It isn't exactly as bad as I you think it is. Int his case, the FDA shot down this thing moving on in terms of acceptability. You actually still might get your hands on one of these devices, but you would get it as a part of a study.
I am not saying the FDA isn't slow. However, when it comes to life and death your options really open up. If you have tried all the approved treatments then generally you just move on to the 'studies' and 'trails'. In other words, you move onto the very high risk treatments if it is a choice between death or taking a chance on a product that the FDA has yet to approve.
I think you are confusing a 'pot head' with someone who occasional does drugs. All drugs, and I absolutely include alcohol as a drug, have the potential to be destructive to your life. Hell, that glowing box you are sitting in front of has had a destructive effect on more then one person. That said, you can absolutely do something recreationally on occasion without any harm to your life. Some people have a beer with dinner. Some people smoke some weed. Some people take mushrooms once a year. None of the above activities are destructive.
As to your antidotal 'evidence' that a bunch of academic losers you knew were also pot heads or drunks, you clearly need to consider going back to school yourself to take a stats class. Correlation does NOT mean causation. If correlation implied causation, then you could look at crime statistics, see the blacks have a massively disproportionate share of criminals in the US, and concluded that being black is more likely to make you a criminal. You would be stupid though because if you split it up along wealth lines, you would find that poor people, blacks included, are more likely to be driven to criminal acts. A rich black guy is just as unlikely to commit a crime as a rich white guy.
So, exploring the line of reasoning that anyone who does drugs must also be an academic failure, what you is probably more likely to find is that being an academic failure is more likely to result in excessive and open drug consumption.
If you really want to get antidotal, the most academically skilled person I have ever met was my roommate from freshmen year in college. The guy was a fucking animal. He would get blackout drunk on Friday night and merrily partake in any drugs being passed around. On Saturday night he would get mildly drunk and go out and party. Every single day of the week other then that, he would study. He graduated summa cum laude as a civil engineer.
Hell, looking back on it, in studying for my Chemical Engineering BS, all but 4 people of the 15 people in the same graduating year and degree as me merrily partook in drugs. Further, every single one of them, without exception, was known to get drunk on occasion. Further, they were all horrifically smart people. I am not sure what sheltered part of the world you come from (Utah maybe?), but for most sane and rational people, partaking in drugs and alcohol can be a fun and non-destructive activity, much like playing video games. Kick people out of college for being academic failures, not because some arbitrary law decided that some how drinking is a-okay, but marijuana, a significantly safer drug then alcohol, isn't.
Err, the reason why this entire mess exists is because artists sign up with producers. Sure, you can want to buy from the artist, but that isn't really an option if the artist already signed away his soul to a publisher. The reason why artist sign up with publishers is because they can get the equipment the artist needs and market their stuff.
So, you can certainly cut out the producer... once you figure out a way to fund the initial cost of producing an album. Don't get me wrong, I am all for cutting out the middle man, but the middle man is there for a reason. He is the guy with the money. Cut him out, and someone else needs to fund the artist.
That leaves two options that I can easily see. Either people agree to pay for the album before it exists (stupid), or the artist takes out a loan and stakes his credit line that he is going to be able to pay it back. Someone has to taken on the risk... hence why we have an RIAA in the first place. Artists don't want to take on the risk. If you have a better system, I am all ears.
If the gaming industry is even vaugly in touch with its consumer base, they are laughing their asses off as SAG attempts to dictate terms. Players really don't give a shit. Is good voice acting nice? Sure. Does rate ANYWHERE near good graphics, sound, game play, lack of bugs, content, exc exc? Hell no. If a voice actor thinks he/she is worth even one half way decent programer then said voice actor is very sadly mistaken. Voice acting rests exactly last on my criteria of things to look for in a game. Yes, I mean it, last. I can't think of anything else less important in a game.
I would rather video game makers simply higher non-union voice actors. There are plenty of young folks in or just out of college drama degrees that would be more then happy to work for a reasonable wage for a few hours worth of work. What SAG doesn't seem to realize is that unlike the movie industry, there are no other unions to threaten the gaming industry with. If the voice actors walk out (for the two days they work in a three year long project), no one else is walking with them. If a game has no union voice actors, it isn't going to be noted by anyone other then perhaps a foot note in a review stating that the game was awesome, but the voice acting was lacking. Voice actors a footnote in game, not a life or death component.
"Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG."
"Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG."
I think that is the entire point. You CAN have perma death. Armageddon MUD has no holds bar perma death and does it very well. Further, it is REAL perma death. No ressurecting, no gods, nothing. Get stabbed to death and you die. Period.
The difference between a perma death game like Armageddon MUD and WoW is night and day. The two are built upon an entirely different style of game play.
First, numbers generally trumps skill. Five complete n00bs can kill almost anyone. Even the best warriors when faced with five opponents will only be good enough to escape, but never win. It is a scaling system, so there is still advantage to getting good. So, a great warrior can take on one n00b and kill him within seconds. Two n00bs also present no problem. Three n00bs and he probably come out badly wounded but alive. Four complete n00bs vs a skilled warrior is an even match, and five tips the scales. These does a couple of things. It prevents players with way too much time on their hands from becoming immortal. It also makes even the most green newbie worth something. Just having an extra guy with a sword at your back, even if he only knows which end to hold it by, is worthwhile. This makes it so that newbies are valuable, sought after, and quickly integrated into in game organizations. This also prevents more powerful players from owning the game simply due to the amount of time they spend in game.
Second, the skill system is a level less skill system. Skill is increased by failing. Further, the rate at which you can increase your skills is capped off. You could set up a macro to do a skill all day long, but you would find that you don't advance any faster then anyone else. Play time still is going to effect how powerful you get, but much less so. Your ability to survive plays a much more important role, because once you are dead, you are dead. So, a complete newbie that avoids death for a year will be more powerful then a veteran who has played for 10 years but has just died and had to start a new character.
A side effect of such a skill system is that it encourages more sane behavior when it comes to improving upon yourself. If you decided you wanted to be a kick ass warrior, what would you do? Go out into the streets and pick fights or join the army? This skill system encourages the same sort of rational. You could wander out side of the protection of the city and go NPC farming, but you would get just as good if you join the local band of mercenaries and sparred for a few minutes every couple of hours.
