Planescape and Dark Sun are out of print, although if you feel like getting into 3/3.5 then there are official fan conversions: Planescape Dark Sun (This one seems to be down, hopefully it's not down for good.)
Wait, you've heard people refer to '*' as "bang"? I've always heard that bang is '!' (probably because of the fact that the technical name for '?!' is the interrobang). Stupid ambiguous punctuation names.
Fallout 3 definitely worked better than Oblivion. In FO3, Bethesda basically set up zones around the game world, where each zone had a level range (say, 8-12). If you were beneath the range, the level of the area was the minimum of the zone. If you were above, the level was the maximum. If you were inside the range, your level was the zone's level. Not only that, once you reached a zone its level was locked for the rest of the game. This does mean that you can cheat the game and do early runs to minimize levels, but at least it's better how in Oblivion everything was always autoscaling to your level.
Where Bethesda really messed up, though, was that they don't know how to do difficulty. I bought Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage, got the best power armor in the game (Winterized T-51b) and leveled up to 22. Then I bought Point Lookout, grabbed my plasma rifle, tri-beam laser rifle, minigun, rocket launcher, and gatling laser and went to explore the new area. Cue me getting my ass handed to me by unarmored tribals. Why? Because Bethesda saw fit to outfit them with 35 points unresistable damage per hit. This is bad design. I certainly understand that if I had gone at, say, level 3, I should have died. A game that does level scaling needs to preserve the feelings of the dangers of early levels (which FO3 did beautifully) while providing players with a sense of accomplishment (which FO3 sucked at). FWIW, it's not just Point Lookout that sucked at that. Your first trip to downtown DC sees a bunch of super mutants kicking your ass. Your later trips see you mowing down super mutants but getting killed by super mutant masters. And never, ever go back once you play Broken Steel. Super mutant overlords are worse than tribals.
Yes. Consider the following completely fake headline that I just made up on the spot:
North Korea Nukes Los Angeles, Millions Feared Dead
If people take the time to verify the story before reposting, they'll see that it is patently false. Nothing happened, everything is fine. If they don't, however, I think we could all picture a scenario of people running through the streets shouting about what had happened, panicked calls to loved ones in LA, and in short chaos running rampant.
Alright, so it's an extreme example, but it is better to be slightly slow in letting people know what's going on than to feed them wrong information.
Just a few years ago I was taking standard tests for college. A few colleges I was applying to required me to take the SAT Subject Test for Physics. I took the test and got a 750. This sounds like a fantastic score (and it is pretty good) although the mean for the test that year was 643 with a standard deviation of 107, putting me exactly one standard deviation away. Not only that, a large number of students (including a few friends of mine and some people I later met in college) got 800s. However, I'm the only person out of those people to score a 5 (max) on both calculus-based physics AP tests. What happened?
Easy. I took the SAT Physics my junior year and the physics AP my senior year. In that year was my first exposure to electricity and magnetism, which comprises ~20% of the SAT Physics. Everybody I know who got an 800 had already taken some form of E&M when they took the test, but I was left to try to figure out how an electric field diagram works. Does my lower score mean that I'm not as good at physics? No. Could I have gotten an 800 after having already learned all of the material? Probably.
It doesn't seem like it would be that tough to me. Include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system like YouTube has. Allow users to set their own threshold, or alternatively set it up so that the number of down-votes it takes to hide a comment is proportional to the number of visitors. That'll prevent just a few douchebags from hiding valuable comments on a frequently-visited site while still letting a group of friends delete spambots from their personal site.
Actually, menu bars being already in the system is a legitimate complaint. It's obvious when a program was not written natively for Mac because it doesn't utilize the integrated menu bar system. If Firefox introduces a ribbon menu for all releases, there will be a backlash from Mac users who just want the old classic interface back. I have no idea what the hell he's complaining about with Aqua/Aero though...
Actually, a lot of people will have that reaction. I'm not planning on buying it any time soon (too many other great games coming out at the end of this year), but a local ban on it would certainly remove any of my moral reasons not to pirate it.
Please point me to the part of the original post where the anonymous writer talked about how they love Fox News, hate brown people, and are fundamentalist Christians. I'm looking pretty hard, and I don't see it.
The reason games cost the same on the PS3 and 360 is pricefixing, pure and simple. If I wanted to release a full retail game on either system (assuming I had a studio and a license to develop for the systems) I would be forced into selling it for $60. It's only after the game had been out for a while and sales declined that the retailers would start lowering the price.
