I watched more than a hundred kids get pulled out by cops because of a gang-related riot. I'm not joking; you can find it in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in early school 1997 - October, I think, not really sure these days.
I mean in one single incident. In retrospect what I wrote does not read that way.
Also, something that occurred to me after I hit submit: if the textbooks are digital, then the community movement - what drives OSS - can apply to it. Have you considered how many times you caught errors in your textbook as a kid, or how many things in the sciences or humanities could have used better explanations?
Another issue which I failed to touch on - I had planned to but then simply forgot - is that laptops are significantly better teaching devices than are books. They cover everything a book can do (provided electricity,) but also significantly more.
My Civics teacher brought in the few videos and many audio recordings of Martin Luther King, as well as several other historic figures, because the teacher felt that actually hearing and seeing these speeches made had a far greater impact than did reading their speeches. I was already familiar with the text of the speech "I have a dream" by the time that teacher first let me listen to Doctor King's voice read it aloud. That day, I got chills, hearing the mixture of hope, anger, faith and terror throughout that oration. I continue to get chills to this day.
Before I had heard that speech aloud, it meant very little to me. That changed in half an hour, because of a method of delivery which a book can never make possible. Whereas this may be an isolated incident - maybe I and the other people in that class were weird for being more affected by the speaker than his transcription - but I don't believe so.
The reason I ask is that I have, and that having done so has given me some very strong beliefs about communication. One compelling example was my having discussed some statistics I had
Where I teach (NC), however, we don't buy books for a year (or worse, a semester) then try and get $3 at the end. We buy our books for 5 years.
Then you are stunningly fortunate in a shockingly unlikely fashion. Consider for contrast that three years ago Rutgers (New Jersey's state university chain, with almost 150k students) had to take Wiley to court to prevent them from strong-arming the school into a contract requiring textbook turnover every two years. Please note how commonly a college student will complain that half their textbooks aren't being bought back because the school is buying this year's version of the book. In fact, Apollo Group - owners of University of Phoenix, DeVry and a bunch of other college chains - started their own press and began paying their teachers to make new textbooks, because it was cheaper to set up an entire publishing facility, hire new staff and pay for new material than to continue to deal with publisher behavior.
However, $65 for a book that lasts 5 years is not too much to expect taxpayers to pay.
Laptops are cheaper, even annually with only five classes, than that book price. I'll do the breakdown below, though I think that book price is entirely too high (you're used to college textbook prices in the humanities; this is a middle school, which pays less, and the humanities are gifted with cheap books. Consider that Amazon's price on my college Calc textbook is $138.)
It is expensive as hell initially and when books are lost/destroyed.
Typically, schools do not absorb the cost of lost or destroyed books, in the public school system. Yes, though, it is expensive as hell initially. That's the observation which makes computers the right thing to do.
What happens when someone steals the laptop? Not too many people look to jack you for a textbook.
Same thing as when a book is stolen: the kid is expected to replace it. Theft won't be as large an issue, I suspect, as you believe it to be: it's not as if one kid will have a better laptop than another kid, or as if these machines - Knoppix P3s w/ 128m ram - would sell on the black market. All the kids will have one; there wouldn't be any people without. Still, you're right to witness that you're compounding the risk. By contrast, consider that the school lockers would suddenly almost not need to exist, that teachers could update material instantly, that a kid could carry next to nothing between rooms and still have all their stuff, that tests could be issued over wifi, that the cost of xerox and mimeograph machines (which is surprisingly large to schools - my high school put almost $200k into ink a year) would go away, et cetera. The kid would have to stow their laptop for gym, sure, but that's about it.
By contrast, consider that kids already have this sort of setup with their graphing calculators, which are $144 new with an online discount (list is $200), and you're already looking at more than half of the laptop's projected price (my school made you pay list price.) Using your price for textbooks, that calculator plus two textbooks is higher than the price I got on the phone for 600 laptops with an educational discount (see below.) It is, in my admittedly limited experience, rare for a schoolkid to keep that little in their backpack.
So, in my opinion, you're actually reducing the cost of a one-time backpack theft. To wit, those $200 calculators - I went to the second high school in Pennsylvania to have metal detectors every day (Peabody High, Pittsburgh.) Mine was a violent school; I watched more than a hundred kids get pulled out by cops because of a gang-related riot. I'm not joking; you can find it in the Pittsburgh P
1. If you can compare WW2 battles where both sides had rifles and AT guns, to a battle involving bronze spears against tanks, I rest my case. You do have a perception problem. By Civ 3 standards every WW2 battle involved _at_ _least_ Riflemen.
No. One man, no rifle. I said that three divisions had 60 guns. That's more than a thousand people.
Hey, here's a thought. Go read about it before guessing what happened. The thing you think is a perception problem on my part is actually a fault of research on your part.
Ditto about infantry taking on tanks. If you'll actually researched how that was done in WW2 or now, you may discover it involved AT rifles, bazookas and AT magnetic mines. If for you that's the same as poking it with a bronze spear, that's funny.
Hey - instead of telling me to research, read what I gave you to read. You're ranting about a non-issue. One of the guys had a bowie knife. The other had a grenade. Sure, the grenade is different, but you'll be hard pressed to convince me that a bowie knife isn't close enough.
Guessing just makes you look stupider.
2. My dear fanboy, you don't even start to understand the difference between "renderer" and "interface".
The renderer's job is to take a 3D scene and paint the polygons on the screen. Rendering in an isometric view isn't even requiring a new renderer. It's the same renderer with a different view.
Hahahahhahahahahha. You dumbass. That's exactly what I just told you.
Clicking and dragging to select units, and clicking to move/attack, as well as all the rest of a RTS interface, instead of FPS controlls, _is_ a different kind of interface.
Man, learn to read.
3. The fact that UT2004 did support different interfaces,
Renderers, dipshit. Renderers. And there is only one in play.
or that in your own words "Yes, facilities exist for that in many games, and also in many operating systems." is just proving my point: it _is_ possible.
I never said it wasn't possible. I said you couldn't do it.
And no, it doesn't take years in development to allow loading DLLs, or to have a clean API that allows one to read a list of displayed icons and intercept mouse clicks.