Third, the game is brutally harsh. There are no n00b zones. There are in fact no 'zones' at all in the traditional sense. Places are not separated by skill levels. The desert just outside of the main city in the game has things that anyone with a rock can kill, and it has things that take a small mercenary company to take down. There is no such thing as safe place to hunt. There is further compounded by the fact that the game is open PvP. Leave the city and you put yourself at risk. Some people get good at living in the danger, but most people just die. This has the neat effect of concentrating the population into cities. The cities themselves are fully developed. Some areas are tightly controlled and any sort of unlawful activity is met with deadly force, while other areas are slums and have no (official) police protection at all. It forces people to travel in convoys and groups between cities. It actually creates a real environment for trade because it is so difficult and expensive to move between cities due to the high danger. Some people get rich off trade, others die trying.
Are you joking me? The solution to drugs is to make it so that anyone caught has their future crushed? That sounds like a great idea. I am sure the kid going into college with a 4.0 for engineering who gets caught smoking pot and ends up working at a gas station for the rest of his life will NEVER contemplate doing drugs again. I mean, after having your life ruined for something you did as a kid couldn't possibly have any negative side effects, like increased drug use.
The biggest problem with drugs is the blackmarket they create. Blackmarkets are ugly. They create crime and poverty. The solution to blackmarkets is simple, legalization. Case in point, examin prohobition laws. The violence those laws created was unprecidented. With them removed... well, when was the last time you saw someone die over a couple of Buds?
I have read dozens of posts complaining that this idea sucks, but I have yet to hear someone put out a better plan. You currently have all you can eat DRM sites, pay per download sites, and now P2P pay per download with credits for providing bandwidth. Short of declaring that piracy is legal and anyone can download whatever they want for free, what exactly is it more that you could possibly want?
I personally have just stopped paying for music. If I can't get it for free, I don't get it. I don't pirate, but I sure as hell don't pay a dollar a song or shell out $15 for a CD I may or may not like. That said, I am curious as to what it is you want out of the RIAA. They want to make money, you want as much music as possible for little or no cost. What is your comprimise?
Why do few women makes games? Because far fewer women play serious video games (Bejeweled doesn't count is serious, so put thus statistics away). I would bet that any woman with average skill can land herself a job making video games significantly faster then any man could, simply because she is a woman. The industry is already biased to trying to balance out the ratios. The problem is simply that the supply of woman who want to make games is so low to meet up with the demand.
As to the why of it, I think it is just a cultural stigma. Further, I think it is a self imposed cultural stigma. My girlfriend is the biggest fucking geek on the face of the planet. We watched DS9 from session 1 to session 7 in order together. She genuinely enjoyed it and often times was the one that was pushing me to pop another one in so that we could see how it ends. This is a woman who knows all of the characters by name and their entire back stories. Put her in front of her friends and you have to twist her arm off to get her to admit she has even watched it, much less that she enjoyed it and knows the name of every character and who they slept with. The same happens with video games. With video games it is even worse. Unless the game is cute and fluffy, she won't touch it. Yet if she thinks no one is looking though, she will wander off and play Vampire: Bloodline (which is a horribly violent RPG).
Guys have gotten over the entire geek stigma. Hell, these days being a geek for a guy is just down right cool. You can wear your math club T-shirt to a fancy club and no one will look down on you for it. Having your pockets bulging with gadgets and gizmos isn't going to make anyone think less of you. Women on the other hand have a long way to go, and my personal belief that what is holding them back isn't men. I don't think there are many guys out there who would be offended if their girl friend pressed them to play Grand Theft Auto or Halo with them.
"Honey, we desperately NEED a new computer to be able to play Half-Life 3."
"Honey... come play... when was the last time we spent some quality time we 0wn3d n00bs in World of Warcraft or went pwn1g by0tch3s in UT2004?"
Well, uh, gee, don't twist my arm.
The real issue is women dealing with other women. Women can just be fucking vicious to each other in ways that my tiny male brain just can't comprehend. If only someone could just explain to them that geek is sheik...
I recently went out and got video games for, my older sisters kid (8), my little brother (12) and my little sister (16). I ignored the ratings. Hell, I didn't even check the ratings. Why?
1) The ratings are stupid to begin with. Who decided what a "teen" game is. Who in the hell decided that "cartoon violence" is a 10+ game? Trying to set some magical age barrier up is stupid. I knew a girl who was 22 and couldn't sit through an PG-13 rated movie because her parents had so thoroughly sheltered her. My little brother on the other hand had no problems watching Blade with me and following it up by reading a dozen vampire books. Trusting a some foolish rating system to raise your kids is lazy.
2) I checked into the games myself. I didn't use the stupid rating system. I learned what each game before I bought it. Glacing at their website and hitting up a review only takes a couple of minutes. Hell, the back of the box should give you a pretty friggin good idea.
So, does the stat that most parents ignore the ESRB ratings mean anything? No. Show me a stat showing that parents are ignorant as to what they are buying and there might be some valid point in there (that point being some parents are lazy). Just showing that people ignore the worthless ESRB ratings is just stupid.
Err, yeah... I know the culture wars are coming and all, but I'll refrain from getting my gun just yet.
It is pretty easy to keep this information from starting a civil war. Just publish information on people who commit serious crimes. That 100 dollar fine you get when they caught you with a smoking the blunt in college probably does not fall under 'serious'. Unless someone gets very creative with definitions and liberals get tracked down for 'raping' the economy and Republicans get tracked down for 'murdering' the environment, I think this is one slippery slope we can safely avoid.
Now, that said, there is a real issue with this. House prices. Nothing is going to kill the value of your home quicker then if a quick glance at a map reveals that your neighbor is a convicted rapist. To me, the only pragmatic issue involved is what it does to the value of housing. I know people might scoff at the idea of worrying about housing prices, but imagine how you would feel if suddenly the price of the largest investment you will likely ever make suddenly got cut in half because some jack ass rapist moved in next door?
I guess the moral of the story is that ignorance bliss. Keeping such databases secret probably only has an extremely marginal chance on affecting your safety. Making the databases public likely has a large chance of affecting your piece of mind and economic security.
Hrm... advocating keeping information secret because the masses are too stupid to act rationally with it must be a social commentary on something.
No. If part of the punishment is to be stuffed onto a list for the rest of your life, good. Break the law and your punishment might be more complex then paying a fine or spending time in jail. I really have no problem with this.
The only thing that gives me pause is that I believe these lists are retroactive. To me, that feels an awful lot like violation of due process. Barring that one exception, if you rape someone, I have absolutely zero problem with your vile name being put on a list and everyone knowing exactly where you live. The very minor risk vigilantism seems more then worth it for your neighbor to know that a rapist is living next door. If society ostracizes you for your what you did, good. If nothing else, pragmatically you know not to let them baby sit your kids.
