Assuming that "screwing up" means "causing damage beyond what their capitalization can repair", then the explanation is simply that they invested in a company which took on an unmanagably large uninsured risk and is now bankrupt. Not such a strange concept really. I guess they should have invested more wisely. Speaking of which, note, assuming they have a diverse enough portfolio, the surviving company/ies will pick up some of the slack and mitigate this somewhat. Ideally the government would sell of the assets to these companies (this is what typically happens in foreclosure, yes?) and basically ensure that this happens.
If there were never downfalls to investors, ever, it'd be a perpetual motion machine of profit without responsibility.
the much-loathed pulseaudio has this also. It's not very convenient though; takes a lot of clicks to get to, at least the way it's set up in ubuntu. It's even worse now, since the volume control panel app is no longer available by default in 10.04. wtf?
What matters, for better or worse, is often the public perception and norms involved rather than the technical definitions. In the US for example, it was ruled that passive infrared scanning (for a grow operation) of property from a public area counted as a search even though it was scientifically identical to normal vision. The device was rare enough, so as to violate commonly held standards of privacy.
Yes, it just reiterates the plot of the first two with some variation. Although of course the series cleverly uses deja vu as a motif, so repetition is not only excusable but fundamental to the story. I'll have to remember that trick if I ever write a game.;-)
I played it mostly because I hoped it would get better; and, hey, it was at least a semi-decent linux game. Save it for a rainy day.
As a counterpoint, I'd just like to weigh in with my opinion that the second and third in the series are rather disappointing. I kept playing because the plot was, indeed, engrossing. There is no question there: they've absolutely nailed the video game "port" of a good Lovecraft story. There is no doubt that they are worth the price; however, I felt a bit cheated with the sequels. The plot begs you to continue, but the gameplay becomes a tedious challenge instead of a nerve-tingling joy. Overall, the series succeeds on the strength of its plot, despite gameplay; whereas the first entry masterfully combined them both.
Part two, Black Plague, replaces a menacing enemy with an outright frustrating one, and its puzzles begin to wear thin. The horror in the first part, Overture, comes from a series of uncannily well-executed escalations: at the moment you are finally exasperated from running from an enemy, circumstances turn in your favor. As you acclimate to this, another enemy is introduced requiring more adaptation. This staging was nothing less than a stroke of genius.
In contrast, for the entirety of Black Plague you are completely defenseless. This would be OK were it not for the scripting/AI of your sole enemy. Occasionally you may even need to engage and run away from an enemy since they are blocking a goal. Repeated ad nauseam, this is not scary; it's just annoying. These frustrations are also present in Overture, but as an exception. In Black Plague they have become the rule.
Likewise the stealth-orienteering of Overture has been mostly replaced by puzzles which are either insulting straightforward or require rather silly, contrived solutions in the spirit of Sierra games (although simpler). Certain sections require the use of a (filth-encrusted) gas mask which serves, gameplay-wise, only to make life more difficult by obscuring your vision. Again, this is neither challenging nor scary; it's just annoying. To add insult to injury, your character has in his inventory a bottle of alcohol and a rag which cannot be used to clean the damned thing; you see, they are for use in a puzzle later on. Further, as in most physics-puzzle games, the promise of "multiple solutions" reminds one of the hillbilly bar in Blues Brothers which played both kinds of music, country and western. Indeed, one may cross an obstacle using either a stack of crates or a stack of barrels.
With the final entry of the series, the developers seem to have finally accepted defeat in the combat/stealth genre; it's a pure first-person puzzle-platformer which, to put it mildly, deviates somewhat radically from the spirit of the first two and borrows quite a bit from the spirit of Portal (to which there is a bit of an homage in the second level), as a somewhat deranged alien intelligence guides the character through a sequence of tests. At least it's passable gameplay, but the gameplay and the plot have at long last become totally orthogonal.
Their stuff reads like the slightly-less-funny nerd version of Dave Barry. Which is fine; I like Dave Barry at times, but the subgroup they're targeting isn't geniuses.
And then when they do "cause distress" to a user who sues for massive damages, people like you are going to cry and whine about tort reform and frivolous lawsuits.
It's just more efficient to set up "best practices" in a sufficiently general way so that the standards can be met freely; welcome to reality. It's either this; the status quo; or a massive "coffee burn"-type lawsuit.
Under my proposed law, during the years between 16 and 21 noninclusive, the probability of being chargeable, upon discovery, with underage drinking shall be determined by interpolation through a truncated logistic function. n'hey.
