More like, "My neighbor would stop looking in my window if a person I don't know two thousand miles away would stop standing naked in front of her window."
I'm going to have to take issue with some of what you've said here.
First, exercise is not going to have a significant impact on weight, certainly not in the amounts you're talking about. It simply doesn't burn enough calories. Your 150 minutes a week of brisk walking burns 870 calories. That's about 4oz of fat burned off. Exercise is good for your health, oh yes. But don't count on it for weight loss.
Second, bread takes considerably longer than that to make. Sure, you can bake bread in an oven in a half hour. But that ignores the time measuring and combining ingredients, kneading the bread, waiting hours (sourdough) for it to rise, folding the dough and waiting again, and waiting an hour after baking for it to finish. I bake my own bread whenever I have the time, but I would never try to claim that it only takes a half hour.
That's as may be; I'll grant that Steam makes no effort to prevent non-Valve publishers from implementing whatever hairbrained schemes, DRM, DLC or otherwise, that they wish. But when it comes to Valve games, I've always been able to play them offline.
And the GGP's claim that the outage made all Steam games unplayable for an entire evening is rather more general than your assertion about a part of a particular game. I was not trying to play any Steam games during the event in question, so I cannot say whether or not it's accurate. I will say that it is at odds with my personal experience playing Valve's games on Steam when Steam was unavailable.
The only way I can make my experience match the assertion is if the context is rather narrower, for instance if the GGP's universe is multiplayer, so "all games" would mean "all games having multiplayer," and "unplayable" would mean "can't be played in multiplayer." In that case, the issue is not really about DRM, but about the player-hostile act of making a multiplayer game that relies on the presence of servers at a particular Internet address in order to function.
Really? I've always had decent success playing in offline mode. I have some temporary network configuration that keeps me off the Internet, I start a Steam game, it complains that it can't find the Steam servers, and asks me if I want to play in offline mode. I click the Yes (or Okay, or whatever) button and away I go.
In a follow-up session, the Zurich researchers announced that by this time next year, they hope to have imaged two molecules. "We won't stop there," said one scientist, "We plan to image ten, then a thousand, and so on until we are able to image an entire piece of, say, fairy-cake."
Perhaps because good customer relations will make you more money in the long run?
Perhaps because there's more to life than the money you can make by exploiting the misery of others?
The big question: Will last.fm on the Xbox 360 stop playing after 45 minutes of no input, the way it does on the PC? The "Are You Still Listening" prompt would seriously decrease its value.
I was in EVE for 17 months, playing between one and 10 hours a week (3 was typical), between fall '05 and winter '07.
I was in a corps, and the most exciting group activity we ever did was... mining in.4 space.
Perhaps this was a mistake, but I concentrated on leverage skills first (learning), then ship-handling and combat. I hunted rats rather than mining.
I never got powerful enough to spend time in.4 space, let alone 0.0, and it took forever to make enough ISK to buy a new skill (at 4.5M ISK per skill).
Eventually I realized that I was never going to get anywhere playing three hours a week, and cancelled. I don't like grinding; I get much more fun/second out of single player games, even grindy JRPGs, and session-based multiplayer games like Freelancer or Halo 3 or Unreal Tournament 1 than any MMO.
That's not to rag on MMOs; my player style is simply unsuited to them. I'm a tourist with a little completionist, and almost no perfectionist tendencies.
For me, it's not about the interface or complexity.
My problem with it is that I'm a tourist, and like every other MMO it caters to perfectionists. It's not well designed for completionists or tourists.
The NPC missions are few and far between, and most are not very interesting.
Oh sure, I've heard all about the player created PVP drama in the game, but that's all endgame content. And it takes months if not years of mining or 'rat-hunting for hours every day to earn the skills needed to enter 0.0 space without getting pod-killed every five minutes.
And getting pod-killed can set you back days (implants), weeks or months (underinsured with inadequate quality clone), or back to where you were when you first got your account.
So while the tourist content might be there, it's behind a giant wall of perfectionist grind. No thanks.