It could be that it was Microsofts evil plan to buy up an anti-virus company and kill their product line for *inx. Personally, I doubt it, and I imagine the DoJ does too.
What is far more likely to of happened is that Microsoft bought up the company because it needs anti-virus technology for Windows. They bought the company up and killed off the *inx product line so that company could focus exclusivly on Windows.
The real question is why did Microsoft buy this company? If they bought it to simply leave it alone and let it make money for them, then yes, dropping *inx seems sketchy. If on the otherhand they wanted the technology that company had and simply wanted them to improve Windows products (the far more likely of the two IMO), then killing off any non-Windows line of product makes perfect sense.
Personally, I would look to single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) for what you describe. The real problem we have is that the body has a nasty habit of rejecting anything that isn't made by our own body. I have a feeling that these organically made wires will be no mored loved then the old fashion kind. The issue isn't organic vs inorganic, it is whether or not the body identifies the wires as not being apart of itself. We have evolved for millions of years to whack bacteria that isn't our own, so I wouldn't but the chances high that our bodies will be terribly receptive (though I would be pleased to be wrong).
There have been some mixed signals as to weather or not nanotubes are carcinogens. The latest studies show that SWCNTs to be non-toxic and easily dealt with by the body. It isn't a green light, but it is hopeful. The real magic behind nanotubes is two fold. First, they are really small. Cells are giants compared to nanotubes. Second, nanotubes can be functionalized relatively easily, which is to say you can attach things to the surface of the nanotubes. When people talk about using nanotubes, they rarely mean those nifty little carbon chains that we all know at love. Generally, functional nanotubes have something else on the surface to specialize its purpose. For biological purposes, this means that what you see isn't necessarily what you have to work with. If these bacteria made nanowires turn out to be rejected by the human body, you are out of luck and the work stops there. With SWCNTs though, it just means you need to alter what type of molecules are hanging off of the carbon chain until you find some that the body won't attack and that don't disrupt the properties of the nanotube too bad.
Simply put... single walled carbon nanotubes are the shit, err, and the future.
Let me be more specific. I am all for division of labor. I need to eat, but someone else can grow the fucking crops.
Let me clarify the issue. Hollywood and the RIAA are shitting out entertainment products and selling them to you. When they sell these products they do so with stipulations as to how you can and can not use the products. Further, they are taking legal action to prevent people from using the products they own in ways that they have not sanctioned.
Now we come to the crux of the problem. There are people that do not want to accept the terms under which their entertainment is to be spewed at them from these entities. Fair enough, I consider myself one of them. $10 to see the newest crap fest by Hollywood actors at the theater on top of a $10 dollar charge for popcorn and soda? Hell no. $15 to get a frigging piece of shit DvD? $1 for a single 3 minute song crippled such that I can't burn it? Screw that.
Here is where the difference appears. I advocate not being such a consumer whore that this leaves you feeling indignant that you are not getting your precious entertainment in the manner that you wanted at the price you wanted. Other people bitch that they have a fucking right to the crap spewed out of Hollywood or the industrialized music industry on their terms. Why is it suddenly a right to have control over the products that another has paid for and produced? Because they are so utterly obsessed with the mass produced consumer crap that they need to invent justifications for their whining and pleading for a right to terms they like.
Jesus fucking Christ. Don't like the terms the producers are offering? Don't fucking paying them. You don't need it. You will not die if you don't get your Justin Timberlake album. Don't bitch and moan that you have a right to it under your terms. Don't complain if you get prosecuted for obtaining it through illegal means. Just don't fucking consume it. It is that easy. It isn't like this is some horrible monopoly on food held by some evil corporation. This is worthless crap you can live without. If you need it so bad that you need to invent "rights" that justify your need, just get a fucking job and pay for it if it is so important to you.
So, when I say stop being such a consumer whore, I am not advocating raising growing your own crops or building your own house out of shit. I am advocating getting your priorities in focus such that you can recognize the difference between necessities that you have a "right" to, and mass-fucking-marketed entertainment that if you don't like the terms it is being offered to you can merrily say no and suffer no negative consequences beyond not being up to date with the latest crap-tacular movie everyone else saw and is gossiping about at the coffee pot.
"I'm sure Blizzard will add more casual oriented content in the future"
I call bull shit.
If Blizzard wanted to appease casual gamers they would have made it so that BGs balanced levels. If a level 30 goes in, he gets put with similarly leveled characters, not a pile of 60's. Blizzard has done exactly zero for the casual gamer since they opened the game.
Blizzard is more then welcome to jerk off the level 60 guys all they want. Me personally? I just quit. Level 40 is as far as I could stomach mindless NPC killing. PvP is effectivly killed by the endless supply of near god like level 60's. At best, I can occasionally get my rocks off sneaking into lowbie alliance zones and killing n00bs until a level 60 gets bored and decides to hunt me down. Fun, but I need more then n00b killing to keep me happy.
The Diablo game play has gotten old and WoW has nothing original left to offer. Someone should dust off the original design document for Ultima Online, grow a pair of balls, and do it. Imagine a truly living and breathing interactive world... instead of the Massive Multiplayer Online Diablo Clones of today.
Someone wake me up when MMORPGs get out of their clone phase.
"Except that: 1. It's Hollywood's war against us, the consumers, so it matters to me"
Stop being a consumer and there will be peace on Earth. Really people. Who cares if Hollywood owns the crap they spew onto DvD or you do? Just don't buy it. Don't buy it, don't pirate it.
It is like watching two children fighting over a turd.
One kid screams, "But I am the one that shit it! It is mine! You can only have it if you give me your candy!"
The other kid screams in response, "But you are not even playing with it and have a whole pile of turd at home! I want to play with the turd now!"
Meanwhile, I am merrily playing the sandbox not really caring about the battle over shit. The joys of not consuming.
The best part is that you can sit around not consuming and be perfectly content, even if the other 6 billion idiots on the Earth are desperatly fighting over their ability to consume worthless shit they don't need. Really. Just try it for a change.
Allow me to explain a little better. When I said the US was centrist, I didn't mean that it was centrist compared to the rest of the world. What I meant is that the parties in the US tend to converge. When you take your average republican and compare him to your average democrat, the two are not radically different. Sure, they differ on some points, but neither of them are socialist by any stretch of the imagination, nor is either one an ultra right wing anti-immigration or ultra libertarian. Now, go to nearly European. The difference between the left and the right is vast. On the left you will have a party that calls themselves a communist party, or in the very least, socialist party. On the right you have ultra-nationalist parties. It isn't that Europeans are more divided then Americans (though they might, I really can't say), it is that a parliamentary system is far more encouraging of extreme parties and far more likely to give them some say in government.
