Wow, for me it was the exact opposite. Civ 3 and it's bolt on PTW (Pray till works) was a huge step back in terms of game play compared to Civ 2 or SMAC. I felt Civ 4, on the other hand, fixed a ton of broken game play issues with 3. (I still consider SMAC to be the pinnacle of the series, but Civ 4 is pretty close.)
I totally agree on GRAW; what a huge disappointment. The thing that killed it for me was the idiotic, console-inspired, check-point save system. It's nothing in GRAW to work for 20 minutes (or more) to get your squad to an objective only to get clipped with some random shot and sent back to the very beginning of the scenario again.
I don't have a lot of free time to waste and I have little tolerance for games that waste the time I'm trying to waste.
GRAW certainly had/has the potential to be a great game. Too bad it's not.
"It's that kind of publicity, coupled with evidence of how this is directly impacting them, that is going to change the minds of Americans."
Perhaps I'm feeling excessively pessimistic today, but I think the hill you've got to climb is steeper than that as evidenced by the shocking (IMO) lack of concern about the status of the US' Social Security system. Here's a system with a pending crisis that's not nearly as complicated as the global climate and much more personally relevant to the average US citizen. Despite this, there's not been a lot of evidence that US citizens really care to do _anything_ about it.
The only explanation I can come up with is that most US citizens must believe that when there's finally a financial crisis it will be an SEP (Someone Else's Problem). If that's how they really feel about Social Security, how are you going to get their attention (let alone action) on something as intangible as global climate change?
Agreed. My family's been using this for Photoshop Album for years and we love it. I believe there's a free trial download. Tagging is well done; I wish other programs tagged as well as this one.
If you're looking for backbone from either party, I think you'll be disappointed. The simple fact is that pols on both sides of the aisle like things just the way they are now. By not actually doing anything about illegal aliens we continue to benefit economically from cheap labor (who wants to pay $5 for a head of lettuce anyway?) and at the same time we've got a convenient scapegoat/"get out the base" political issue every time an election crops up.
If we in the US were actually serious about the problem we would, as cayenne8 suggested, actually enforce the laws on the books and make it prohibitively expensive for employers to use illegal labor rather than engage in putting up symbolic but useless walls.
"IBM is still not allowed to do things because they were a monopoly."
If you're referring to IBM's troubles with the government in the 70's, then you should know that IBM was never "convicted" of being a monopoly. The legal wrangling went on for years and in the end the goverment ended up dropping the case.
Morrowind or as I liked to call it: Boringwind. Getting anywhere or doing anything in the game was such a complete and total grind that I gave up on the game after only a few hours. When you weren't spending 10 to 15 minutes just trying to get somewhere and wandering pointlessly between places you were wandering pointlessly between places being attacked by glorified bats.
And talk about slow: I had a good system for the time and the stupid thing absolutely _crawled_.
RUN RUN RUN...rest WALK rest WALK rest...RUN RUN RUN...what I'm not there yet? But I'm only trying to get to the market from my guild.:(
"The telcos should wake up and realize that voice and video (in a peer-to-peer sense) are just data..."
Ah, but you see they DO realize that and it is, without hyperbole or further qualification, their worst nightmare. The telcos are in a bit of a quandry: their customers are demanding high bandwidth low latency Internet connections but giving this to their customers also hands their customers the keys to completely bypassing the telcos for _all other services!_ In effect, the telcos become nothing more than undifferentiated bit pipes.
This scenario would be less frightening for them if they had any other services available that people want to use; which they don't. All of the so-called content belongs to other people.
In the past if they needed to try to compete by adding services or features their end customers were pretty much stuck: what they offered was what you got. Not much chance of failing to recoup at least some of your investment because you had a completely captive audience. Now, however, their development efforts have real risks. They'd like to offer a triple-play package that includes TV, but what if it sucks? Their customers will simply cruise onto the Internet and buy the service that doesn't suck leaving the telco's holding the bag.
In the absence of any differentiating services (that anyone wants to buy) the premium they can command for just being a bit pipe becomes very small. Possibly too small to justify investing billions in FTTH. On the other hand if they fail to keep up, they'll surely lose their entire customer base to cable or wireless or both.
Fortunately, while they don't have any actual services anyone wants to pay a premium for, they do have a large investment in lobbyists. So, off to Washington we go with the argument that Google and Microsoft and all these other jerks are getting to ride "for free" on the blood, sweat, and tears, that the telcos have invested in building their networks.
Only there's a problem there: Google and Apple might not pay for that bandwidth, but _I_ do. They're not using it for free, I'm using it and I'm paying to for it and I'm chosing to go somewhere else for my services. Too bad telco.
