Absolutely not! First off, what does the past have to do with anything? The people, their cultural framework, everything about them, are dead. We can have a few historians tell a few stories about them that entertains us, but such histories will always be through the viewpoint of our culture. The only way you can deal with property rights with any sort of intelligence or consistency is to look at what property is today. Wrong. Your ignorance is creeping out into view again.
There are plenty of tribes that have continued well into the modern world. They may not have stayed in wigwams, but they hold no lesser grasp on their culture or history for having advanced along with the times. Saying that they are all dead and their culture is little more than a legend is just an easy way for your greedy, white culture to continue to comfort itself.
Let us hope against hope that it wouldn't actually be in Florida. Why anyone wants to visit that hot, sticky, humid, wasteland of a peninsula is beyond me. Then add to the fact that the only people actually around are retirees and tourists and you have all the trappings of a hellhole.
I want to see entire cities, counties, states, and countries pass such laws instead. And really, why stop at just PDAs and Smartphones? Why not mobile telephones in general? How about digital music players too? These things only tend to make an already annoying populace that much more annoying while at in public because they become absolutely oblivious to their surroundings.
If the future of gaming is online distribution then it can count me out. Not having a physical copy while relying entirely on some company's server (both to download and install, as well as connect to authenticate and play) just screams lost games to me. I own plenty of games where the developers have since gone extinct. I sure would hate to have to try to play one of those without the actual disc, or worse, try to connect to a long since defunct authentication server.
DD-WRT can be flashed onto just about any WRT54G nowadays. You loose a few features with the newer version though, as the storage space isn't as large as it once was.
For the tiny bit of extra money however, the GL is definitely worth it in terms of hacking.
It's a two way street. EA/Harmonix has actively decided to just keep using their stupid USB dongle for the Wii instruments as opposed to taking advantage of the remote like Activision's guitar did. They want to use high-minded phrases like "open controller standard" but then fail to utilize the most obvious one; the Wii remote. Of course, EA/Harmonix made all of the wrong decisions concerning that gimped Wii game they plan on calling Rock Band.
To be fair, I rarely go out to the theater in part because movie tickets are horrendously priced. I don't have any sort of television subscription for similar reasons. Just because something is of comparative value doesn't necessarily mean that it's a deal.
The other thing is that you must first go out and purchase the game before you are even hit with the subscription fee. The game is probably cheaper now than it was originally to purchase in store, but that's still an initial investment on top of a monthly subscription fee. Add to that the growing number of expansion packs that are needed for the entire experience and you could have already bought one or two games that don't require a monthly fee. Furthermore, everyone I know that plays an MMO pays for two accounts so that they can play with their wife or husband.
This is just how I see it however. I'm more than willing to accept that many people see it as just another competitively priced form of entertainment. I just wouldn't be able to think of it in that light myself if I were considering a purchase. I'd much rather pursue something along the lines of Morrowind or Oblivion, which can easily provide hundreds of hours of gameplay with room for even further expansion byway of user created mods. The only thing you would really be missing is multiplayer (which is a shame, the Elder Scrolls would be great with two or four person LAN play).
Perhaps I am just more value orientated than most? It's hard to tell. I have a NetFlix subscription, but that's $15 for two (or more) hours of entertainment a day. I get "three at a time" and send them back pretty quickly, which results in six discs per week. That's is a time and price range pretty on par with what I was originally talking about as far as MMOs go.
That ridiculously boring combat system is the main thorn in every MMO's side. Clicking an enemy only to watch as you automatically take turns attacking is not fun or interactive in the least bit.
Age of Conan does seem to want to rectify this to some extent. How well it turns out is anyone's guess though.
Unless you are playing quite often, it's simply not worth the subscription fee. That is assuming it's worth the price to begin with, which may be debatable given the continuous expansion packs that eventually become necessity. That's how I see it at least. If I had no life and could play it for several hours a day almost every single day, then the subscription price might be justified (assuming the combat wasn't of the boring click-n-wait variety). But since that isn't the case, it's essentially just a waste of money.
I don't like MMOs and never will. The very fact that I have to pay to play the games keeps me from caring. Outside of that however, I find that Age of Conan (in theory) fixes a lot of the problems inherent within popular MMOs. The most obvious of these problems being the ridiculously dumbeddown combat. Clicking on an enemy and watching as your character takes turns attacking it is not fun. I don't know how well Conan's system works, but real time, actual skill-based combat is sure a step in the right direction anyway you slice it.