Austria's Freedom Party comes to mind as a right wing party with power that is extremely far to the right, which recently gain power. Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front also comes to mind as an extreme right winger with considerable support.
I am not saying that these people and parties represent the majority in Europe. What I am saying is that they without a doubt have a voice due to the nature of a parliamentary system. When people across the ocean across talk politics, the use of 'left' and 'right' really muddies the waters. The far 'right' in America that has any sort of political voice is nothing like the far 'right' of Europe.
For a fun exercise, try and find the economic positions of the two European parties. In both cases you will be lucky to find anything that mentions taxes, liberal economics, and free trade, the bread and butter of economic policy 'right' in America. What you will find is page after page on their immigration policies, which in Le Pen's case, is to eliminate it altogether. The European right is utterly obsessed with immigration. Now, try to find the immigration policies of an American right wing congressmen. If they live on the border with Mexico you might find a blurb about it, but it won't even be comparable to the European right wing. The American right is obsessed with free trade economics, but barely pays any attention to immigration. In fact, the guest visa system Bush has proposed would send both the European left and right up the wall. The two rights share almost nothing in common other then that they are not socialist.
While left and right are easy terms to shoot off, they really ignore the full range of the political spectrum and lead to gross misunderstandings, especially when trying to translate it across the old pond. For instance, the 'far right' American Libertarians could not even sit in the same room with the 'far right' National Front of France without killing each other.
So... let me see if I understand... your argument is that a nation of immigrants that has the one of the worlds most liberal immigration policies is really made up of a nation of facist that hate immigration.
$20 dollars says you are a stupid American who can't even fathom politics outside of his own narrow little view of the world. Wake up. The rest of the world has politics that fall outside of the narrow range that America represents.
Americans also have a skewed idea of what it means to be 'right wing'. Your average 'right wing' European is for walling up the nations borders and uses near facist rhetoric when talking about cultural integrity and when speaking against immigration.
The US is a place of centrist. The European left and right and miles left and right (resepctivly) of American left and right. Paralmentary systems naturally tend to bring in people from a very large spectrum, both left and right. The American system on the other hand tends to move people into the middle. The US surely right (in terms of economics) of Europe, but don't let the fact that the American left is not that far left confuse you as to how far left they are. They both have their advantages.
Personally, I am done with WoW. WoW was never terribly innovative in my opinion. It refined the drab MMORPG equation for sure, but it was not Half-Life to replace my Doom.
I had leveled up to level 40 at my leisurely pace on a PvP server and really couldn't stand the thought of killing more NPCs or doing more increasingly mindless 'quests'. My real hope had been with battle grounds. My hopes for BGs was quickly shattered when it became abundantly clear that being a level 40 in the BGs was pointless. I personally had hoped that the BGs would try and match up levels to offer a competitive atmosphere for all.
I am sick of MMORPGs. There was so much promise originally when people started connecting thousands of people together in online worlds. I was not surprised to see the original ones were just static NPC slaying games, but I really had hoped that after nearly a decade a spark of creativity would be injected into these MMORPGs. I am not saying I want a Tail in the Desert or a Second Life. I just want am MMORPG that offers a living and breathing world, not another friggin MMODC (Massive Mutliplayer Online Diablo Clone).
This is deja-vu from the year Doom came out and was immediately followed by roughly a thousand knock offs with absolutely no creatively or thought put behind them. The only difference is that the MMORPGs that have come out are even less creative then the Doom knock offs were, and the drought did last a frigging decade. It is sad and pathetic that the original pre-release Ultima Online remains to this day BY FAR the most innovative MMORPG to date. Wake me up when someone grows the balls to make a truly grand and inspiring MMORPG.
Sure it adds something to a game. The question is, how much? For most games, the answer is not that much.
Take the game Vampires: Bloodlines. The game was solid in concept. It had three problems though. First, it was buggy beyond all comprehension. Second, it ate system for breakfast, even though the graphics were nothing to get too excited about. Third, the voice acting sucks. The game was a failure and the company went under. A few fans an ex-employees got together and patched the game up though. They optimized the game to run on decent machines and they cleared out almost all of the bugs. What was left? An awesome game with voice acting that was mediocre at best. Just a few part time programmers managed to take a game from being a piece of crap, to being something worth your money.
Now, imagine before our beloved company went under they decided that they had enough money to buy one more piece of talent. They could either grab another coder to pump another 40+ hours a week into brining the game up to spec and fixing the bugs, or they could hire a voice actor. Tough call?... no. Not really.
Is voice acting nice to have around? Sure. Is it essential in a game ripped from Hollywood like the Chronicles of Riddick? Probably. Should your average game company piss away their budget on a SAG member to deliver a few hours worth of dialog instead of hiring another programmer to pump his extra 40+ man hours a week into the game? Hell - fucking - no.
Voice acting is a luxury. If you have the money to splurge, knock yourself out. If you are struggling to meet deadlines and have a publisher on yours ass to get your game out NOW, do the gamers a favor, hire some pore theater kids who have not yet been able get into the union yet to do the voice acting, and hire another programmer or writer. Mediocre voice acting is a slight annoyance. Poor writing or a buggy game is unforgivable.
I would rather video game makers drag people in off the street and hand out the voice acting spots to desperate college kids who will work for pennies then get some 'high quality' voice acting at the expense of a couple of programmers. Of all the things I would like to see video games focus more on, voice acting is exactly last. I would pick a fiction writer to write a good story, another programmer to debug, another programmer to optimize performace, a dozen more beta testers, or a number of other things over voice actors. The thought of giving risiduals to voice actors makes me sick. I can't think of a bigger waste of money. If SAG can't get its shit together and offer a reasonable contract, I hope the gaming industry merrily points them to the picket lines where they can rot until hell freezes over and have no one care.
Good voice acting is nice, but it is hardly on my top 10 as a consumer of games. I can stomach half assed voice acting if the game is bug free and well written. I can't stomach a game with bugs and poor writing though, even if the voice acting kicks ass.
You know the industry is completely stagnent when the following are considered earth shattering 'innovations' in gameplay.
1) The ability to change your skills. 2) The bare semblance of a story. 3) PvP arenas 4) "some unique areas"
Wake me up when the MMORPG industry shows even and the faintest signs of innovation. Until then, excuse me while I completely avoid these complete drought in creativity. Remember that period after Doom and before Quake when everyone and their dog made a shitty unoriginal FPS trying to capitalize off Doom? This period is roughly a hundred times worse, but for MMORPGs instead of FPS.