This was a long time ago when throwing the manual on the (black and white) office photocopier before lending the disks to your coworkers was a major piracy channel... Scanners were quite rare, and running photoshop on an EGA card would have been a joke.
Anyway, have to say your sig goes well with the topic of your post.
Please see my prior reply. The concept which you and nearly everyone else miss, is that personal property requires personal responsibility. At some point this got abandoned in favor of a labyrinthine system of rent-seeking middle-man parasites.
It's not difficult: if the bike is locked up securely, it's theft. If you leave it on the street with no identification, then you have forfeited your claim to personal property.
I guess "commie" isn't the right word. I meant "unnatural", and communism is just one particularly unnatural system.
Personal property rights basically developed from the right to harvest land which you cultivated. Nowadays you're not allowed to say this, of course, because so much of today's so-called "property" is based on rent-seeking and thus does not have this moral basis. Thus we have deified the very concept of property and all its extensions, while abandoning the moral basis. This is your mistake.
The point is, that any natural sense of personal property is predicated on a sense of personal responsibility. If one is neglectful enough to abandon their property then what claim do they have afterward?
So I call it commie because it's an artificial social welfare program which directly negates a rightful loss. This is important. Good welfare programs help the innocent, those who did not contribute to their disadvantages.
I remember when running the "Second Reality" demo (by Future Crew) on my 486, if you hit the desk the computer was on, the particles on screen would jump around to different locations (and occasionally it would crash). I never noticed any other problems with any other software. Granted it was probably the RAM and not CPU, but after seeing this, I was really surprised that the computer worked at all...
I wouldn't be happy, but then again it's the rational thing to do. I don't think I'd begrudge them much, and I don't think I'd have much of a problem doing the same. Who knows, it'd depend on a number of factors.
Laws about having to return found property are commie bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that "screwing up" means "causing damage beyond what their capitalization can repair", then the explanation is simply that they invested in a company which took on an unmanagably large uninsured risk and is now bankrupt. Not such a strange concept really. I guess they should have invested more wisely. Speaking of which, note, assuming they have a diverse enough portfolio, the surviving company/ies will pick up some of the slack and mitigate this somewhat. Ideally the government would sell of the assets to these companies (this is what typically happens in foreclosure, yes?) and basically ensure that this happens.
If there were never downfalls to investors, ever, it'd be a perpetual motion machine of profit without responsibility.
the much-loathed pulseaudio has this also. It's not very convenient though; takes a lot of clicks to get to, at least the way it's set up in ubuntu. It's even worse now, since the volume control panel app is no longer available by default in 10.04. wtf?
just ask rms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
What matters, for better or worse, is often the public perception and norms involved rather than the technical definitions. In the US for example, it was ruled that passive infrared scanning (for a grow operation) of property from a public area counted as a search even though it was scientifically identical to normal vision. The device was rare enough, so as to violate commonly held standards of privacy.
One can have statistical correlation which is neither necessary nor sufficient...
But it can be used as a proposition, albeit an unreliable one.
Yes, it just reiterates the plot of the first two with some variation. Although of course the series cleverly uses deja vu as a motif, so repetition is not only excusable but fundamental to the story. I'll have to remember that trick if I ever write a game. ;-)
I played it mostly because I hoped it would get better; and, hey, it was at least a semi-decent linux game. Save it for a rainy day.
As a counterpoint, I'd just like to weigh in with my opinion that the second and third in the series are rather disappointing. I kept playing because the plot was, indeed, engrossing. There is no question there: they've absolutely nailed the video game "port" of a good Lovecraft story. There is no doubt that they are worth the price; however, I felt a bit cheated with the sequels. The plot begs you to continue, but the gameplay becomes a tedious challenge instead of a nerve-tingling joy. Overall, the series succeeds on the strength of its plot, despite gameplay; whereas the first entry masterfully combined them both.
Part two, Black Plague, replaces a menacing enemy with an outright frustrating one, and its puzzles begin to wear thin. The horror in the first part, Overture, comes from a series of uncannily well-executed escalations: at the moment you are finally exasperated from running from an enemy, circumstances turn in your favor. As you acclimate to this, another enemy is introduced requiring more adaptation. This staging was nothing less than a stroke of genius.
In contrast, for the entirety of Black Plague you are completely defenseless. This would be OK were it not for the scripting/AI of your sole enemy. Occasionally you may even need to engage and run away from an enemy since they are blocking a goal. Repeated ad nauseam, this is not scary; it's just annoying. These frustrations are also present in Overture, but as an exception. In Black Plague they have become the rule.
