Reminds me of a recurring dream I've had of being forced back in primary or secondary school (I'm ~30), and not knowing which classroom I'm supposed to be in, or for which lesson, leaving me wandering nervously around in the corridors, afraid of being caught by the teachers. I'm not sure whether this dream is supposed to make me ready for a return to childhood or school, or perhaps a warning that my unconscious imagination plagiarises major modernist novels because of too much education (or too little, the dreams being set in primary school).
No, that's when you're actually paralysed, not when you're just dreaming that you're paralysed. I've had that too, several times and many years ago. This other thing is a totally normal dream that most people have (to be honest I can't remember having it recently). I don't buy into TFA at all. I think it's just a plausible pseudo-darwinian theory that is about as verifiable as Freud's theories (i.e. not at all), but that appears more "scientific" because it fits with the idea of evolution. Just like the whole field of evolutionary psychology (or most of it, perhaps), it's a bunch of unsupported bullshit that lends all its credibility from a remote likeness to evolutionary biology while being as verifiable, testable and falsifiable as creationism. I'm sure it fails to meet other scientific criteria as well.
You can get into a similar state to sleep paralysis through meditation.
All those dreams I had of being chased and then not being able to run, losing all the power of my usually very strong and quick legs. It's all there to prepare me for giving up in case a real situation should arise. Thank you, science of psychology.
2008: the year when Slashdot ditches its "news for nerds" slogan for something more fitting, like "news for the technologically illiterate and cringeworthy trolls for the rest of us".
If you're going to compare CD with mp3, compare the original wav files to the mp3 instead of comparing your mp3 player to your CD player. As it is, you have too many variables. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an audible difference between a headphone jack and a line out, simply because they have to drive very different loads.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a pretty good book, though, and I'm not sure Blade Runner overshadows it so much because of its undeniably high quality as because of its more popular medium. Both are fairly deep pieces of art, but their underlying themes are so different that the iconic moments specific to the film wouldn't even make sense in the book.
I don't disagree with your points re GTA, but there's another form of open-endedness to it, in that you sometimes can use the city in a more open way during the missions, choosing different paths to employ different tactics. In HL2, you're pretty much locked into a specific path: you can't go back and outflank the enemy, for instance, since the way back more often than not is blocked (a notable exception is the striders attacking the silo at the end of Episode 2). Even when you don't have much choice of where to go in GTA, you still have the feeling of some sort of freedom, since you could, potentially, explore the area when not doing the mission. So it's a greater freedom of movement, if only imaginary.
Deus Ex is a game with both more freedom and better storytelling than HL2. But in this case I do believe it makes it a worse action game. It's certainly not nearly as fast-paced, and that's probably in part because they had to make it possible to choose different tactics and different routes to solve the exact same problems. You don't get the same kind of timing of the excitement when you have the element of surprise on your own side.
The characters of GTA: Vice City and San Andreas were much, much better than the ones in Half-Life 2, perhaps in part because of the superior voice acting, but also because they had larger than life personalities. What exactly is there to Alyx? She's a boilerplate "fun" girl who likes action and dangerous things, but she doesn't express any personal ideas (well, she came up with the word 'zombine'), and she certainly doesn't properly function as a dramatic character. For that you need some sort of conflict, like with those traitorous scumbags Big Smoke and Ryder. Apart from the one with the Combines, all conflicts in HL2 are shallow and superficial, but that one suffers from being too big and too obvious to really generate interest. It's not like you ever consider going over to the Combines as a serious option, is it?
And what exactly is so great about the story? It consists mainly of going from one place to the next while shooting stuff and sometimes even solving small problems. Sometimes you get cooler toys. Hey, even a James Bond movie can do better than that.
No, what HL2 has going for it is that it's an immensely well made action game. Like a rollercoaster, it runs on rails, but like a well-made rollercoaster, it has well thought out pacing, the right intervals between challenging moments, and so on. A rollercoaster isn't supposed to tell a story, and neither is HL2. There is, perhaps, a story in there somewhere, but it's not one of the positive aspects of the game.
Free newspapers are "free" only because you're not their customer. They deliver readers to their advertisers, the articles are just there as enticement. The difference in business model certainly influences editorial choices, no matter how "independent" they claim to be: advertisement-driven papers almost universally feature articles designed to "pique your curiosity" more prominently than papers with high subscription rates do, since those more often actually try to inform.