It is bad... if you are the dumb sucker shelling out money for the crappy music covered in DRM. Here is a novel idea... don't buy music. Hell, don't even pirate the music. Just stop supporting the entire stupid system and watch and be amazed at how easy it is to not care about the other million dumb suckers who are still shelling out their dollars.
Mindless consumering (which is the real complaint you are making) is easy to avoid. Just don't buy into it. Will it stop the herd if you go your own way? No. Should you care? Hell no. If someone asks if you have heard the new mindless crap MTV is plugging with its half hour music spot in the day, just give them a blank glazed over stare.
There are plenty of alternatives out there. There is the Creative Commons, countless college radios on the net, and a pile of other places that offer up free music. Will you know what everyone else is talking about when they talk about the new corporate mass produce CD? No. Is that a bad thing? Only if you are into consumerism... and if you are into consumerism, what in the hell are you complaining about? That it isn't free?
I have a feeling they are not going to be sending up robots on their own. Getting stuff into space is expensive. The best way to get into space is to ask a super power (read that as the US) or a crumbling super power with left over cold war toys (Russia) to get you up there. I don't think it is unreasonable that Japan might play a role, especially in robotics.
Building a moon base is simply beyond NASA's capability. NASA will do logistics, pay for the shuttles, and provide warm bodies. I have a feeling the majority of the technology being blasted up there will be contracted from pirvate companies. In this way, I think Japan has a reasonable shot at getting in on the action. Japan's space agency might even kick up some funding, but I think the private sector is where you will really see the equipment for this little venture coming from.
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It isn't exactly as bad as I you think it is. Int his case, the FDA shot down this thing moving on in terms of acceptability. You actually still might get your hands on one of these devices, but you would get it as a part of a study.
I am not saying the FDA isn't slow. However, when it comes to life and death your options really open up. If you have tried all the approved treatments then generally you just move on to the 'studies' and 'trails'. In other words, you move onto the very high risk treatments if it is a choice between death or taking a chance on a product that the FDA has yet to approve.
I think you are confusing a 'pot head' with someone who occasional does drugs. All drugs, and I absolutely include alcohol as a drug, have the potential to be destructive to your life. Hell, that glowing box you are sitting in front of has had a destructive effect on more then one person. That said, you can absolutely do something recreationally on occasion without any harm to your life. Some people have a beer with dinner. Some people smoke some weed. Some people take mushrooms once a year. None of the above activities are destructive.
As to your antidotal 'evidence' that a bunch of academic losers you knew were also pot heads or drunks, you clearly need to consider going back to school yourself to take a stats class. Correlation does NOT mean causation. If correlation implied causation, then you could look at crime statistics, see the blacks have a massively disproportionate share of criminals in the US, and concluded that being black is more likely to make you a criminal. You would be stupid though because if you split it up along wealth lines, you would find that poor people, blacks included, are more likely to be driven to criminal acts. A rich black guy is just as unlikely to commit a crime as a rich white guy.
So, exploring the line of reasoning that anyone who does drugs must also be an academic failure, what you is probably more likely to find is that being an academic failure is more likely to result in excessive and open drug consumption.
If you really want to get antidotal, the most academically skilled person I have ever met was my roommate from freshmen year in college. The guy was a fucking animal. He would get blackout drunk on Friday night and merrily partake in any drugs being passed around. On Saturday night he would get mildly drunk and go out and party. Every single day of the week other then that, he would study. He graduated summa cum laude as a civil engineer.
Hell, looking back on it, in studying for my Chemical Engineering BS, all but 4 people of the 15 people in the same graduating year and degree as me merrily partook in drugs. Further, every single one of them, without exception, was known to get drunk on occasion. Further, they were all horrifically smart people. I am not sure what sheltered part of the world you come from (Utah maybe?), but for most sane and rational people, partaking in drugs and alcohol can be a fun and non-destructive activity, much like playing video games. Kick people out of college for being academic failures, not because some arbitrary law decided that some how drinking is a-okay, but marijuana, a significantly safer drug then alcohol, isn't.
Err, the reason why this entire mess exists is because artists sign up with producers. Sure, you can want to buy from the artist, but that isn't really an option if the artist already signed away his soul to a publisher. The reason why artist sign up with publishers is because they can get the equipment the artist needs and market their stuff.
So, you can certainly cut out the producer... once you figure out a way to fund the initial cost of producing an album. Don't get me wrong, I am all for cutting out the middle man, but the middle man is there for a reason. He is the guy with the money. Cut him out, and someone else needs to fund the artist.
That leaves two options that I can easily see. Either people agree to pay for the album before it exists (stupid), or the artist takes out a loan and stakes his credit line that he is going to be able to pay it back. Someone has to taken on the risk... hence why we have an RIAA in the first place. Artists don't want to take on the risk. If you have a better system, I am all ears.
If the gaming industry is even vaugly in touch with its consumer base, they are laughing their asses off as SAG attempts to dictate terms. Players really don't give a shit. Is good voice acting nice? Sure. Does rate ANYWHERE near good graphics, sound, game play, lack of bugs, content, exc exc? Hell no. If a voice actor thinks he/she is worth even one half way decent programer then said voice actor is very sadly mistaken. Voice acting rests exactly last on my criteria of things to look for in a game. Yes, I mean it, last. I can't think of anything else less important in a game.
I would rather video game makers simply higher non-union voice actors. There are plenty of young folks in or just out of college drama degrees that would be more then happy to work for a reasonable wage for a few hours worth of work. What SAG doesn't seem to realize is that unlike the movie industry, there are no other unions to threaten the gaming industry with. If the voice actors walk out (for the two days they work in a three year long project), no one else is walking with them. If a game has no union voice actors, it isn't going to be noted by anyone other then perhaps a foot note in a review stating that the game was awesome, but the voice acting was lacking. Voice actors a footnote in game, not a life or death component.
"Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG."
"Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG."
I think that is the entire point. You CAN have perma death. Armageddon MUD has no holds bar perma death and does it very well. Further, it is REAL perma death. No ressurecting, no gods, nothing. Get stabbed to death and you die. Period.
The difference between a perma death game like Armageddon MUD and WoW is night and day. The two are built upon an entirely different style of game play.