Robert E. Howard's "Hyborian Age" is the perfect setting if done correctly. It certainly puts to shame all of the weak "high fantasy" out there. It's just a shame that it's being relegated to an MMO which may or may not even catch on with the population.
I love GL Tron, have ever since I first saw it on Linux Mandrake years and years ago. I only wish that they're get the LAN multiplayer coded in and working.
Soldat is damn fun as well--and free! It's a 2D, sidecrolling deathmatch type of game. http://www.soldat.pl/main.php
That's simply not true. They'll just teleport in and take your baby anyway. They can teleport out as well, so it's not as if you can set the house on fire in order to kill the baby and the social worker.:(
There's too much luck involved and not enough skill. I'll play Pinball over Solitaire any day. Now if only Microsoft would include a good Chess game...
Seriously though, I have Quake, SimCity2000, and Diablo on any computer that I use just in case I do get bored. Those titles will run on pretty much anything.
I realize that much of the terms, phrases and dialogue in general through A Scanner Darkly are accurate to the source. I remember the tone of the book being much more about paranoia than anything however, which doesn't seem to have a serious presence within the film. If you go back and look at my statement again, I merely quip that "they left out much of the overbearing paranoia and resulting melancholy in order to instead highlight stoner humor."
All one has to do is go back and actually watch The Day the Earth Stood Still. The plot is still relevant, if not perhaps a little too removed from current parallels for the average moviegoer to realize. The special effects have held up phenomenally well, much better than any instantly outdated CGI will. It's a classic, and cannot be redone or outdone.
I realize that Hollywood has not been big on new ideas for decades, but recently it literally seems like everything is a remake, a "re-imagining", a comic book or videogame adaptation, or based on a novel. Rarely do any of them do justice to the source material, and often times it is obvious that no one even tried. Many times the only real connection these films have with their inspiration is the title and character names, which is purely for marketing reasons.
Of course, Hollywood isn't alone in pushing out garbage. It seems that the so-called indie scene has gotten extremely popular as of the last several years. Most of those just feel too manufactured, as if they all follow the exact same guidelines on how to be "Indie Hits", with their unrealistically quirky characters and overall feelgood moments.
Obviously good films have always been a rarity, just like any of medium of entertainment. You'll inevitably wade through more trash than you will find treasure. This symptom of lazy entertainment just seems to be disproportionately large nowadays.
Blade Runner was great, but left out every shred of thought (Mercerism, Mood Machines, radiation poisoning, social significance of real pets vs. synthetic ones, etc) in favor of film noir. Likewise, Total Recall was a decent action film, but didn't manage much more. Outside of those, the Minority Report was poorly done and riddled with plot holes, Paycheck just outright sucked, and so on.
The only film so far that has worked as an adaptation of PKD's work was A Scanner Darkly. One big problem with it was that they left out much of the overbearing paranoia and resulting melancholy in order to instead highlight stoner humor. Though I admit I would have preferred that the ending remained more nuanced, as opposed to the ever-so-convenient voiceover/recap that films seem to like to push on audiences to counter their short attention spans.
The rotoscoping could have possibly been used to better effect as well. It only really seemed to truly add to the atmosphere on a few occasions. Otherwise the style seemed surprisingly tame given the tone and content of the plot.
And while you're at it, could you remotely stick to the source material, unlike that abomination you called I Am Legend? I think the only thing that the movie had in common with the book was the fact he was alone in the city. Try "The Last Man on Earth". Not only does Vincent Price still have more acting ability than Will Smith can ever dream of, but Richard Matheson was actually involved in writing the screenplay. To be fair, I do believe that Matheson eventually left the project for one reason or another, but it was still a pretty good adaptation.
Upon using the "Restore Default Set" option, it was seemingly fixed. That is, until I customized the placement of my toolbars again. I like to have all of the navigation buttons down on the third row where the Bookmarks Toolbar would normally be. It would seem that anytime I move the Home button down to that row, the word "Home" appears beside it. No other button does this. Furthermore, the Home button returns to normal if moved back up a row (or even two, to the very top!).
But why is it that the Home button says "Home" beside the icon no matter what I do. I use small icons with no text, yet it is there and looks horrid. Even switching to icons with text, it still shows up on the side as opposed to beneath like all of the others and still ends up looking out of place. What's up with that?