You are a liar. OS X doesn't boot on 64 MB, and its virtual memory, while better than in OS 9, isn't very good. Certainly not nearly as good as in Linux. Also, OS X pre Panther was dead slow on any computer.
It's mainly about DRM, you're writing about copyright. And no, your reply wasn't a reply to the first post, but you chose to ignore that part (the subject line) of my comment. What I'm getting at is that your comment is a boilerplate "insightful" comment, and that karma whoring is gay.
There are several alternative parties already, Green and Libertarian perhaps the better known. The problem is that the whole electoral system is designed for a two party system, and since none of the parties that can change this has any interest in changing it, it won't be changed.
How is this news? It's advertising, a reminder that you should buy a Wii and buy it now, since it's still readily available and presumably won't be in a couple of weeks. That is, it won't be if the hype works like planned.
You Apple fans are so full of shit. Here, Apple has made beta software with a timebomb that effectively renders the whole OS -- not only the software itself -- useless, and you don't only blame the customer ("the biggest problem was that the person had less than 1GB free space"), but Google?! And that's somehow worthy a +4 mod in defence of the always innocent Apple Inc.
He was off topic, raising an ad hominem. I think we all can agree much (most?) of the moderation on Slashdot sucks, especially the fact that the most inane fanboyism will end up at +5 if it's pro Apple or Ubuntu or whatever the current fashion dictates, but there's nothing worth anything in the comment above. Flamebait? Certainly. Troll? Yes. A "RIAA/m$ suxxx" comment, on the other hand, isn't flamebait, as it's hardly a controversial statement here. Redundant, overrated, off topic, but definitely not flamebait.
It's not rational. He's dismissing the views of Linux's leader just because he doesn't take a great deal of interest in whatever he himself cares about. It's about as rational as criticising a philharmonic orchestra for not playing Metallica.
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Reminds me of a recurring dream I've had of being forced back in primary or secondary school (I'm ~30), and not knowing which classroom I'm supposed to be in, or for which lesson, leaving me wandering nervously around in the corridors, afraid of being caught by the teachers. I'm not sure whether this dream is supposed to make me ready for a return to childhood or school, or perhaps a warning that my unconscious imagination plagiarises major modernist novels because of too much education (or too little, the dreams being set in primary school).
No, that's when you're actually paralysed, not when you're just dreaming that you're paralysed. I've had that too, several times and many years ago. This other thing is a totally normal dream that most people have (to be honest I can't remember having it recently). I don't buy into TFA at all. I think it's just a plausible pseudo-darwinian theory that is about as verifiable as Freud's theories (i.e. not at all), but that appears more "scientific" because it fits with the idea of evolution. Just like the whole field of evolutionary psychology (or most of it, perhaps), it's a bunch of unsupported bullshit that lends all its credibility from a remote likeness to evolutionary biology while being as verifiable, testable and falsifiable as creationism. I'm sure it fails to meet other scientific criteria as well.
You can get into a similar state to sleep paralysis through meditation.
All those dreams I had of being chased and then not being able to run, losing all the power of my usually very strong and quick legs. It's all there to prepare me for giving up in case a real situation should arise. Thank you, science of psychology.
You seem like a rather mean-spirited character. Hopefully this year you'll learn a lesson or two about the effects of punishment.
Comment rating:
50% Interesting
30% Overrated
20% Funny
2008: the year when Slashdot ditches its "news for nerds" slogan for something more fitting, like "news for the technologically illiterate and cringeworthy trolls for the rest of us".
If you're going to compare CD with mp3, compare the original wav files to the mp3 instead of comparing your mp3 player to your CD player. As it is, you have too many variables. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an audible difference between a headphone jack and a line out, simply because they have to drive very different loads.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a pretty good book, though, and I'm not sure Blade Runner overshadows it so much because of its undeniably high quality as because of its more popular medium. Both are fairly deep pieces of art, but their underlying themes are so different that the iconic moments specific to the film wouldn't even make sense in the book.
It's good that you read Mozilla's guidelines, since by not following them, you can make Ogg Frog a lot better and faster! Now get back to work.
I don't disagree with your points re GTA, but there's another form of open-endedness to it, in that you sometimes can use the city in a more open way during the missions, choosing different paths to employ different tactics. In HL2, you're pretty much locked into a specific path: you can't go back and outflank the enemy, for instance, since the way back more often than not is blocked (a notable exception is the striders attacking the silo at the end of Episode 2). Even when you don't have much choice of where to go in GTA, you still have the feeling of some sort of freedom, since you could, potentially, explore the area when not doing the mission. So it's a greater freedom of movement, if only imaginary.