First, numbers generally trumps skill. Five complete n00bs can kill almost anyone. Even the best warriors when faced with five opponents will only be good enough to escape, but never win. It is a scaling system, so there is still advantage to getting good. So, a great warrior can take on one n00b and kill him within seconds. Two n00bs also present no problem. Three n00bs and he probably come out badly wounded but alive. Four complete n00bs vs a skilled warrior is an even match, and five tips the scales. These does a couple of things. It prevents players with way too much time on their hands from becoming immortal. It also makes even the most green newbie worth something. Just having an extra guy with a sword at your back, even if he only knows which end to hold it by, is worthwhile. This makes it so that newbies are valuable, sought after, and quickly integrated into in game organizations. This also prevents more powerful players from owning the game simply due to the amount of time they spend in game.
Second, the skill system is a level less skill system. Skill is increased by failing. Further, the rate at which you can increase your skills is capped off. You could set up a macro to do a skill all day long, but you would find that you don't advance any faster then anyone else. Play time still is going to effect how powerful you get, but much less so. Your ability to survive plays a much more important role, because once you are dead, you are dead. So, a complete newbie that avoids death for a year will be more powerful then a veteran who has played for 10 years but has just died and had to start a new character.
A side effect of such a skill system is that it encourages more sane behavior when it comes to improving upon yourself. If you decided you wanted to be a kick ass warrior, what would you do? Go out into the streets and pick fights or join the army? This skill system encourages the same sort of rational. You could wander out side of the protection of the city and go NPC farming, but you would get just as good if you join the local band of mercenaries and sparred for a few minutes every couple of hours.
Third, the game is brutally harsh. There are no n00b zones. There are in fact no 'zones' at all in the traditional sense. Places are not separated by skill levels. The desert just outside of the main city in the game has things that anyone with a rock can kill, and it has things that take a small mercenary company to take down. There is no such thing as safe place to hunt. There is further compounded by the fact that the game is open PvP. Leave the city and you put yourself at risk. Some people get good at living in the danger, but most people just die. This has the neat effect of concentrating the population into cities. The cities themselves are fully developed. Some areas are tightly controlled and any sort of unlawful activity is met with deadly force, while other areas are slums and have no (official) police protection at all. It forces people to travel in convoys and groups between cities. It actually creates a real environment for trade because it is so difficult and expensive to move between cities due to the high danger. Some people get rich off trade, others die trying.
I have rambled on long enough. The major poi
Are you joking me? The solution to drugs is to make it so that anyone caught has their future crushed? That sounds like a great idea. I am sure the kid going into college with a 4.0 for engineering who gets caught smoking pot and ends up working at a gas station for the rest of his life will NEVER contemplate doing drugs again. I mean, after having your life ruined for something you did as a kid couldn't possibly have any negative side effects, like increased drug use.
The biggest problem with drugs is the blackmarket they create. Blackmarkets are ugly. They create crime and poverty. The solution to blackmarkets is simple, legalization. Case in point, examin prohobition laws. The violence those laws created was unprecidented. With them removed... well, when was the last time you saw someone die over a couple of Buds?
I have read dozens of posts complaining that this idea sucks, but I have yet to hear someone put out a better plan. You currently have all you can eat DRM sites, pay per download sites, and now P2P pay per download with credits for providing bandwidth. Short of declaring that piracy is legal and anyone can download whatever they want for free, what exactly is it more that you could possibly want?
I personally have just stopped paying for music. If I can't get it for free, I don't get it. I don't pirate, but I sure as hell don't pay a dollar a song or shell out $15 for a CD I may or may not like. That said, I am curious as to what it is you want out of the RIAA. They want to make money, you want as much music as possible for little or no cost. What is your comprimise?
Why do few women makes games? Because far fewer women play serious video games (Bejeweled doesn't count is serious, so put thus statistics away). I would bet that any woman with average skill can land herself a job making video games significantly faster then any man could, simply because she is a woman. The industry is already biased to trying to balance out the ratios. The problem is simply that the supply of woman who want to make games is so low to meet up with the demand.
As to the why of it, I think it is just a cultural stigma. Further, I think it is a self imposed cultural stigma. My girlfriend is the biggest fucking geek on the face of the planet. We watched DS9 from session 1 to session 7 in order together. She genuinely enjoyed it and often times was the one that was pushing me to pop another one in so that we could see how it ends. This is a woman who knows all of the characters by name and their entire back stories. Put her in front of her friends and you have to twist her arm off to get her to admit she has even watched it, much less that she enjoyed it and knows the name of every character and who they slept with. The same happens with video games. With video games it is even worse. Unless the game is cute and fluffy, she won't touch it. Yet if she thinks no one is looking though, she will wander off and play Vampire: Bloodline (which is a horribly violent RPG).
Guys have gotten over the entire geek stigma. Hell, these days being a geek for a guy is just down right cool. You can wear your math club T-shirt to a fancy club and no one will look down on you for it. Having your pockets bulging with gadgets and gizmos isn't going to make anyone think less of you. Women on the other hand have a long way to go, and my personal belief that what is holding them back isn't men. I don't think there are many guys out there who would be offended if their girl friend pressed them to play Grand Theft Auto or Halo with them.
"Honey, we desperately NEED a new computer to be able to play Half-Life 3."
"Honey... come play... when was the last time we spent some quality time we 0wn3d n00bs in World of Warcraft or went pwn1g by0tch3s in UT2004?"
Well, uh, gee, don't twist my arm.
The real issue is women dealing with other women. Women can just be fucking vicious to each other in ways that my tiny male brain just can't comprehend. If only someone could just explain to them that geek is sheik...
I recently went out and got video games for, my older sisters kid (8), my little brother (12) and my little sister (16). I ignored the ratings. Hell, I didn't even check the ratings. Why?
1) The ratings are stupid to begin with. Who decided what a "teen" game is. Who in the hell decided that "cartoon violence" is a 10+ game? Trying to set some magical age barrier up is stupid. I knew a girl who was 22 and couldn't sit through an PG-13 rated movie because her parents had so thoroughly sheltered her. My little brother on the other hand had no problems watching Blade with me and following it up by reading a dozen vampire books. Trusting a some foolish rating system to raise your kids is lazy.
2) I checked into the games myself. I didn't use the stupid rating system. I learned what each game before I bought it. Glacing at their website and hitting up a review only takes a couple of minutes. Hell, the back of the box should give you a pretty friggin good idea.
So, does the stat that most parents ignore the ESRB ratings mean anything? No. Show me a stat showing that parents are ignorant as to what they are buying and there might be some valid point in there (that point being some parents are lazy). Just showing that people ignore the worthless ESRB ratings is just stupid.