Luckily, I never said it did. You should learn to read.
4. If you're at OS interface replacements, why don't you look at Linux, then?
Stop straying from the point. Window managers aren't new interfaces. There's a reason the X11 renderer is called a renderer.
Have a look on Freshmeat
Why? All I said was that you weren't able. I know other people are.
Or since you mention Windows 3.x, there were a lot more than OpenStep out there. I personally had Dashboard and Norton Desktop
Those aren't new interfaces. They're simple applications. Jesus. You can't tell the difference between an interface and an application? They're still Win32 buttons. They're still Win32 scrollbars.
Which, again, is just proving the point: if a clean API exists, people will do it.
Nothing you've said has been cogent, much less even remotely related to what I said.
I'll say it again. You, personally, are not of the skill that you pretend to be.
Now remind me, why was this somehow inapropriate for games?
I never said it was. I just told you that you shouldn't pretend that you'll make a giant chunk of software when you don't have the requisite skill or knowledge.
5. So your claim is that, for an icon that is already painted on the screen, taking a click in that area and sending an event to the game engine would take 4 years to code? Heh. Funny stuff.
No. Learn to read, please. I was quite clear on the point that reinventing an interface is nowhere near as complex as inventing an interface.
Every rebuttal is hollow. I find it particularly amusing that you claim that I've made straw men and then don't show any, which is in fact the definition of making a straw man; I wonder if you even realize your hypocrisy.
name drop ("Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"),
How is it name dropping? You were the one that said Peter Molyneaux, not me. In fact, other than my mother, I did not discuss anyone you didn't. You, however, named characteristics of a bunch of people you don't even know. Sounds like pot and kettle to me.
You made comments as regards his character. I gave a personal anecdote as regards his character. Taking this out of context doesn't suddenly mean there's no context. That you've chosen to tell me that my response regarding a man's character is name dropping with regards to your baseless insults is just silly. You've yet to show what you said about him, or any of the other designers, to be true, yet when I respond with actual experience, you pretend I'm just trying to make myself look good.
Do you actually believe that's the case?
If you think you have a point, actually argue that point, don't just throw insults around and pretend your point is right just because you say so.
I find it interesting that first you claim that my explanations of my statements are fallacies when the fallacies you claim aren't applicable, and then believing you have discarded my arguments, you claim that I have not argued my points.
Giving an example is not an appeal to authority. Appeals to authority are when you use that authority's beliefs to shore you up, rather than to make an argument. This, by contrast, was a way for me to tell you about schizoaffective disorder, and to tell you why I have personal exposure to the syndrome. You will note that not once did I make any mention of her beliefs or things she's told me. I only said that so you'd know why I knew schizoids.
"Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"
Ah, yes, classic fanboy.
For someone who likes to drop the titles of fallacies he seems to either think he can slip by me or genuinely does not understand, you do a whole lot of Ad Hominem, generally considered in debate to be the coward's way to make a point. Of course, you alluded to that I was supposedly laying out three insults a paragraph. If you count the word dumbass, I made seven. You make more than that in your first two paragraphs. None of what I said had vitriol; I felt that I was scolding someone being a dumbass, and I stand by that. By comparison, you write just awful things, and then you want me to think that I'm an agressor. What, in my message, has any content anything like "Ah, yes, classic fanboy. I don't doubt that it filled your life with "meaning" to have the opportunity to sit, beg and wag your tail at the master. I swear some people should have been born a dog, the way they need to sit and beg at a master." ?
One wonders if you can see your own behavior. All I said was "don't talk shit on people you don't know; in this case you're wrong."
"I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap." And two paragraphs later, "Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy."
You know, it's very very sad when you can't even keep the same idea for more than a paragraph.
There's a big difference between the two. If you'll notice, what I said was that people were adhering to unrealistic schedules because that's what the market demands of them, and that as a result what they ship is not of high quality.
That does not mean that they're being sloppy. Being sloppy is an issue of contempt. These people are desperately overworked, underpaid, given wholly unreasonable schedules. They're not being sloppy, they're being driven into the ground.
You still haven't provided even one example. There are a few, but not many. Every example you
Yay, so everyone but the white guy gets to say "yo yo yo what up my eskimo brother" and we honkies get to go "well hello my inuit-american associate."
Hur hur. Maybe we should all just grow up. Black people aren't offended by nigger, by and on the whole, anymore, and most people don't even know what eskimo means. Can't you just not get offended that the honkies don't know better? We are, as a skin color, stupid. Cut us some slack once in a while. (Or, better yet, just make up some names for us. Lord knows we deserve it.)
The thing about delusional systems is that these people will spend their entire lives refining and reinforcing a strange set of seemingly disconnected memes. That example is a real one, from a very sweet young girl, who has a surprisingly compelling argument for why that Henry Ford didn't make buildings mobile has condemned us to resource wasting, which is why the aliens think we need to be wiped out.
Yeah yeah, I know it sounds stereotypical. It's stereotypical because it's common. Turns out that there's a very small set of delusions that come with this disease, and the variance one hears about simply comes from which information ends up getting hooked in as the basis for paranoia.
No. Game theory is the branch of economics devoted to agent behavior and best-course actions (minmax trees, ply trees, risk minimization, saddlepoint grids, quanta, that sort of stuff.) This is game design and game balance.
The samurai in civ III if youre janapese, were too strong compared to other units, so you just make hundereds of samurai and youve won the game.
You need more skillful opponents. The samurai is too expensive to overweight the game. If you're able to flood them with samurai, they're spending no time on their military at all, don't have any ranged units, don't know how to make chaff units, et cetera.
Real life is more complex and you have to balance many other variables. The most successful armies have a large diversity of units to succeed, and that should be reflected in civ.
Yes and no. Whereas you do want some modicum of challenge and differentiation, just how much one wants is debatable. Sit down with some miniatures gamers some time and play one of their world war two games. Their units have sometimes upwards of 20 combat statistics.
It is my opinion - and many people will disagree with me on this - that one wants the minimum count of rules which allow for a game with significant long-term variability. Many stats have been dropped from the units over the years. Others have been added in their place. Experience, hit points, leader base rate, distance from home city, maintenance effects, range, they've all been missing from one Civ or another.