The PS3 does have hacks available, even if it doesn't have true piracy yet (Example. Warning: mildly NSFW ads.) I suspect a large part of the reason there's no true piracy yet is because of the Blu-Ray format. A single BD-R costs $12.85 on Amazon, and I can't imagine that it's easy to create/load a ROM of a game stored in that format.
A few years ago I was planning to sell off some of my old Dreamcast games, among them Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I did an eBay search to figure out how much I'd get, and the search turned up about $700-$1000. Naturally, I was pretty excited. Then I saw the word "Arcade" next to most of the listings, and a few with the word "Dreamcast" next to them. Those ones were more like $10. I was pretty pissed.
It's a bit hard to judge, naturally, but it doesn't seem that far-fetched. There's what, 6.5 billion people in the world? This means that, on average, there's ~35.68 people/book. That doesn't include books written by dead people, but there's more people alive than dead so it doesn't seem unreasonable to guess that that's about 70 people/book. Remember that's books published and cataloged, not books written. In fact, the idea of 1.4% of all people being published authors sounds a bit high to me.
Fun fact! There's lots of interpretations of the Bible, which is why there's so many sects of Christianity. For instance, in that one verse, I see a few different ways to look at it:
Two men can't have sex, it's an abomination. Lesbians are ok.
Two men can have sex, they just can't do it the same way that a man and a woman can. That would probably be difficult anyways, since men lack the necessary parts.
Men can't lie together the same way men and women can. Who said anything about sex? We're talking about lying down. Or maybe spreading falsehoods.
Alright, so it might be clearer in the original Hebrew, but the point is that no, you can't say that the Bible is bigoted as a blanket statement. People who blame others of being bigoted are frequently bigoted against those people.
And now I'm at it: a way to link to the same subject in a different language.
Wikipedia already has that feature. For instance, check out the page for Slashdot. Along the left-hand side you'll see links for German, Spanish, French, Russian, and all sorts of other languages. If you want to add a link to a Wikipedia page to the same page in a different language, edit the page, scroll to the bottom, and add something like this:
[[es:Slashdot]]
That'll add a link to the Spanish version of the page. Of course, you'll have to learn what the two-letter code is for the one you're linking to, but it's right up in the address bar.
Sorry about the Ironclad Games/Stardock thing. You're right. While Ironclad Games is a new studio, however, it was formed by guys from Rockstar Vancouver, so we're not talking about at-home programmers.
I got the $10,000 development figure for World of Goo from Wikipedia: "The developers estimate spending about $10,000 of their personal savings to develop World of Goo which includes rent, food, and minimal equipment." (source). Where'd you get your quote?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but cold fusion is only a few decades away.
Planescape and Dark Sun are out of print, although if you feel like getting into 3/3.5 then there are official fan conversions:
Planescape
Dark Sun (This one seems to be down, hopefully it's not down for good.)
Can I ask the mod who modded me offtopic exactly why that was offtopic? It was a joke in response to another joke about the same subject matter!
4chan was so much better before that Anonymous guy showed up.
Wait, you've heard people refer to '*' as "bang"? I've always heard that bang is '!' (probably because of the fact that the technical name for '?!' is the interrobang). Stupid ambiguous punctuation names.
Fallout 3 definitely worked better than Oblivion. In FO3, Bethesda basically set up zones around the game world, where each zone had a level range (say, 8-12). If you were beneath the range, the level of the area was the minimum of the zone. If you were above, the level was the maximum. If you were inside the range, your level was the zone's level. Not only that, once you reached a zone its level was locked for the rest of the game. This does mean that you can cheat the game and do early runs to minimize levels, but at least it's better how in Oblivion everything was always autoscaling to your level.
Where Bethesda really messed up, though, was that they don't know how to do difficulty. I bought Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage, got the best power armor in the game (Winterized T-51b) and leveled up to 22. Then I bought Point Lookout, grabbed my plasma rifle, tri-beam laser rifle, minigun, rocket launcher, and gatling laser and went to explore the new area. Cue me getting my ass handed to me by unarmored tribals. Why? Because Bethesda saw fit to outfit them with 35 points unresistable damage per hit. This is bad design. I certainly understand that if I had gone at, say, level 3, I should have died. A game that does level scaling needs to preserve the feelings of the dangers of early levels (which FO3 did beautifully) while providing players with a sense of accomplishment (which FO3 sucked at). FWIW, it's not just Point Lookout that sucked at that. Your first trip to downtown DC sees a bunch of super mutants kicking your ass. Your later trips see you mowing down super mutants but getting killed by super mutant masters. And never, ever go back once you play Broken Steel. Super mutant overlords are worse than tribals.
You can poke people who aren't your friends.
Here's the video proof, by the way: Youtube link.
Yes. Consider the following completely fake headline that I just made up on the spot:
If people take the time to verify the story before reposting, they'll see that it is patently false. Nothing happened, everything is fine. If they don't, however, I think we could all picture a scenario of people running through the streets shouting about what had happened, panicked calls to loved ones in LA, and in short chaos running rampant.
Alright, so it's an extreme example, but it is better to be slightly slow in letting people know what's going on than to feed them wrong information.
4. ????
5. Terrorism!
Yeah, insect puns really tick me off.
This.
Just a few years ago I was taking standard tests for college. A few colleges I was applying to required me to take the SAT Subject Test for Physics. I took the test and got a 750. This sounds like a fantastic score (and it is pretty good) although the mean for the test that year was 643 with a standard deviation of 107, putting me exactly one standard deviation away. Not only that, a large number of students (including a few friends of mine and some people I later met in college) got 800s. However, I'm the only person out of those people to score a 5 (max) on both calculus-based physics AP tests. What happened?
Easy. I took the SAT Physics my junior year and the physics AP my senior year. In that year was my first exposure to electricity and magnetism, which comprises ~20% of the SAT Physics. Everybody I know who got an 800 had already taken some form of E&M when they took the test, but I was left to try to figure out how an electric field diagram works. Does my lower score mean that I'm not as good at physics? No. Could I have gotten an 800 after having already learned all of the material? Probably.
I thought you guys were exaggerating. Twenty seconds later, however...
It doesn't seem like it would be that tough to me. Include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system like YouTube has. Allow users to set their own threshold, or alternatively set it up so that the number of down-votes it takes to hide a comment is proportional to the number of visitors. That'll prevent just a few douchebags from hiding valuable comments on a frequently-visited site while still letting a group of friends delete spambots from their personal site.
Actually, menu bars being already in the system is a legitimate complaint. It's obvious when a program was not written natively for Mac because it doesn't utilize the integrated menu bar system. If Firefox introduces a ribbon menu for all releases, there will be a backlash from Mac users who just want the old classic interface back. I have no idea what the hell he's complaining about with Aqua/Aero though...
Actually, a lot of people will have that reaction. I'm not planning on buying it any time soon (too many other great games coming out at the end of this year), but a local ban on it would certainly remove any of my moral reasons not to pirate it.
"Remain calm!" I'm thinking probably huge-sized abrasive lettering to really get the point across.
Please point me to the part of the original post where the anonymous writer talked about how they love Fox News, hate brown people, and are fundamentalist Christians. I'm looking pretty hard, and I don't see it.
A few years ago I was planning to sell off some of my old Dreamcast games, among them Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I did an eBay search to figure out how much I'd get, and the search turned up about $700-$1000. Naturally, I was pretty excited. Then I saw the word "Arcade" next to most of the listings, and a few with the word "Dreamcast" next to them. Those ones were more like $10. I was pretty pissed.
It's a bit hard to judge, naturally, but it doesn't seem that far-fetched. There's what, 6.5 billion people in the world? This means that, on average, there's ~35.68 people/book. That doesn't include books written by dead people, but there's more people alive than dead so it doesn't seem unreasonable to guess that that's about 70 people/book. Remember that's books published and cataloged, not books written. In fact, the idea of 1.4% of all people being published authors sounds a bit high to me.
Alright, so it might be clearer in the original Hebrew, but the point is that no, you can't say that the Bible is bigoted as a blanket statement. People who blame others of being bigoted are frequently bigoted against those people.
Huh. I thought it meant they had run out of pigeons.
Wikipedia already has that feature. For instance, check out the page for Slashdot. Along the left-hand side you'll see links for German, Spanish, French, Russian, and all sorts of other languages. If you want to add a link to a Wikipedia page to the same page in a different language, edit the page, scroll to the bottom, and add something like this:
[[es:Slashdot]]
That'll add a link to the Spanish version of the page. Of course, you'll have to learn what the two-letter code is for the one you're linking to, but it's right up in the address bar.
Sorry about the Ironclad Games/Stardock thing. You're right. While Ironclad Games is a new studio, however, it was formed by guys from Rockstar Vancouver, so we're not talking about at-home programmers.
I got the $10,000 development figure for World of Goo from Wikipedia: "The developers estimate spending about $10,000 of their personal savings to develop World of Goo which includes rent, food, and minimal equipment." (source). Where'd you get your quote?