Likewise the stealth-orienteering of Overture has been mostly replaced by puzzles which are either insulting straightforward or require rather silly, contrived solutions in the spirit of Sierra games (although simpler). Certain sections require the use of a (filth-encrusted) gas mask which serves, gameplay-wise, only to make life more difficult by obscuring your vision. Again, this is neither challenging nor scary; it's just annoying. To add insult to injury, your character has in his inventory a bottle of alcohol and a rag which cannot be used to clean the damned thing; you see, they are for use in a puzzle later on. Further, as in most physics-puzzle games, the promise of "multiple solutions" reminds one of the hillbilly bar in Blues Brothers which played both kinds of music, country and western. Indeed, one may cross an obstacle using either a stack of crates or a stack of barrels.
With the final entry of the series, the developers seem to have finally accepted defeat in the combat/stealth genre; it's a pure first-person puzzle-platformer which, to put it mildly, deviates somewhat radically from the spirit of the first two and borrows quite a bit from the spirit of Portal (to which there is a bit of an homage in the second level), as a somewhat deranged alien intelligence guides the character through a sequence of tests. At least it's passable gameplay, but the gameplay and the plot have at long last become totally orthogonal.
what do you mean? AT&T is doing fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy#Legal_developments
zomg pwned. i just throw mine at greenpeace canvassers.
there's more to it than energy, but yes I also would like to see an in-depth accounting.
and of course... there are those of us who don't wash their ceramic coffee mug. :)
And if you put something in that's neither an honest answer nor a random phrase: the universe explodes.
1. how would they tell?
2. you could install vi on your own computer.
Wordy and convoluted isn't enough to be "smart".
Their stuff reads like the slightly-less-funny nerd version of Dave Barry. Which is fine; I like Dave Barry at times, but the subgroup they're targeting isn't geniuses.
I think the prosecution would have to prove that he actually doesn't know the difference between fraud and smoking.
Oh shut up. If you can't tell the difference between fraud and smoking, just shut the hell up and kill yourself.
And then when they do "cause distress" to a user who sues for massive damages, people like you are going to cry and whine about tort reform and frivolous lawsuits.
It's just more efficient to set up "best practices" in a sufficiently general way so that the standards can be met freely; welcome to reality. It's either this; the status quo; or a massive "coffee burn"-type lawsuit.
Under my proposed law, during the years between 16 and 21 noninclusive, the probability of being chargeable, upon discovery, with underage drinking shall be determined by interpolation through a truncated logistic function. n'hey.
This was a long time ago when throwing the manual on the (black and white) office photocopier before lending the disks to your coworkers was a major piracy channel... Scanners were quite rare, and running photoshop on an EGA card would have been a joke.
Anyway, have to say your sig goes well with the topic of your post.
Please see my prior reply. The concept which you and nearly everyone else miss, is that personal property requires personal responsibility. At some point this got abandoned in favor of a labyrinthine system of rent-seeking middle-man parasites.
It's not difficult: if the bike is locked up securely, it's theft. If you leave it on the street with no identification, then you have forfeited your claim to personal property.
I guess "commie" isn't the right word. I meant "unnatural", and communism is just one particularly unnatural system.
Personal property rights basically developed from the right to harvest land which you cultivated. Nowadays you're not allowed to say this, of course, because so much of today's so-called "property" is based on rent-seeking and thus does not have this moral basis. Thus we have deified the very concept of property and all its extensions, while abandoning the moral basis. This is your mistake.
The point is, that any natural sense of personal property is predicated on a sense of personal responsibility. If one is neglectful enough to abandon their property then what claim do they have afterward?
So I call it commie because it's an artificial social welfare program which directly negates a rightful loss. This is important. Good welfare programs help the innocent, those who did not contribute to their disadvantages.
I remember when running the "Second Reality" demo (by Future Crew) on my 486, if you hit the desk the computer was on, the particles on screen would jump around to different locations (and occasionally it would crash). I never noticed any other problems with any other software. Granted it was probably the RAM and not CPU, but after seeing this, I was really surprised that the computer worked at all...
I wouldn't be happy, but then again it's the rational thing to do. I don't think I'd begrudge them much, and I don't think I'd have much of a problem doing the same. Who knows, it'd depend on a number of factors.
Laws about having to return found property are commie bullshit.
Even worse, a hoity-toity tenured professor will raise hell if finds out he makes less than any "computer janitor," even a senior one.
That might be part of it, but even so, if it convinces the spectators and judges (these are serious tournaments!), then that's good enough for me.