Deus Ex is a game with both more freedom and better storytelling than HL2. But in this case I do believe it makes it a worse action game. It's certainly not nearly as fast-paced, and that's probably in part because they had to make it possible to choose different tactics and different routes to solve the exact same problems. You don't get the same kind of timing of the excitement when you have the element of surprise on your own side.
The characters of GTA: Vice City and San Andreas were much, much better than the ones in Half-Life 2, perhaps in part because of the superior voice acting, but also because they had larger than life personalities. What exactly is there to Alyx? She's a boilerplate "fun" girl who likes action and dangerous things, but she doesn't express any personal ideas (well, she came up with the word 'zombine'), and she certainly doesn't properly function as a dramatic character. For that you need some sort of conflict, like with those traitorous scumbags Big Smoke and Ryder. Apart from the one with the Combines, all conflicts in HL2 are shallow and superficial, but that one suffers from being too big and too obvious to really generate interest. It's not like you ever consider going over to the Combines as a serious option, is it?
And what exactly is so great about the story? It consists mainly of going from one place to the next while shooting stuff and sometimes even solving small problems. Sometimes you get cooler toys. Hey, even a James Bond movie can do better than that.
No, what HL2 has going for it is that it's an immensely well made action game. Like a rollercoaster, it runs on rails, but like a well-made rollercoaster, it has well thought out pacing, the right intervals between challenging moments, and so on. A rollercoaster isn't supposed to tell a story, and neither is HL2. There is, perhaps, a story in there somewhere, but it's not one of the positive aspects of the game.
Free newspapers are "free" only because you're not their customer. They deliver readers to their advertisers, the articles are just there as enticement. The difference in business model certainly influences editorial choices, no matter how "independent" they claim to be: advertisement-driven papers almost universally feature articles designed to "pique your curiosity" more prominently than papers with high subscription rates do, since those more often actually try to inform.
You are a liar. OS X doesn't boot on 64 MB, and its virtual memory, while better than in OS 9, isn't very good. Certainly not nearly as good as in Linux. Also, OS X pre Panther was dead slow on any computer.
It's still far more memory-efficient than OS X or Vista, though.
Congrats on the 5, insightful.
It's mainly about DRM, you're writing about copyright. And no, your reply wasn't a reply to the first post, but you chose to ignore that part (the subject line) of my comment. What I'm getting at is that your comment is a boilerplate "insightful" comment, and that karma whoring is gay.
And is it really on topic?
There are several alternative parties already, Green and Libertarian perhaps the better known. The problem is that the whole electoral system is designed for a two party system, and since none of the parties that can change this has any interest in changing it, it won't be changed.
Allright. I checked just four web shops right before posting the comment. Half of them had Wiis, half of them would get them Monday or Tuesday.
How is this news? It's advertising, a reminder that you should buy a Wii and buy it now, since it's still readily available and presumably won't be in a couple of weeks. That is, it won't be if the hype works like planned.
I would think the risk was much higher than that: I died five times just playing the last map in Episode 2.
One would imagine Nigerian schoolchildren are taught Nigeria's official language, English.
You Apple fans are so full of shit. Here, Apple has made beta software with a timebomb that effectively renders the whole OS -- not only the software itself -- useless, and you don't only blame the customer ("the biggest problem was that the person had less than 1GB free space"), but Google?! And that's somehow worthy a +4 mod in defence of the always innocent Apple Inc.
He was off topic, raising an ad hominem. I think we all can agree much (most?) of the moderation on Slashdot sucks, especially the fact that the most inane fanboyism will end up at +5 if it's pro Apple or Ubuntu or whatever the current fashion dictates, but there's nothing worth anything in the comment above. Flamebait? Certainly. Troll? Yes. A "RIAA /m$ suxxx" comment, on the other hand, isn't flamebait, as it's hardly a controversial statement here. Redundant, overrated, off topic, but definitely not flamebait.
It's not rational. He's dismissing the views of Linux's leader just because he doesn't take a great deal of interest in whatever he himself cares about. It's about as rational as criticising a philharmonic orchestra for not playing Metallica.
It's an Apple propaganda blog. They don't report that the Zune is a failure, they try to make it so.