Err, yeah... I know the culture wars are coming and all, but I'll refrain from getting my gun just yet.
It is pretty easy to keep this information from starting a civil war. Just publish information on people who commit serious crimes. That 100 dollar fine you get when they caught you with a smoking the blunt in college probably does not fall under 'serious'. Unless someone gets very creative with definitions and liberals get tracked down for 'raping' the economy and Republicans get tracked down for 'murdering' the environment, I think this is one slippery slope we can safely avoid.
Now, that said, there is a real issue with this. House prices. Nothing is going to kill the value of your home quicker then if a quick glance at a map reveals that your neighbor is a convicted rapist. To me, the only pragmatic issue involved is what it does to the value of housing. I know people might scoff at the idea of worrying about housing prices, but imagine how you would feel if suddenly the price of the largest investment you will likely ever make suddenly got cut in half because some jack ass rapist moved in next door?
I guess the moral of the story is that ignorance bliss. Keeping such databases secret probably only has an extremely marginal chance on affecting your safety. Making the databases public likely has a large chance of affecting your piece of mind and economic security.
Hrm... advocating keeping information secret because the masses are too stupid to act rationally with it must be a social commentary on something.
No. If part of the punishment is to be stuffed onto a list for the rest of your life, good. Break the law and your punishment might be more complex then paying a fine or spending time in jail. I really have no problem with this.
The only thing that gives me pause is that I believe these lists are retroactive. To me, that feels an awful lot like violation of due process. Barring that one exception, if you rape someone, I have absolutely zero problem with your vile name being put on a list and everyone knowing exactly where you live. The very minor risk vigilantism seems more then worth it for your neighbor to know that a rapist is living next door. If society ostracizes you for your what you did, good. If nothing else, pragmatically you know not to let them baby sit your kids.
It could be that it was Microsofts evil plan to buy up an anti-virus company and kill their product line for *inx. Personally, I doubt it, and I imagine the DoJ does too.
What is far more likely to of happened is that Microsoft bought up the company because it needs anti-virus technology for Windows. They bought the company up and killed off the *inx product line so that company could focus exclusivly on Windows.
The real question is why did Microsoft buy this company? If they bought it to simply leave it alone and let it make money for them, then yes, dropping *inx seems sketchy. If on the otherhand they wanted the technology that company had and simply wanted them to improve Windows products (the far more likely of the two IMO), then killing off any non-Windows line of product makes perfect sense.
Personally, I would look to single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) for what you describe. The real problem we have is that the body has a nasty habit of rejecting anything that isn't made by our own body. I have a feeling that these organically made wires will be no mored loved then the old fashion kind. The issue isn't organic vs inorganic, it is whether or not the body identifies the wires as not being apart of itself. We have evolved for millions of years to whack bacteria that isn't our own, so I wouldn't but the chances high that our bodies will be terribly receptive (though I would be pleased to be wrong).
There have been some mixed signals as to weather or not nanotubes are carcinogens.
The latest studies show that SWCNTs to be non-toxic and easily dealt with by the body. It isn't a green light, but it is hopeful. The real magic behind nanotubes is two fold. First, they are really small. Cells are giants compared to nanotubes. Second, nanotubes can be functionalized relatively easily, which is to say you can attach things to the surface of the nanotubes. When people talk about using nanotubes, they rarely mean those nifty little carbon chains that we all know at love. Generally, functional nanotubes have something else on the surface to specialize its purpose. For biological purposes, this means that what you see isn't necessarily what you have to work with. If these bacteria made nanowires turn out to be rejected by the human body, you are out of luck and the work stops there. With SWCNTs though, it just means you need to alter what type of molecules are hanging off of the carbon chain until you find some that the body won't attack and that don't disrupt the properties of the nanotube too bad.
Simply put... single walled carbon nanotubes are the shit, err, and the future.
Let me be more specific. I am all for division of labor. I need to eat, but someone else can grow the fucking crops.
Let me clarify the issue. Hollywood and the RIAA are shitting out entertainment products and selling them to you. When they sell these products they do so with stipulations as to how you can and can not use the products. Further, they are taking legal action to prevent people from using the products they own in ways that they have not sanctioned.
Now we come to the crux of the problem. There are people that do not want to accept the terms under which their entertainment is to be spewed at them from these entities. Fair enough, I consider myself one of them. $10 to see the newest crap fest by Hollywood actors at the theater on top of a $10 dollar charge for popcorn and soda? Hell no. $15 to get a frigging piece of shit DvD? $1 for a single 3 minute song crippled such that I can't burn it? Screw that.
Here is where the difference appears. I advocate not being such a consumer whore that this leaves you feeling indignant that you are not getting your precious entertainment in the manner that you wanted at the price you wanted. Other people bitch that they have a fucking right to the crap spewed out of Hollywood or the industrialized music industry on their terms. Why is it suddenly a right to have control over the products that another has paid for and produced? Because they are so utterly obsessed with the mass produced consumer crap that they need to invent justifications for their whining and pleading for a right to terms they like.
Jesus fucking Christ. Don't like the terms the producers are offering? Don't fucking paying them. You don't need it. You will not die if you don't get your Justin Timberlake album. Don't bitch and moan that you have a right to it under your terms. Don't complain if you get prosecuted for obtaining it through illegal means. Just don't fucking consume it. It is that easy. It isn't like this is some horrible monopoly on food held by some evil corporation. This is worthless crap you can live without. If you need it so bad that you need to invent "rights" that justify your need, just get a fucking job and pay for it if it is so important to you.
So, when I say stop being such a consumer whore, I am not advocating raising growing your own crops or building your own house out of shit. I am advocating getting your priorities in focus such that you can recognize the difference between necessities that you have a "right" to, and mass-fucking-marketed entertainment that if you don't like the terms it is being offered to you can merrily say no and suffer no negative consequences beyond not being up to date with the latest crap-tacular movie everyone else saw and is gossiping about at the coffee pot.
"I'm sure Blizzard will add more casual oriented content in the future"
I call bull shit.
If Blizzard wanted to appease casual gamers they would have made it so that BGs balanced levels. If a level 30 goes in, he gets put with similarly leveled characters, not a pile of 60's. Blizzard has done exactly zero for the casual gamer since they opened the game.
Blizzard is more then welcome to jerk off the level 60 guys all they want. Me personally? I just quit. Level 40 is as far as I could stomach mindless NPC killing. PvP is effectivly killed by the endless supply of near god like level 60's. At best, I can occasionally get my rocks off sneaking into lowbie alliance zones and killing n00bs until a level 60 gets bored and decides to hunt me down. Fun, but I need more then n00b killing to keep me happy.
The Diablo game play has gotten old and WoW has nothing original left to offer. Someone should dust off the original design document for Ultima Online, grow a pair of balls, and do it. Imagine a truly living and breathing interactive world... instead of the Massive Multiplayer Online Diablo Clones of today.
Someone wake me up when MMORPGs get out of their clone phase.
"Except that: 1. It's Hollywood's war against us, the consumers, so it matters to me"
Stop being a consumer and there will be peace on Earth. Really people. Who cares if Hollywood owns the crap they spew onto DvD or you do? Just don't buy it. Don't buy it, don't pirate it.
It is like watching two children fighting over a turd.
One kid screams, "But I am the one that shit it! It is mine! You can only have it if you give me your candy!"
The other kid screams in response, "But you are not even playing with it and have a whole pile of turd at home! I want to play with the turd now!"
Meanwhile, I am merrily playing the sandbox not really caring about the battle over shit. The joys of not consuming.
The best part is that you can sit around not consuming and be perfectly content, even if the other 6 billion idiots on the Earth are desperatly fighting over their ability to consume worthless shit they don't need. Really. Just try it for a change.
Allow me to explain a little better. When I said the US was centrist, I didn't mean that it was centrist compared to the rest of the world. What I meant is that the parties in the US tend to converge. When you take your average republican and compare him to your average democrat, the two are not radically different. Sure, they differ on some points, but neither of them are socialist by any stretch of the imagination, nor is either one an ultra right wing anti-immigration or ultra libertarian. Now, go to nearly European. The difference between the left and the right is vast. On the left you will have a party that calls themselves a communist party, or in the very least, socialist party. On the right you have ultra-nationalist parties. It isn't that Europeans are more divided then Americans (though they might, I really can't say), it is that a parliamentary system is far more encouraging of extreme parties and far more likely to give them some say in government.
Austria's Freedom Party comes to mind as a right wing party with power that is extremely far to the right, which recently gain power. Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front also comes to mind as an extreme right winger with considerable support.
I am not saying that these people and parties represent the majority in Europe. What I am saying is that they without a doubt have a voice due to the nature of a parliamentary system. When people across the ocean across talk politics, the use of 'left' and 'right' really muddies the waters. The far 'right' in America that has any sort of political voice is nothing like the far 'right' of Europe.
For a fun exercise, try and find the economic positions of the two European parties. In both cases you will be lucky to find anything that mentions taxes, liberal economics, and free trade, the bread and butter of economic policy 'right' in America. What you will find is page after page on their immigration policies, which in Le Pen's case, is to eliminate it altogether. The European right is utterly obsessed with immigration. Now, try to find the immigration policies of an American right wing congressmen. If they live on the border with Mexico you might find a blurb about it, but it won't even be comparable to the European right wing. The American right is obsessed with free trade economics, but barely pays any attention to immigration. In fact, the guest visa system Bush has proposed would send both the European left and right up the wall. The two rights share almost nothing in common other then that they are not socialist.
While left and right are easy terms to shoot off, they really ignore the full range of the political spectrum and lead to gross misunderstandings, especially when trying to translate it across the old pond. For instance, the 'far right' American Libertarians could not even sit in the same room with the 'far right' National Front of France without killing each other.
So... let me see if I understand... your argument is that a nation of immigrants that has the one of the worlds most liberal immigration policies is really made up of a nation of facist that hate immigration.
$20 dollars says you are a stupid American who can't even fathom politics outside of his own narrow little view of the world. Wake up. The rest of the world has politics that fall outside of the narrow range that America represents.
Americans also have a skewed idea of what it means to be 'right wing'. Your average 'right wing' European is for walling up the nations borders and uses near facist rhetoric when talking about cultural integrity and when speaking against immigration.
The US is a place of centrist. The European left and right and miles left and right (resepctivly) of American left and right. Paralmentary systems naturally tend to bring in people from a very large spectrum, both left and right. The American system on the other hand tends to move people into the middle. The US surely right (in terms of economics) of Europe, but don't let the fact that the American left is not that far left confuse you as to how far left they are. They both have their advantages.
Personally, I am done with WoW. WoW was never terribly innovative in my opinion. It refined the drab MMORPG equation for sure, but it was not Half-Life to replace my Doom.
I had leveled up to level 40 at my leisurely pace on a PvP server and really couldn't stand the thought of killing more NPCs or doing more increasingly mindless 'quests'. My real hope had been with battle grounds. My hopes for BGs was quickly shattered when it became abundantly clear that being a level 40 in the BGs was pointless. I personally had hoped that the BGs would try and match up levels to offer a competitive atmosphere for all.
I am sick of MMORPGs. There was so much promise originally when people started connecting thousands of people together in online worlds. I was not surprised to see the original ones were just static NPC slaying games, but I really had hoped that after nearly a decade a spark of creativity would be injected into these MMORPGs. I am not saying I want a Tail in the Desert or a Second Life. I just want am MMORPG that offers a living and breathing world, not another friggin MMODC (Massive Mutliplayer Online Diablo Clone).
This is deja-vu from the year Doom came out and was immediately followed by roughly a thousand knock offs with absolutely no creatively or thought put behind them. The only difference is that the MMORPGs that have come out are even less creative then the Doom knock offs were, and the drought did last a frigging decade. It is sad and pathetic that the original pre-release Ultima Online remains to this day BY FAR the most innovative MMORPG to date. Wake me up when someone grows the balls to make a truly grand and inspiring MMORPG.
Sure it adds something to a game. The question is, how much? For most games, the answer is not that much.
Take the game Vampires: Bloodlines. The game was solid in concept. It had three problems though. First, it was buggy beyond all comprehension. Second, it ate system for breakfast, even though the graphics were nothing to get too excited about. Third, the voice acting sucks. The game was a failure and the company went under. A few fans an ex-employees got together and patched the game up though. They optimized the game to run on decent machines and they cleared out almost all of the bugs. What was left? An awesome game with voice acting that was mediocre at best. Just a few part time programmers managed to take a game from being a piece of crap, to being something worth your money.
Now, imagine before our beloved company went under they decided that they had enough money to buy one more piece of talent. They could either grab another coder to pump another 40+ hours a week into brining the game up to spec and fixing the bugs, or they could hire a voice actor. Tough call?... no. Not really.
Is voice acting nice to have around? