You do NOT want to piss off retailers in this area - especially retailers who have plenty of other products to sell and could use the space to sell something that the manufacturer ISN'T selling direct either earlier or cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, all that being said, NCSoft does NOT provide templates for making ripoff characters easily (like being able to choose "Wolverine yellow/blue" or "Wolverine brown") and a player has to go to some effort to make a ripoff character - in most cases, it would be far easier to make an original design. Further, they specify in the terms of service that ripoff characters are not permitted, and when they are reported/caught they are forced to change names and/or costumes.
I don't know if Marvel is trying to shut CoH down or cripple it (like by making NCSoft remove particular costume traits so that customers can no longer make costumes that look like Marvel heroes). It seems to me that if Cryptic and company are making a good faith effort to police the ripoffs, that SHOULD be enough to get them off the hook. Of course, nobody ever said the law always made sense.
Of course, I don't buy into your "undue influence" argument, either. Like the woman who was wearing a Bush/Cheney shirt and wasn't allowed to vote (don't recall the location) until she took it off. What's the undue influence of seeing a candidate's name? After all, you're going to see it on the ballot in just a minute anyway. Now, having someone standing over your shoulder and "advising" you on your vote is going too far (and obviously active campaigning shouldn't be permitted at polling places), but that kind of thing is easy to avoid with mail-in ballots by simply filling them out when nobody else is around.
The punch card garbage has to be eliminated completely. It's archaic and doesn't do anything better than a simple pen and paper followed by an optical scan, not to mention the fact that a ballot marked with a pen is easier to read in a hand recount. I find it quite understandable, especially with the machine punchers, that people can screw up their ballots on the punch system. With pen and paper, virtually all excuses - apart maybe from Parkinson's or similar tremor problems - go right out the window.
The only reason savegames for some Xbox titles are ridiculously huge is that they didn't have to spend any time optimizing - they had the luxury of a hard drive and they used it. There are many PS2 RPGs that have to keep track of similar amounts of information (sometimes even more) and the developers simply have to factor in the optimization to fit their saves into 8MB or less - if the PS2 had come stock with a hard drive, I guarantee you would have many PS2 games with "humongous" save files.
You probably could have saved at least $165 by not continuing to play the "mundane grind bullshit" so long. MMOG players who whine about playing a game that they dislike for months or years are, to put it simply and crudely, tools.
They've also added alignment changes that apply to the whole party instead of just the main character. Hopefully, this will result in some extra challenge since, if you chose to go dark side in KOTOR you could still access all the light side powers with no penalty through party selection.
Wow. Is it 2001 again already?
From what I've read, the backwards compatibility of the DS stops at GBA, so GB and GBC games are being left behind.
Besides conspiracy nutcases, who says we don't count every vote? While there may be errors (almost inevitable when you're talking about a hundred million individual ballots), state and county elections people do count every ballot they have before certifying an election. The only thing I was talking about was the media practice of announcing winners based on statistical likelihood which, obviously, isn't a government function.
Let's see...The differences between voting and boarding an airplane. Well, the airplane is owned by a non-governmental company - that's a pretty big one. One can travel via car, bus or train in addition to flying an airplane; while the only way to elect representatives, vote on taxes, etc. is to vote. Flying in an airplane isn't a constitutionally protected right, while voting is...
Hehe. National ID cards are always a bad idea until a hated republican is re-elected.
Not just a *little* too careful. I was on MSNBC through the night (politics aside, I'm a Chris Matthews fan) and kept waiting for them to call another state which would have pushed Bush over 270 (counting Ohio, of course) and would possibly have resulted in Bush coming out to speak. After staying up all night with nothing happening, I then continued to watch Imus in the Morning (radio show simulcast on MSNBC). The NBC folks then revealed that they made the conscious decision NOT to call any more states after Ohio to avoid any sniping at them about the process. To me, this was going too far the other way in an effort to avoid controversy. If you're going to "call" states for a particular candidate according to certain criteria at 10:00 p.m., you should be ready to make the same calls at 1:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. If a network isn't willing to do that, then I think they should get out of that business entirely and just report the numbers, letting the commentators provide analysis without making the "calls."
The bottom line is that if someone wants to commit fraud, there's always a way to do it. Elections are scrutinized (see this article) in such a way, though, that getting away with it is another thing entirely.
I'll also give the requirements for perpetrating a fraud such as you're proposing and making it statistically significant:
1) You would have to have many individuals involved in the fraud because voting twice in the same precinct would be too dangerous - a person could easily be recognized as voting multiple times and possibly arrested.
2) Once you have the people, you now have to have access to multiple registered identities, one per precinct per person involved in the fraud.
2a) You need to be certain that those multiple registered identities aren't going to vote, either by registering nonexistant people or somehow figuring out who is not going to show up.
3) Now, you have to have each person travel to every precinct to be defrauded and vote.
3a) Absentee ballots could simplify this process but given how few elections have turned on these ballots over the years it hardly seems credible that this could be done without detection.
Bottom line? Your "undoubtable fact" is very much in doubt and would be difficult to perpetrate under ideal circumstances. Far easier (though I've gotta think still difficult) would be coopting election officials themselves and taking that more direct route to fixing an election.
Actually, it's what makes the internet able to show so many people AS social tools.
People should mark these words carefully: Just because you believe something doesn't make it true. Having an opinion, whatever it is, doesn't make you unique or special. Playing video games for a long period of time doesn't differentiate you that much, either.
Me? I didn't enjoy Halo that much. Then again, I'm not a big FPS player. If I were to score it as a reviewer Halo would have received about a 7 - that wouldn't, however, be the "truth"...It would be my opinion.
Whilst I would have thought that the idiots out there had learned that opinions are just like assholes.
Console FPSs DO have the "up-down dimension." They also have the right-left dimension and the forward-back dimension. They are indeed fully featured in the dimensional respect.
Wow. So, somehow it's chilling that Slashdot editors and readers are ready to believe the worst about the US government without any evidence whatsoever? I call it pathetic and a sign of how many people are living inside of their own paranoid little worlds instead of getting out into the real one.
Marvel does indeed have a fairly prominent super-speed character: Quicksilver - son of Magneto, former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, The Avengers and X-Factor.
They also have "The Whizzer" but I won't try to describe him any further since there are too many versions of him in alternate realities.
If you'll excuse me, I need to crawl back under my rock.
In short, this proves once again that paranoid, imaginary conspiracies are more fun for some people than the truth.
Actually, an evil genius who was already sitting on a pile of diamonds would be very well advised to destroy any diamond mine he comes across since his diamonds will appreciate rapidly in value. Destroying to make money is much easier than creating to make money, and explosives are much cheaper than diamonds.
We're long past the days when you could isolate a single person and identify them as the sole creator of a game, responsible for every nuance. There are still some great individual designers and they're just as well known in this industry as Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton are in theirs (though obviously the film industry receives wider recognition), but the truth is that without the rest of the people on their staffs their games wouldn't be what they are.
EB tried to hose me that way with Star Wars KOTOR on release day. They told me to come back in three hours and check if they had any extra copies available for people who didn't preorder. Their mistake, of course, was that there is a Gamestop only 15 feet (plus escalator) away and they were happy to sell me a copy of KOTOR - as a bonus for them, because I decided I wanted to support a game shop not having anti-customer policies, I picked up the strategy guide at the same time (something I very rarely do considering the availability of DSL in the house).
Probably because if Microsoft does this, then suddenly, inexplicably, Xbox merchandise in retail outlets is moved to a single shelf, right next to that bathroom that's never cleaned. If you ask for an Xbox game, the store will have it, but you'll take hours trying to find the "display." You do NOT want to piss off retailers in this area - especially retailers who have plenty of other products to sell and could use the space to sell something that the manufacturer ISN'T selling direct either earlier or cheaper.
After a bad experience with an infinite number of monkeys, I'm quite happy not to have to play any games with an infinite number of humans.