If the combat were actually fun, it might make up for the grind, but it really isn't. Lock on and auto-attack until the enemy blows up. Yawn. Even Starfleet Command's combat was better. What I want in a space MMO's combat is something like LucasArts' X-Wing, or Freelancer.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth does exactly this at one point (flee and try to lock doors behind you). Never had a game induce quite that level of panic.
Haunting Ground tries it with a hide mechanic, but after the first couple of encounters it becomes more annoying than frightening.
Not only will it follow you, but it can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until....
Maybe this will draw off all the super-hardcore sim enthusiasts who are constantly bitching about how PC and console racing sims aren't realistic enough.
Then the rest of us can enjoy our racing games where fun is more important than that last decimal point in the suspension and tires simulation, without all the tiresome whinging. Games like GRID, for instance.
As a small-l libertarian who leans Republican/conservative on a number of issues, let me assure you: Party affiliation has little to do with election fraud. Both sides will use it when they can get it. It changes an election from who gets the most votes to who can get the support of the voting machine manufacturers.
I have no doubt that if Democratic leadership were able to get the same kind of advantage that they would use it to its limit.
I for one value a clean election that puts a candidate I despise into office far more than a dirty one that elects the candidate I want.
Slashdot Mirror
More like, "My neighbor would stop looking in my window if a person I don't know two thousand miles away would stop standing naked in front of her window."
Hans
Because most businesses are not in the habit of defrauding their customers.
Hans
It's the Nordschleife. http://www.plugincars.com/fastest-ev-nurburgring-peugeot-ex1-107128.html
I'm going to have to take issue with some of what you've said here.
First, exercise is not going to have a significant impact on weight, certainly not in the amounts you're talking about. It simply doesn't burn enough calories. Your 150 minutes a week of brisk walking burns 870 calories. That's about 4oz of fat burned off. Exercise is good for your health, oh yes. But don't count on it for weight loss.
Second, bread takes considerably longer than that to make. Sure, you can bake bread in an oven in a half hour. But that ignores the time measuring and combining ingredients, kneading the bread, waiting hours (sourdough) for it to rise, folding the dough and waiting again, and waiting an hour after baking for it to finish. I bake my own bread whenever I have the time, but I would never try to claim that it only takes a half hour.
That's as may be; I'll grant that Steam makes no effort to prevent non-Valve publishers from implementing whatever hairbrained schemes, DRM, DLC or otherwise, that they wish. But when it comes to Valve games, I've always been able to play them offline.
And the GGP's claim that the outage made all Steam games unplayable for an entire evening is rather more general than your assertion about a part of a particular game. I was not trying to play any Steam games during the event in question, so I cannot say whether or not it's accurate. I will say that it is at odds with my personal experience playing Valve's games on Steam when Steam was unavailable.
The only way I can make my experience match the assertion is if the context is rather narrower, for instance if the GGP's universe is multiplayer, so "all games" would mean "all games having multiplayer," and "unplayable" would mean "can't be played in multiplayer." In that case, the issue is not really about DRM, but about the player-hostile act of making a multiplayer game that relies on the presence of servers at a particular Internet address in order to function.
Really? I've always had decent success playing in offline mode. I have some temporary network configuration that keeps me off the Internet, I start a Steam game, it complains that it can't find the Steam servers, and asks me if I want to play in offline mode. I click the Yes (or Okay, or whatever) button and away I go.
In a follow-up session, the Zurich researchers announced that by this time next year, they hope to have imaged two molecules. "We won't stop there," said one scientist, "We plan to image ten, then a thousand, and so on until we are able to image an entire piece of, say, fairy-cake."
Perhaps because good customer relations will make you more money in the long run?
Perhaps because there's more to life than the money you can make by exploiting the misery of others?
He's what we need to do, hire writers, pay them starvation wages and provide them with shitloads of high quality hallucinogens.
Already been done. The result was Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit).
Avast. I don't know about how it compares to AVG, but compared to Norton, McAfee and the like it's far less of a resource hog. Hans
The big question: Will last.fm on the Xbox 360 stop playing after 45 minutes of no input, the way it does on the PC? The "Are You Still Listening" prompt would seriously decrease its value.
Actually, by tourist I meant that I play games to experience the content, whether that is new environments or the story or cool toys or new gameplay.
As Penny Arcade's Gabe wrote, "I don't play games to beat them, I play games to see them."
More on this topic here: A New Taxonomy of Gamers
Achievements are for completionists. I'm mostly a tourist. I play to "see the sights", not to get every last gold star or become the best player.
Hans
More like I couldn't play for seventeen months and go into 0.4 space alone.
Hans
I was in EVE for 17 months, playing between one and 10 hours a week (3 was typical), between fall '05 and winter '07.
I was in a corps, and the most exciting group activity we ever did was... mining in .4 space.
Perhaps this was a mistake, but I concentrated on leverage skills first (learning), then ship-handling and combat. I hunted rats rather than mining.
I never got powerful enough to spend time in .4 space, let alone 0.0, and it took forever to make enough ISK to buy a new skill (at 4.5M ISK per skill).
Eventually I realized that I was never going to get anywhere playing three hours a week, and cancelled. I don't like grinding; I get much more fun/second out of single player games, even grindy JRPGs, and session-based multiplayer games like Freelancer or Halo 3 or Unreal Tournament 1 than any MMO.
That's not to rag on MMOs; my player style is simply unsuited to them. I'm a tourist with a little completionist, and almost no perfectionist tendencies.
Hans
For me, it's not about the interface or complexity.
My problem with it is that I'm a tourist, and like every other MMO it caters to perfectionists. It's not well designed for completionists or tourists.
The NPC missions are few and far between, and most are not very interesting.
Oh sure, I've heard all about the player created PVP drama in the game, but that's all endgame content. And it takes months if not years of mining or 'rat-hunting for hours every day to earn the skills needed to enter 0.0 space without getting pod-killed every five minutes.
And getting pod-killed can set you back days (implants), weeks or months (underinsured with inadequate quality clone), or back to where you were when you first got your account.
So while the tourist content might be there, it's behind a giant wall of perfectionist grind. No thanks.
If the combat were actually fun, it might make up for the grind, but it really isn't. Lock on and auto-attack until the enemy blows up. Yawn. Even Starfleet Command's combat was better. What I want in a space MMO's combat is something like LucasArts' X-Wing, or Freelancer.
A Freelancer MMO... now that I'd play.
Hans
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth does exactly this at one point (flee and try to lock doors behind you). Never had a game induce quite that level of panic.
Haunting Ground tries it with a hide mechanic, but after the first couple of encounters it becomes more annoying than frightening.
Hans
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has a full-on FPS control scheme.
Yet, Attack of the Fishmen from that game is the single most panic-inducing sequence I've ever encountered.
Capcom's argument is complete bollocks.
Hans
Zombies don't count as kills, they're already dead.
Hans
Daleks are not robots.
Hans
I dunno, since Daleks are not robots.
Hans
If it's a QTE-fest like Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit was, with a peyote-inspired plot wrap-up, count me out.
Not only will it follow you, but it can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until....
Well, you know the rest.
Maybe this will draw off all the super-hardcore sim enthusiasts who are constantly bitching about how PC and console racing sims aren't realistic enough.
Then the rest of us can enjoy our racing games where fun is more important than that last decimal point in the suspension and tires simulation, without all the tiresome whinging. Games like GRID, for instance.
Hans
As a small-l libertarian who leans Republican/conservative on a number of issues, let me assure you: Party affiliation has little to do with election fraud. Both sides will use it when they can get it. It changes an election from who gets the most votes to who can get the support of the voting machine manufacturers.
I have no doubt that if Democratic leadership were able to get the same kind of advantage that they would use it to its limit.
I for one value a clean election that puts a candidate I despise into office far more than a dirty one that elects the candidate I want.
Hans Dannik