Yes, I've had Vonage for years and even before the latest bruhaha erupted Vonage specifically indicated the issues involved with both 911 and the fact that it's dependent on your internet connection. They've always taken pains to explain what the limitations of the service were.
Ok, I'm not liberal/Democratic by any stretch of the imagination, but come on, to limit the Democrats to the "pork" label is pretty unfair these days. Just look at the last highway bill. Republicans have both trotters in trough too.
1) I grew up on a farm. 2) I have been a hunter in the past and I don't have a problem with it in general.
My point was that the OP was comparing the suffering of an animal slaughtered in a slaughterhouse as somehow being more than the suffering of an animal taken in the field. In my experience the exact opposite is true. An animal put down in a slaughterhouse isn't likely to ever know what hit them while it usually take a while for something killed in the field to die. (I can't stand the sound of a wounded rabbit.)
Our cattle btw, (and chickens for that matter) spent most of their days roaming around our pastures (or in the case of the chickens, the farmyard). This is, and was, true of all the farms/farmers I know.
Now, I have seen commerical hog operations and they're not far off of what you're describing.
I find this overall thread fascinating; has anyone here actually been to a farm or been hunting in their life?
Most slaughterhouses that I'm aware of use a quick and effective method to kill the cattle that's similar to getting a bullet in the brain. If the cattle know what hit them (literally) I'd be surprised.
Compare that to the taking of wild game, deer for instance. If you're able to instantly kill a deer with one shot, then you're either pretty lucky or a sharpshooter. It's certainly not uncommon to have to track a wounded deer down to finish it off. And this is considered ok versus a quick steel rod in the brain? Seems to be contradictory to me.
A pointless correction but one that I just can't let slide by: cattle don't eat straw, they eat hay. You use straw (or sometimes sawdust)to catch what comes out the other end.
There are more GSM users on 850mhz in the US than there are at 1900. Cingular (including old AT&T Wireless) runs their network on 850 primarily. T-Mobile is 1900, but they're not as large as Cingular is now.
TI still does a lot of its research and development in the US. In fact one of the reasons the fab is going up in Richardson is because TI wants the R&D and design engineers to be close to manufacturing resources. (The new fab is just up the road from TI's main campus.)
TI has more fabs in the US than all of their other fabs around the world combined and of those fabs that are outside the US, they're all in so-called first world countries. Why? Because it requires an educated and skilled labor force to actually manufacture the chips.
I agree whole-heartedly with cayenne8's comments concerning cargo space (or complete lack thereof), but even worse is the three person limit.
Imagine, one parent, three children. Whoops sorry junior, you'll have to ride in a car all by yourself. I hope you don't get lost. Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.
What about families with small children, do these guys have any idea how much room it takes to move a small child around? The stroller and the diaper bag alone would fill one of those things and that's before you've brought any groceries home!
Sheesh, if you're going to drag us into "collectable" card game territory the least you could have done was confine your comments to SpellFire, the rules-lawyering, MTG wanna-be, CCG from TSR.
Actually, this is possible, just probably not where you were trying.
If you were trying to get back up on the 2nd floor railing that you originally jumped down from, then I'd be willing to believe you've been prevented from doing that by an invisible wall.
However, If you look down the right (as opposed to left) hallway and go about 1/2 way down you'll notice that there's a railing and a ledge up there. With only 6 of the available boxes you can make a nice stair way up there and move all the guns up to that railing. There's a hallway that runs back from there which is out of grenade range, so you can setup your guns and all you have to do is run up and set them up again every once and a while.
Note that no matter how long you take, the "bad guys" don't come until you pick up the last of the automatic guns, so there's plenty of time to get everything in place. Just don't fall of the boxes on your last run up to the balcony. (I'd carried one in from the previous scene as well so I had a nice little setup.)
I don't know of the AI was smart enough to climb the boxes as well (I assume not) but just for good measure I tossed a grenade over the railing to blow up the stack of boxes.
Like a lot of other posters I was very disappointed by the "Gordan on Rails" aspect of the game, but here's one scenario where you can make the tight scripting work for you.
That should restore your 30 second skip if memory serves.
What really annoys me about having to 'hack' the 30 second skip is that all the content providers complained bitterly about Tivo's 30 second skip function but it's ok for them to provide it themselves. I was out at my parents over Memorial day and they've got the Dish?/DirectTV? PVR which has a very handy, no hack required, 30 second skip.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, for me it was the exact opposite. Civ 3 and it's bolt on PTW (Pray till works) was a huge step back in terms of game play compared to Civ 2 or SMAC. I felt Civ 4, on the other hand, fixed a ton of broken game play issues with 3. (I still consider SMAC to be the pinnacle of the series, but Civ 4 is pretty close.)
;)
Oh well, I guess we both got what we wanted!
I totally agree on GRAW; what a huge disappointment. The thing that killed it for me was the idiotic, console-inspired, check-point save system. It's nothing in GRAW to work for 20 minutes (or more) to get your squad to an objective only to get clipped with some random shot and sent back to the very beginning of the scenario again.
I don't have a lot of free time to waste and I have little tolerance for games that waste the time I'm trying to waste.
GRAW certainly had/has the potential to be a great game. Too bad it's not.
G is for GSM
I is for iDen
"It's that kind of publicity, coupled with evidence of how this is directly impacting them, that is going to change the minds of Americans."
Perhaps I'm feeling excessively pessimistic today, but I think the hill you've got to climb is steeper than that as evidenced by the shocking (IMO) lack of concern about the status of the US' Social Security system. Here's a system with a pending crisis that's not nearly as complicated as the global climate and much more personally relevant to the average US citizen. Despite this, there's not been a lot of evidence that US citizens really care to do _anything_ about it.
The only explanation I can come up with is that most US citizens must believe that when there's finally a financial crisis it will be an SEP (Someone Else's Problem). If that's how they really feel about Social Security, how are you going to get their attention (let alone action) on something as intangible as global climate change?
Agreed. My family's been using this for Photoshop Album for years and we love it. I believe there's a free trial download. Tagging is well done; I wish other programs tagged as well as this one.
If you're looking for backbone from either party, I think you'll be disappointed. The simple fact is that pols on both sides of the aisle like things just the way they are now. By not actually doing anything about illegal aliens we continue to benefit economically from cheap labor (who wants to pay $5 for a head of lettuce anyway?) and at the same time we've got a convenient scapegoat/"get out the base" political issue every time an election crops up.
If we in the US were actually serious about the problem we would, as cayenne8 suggested, actually enforce the laws on the books and make it prohibitively expensive for employers to use illegal labor rather than engage in putting up symbolic but useless walls.
"IBM is still not allowed to do things because they were a monopoly."
If you're referring to IBM's troubles with the government in the 70's, then you should know that IBM was never "convicted" of being a monopoly. The legal wrangling went on for years and in the end the goverment ended up dropping the case.
*sigh* 3 blind mice, 3 blind mice, see how they run, see how they run...
I despised Morrowind, but I'm having a great time with Oblivion. It's not perfect but it's a very enjoyable game.
Morrowind or as I liked to call it: Boringwind. Getting anywhere or doing anything in the game was such a complete and total grind that I gave up on the game after only a few hours. When you weren't spending 10 to 15 minutes just trying to get somewhere and wandering pointlessly between places you were wandering pointlessly between places being attacked by glorified bats.
:(
And talk about slow: I had a good system for the time and the stupid thing absolutely _crawled_.
RUN RUN RUN...rest WALK rest WALK rest...RUN RUN RUN...what I'm not there yet? But I'm only trying to get to the market from my guild.
"The telcos should wake up and realize that voice and video (in a peer-to-peer sense) are just data..."
Ah, but you see they DO realize that and it is, without hyperbole or further qualification, their worst nightmare. The telcos are in a bit of a quandry: their customers are demanding high bandwidth low latency Internet connections but giving this to their customers also hands their customers the keys to completely bypassing the telcos for _all other services!_ In effect, the telcos become nothing more than undifferentiated bit pipes.
This scenario would be less frightening for them if they had any other services available that people want to use; which they don't. All of the so-called content belongs to other people.
In the past if they needed to try to compete by adding services or features their end customers were pretty much stuck: what they offered was what you got. Not much chance of failing to recoup at least some of your investment because you had a completely captive audience. Now, however, their development efforts have real risks. They'd like to offer a triple-play package that includes TV, but what if it sucks? Their customers will simply cruise onto the Internet and buy the service that doesn't suck leaving the telco's holding the bag.
In the absence of any differentiating services (that anyone wants to buy) the premium they can command for just being a bit pipe becomes very small. Possibly too small to justify investing billions in FTTH. On the other hand if they fail to keep up, they'll surely lose their entire customer base to cable or wireless or both.
Fortunately, while they don't have any actual services anyone wants to pay a premium for, they do have a large investment in lobbyists. So, off to Washington we go with the argument that Google and Microsoft and all these other jerks are getting to ride "for free" on the blood, sweat, and tears, that the telcos have invested in building their networks.
Only there's a problem there: Google and Apple might not pay for that bandwidth, but _I_ do. They're not using it for free, I'm using it and I'm paying to for it and I'm chosing to go somewhere else for my services. Too bad telco.
Yes, I've had Vonage for years and even before the latest bruhaha erupted Vonage specifically indicated the issues involved with both 911 and the fact that it's dependent on your internet connection. They've always taken pains to explain what the limitations of the service were.
Ok, I'm not liberal/Democratic by any stretch of the imagination, but come on, to limit the Democrats to the "pork" label is pretty unfair these days. Just look at the last highway bill. Republicans have both trotters in trough too.
The best one I ever saw was while driving into Missouri on I-44 where the flashing highway warning sign read:
Construction Zone
Next 14 Miles
Prepare to Be Annoyed
1) I grew up on a farm.
2) I have been a hunter in the past and I don't have a problem with it in general.
My point was that the OP was comparing the suffering of an animal slaughtered in a slaughterhouse as somehow being more than the suffering of an animal taken in the field. In my experience the exact opposite is true. An animal put down in a slaughterhouse isn't likely to ever know what hit them while it usually take a while for something killed in the field to die. (I can't stand the sound of a wounded rabbit.)
Our cattle btw, (and chickens for that matter) spent most of their days roaming around our pastures (or in the case of the chickens, the farmyard). This is, and was, true of all the farms/farmers I know.
Now, I have seen commerical hog operations and they're not far off of what you're describing.
I find this overall thread fascinating; has anyone here actually been to a farm or been hunting in their life?
Most slaughterhouses that I'm aware of use a quick and effective method to kill the cattle that's similar to getting a bullet in the brain. If the cattle know what hit them (literally) I'd be surprised.
Compare that to the taking of wild game, deer for instance. If you're able to instantly kill a deer with one shot, then you're either pretty lucky or a sharpshooter. It's certainly not uncommon to have to track a wounded deer down to finish it off. And this is considered ok versus a quick steel rod in the brain? Seems to be contradictory to me.
A pointless correction but one that I just can't let slide by: cattle don't eat straw, they eat hay. You use straw (or sometimes sawdust)to catch what comes out the other end.
There are more GSM users on 850mhz in the US than there are at 1900. Cingular (including old AT&T Wireless) runs their network on 850 primarily. T-Mobile is 1900, but they're not as large as Cingular is now.
Fortunately, you are incorrect.
TI still does a lot of its research and development in the US. In fact one of the reasons the fab is going up in Richardson is because TI wants the R&D and design engineers to be close to manufacturing resources. (The new fab is just up the road from TI's main campus.)
TI has more fabs in the US than all of their other fabs around the world combined and of those fabs that are outside the US, they're all in so-called first world countries. Why? Because it requires an educated and skilled labor force to actually manufacture the chips.
As more than one poster have already pointed out, this isn't outsourcing. The India location is a TI site with TI employees.
I agree whole-heartedly with cayenne8's comments concerning cargo space (or complete lack thereof), but even worse is the three person limit.
Imagine, one parent, three children. Whoops sorry junior, you'll have to ride in a car all by yourself. I hope you don't get lost. Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.
What about families with small children, do these guys have any idea how much room it takes to move a small child around? The stroller and the diaper bag alone would fill one of those things and that's before you've brought any groceries home!
Sheesh, if you're going to drag us into "collectable" card game territory the least you could have done was confine your comments to SpellFire, the rules-lawyering, MTG wanna-be, CCG from TSR.
http://www.spellfire.net/
Actually, this is possible, just probably not where you were trying.
If you were trying to get back up on the 2nd floor railing that you originally jumped down from, then I'd be willing to believe you've been prevented from doing that by an invisible wall.
However, If you look down the right (as opposed to left) hallway and go about 1/2 way down you'll notice that there's a railing and a ledge up there. With only 6 of the available boxes you can make a nice stair way up there and move all the guns up to that railing. There's a hallway that runs back from there which is out of grenade range, so you can setup your guns and all you have to do is run up and set them up again every once and a while.
Note that no matter how long you take, the "bad guys" don't come until you pick up the last of the automatic guns, so there's plenty of time to get everything in place. Just don't fall of the boxes on your last run up to the balcony. (I'd carried one in from the previous scene as well so I had a nice little setup.)
I don't know of the AI was smart enough to climb the boxes as well (I assume not) but just for good measure I tossed a grenade over the railing to blow up the stack of boxes.
Like a lot of other posters I was very disappointed by the "Gordan on Rails" aspect of the game, but here's one scenario where you can make the tight scripting work for you.
While playing back content:
Select -> Play -> Select -> 3 -> 0 -> Select
That should restore your 30 second skip if memory serves.
What really annoys me about having to 'hack' the 30 second skip is that all the content providers complained bitterly about Tivo's 30 second skip function but it's ok for them to provide it themselves. I was out at my parents over Memorial day and they've got the Dish?/DirectTV? PVR which has a very handy, no hack required, 30 second skip.
Could I interest you in a bottle of water?
How about a cup of coffee?