I apparently still need to wait for compatible versions of "FireFTP" and "Download Embedded" to come out.:\
A little less than one year ago I had put up a forum for my website; PHPBB (insert whatever the current version was). Anyway, all was fine for a few weeks until I noticed obvious spam accounts registering maybe once a day. Nothing ever came of them, no abusive posts or anything of that nature, but they were sitting there in my user list. I tried several common approaches, such as using a different CAPTCHA and also forcing a verification word to be typed in. Nothing worked. Eventually I noticed that the one commonality between all of the spam accounts was that they all chose Albanian as their language. Odd. I initially thought that perhaps the spammers were based in Albania, but quickly came to the conclusion that the bots were simply selecting the first available option in the language dropdown. I wrote up a script (which was painfully sloppy, I'm sure) that would not allow anyone to successfully register with the Albanian language. After filling everything out and hitting submit, it would take you to a page and say something to the extent of "Sorry, you have selected an unauthorized language. Please try again". I watched carefully as for weeks I didn't spot a single new spam account. Eventually I made a fake language to sit at the top of the list and block, just in case any actual Albanians wanted to use the board. It continued to work just fine. After several months I did get hit by one or two spam accounts that had set their language to English. After that, I wrote a similar script for the "personal website" field of the signup process, forcing legitimate users to add it to their profile after successfully registering. I haven't had any problems since.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of tribes that have continued well into the modern world. They may not have stayed in wigwams, but they hold no lesser grasp on their culture or history for having advanced along with the times. Saying that they are all dead and their culture is little more than a legend is just an easy way for your greedy, white culture to continue to comfort itself.
Let us hope against hope that it wouldn't actually be in Florida. Why anyone wants to visit that hot, sticky, humid, wasteland of a peninsula is beyond me. Then add to the fact that the only people actually around are retirees and tourists and you have all the trappings of a hellhole.
I want to see entire cities, counties, states, and countries pass such laws instead. And really, why stop at just PDAs and Smartphones? Why not mobile telephones in general? How about digital music players too? These things only tend to make an already annoying populace that much more annoying while at in public because they become absolutely oblivious to their surroundings.
If the future of gaming is online distribution then it can count me out. Not having a physical copy while relying entirely on some company's server (both to download and install, as well as connect to authenticate and play) just screams lost games to me. I own plenty of games where the developers have since gone extinct. I sure would hate to have to try to play one of those without the actual disc, or worse, try to connect to a long since defunct authentication server.
I did not realize that version 7 wasn't supported. That's surprising, considering I just did a version 8 router for someone.
For the tiny bit of extra money however, the GL is definitely worth it in terms of hacking.
It's a two way street. EA/Harmonix has actively decided to just keep using their stupid USB dongle for the Wii instruments as opposed to taking advantage of the remote like Activision's guitar did. They want to use high-minded phrases like "open controller standard" but then fail to utilize the most obvious one; the Wii remote. Of course, EA/Harmonix made all of the wrong decisions concerning that gimped Wii game they plan on calling Rock Band.
I don't know that Slash is a good indication of anything, especially whether or not actual guitar playing is involved...
Cthulhu does not adhere to your feeble ideals of Euclidean space.
Everyone knows that Cthulhu would simply devour the Flying Spaghetti Monster, god and savior or not!
The other thing is that you must first go out and purchase the game before you are even hit with the subscription fee. The game is probably cheaper now than it was originally to purchase in store, but that's still an initial investment on top of a monthly subscription fee. Add to that the growing number of expansion packs that are needed for the entire experience and you could have already bought one or two games that don't require a monthly fee. Furthermore, everyone I know that plays an MMO pays for two accounts so that they can play with their wife or husband.
This is just how I see it however. I'm more than willing to accept that many people see it as just another competitively priced form of entertainment. I just wouldn't be able to think of it in that light myself if I were considering a purchase. I'd much rather pursue something along the lines of Morrowind or Oblivion, which can easily provide hundreds of hours of gameplay with room for even further expansion byway of user created mods. The only thing you would really be missing is multiplayer (which is a shame, the Elder Scrolls would be great with two or four person LAN play).
Perhaps I am just more value orientated than most? It's hard to tell. I have a NetFlix subscription, but that's $15 for two (or more) hours of entertainment a day. I get "three at a time" and send them back pretty quickly, which results in six discs per week. That's is a time and price range pretty on par with what I was originally talking about as far as MMOs go.
That ridiculously boring combat system is the main thorn in every MMO's side. Clicking an enemy only to watch as you automatically take turns attacking is not fun or interactive in the least bit.
Age of Conan does seem to want to rectify this to some extent. How well it turns out is anyone's guess though.
Unless you are playing quite often, it's simply not worth the subscription fee. That is assuming it's worth the price to begin with, which may be debatable given the continuous expansion packs that eventually become necessity. That's how I see it at least. If I had no life and could play it for several hours a day almost every single day, then the subscription price might be justified (assuming the combat wasn't of the boring click-n-wait variety). But since that isn't the case, it's essentially just a waste of money.
Robert E. Howard's "Hyborian Age" is the perfect setting if done correctly. It certainly puts to shame all of the weak "high fantasy" out there. It's just a shame that it's being relegated to an MMO which may or may not even catch on with the population.
Soldat is damn fun as well--and free! It's a 2D, sidecrolling deathmatch type of game. http://www.soldat.pl/main.php
That's simply not true. They'll just teleport in and take your baby anyway. They can teleport out as well, so it's not as if you can set the house on fire in order to kill the baby and the social worker. :(
Seriously though, I have Quake, SimCity2000, and Diablo on any computer that I use just in case I do get bored. Those titles will run on pretty much anything.
All one has to do is go back and actually watch The Day the Earth Stood Still. The plot is still relevant, if not perhaps a little too removed from current parallels for the average moviegoer to realize. The special effects have held up phenomenally well, much better than any instantly outdated CGI will. It's a classic, and cannot be redone or outdone.
I realize that Hollywood has not been big on new ideas for decades, but recently it literally seems like everything is a remake, a "re-imagining", a comic book or videogame adaptation, or based on a novel. Rarely do any of them do justice to the source material, and often times it is obvious that no one even tried. Many times the only real connection these films have with their inspiration is the title and character names, which is purely for marketing reasons.
Of course, Hollywood isn't alone in pushing out garbage. It seems that the so-called indie scene has gotten extremely popular as of the last several years. Most of those just feel too manufactured, as if they all follow the exact same guidelines on how to be "Indie Hits", with their unrealistically quirky characters and overall feelgood moments.
Obviously good films have always been a rarity, just like any of medium of entertainment. You'll inevitably wade through more trash than you will find treasure. This symptom of lazy entertainment just seems to be disproportionately large nowadays.
The only film so far that has worked as an adaptation of PKD's work was A Scanner Darkly. One big problem with it was that they left out much of the overbearing paranoia and resulting melancholy in order to instead highlight stoner humor. Though I admit I would have preferred that the ending remained more nuanced, as opposed to the ever-so-convenient voiceover/recap that films seem to like to push on audiences to counter their short attention spans.
The rotoscoping could have possibly been used to better effect as well. It only really seemed to truly add to the atmosphere on a few occasions. Otherwise the style seemed surprisingly tame given the tone and content of the plot.
I'm glad I don't have a mobile telephone. This is just one more reasons (in the list of many reasons) not to have one anyway.
Upon using the "Restore Default Set" option, it was seemingly fixed. That is, until I customized the placement of my toolbars again. I like to have all of the navigation buttons down on the third row where the Bookmarks Toolbar would normally be. It would seem that anytime I move the Home button down to that row, the word "Home" appears beside it. No other button does this. Furthermore, the Home button returns to normal if moved back up a row (or even two, to the very top!).
I apparently still need to wait for compatible versions of "FireFTP" and "Download Embedded" to come out. :\
A little less than one year ago I had put up a forum for my website; PHPBB (insert whatever the current version was). Anyway, all was fine for a few weeks until I noticed obvious spam accounts registering maybe once a day. Nothing ever came of them, no abusive posts or anything of that nature, but they were sitting there in my user list. I tried several common approaches, such as using a different CAPTCHA and also forcing a verification word to be typed in. Nothing worked. Eventually I noticed that the one commonality between all of the spam accounts was that they all chose Albanian as their language. Odd. I initially thought that perhaps the spammers were based in Albania, but quickly came to the conclusion that the bots were simply selecting the first available option in the language dropdown. I wrote up a script (which was painfully sloppy, I'm sure) that would not allow anyone to successfully register with the Albanian language. After filling everything out and hitting submit, it would take you to a page and say something to the extent of "Sorry, you have selected an unauthorized language. Please try again". I watched carefully as for weeks I didn't spot a single new spam account. Eventually I made a fake language to sit at the top of the list and block, just in case any actual Albanians wanted to use the board. It continued to work just fine. After several months I did get hit by one or two spam accounts that had set their language to English. After that, I wrote a similar script for the "personal website" field of the signup process, forcing legitimate users to add it to their profile after successfully registering. I haven't had any problems since.