Theres another thing that I've been wanting in the civ series for a while. You can make 'armies' in civiii but thats limited. You should be able to group units like in tiberian sun, make military units, and movement formations like in kohan, and do much more with a group of units than just select each and give them a destination.
The problem is, Civ is pretty clearly a strategy game, and those are mechanics for a tactical game. Yes, that sort of thing can work out well; one of the best examples IMO is Mission Risk. Still, I don't think it would really change the average outcome of wars much, excepting in the case of a novice versus an expert (when you don't want for it to,) and as such it doesn't seem to add to this particular game much. I suspect it would just be chaff.
Consider by comparison the trade scheme in Civ1/2, with caravans. Yes, they mimic the real world relatively accurately, and can be used to model a significant facet of the game. Yes, you can even get them into combat situations. That said, they had almost no long-term impact on the game other than to slow one down; they shouldn't really have been in the game. Civ3 is better for not having them.
Alexander's army was successful because of their direct attacks into enemy units with a blitz.
You can blitz in every civilization game. Blitzing is effectively just moving more troops into a region than the region can scale up to fight back against at once. The primary mechanic of blitzing is overwhelming someone during the time that they're trying to get started up to resist. If anything, Civ's turn-based nature makes blitzing much easier than in a realtime game. All you do is move a gigantic stack; when it gets to a city, the city has time to make one, maybe two units if it's lucky. If the stack is large enough, that's blitz material.
The real effective mechanic of Hitler's Blitzes was political - that he managed to convince neighboring nations not to step up to war until he had already invaded. Blitz is just about taking advantage of someone's not being prepared.
For what it's worth, Alexander almost never did directed charges. He was much more fond of surrounding maneuvers, splitting maneuvers and flanking maneuvers, presumably due to his time as a cavalry officer (remember, he frequently rode into battle personally.) Alexander can be argued to have been largely ignorant of the Blitz. The only two militar
So they're introducing loads of new concepts, like religion and famous people.
Actually, these are being incorporated from Call to Power and Master of Magic, both of which were Microprose/Hasbro games (ie, they were one of the early Sid split off teams.) It can be argued that Sid is simply taking these mechanics back.
(Maybe they could introduce "fundamentalist" units, which you can infiltrate into opposing civilisations in order to slow their science rates...)
In Civ:CTP and Civ:CTP2, there are units like this, the most commonly named of which is probably the Ecoterrorist. They're a real drag. It sounds like a good idea; when I read about it the first time I was very excited.
Every implementation of this mechanic I've seen has been a big pain. I don't know that I believe that this can be done in a fun way.
I really don't see the rationale behind this particular change. Did anyone really find the two-stat system to be hopelessly complicated?
You would need information which is not yet public. All I'm allowed to say is that there is a good reason for this. I had the same "oh no" moment you're having. Don't worry.
As a member of the Civ 4 beta team, I'd be interested to learn what specifically about the game's progress you dislike. It may be that it's just that the game has moved in a direction with which you disagree, and if so there's nothing I can do. However, more often than not when a complaint is spelled out in significant detail, something can be done.
Ok it is insanely hard to code even when your just a little stoned.
Meh, not really. I do it every weekend.
Imagine trying to code a game when your tripping.
Now, that's difficult. And, reading the comments afterwards... just bring tissues. Huhu.
Making a game whilst on drugs is really really hard if not nearly impossible.
That's the problem with referring to all drugs at once - people tend to forget caffeine and nicotene, and then just lump things like pot with things like psylocibin. Some drugs - notably caffeine, cocaine and nonhallucinogenic amphetamines - actually make it much easier to code, and there's an ongoing abuse problem among programmers for that reason.
"If video games affected children, we'd all be running around in the dark through a maze of neon lights, munching magic pills, listening to repetitive electronic music."
The quote becomes much funnier when you discover that it's from Kristian Wilson, a CEO at Nintendo back in 1989, from the front door of a private rave. Rather tongue in cheek, one expects.
How can any history of games be complete with any mention of Rise of the Triad at all? That game deserves to be burned from our collective memories. It's the Galactica 1980 of gaming.
I suggest you acquire SMB3 and the japanese game inbetween what Americans call SMB1 and SMB2. Both are significantly more drug-suggestion heavy than SMB2.
SMB has always had an undercurrent of drug topics. As every old slashdotter knows, the jokes about eating mushrooms and flowers, growing to double your size, changing colors, learning to spit fire and swim under the ocean, and so forth are all indicators.
SMB3 is less constant but there's a lot more of it and it's subtle. (Of course there's always the argument that I'm just looking for references, but then, that's the nature of subtle references...)
This is a misconstruance of coincidence. It has nothing to do with art. It's just that among any large group there will be people with fringe behavior.
You might as well try to draw conclusions from that there are sexual deviants in the US pool of car mechanics. It's an observation, not an indicator.
For the record, there is no statistical correlation between artists and drug use in either direction; drug users are equally likely - no more, no less - to create art with regards to other people. Famous artists, the ones you hear about, are different - they get a bunch of money and psychological stress all at once (like rock stars,) and are frequently consumed by a decadent society. Few of the painters the average person can name did drugs beyond what was common in their society (in Europe, for example, that generally means alcohol.)
Is there any relevant social group where there are no X? No. Is there any relevant social group where there are fewer than the norm of X? Oh, yes. And that's what's statistically significant. Consider learning how statistics work; your eyes will be open to a new world.
Oh, here we go again. "They made game design decisions with which I do not agree, so their game design is broken. Therefore I will say that all PC games ship broken, because I disagree with them."
Well, call me a bitter old cynic
Cynicism is based on a reasonable, if brutal, interpretation of one's surroundings. If I call you something, that will hardly be it.
but I've pretty much given up on any hope that PC games will start being anything but unfinished stuff shoved out the door.
I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap. Lots of them don't. For example, consider that Civ3 shipped with not even one crashing bug on tested hardware, and that after it shipped in years of use only two were ever found. That's better than most application software does. Civ3 was a five year effort for two software development teams involving literally millions of lines of code. Neither of Civ3's patches introduced any significant bugs.
If you think two quickly corrected crashing bugs on obscure platforms aren't reasonable for a project of that size, my dear boy, you don't know software development. It's not a question of games being low quality. It's a question of combing huge tracts of source for single errors.
Plus, even if someone actually stopped being sloppy
Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy. This sort of contemptuous behavior belongs in France, or EA.
it can happen that the "flaws" in a game are actually WAD (Working As Designed.) I.e., it's not buggy or untested
Sorry. This is the first sign that you shouldn't be commenting on software quality, is that you can't tell the difference between something broken and something with which you disagree. In fact, you follow this with a beautiful example.
E.g., what if 200 man Phalanxes winning against 20,000 man Tank divisions, on plains, in Civ 3 was actually _intended_?
Er. It was, dumbass. The game has worked that way for almost 20 years. Frankly, that's how it should work - there are examples of that sort of thing happening in real life, and it happens in game very rarely.
This has been debated ad nauseum on Apollyton Civ Fanatics and various other game design boards that you don't appear to have looked into acting like you have a better design than the single most successful (both by sales volume and sales profit) game designer in history, so I think I'll leave it to you to look it up instead of to explain to you slowly and at length that in almost every strategy game on earth, every piece has a chance against every other piece, no matter what they are.
E.g., Black And White had an interface that was broken by design. PM's grand vision was an interface without any icons or buttons taking up screen space, and the players would have to just memorize gestures. EA's internal tested showed that even their professional testers had trouble using that, so for Joe Gamer it just couldn't possibly work
Where do you get this stuff? User testing on the Black and White interface was heavily positive since day one across nearly every demographic. Oh, and so you know, the next time you want to make up studies, please don't pretend that EA tests against just one group of gamers. They're a little more sophisticated than that.
However, PM's ego being the size of a continent, he wasn't going to just give in: he put the icons on the screen, but didn't let you click on them.
Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3. He doesn't have an ego the size of a continent. He's a game designer, and the act you're talking about is game design.
Stop coming down on successful game designers for doing things you disagree with. This is like saying Lucas should never have made a film because of Jar-Jar. If you're that good a game designer, design a goddamned game, or shut up.
Cough. Hardly. Civ has been moddable to a varying degree for almost 15 years, and the core modules have never been replaced by amateurs. (Amateurs have provided replacements, but the Microprose/Atari/Firaxis/whoever core game has always remained the core dominant.)
Firaxis in their various forms have always taken the balance of their core games very seriously.
Much of the utility of Linux on a DS would come from its network connection ability. Given that that is currently not well understood, it may be helpful to donate to the DS Wi-Fi Bounty. (Disclaimer: I am running that bounty.)
China has a largely capitalist economy with significant private ownership of capital
Actually, they have a mixed economy (that's the formal term - an economy under which monetization is used to distribute work effort according to nationalized goals,) and the bulk of their fiscal capital is nationalized, owing to that all Chinese banks are federal.
I agree with the rest of your points; just a particularity. A mixed economy supports your argument just as well as does a capitalism.
I think you'll also find that censorship occurs in all countries, and that much of it is ludicrous. (Look at the list of books banned in various parts of the US - "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe"???)
Er. What are you talking about? The US has very strong anti-censorship laws. The only grounds under US law under which you may be censored are the dissemination of technology which poses a serious hazard to national security (nuclear weapon designs are the canonical example.)
Maybe you're confusing school system censorship lists with real censorship. Frankly, I think the notion that school system "censorship" is abberrant are silly; I just don't think that a high school should teach Lady Chatterly, not because it offends me, but because it's against many parents' models for raising their children. Either way, that has nothing to do with real censorship; there is no state, county, city or municipality which can censor fiction in this country, anywhere, by federal law.
In general, philosophies are rarely corrupt
By definition, a philosophy is not something subject to corruption. Rather than using nebulous words like philosophy, which here do not apply anyway, you might consider giving concrete examples.
Americans, especially, are bad about seeing the defects in others and ignoring their own.
Spoken like a true bigot. But, since you're seeing the defects in us and ignoring that in yourself, you're probably just anther filthy American.
Remove the log from your own eye, before removing the speck from your brother's eye. It really does help.
It's simple, if you want people to stop being violent, create a pill which lowers aggression and which prevents people from getting angry. Create a gas which makes people happy, and release it into the workplace, and then maybe violence will go down.
Oh, malarky. Just because fusion occurs occasionally spontaneously at low temperatures doesn't mean that we haven't discovered a new means of achieving fusion at low temperatures. Hell, we can't even force tunneling to happen.
The hair you're trying to split is silly: nobody claims that they've hit breakeven, and scaling doesn't apply to output. They were quite clear in the article that this technique is not expected to hit breakeven with refinement.
But, for narrow-view people like you, let me remind you that this is an order of magnitude closer to break-even than the last major method, forced-point sonoluminescent tritium triggered fusion, did; moreover it's much more easily achieved and controlled. (Do note that one of the three named people was in fact a large figure in sonoluminescent research.)
The question of whether the technique breaks even isn't critical at all. What's important is 1) it gets us closer, 2) it's a whole new methodology, and 3) it has other applications than power-generation fusion, besides.
(Though as I recall, this particular application wasn't touted as being an approach to energy generation anyway).
(cough) Then why is the breakeven point so crucial in your mind?
Hangups like allowing disreputable individuals a simple and easy source to aggregate large volumes of radioactive material, or hangups like that nuclear batteries aren't suitable for nearly any of the applications traditional batteries are, owing to their extremely small voltage output?
Optimism doesn't defeat statistics. You should wait on declaring reasons that something hasn't been deployed until you're at least familiar with the underlying science.
Slashdot Mirror
I should be more specific.
I watched more than a hundred kids get pulled out by cops because of a gang-related riot. I'm not joking; you can find it in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in early school 1997 - October, I think, not really sure these days.
I mean in one single incident. In retrospect what I wrote does not read that way.
Also, something that occurred to me after I hit submit: if the textbooks are digital, then the community movement - what drives OSS - can apply to it. Have you considered how many times you caught errors in your textbook as a kid, or how many things in the sciences or humanities could have used better explanations?
Another issue which I failed to touch on - I had planned to but then simply forgot - is that laptops are significantly better teaching devices than are books. They cover everything a book can do (provided electricity,) but also significantly more.
My Civics teacher brought in the few videos and many audio recordings of Martin Luther King, as well as several other historic figures, because the teacher felt that actually hearing and seeing these speeches made had a far greater impact than did reading their speeches. I was already familiar with the text of the speech "I have a dream" by the time that teacher first let me listen to Doctor King's voice read it aloud. That day, I got chills, hearing the mixture of hope, anger, faith and terror throughout that oration. I continue to get chills to this day.
Before I had heard that speech aloud, it meant very little to me. That changed in half an hour, because of a method of delivery which a book can never make possible. Whereas this may be an isolated incident - maybe I and the other people in that class were weird for being more affected by the speaker than his transcription - but I don't believe so.
Have you ever watched a Nova special alongside someone else on a topic with which either you or they were having difficulty? Particularly good examples include the four-part discourse on string theory, the origins of the universe, genetics (the title of which is "dogs," and which remains the Nova special with which I am most impressed on terms of making a difficult topic obvious,) or Archimedes' approach to Calculus in his lost work (now called the Palimpsest,) Stem Cell research, cryptography and cryptanalysis, relativity, the church's historic combat with science, Genetically modified foods, Universal shape and expansion, the relationship of economics, the environment and the third world and environmental repair options, primitive human migration (1, 2, 3,) viral propogation and epidemiology (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ) and so forth.
The reason I ask is that I have, and that having done so has given me some very strong beliefs about communication. One compelling example was my having discussed some statistics I had
Where I teach (NC), however, we don't buy books for a year (or worse, a semester) then try and get $3 at the end. We buy our books for 5 years.
Then you are stunningly fortunate in a shockingly unlikely fashion. Consider for contrast that three years ago Rutgers (New Jersey's state university chain, with almost 150k students) had to take Wiley to court to prevent them from strong-arming the school into a contract requiring textbook turnover every two years. Please note how commonly a college student will complain that half their textbooks aren't being bought back because the school is buying this year's version of the book. In fact, Apollo Group - owners of University of Phoenix, DeVry and a bunch of other college chains - started their own press and began paying their teachers to make new textbooks, because it was cheaper to set up an entire publishing facility, hire new staff and pay for new material than to continue to deal with publisher behavior.
However, $65 for a book that lasts 5 years is not too much to expect taxpayers to pay.
Laptops are cheaper, even annually with only five classes, than that book price. I'll do the breakdown below, though I think that book price is entirely too high (you're used to college textbook prices in the humanities; this is a middle school, which pays less, and the humanities are gifted with cheap books. Consider that Amazon's price on my college Calc textbook is $138.)
It is expensive as hell initially and when books are lost/destroyed.
Typically, schools do not absorb the cost of lost or destroyed books, in the public school system. Yes, though, it is expensive as hell initially. That's the observation which makes computers the right thing to do.
What happens when someone steals the laptop? Not too many people look to jack you for a textbook.
Same thing as when a book is stolen: the kid is expected to replace it. Theft won't be as large an issue, I suspect, as you believe it to be: it's not as if one kid will have a better laptop than another kid, or as if these machines - Knoppix P3s w/ 128m ram - would sell on the black market. All the kids will have one; there wouldn't be any people without. Still, you're right to witness that you're compounding the risk. By contrast, consider that the school lockers would suddenly almost not need to exist, that teachers could update material instantly, that a kid could carry next to nothing between rooms and still have all their stuff, that tests could be issued over wifi, that the cost of xerox and mimeograph machines (which is surprisingly large to schools - my high school put almost $200k into ink a year) would go away, et cetera. The kid would have to stow their laptop for gym, sure, but that's about it.
By contrast, consider that kids already have this sort of setup with their graphing calculators, which are $144 new with an online discount (list is $200), and you're already looking at more than half of the laptop's projected price (my school made you pay list price.) Using your price for textbooks, that calculator plus two textbooks is higher than the price I got on the phone for 600 laptops with an educational discount (see below.) It is, in my admittedly limited experience, rare for a schoolkid to keep that little in their backpack.
So, in my opinion, you're actually reducing the cost of a one-time backpack theft. To wit, those $200 calculators - I went to the second high school in Pennsylvania to have metal detectors every day (Peabody High, Pittsburgh.) Mine was a violent school; I watched more than a hundred kids get pulled out by cops because of a gang-related riot. I'm not joking; you can find it in the Pittsburgh P
Heh. Where shall I even start:
1. If you can compare WW2 battles where both sides had rifles and AT guns, to a battle involving bronze spears against tanks, I rest my case. You do have a perception problem. By Civ 3 standards every WW2 battle involved _at_ _least_ Riflemen.
No. One man, no rifle. I said that three divisions had 60 guns. That's more than a thousand people.
Hey, here's a thought. Go read about it before guessing what happened. The thing you think is a perception problem on my part is actually a fault of research on your part.
Ditto about infantry taking on tanks. If you'll actually researched how that was done in WW2 or now, you may discover it involved AT rifles, bazookas and AT magnetic mines. If for you that's the same as poking it with a bronze spear, that's funny.
Hey - instead of telling me to research, read what I gave you to read. You're ranting about a non-issue. One of the guys had a bowie knife. The other had a grenade. Sure, the grenade is different, but you'll be hard pressed to convince me that a bowie knife isn't close enough.
Guessing just makes you look stupider.
2. My dear fanboy, you don't even start to understand the difference between "renderer" and "interface".
The renderer's job is to take a 3D scene and paint the polygons on the screen. Rendering in an isometric view isn't even requiring a new renderer. It's the same renderer with a different view.
Hahahahhahahahahha. You dumbass. That's exactly what I just told you.
Clicking and dragging to select units, and clicking to move/attack, as well as all the rest of a RTS interface, instead of FPS controlls, _is_ a different kind of interface.
Man, learn to read.
3. The fact that UT2004 did support different interfaces,
Renderers, dipshit. Renderers. And there is only one in play.
or that in your own words "Yes, facilities exist for that in many games, and also in many operating systems." is just proving my point: it _is_ possible.
I never said it wasn't possible. I said you couldn't do it.
And no, it doesn't take years in development to allow loading DLLs, or to have a clean API that allows one to read a list of displayed icons and intercept mouse clicks.
Luckily, I never said it did. You should learn to read.
4. If you're at OS interface replacements, why don't you look at Linux, then?
Stop straying from the point. Window managers aren't new interfaces. There's a reason the X11 renderer is called a renderer.
Have a look on Freshmeat
Why? All I said was that you weren't able. I know other people are.
Or since you mention Windows 3.x, there were a lot more than OpenStep out there. I personally had Dashboard and Norton Desktop
Those aren't new interfaces. They're simple applications. Jesus. You can't tell the difference between an interface and an application? They're still Win32 buttons. They're still Win32 scrollbars.
Which, again, is just proving the point: if a clean API exists, people will do it.
Nothing you've said has been cogent, much less even remotely related to what I said.
I'll say it again. You, personally, are not of the skill that you pretend to be.
Now remind me, why was this somehow inapropriate for games?
I never said it was. I just told you that you shouldn't pretend that you'll make a giant chunk of software when you don't have the requisite skill or knowledge.
5. So your claim is that, for an icon that is already painted on the screen, taking a click in that area and sending an event to the game engine would take 4 years to code? Heh. Funny stuff.
No. Learn to read, please. I was quite clear on the point that reinventing an interface is nowhere near as complex as inventing an interface.
Here's a hint: what do those gestures do? T
If you actually know at least _one_ historical example, _then_ I'll be willing to take your point.
Somehow I don't believe you will, even though I did.
Every rebuttal is hollow. I find it particularly amusing that you claim that I've made straw men and then don't show any, which is in fact the definition of making a straw man; I wonder if you even realize your hypocrisy.
name drop ("Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"),
How is it name dropping? You were the one that said Peter Molyneaux, not me. In fact, other than my mother, I did not discuss anyone you didn't. You, however, named characteristics of a bunch of people you don't even know. Sounds like pot and kettle to me.
You made comments as regards his character. I gave a personal anecdote as regards his character. Taking this out of context doesn't suddenly mean there's no context. That you've chosen to tell me that my response regarding a man's character is name dropping with regards to your baseless insults is just silly. You've yet to show what you said about him, or any of the other designers, to be true, yet when I respond with actual experience, you pretend I'm just trying to make myself look good.
Do you actually believe that's the case?
If you think you have a point, actually argue that point, don't just throw insults around and pretend your point is right just because you say so.
I find it interesting that first you claim that my explanations of my statements are fallacies when the fallacies you claim aren't applicable, and then believing you have discarded my arguments, you claim that I have not argued my points.
Giving an example is not an appeal to authority. Appeals to authority are when you use that authority's beliefs to shore you up, rather than to make an argument. This, by contrast, was a way for me to tell you about schizoaffective disorder, and to tell you why I have personal exposure to the syndrome. You will note that not once did I make any mention of her beliefs or things she's told me. I only said that so you'd know why I knew schizoids.
"Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"
Ah, yes, classic fanboy.
For someone who likes to drop the titles of fallacies he seems to either think he can slip by me or genuinely does not understand, you do a whole lot of Ad Hominem, generally considered in debate to be the coward's way to make a point. Of course, you alluded to that I was supposedly laying out three insults a paragraph. If you count the word dumbass, I made seven. You make more than that in your first two paragraphs. None of what I said had vitriol; I felt that I was scolding someone being a dumbass, and I stand by that. By comparison, you write just awful things, and then you want me to think that I'm an agressor. What, in my message, has any content anything like "Ah, yes, classic fanboy. I don't doubt that it filled your life with "meaning" to have the opportunity to sit, beg and wag your tail at the master. I swear some people should have been born a dog, the way they need to sit and beg at a master." ?
One wonders if you can see your own behavior. All I said was "don't talk shit on people you don't know; in this case you're wrong."
"I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap." And two paragraphs later, "Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy."
You know, it's very very sad when you can't even keep the same idea for more than a paragraph.
There's a big difference between the two. If you'll notice, what I said was that people were adhering to unrealistic schedules because that's what the market demands of them, and that as a result what they ship is not of high quality.
That does not mean that they're being sloppy. Being sloppy is an issue of contempt. These people are desperately overworked, underpaid, given wholly unreasonable schedules. They're not being sloppy, they're being driven into the ground.
You still haven't provided even one example. There are a few, but not many. Every example you
Yay, so everyone but the white guy gets to say "yo yo yo what up my eskimo brother" and we honkies get to go "well hello my inuit-american associate."
Hur hur. Maybe we should all just grow up. Black people aren't offended by nigger, by and on the whole, anymore, and most people don't even know what eskimo means. Can't you just not get offended that the honkies don't know better? We are, as a skin color, stupid. Cut us some slack once in a while. (Or, better yet, just make up some names for us. Lord knows we deserve it.)
The thing about delusional systems is that these people will spend their entire lives refining and reinforcing a strange set of seemingly disconnected memes. That example is a real one, from a very sweet young girl, who has a surprisingly compelling argument for why that Henry Ford didn't make buildings mobile has condemned us to resource wasting, which is why the aliens think we need to be wiped out.
Yeah yeah, I know it sounds stereotypical. It's stereotypical because it's common. Turns out that there's a very small set of delusions that come with this disease, and the variance one hears about simply comes from which information ends up getting hooked in as the basis for paranoia.
FreeCiv has a long way to go before it catches up with Civ2, let alone Civ3 or Civ4. As far as being for Linux, Civ3 runs just fine in WINE.
Furthermore, that's not what irony means.
Yeah thats game theory.
No. Game theory is the branch of economics devoted to agent behavior and best-course actions (minmax trees, ply trees, risk minimization, saddlepoint grids, quanta, that sort of stuff.) This is game design and game balance.
The samurai in civ III if youre janapese, were too strong compared to other units, so you just make hundereds of samurai and youve won the game.
You need more skillful opponents. The samurai is too expensive to overweight the game. If you're able to flood them with samurai, they're spending no time on their military at all, don't have any ranged units, don't know how to make chaff units, et cetera.
Real life is more complex and you have to balance many other variables. The most successful armies have a large diversity of units to succeed, and that should be reflected in civ.
Yes and no. Whereas you do want some modicum of challenge and differentiation, just how much one wants is debatable. Sit down with some miniatures gamers some time and play one of their world war two games. Their units have sometimes upwards of 20 combat statistics.
It is my opinion - and many people will disagree with me on this - that one wants the minimum count of rules which allow for a game with significant long-term variability. Many stats have been dropped from the units over the years. Others have been added in their place. Experience, hit points, leader base rate, distance from home city, maintenance effects, range, they've all been missing from one Civ or another.
Theres another thing that I've been wanting in the civ series for a while. You can make 'armies' in civiii but thats limited. You should be able to group units like in tiberian sun, make military units, and movement formations like in kohan, and do much more with a group of units than just select each and give them a destination.
The problem is, Civ is pretty clearly a strategy game, and those are mechanics for a tactical game. Yes, that sort of thing can work out well; one of the best examples IMO is Mission Risk. Still, I don't think it would really change the average outcome of wars much, excepting in the case of a novice versus an expert (when you don't want for it to,) and as such it doesn't seem to add to this particular game much. I suspect it would just be chaff.
Consider by comparison the trade scheme in Civ1/2, with caravans. Yes, they mimic the real world relatively accurately, and can be used to model a significant facet of the game. Yes, you can even get them into combat situations. That said, they had almost no long-term impact on the game other than to slow one down; they shouldn't really have been in the game. Civ3 is better for not having them.
Alexander's army was successful because of their direct attacks into enemy units with a blitz.
You can blitz in every civilization game. Blitzing is effectively just moving more troops into a region than the region can scale up to fight back against at once. The primary mechanic of blitzing is overwhelming someone during the time that they're trying to get started up to resist. If anything, Civ's turn-based nature makes blitzing much easier than in a realtime game. All you do is move a gigantic stack; when it gets to a city, the city has time to make one, maybe two units if it's lucky. If the stack is large enough, that's blitz material.
The real effective mechanic of Hitler's Blitzes was political - that he managed to convince neighboring nations not to step up to war until he had already invaded. Blitz is just about taking advantage of someone's not being prepared.
For what it's worth, Alexander almost never did directed charges. He was much more fond of surrounding maneuvers, splitting maneuvers and flanking maneuvers, presumably due to his time as a cavalry officer (remember, he frequently rode into battle personally.) Alexander can be argued to have been largely ignorant of the Blitz. The only two militar
So they're introducing loads of new concepts, like religion and famous people.
Actually, these are being incorporated from Call to Power and Master of Magic, both of which were Microprose/Hasbro games (ie, they were one of the early Sid split off teams.) It can be argued that Sid is simply taking these mechanics back.
(Maybe they could introduce "fundamentalist" units, which you can infiltrate into opposing civilisations in order to slow their science rates...)
In Civ:CTP and Civ:CTP2, there are units like this, the most commonly named of which is probably the Ecoterrorist. They're a real drag. It sounds like a good idea; when I read about it the first time I was very excited.
Every implementation of this mechanic I've seen has been a big pain. I don't know that I believe that this can be done in a fun way.
I really don't see the rationale behind this particular change. Did anyone really find the two-stat system to be hopelessly complicated?
You would need information which is not yet public. All I'm allowed to say is that there is a good reason for this. I had the same "oh no" moment you're having. Don't worry.
As a member of the Civ 4 beta team, I'd be interested to learn what specifically about the game's progress you dislike. It may be that it's just that the game has moved in a direction with which you disagree, and if so there's nothing I can do. However, more often than not when a complaint is spelled out in significant detail, something can be done.
Ok it is insanely hard to code even when your just a little stoned.
... just bring tissues. Huhu.
Meh, not really. I do it every weekend.
Imagine trying to code a game when your tripping.
Now, that's difficult. And, reading the comments afterwards
Making a game whilst on drugs is really really hard if not nearly impossible.
That's the problem with referring to all drugs at once - people tend to forget caffeine and nicotene, and then just lump things like pot with things like psylocibin. Some drugs - notably caffeine, cocaine and nonhallucinogenic amphetamines - actually make it much easier to code, and there's an ongoing abuse problem among programmers for that reason.
"If video games affected children, we'd all be running around in the dark through a maze of neon lights, munching magic pills, listening to repetitive electronic music."
The quote becomes much funnier when you discover that it's from Kristian Wilson, a CEO at Nintendo back in 1989, from the front door of a private rave. Rather tongue in cheek, one expects.
How can any history of games be complete with any mention of Rise of the Triad at all? That game deserves to be burned from our collective memories. It's the Galactica 1980 of gaming.
I suggest you acquire SMB3 and the japanese game inbetween what Americans call SMB1 and SMB2. Both are significantly more drug-suggestion heavy than SMB2.
SMB has always had an undercurrent of drug topics. As every old slashdotter knows, the jokes about eating mushrooms and flowers, growing to double your size, changing colors, learning to spit fire and swim under the ocean, and so forth are all indicators.
SMB3 is less constant but there's a lot more of it and it's subtle. (Of course there's always the argument that I'm just looking for references, but then, that's the nature of subtle references...)
This is a misconstruance of coincidence. It has nothing to do with art. It's just that among any large group there will be people with fringe behavior.
You might as well try to draw conclusions from that there are sexual deviants in the US pool of car mechanics. It's an observation, not an indicator.
For the record, there is no statistical correlation between artists and drug use in either direction; drug users are equally likely - no more, no less - to create art with regards to other people. Famous artists, the ones you hear about, are different - they get a bunch of money and psychological stress all at once (like rock stars,) and are frequently consumed by a decadent society. Few of the painters the average person can name did drugs beyond what was common in their society (in Europe, for example, that generally means alcohol.)
Is there any relevant social group where there are no X? No. Is there any relevant social group where there are fewer than the norm of X? Oh, yes. And that's what's statistically significant. Consider learning how statistics work; your eyes will be open to a new world.
Oh, here we go again. "They made game design decisions with which I do not agree, so their game design is broken. Therefore I will say that all PC games ship broken, because I disagree with them."
Well, call me a bitter old cynic
Cynicism is based on a reasonable, if brutal, interpretation of one's surroundings. If I call you something, that will hardly be it.
but I've pretty much given up on any hope that PC games will start being anything but unfinished stuff shoved out the door.
I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap. Lots of them don't. For example, consider that Civ3 shipped with not even one crashing bug on tested hardware, and that after it shipped in years of use only two were ever found. That's better than most application software does. Civ3 was a five year effort for two software development teams involving literally millions of lines of code. Neither of Civ3's patches introduced any significant bugs.
If you think two quickly corrected crashing bugs on obscure platforms aren't reasonable for a project of that size, my dear boy, you don't know software development. It's not a question of games being low quality. It's a question of combing huge tracts of source for single errors.
Plus, even if someone actually stopped being sloppy
Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy. This sort of contemptuous behavior belongs in France, or EA.
it can happen that the "flaws" in a game are actually WAD (Working As Designed.) I.e., it's not buggy or untested
Sorry. This is the first sign that you shouldn't be commenting on software quality, is that you can't tell the difference between something broken and something with which you disagree. In fact, you follow this with a beautiful example.
E.g., what if 200 man Phalanxes winning against 20,000 man Tank divisions, on plains, in Civ 3 was actually _intended_?
Er. It was, dumbass. The game has worked that way for almost 20 years. Frankly, that's how it should work - there are examples of that sort of thing happening in real life, and it happens in game very rarely.
This has been debated ad nauseum on Apollyton Civ Fanatics and various other game design boards that you don't appear to have looked into acting like you have a better design than the single most successful (both by sales volume and sales profit) game designer in history, so I think I'll leave it to you to look it up instead of to explain to you slowly and at length that in almost every strategy game on earth, every piece has a chance against every other piece, no matter what they are.
E.g., Black And White had an interface that was broken by design. PM's grand vision was an interface without any icons or buttons taking up screen space, and the players would have to just memorize gestures. EA's internal tested showed that even their professional testers had trouble using that, so for Joe Gamer it just couldn't possibly work
Where do you get this stuff? User testing on the Black and White interface was heavily positive since day one across nearly every demographic. Oh, and so you know, the next time you want to make up studies, please don't pretend that EA tests against just one group of gamers. They're a little more sophisticated than that.
However, PM's ego being the size of a continent, he wasn't going to just give in: he put the icons on the screen, but didn't let you click on them.
Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3. He doesn't have an ego the size of a continent. He's a game designer, and the act you're talking about is game design.
Stop coming down on successful game designers for doing things you disagree with. This is like saying Lucas should never have made a film because of Jar-Jar. If you're that good a game designer, design a goddamned game, or shut up.
Think about it. So they _are_ painted on
Cough. Hardly. Civ has been moddable to a varying degree for almost 15 years, and the core modules have never been replaced by amateurs. (Amateurs have provided replacements, but the Microprose/Atari/Firaxis/whoever core game has always remained the core dominant.)
Firaxis in their various forms have always taken the balance of their core games very seriously.
Much of the utility of Linux on a DS would come from its network connection ability. Given that that is currently not well understood, it may be helpful to donate to the DS Wi-Fi Bounty. (Disclaimer: I am running that bounty.)
Actually, no, that's political oppression. Censorship is just taking the site down.
China has a largely capitalist economy with significant private ownership of capital
Actually, they have a mixed economy (that's the formal term - an economy under which monetization is used to distribute work effort according to nationalized goals,) and the bulk of their fiscal capital is nationalized, owing to that all Chinese banks are federal.
I agree with the rest of your points; just a particularity. A mixed economy supports your argument just as well as does a capitalism.
I think you'll also find that censorship occurs in all countries, and that much of it is ludicrous. (Look at the list of books banned in various parts of the US - "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe"???)
Er. What are you talking about? The US has very strong anti-censorship laws. The only grounds under US law under which you may be censored are the dissemination of technology which poses a serious hazard to national security (nuclear weapon designs are the canonical example.)
Maybe you're confusing school system censorship lists with real censorship. Frankly, I think the notion that school system "censorship" is abberrant are silly; I just don't think that a high school should teach Lady Chatterly, not because it offends me, but because it's against many parents' models for raising their children. Either way, that has nothing to do with real censorship; there is no state, county, city or municipality which can censor fiction in this country, anywhere, by federal law.
In general, philosophies are rarely corrupt
By definition, a philosophy is not something subject to corruption. Rather than using nebulous words like philosophy, which here do not apply anyway, you might consider giving concrete examples.
Americans, especially, are bad about seeing the defects in others and ignoring their own.
Spoken like a true bigot. But, since you're seeing the defects in us and ignoring that in yourself, you're probably just anther filthy American.
Remove the log from your own eye, before removing the speck from your brother's eye. It really does help.
Tu quoque.
It's simple, if you want people to stop being violent, create a pill which lowers aggression and which prevents people from getting angry. Create a gas which makes people happy, and release it into the workplace, and then maybe violence will go down.
It's called pot.
Oh, malarky. Just because fusion occurs occasionally spontaneously at low temperatures doesn't mean that we haven't discovered a new means of achieving fusion at low temperatures. Hell, we can't even force tunneling to happen.
The hair you're trying to split is silly: nobody claims that they've hit breakeven, and scaling doesn't apply to output. They were quite clear in the article that this technique is not expected to hit breakeven with refinement.
But, for narrow-view people like you, let me remind you that this is an order of magnitude closer to break-even than the last major method, forced-point sonoluminescent tritium triggered fusion, did; moreover it's much more easily achieved and controlled. (Do note that one of the three named people was in fact a large figure in sonoluminescent research.)
The question of whether the technique breaks even isn't critical at all. What's important is 1) it gets us closer, 2) it's a whole new methodology, and 3) it has other applications than power-generation fusion, besides.
(Though as I recall, this particular application wasn't touted as being an approach to energy generation anyway).
(cough) Then why is the breakeven point so crucial in your mind?
Hangups like allowing disreputable individuals a simple and easy source to aggregate large volumes of radioactive material, or hangups like that nuclear batteries aren't suitable for nearly any of the applications traditional batteries are, owing to their extremely small voltage output?
Optimism doesn't defeat statistics. You should wait on declaring reasons that something hasn't been deployed until you're at least familiar with the underlying science.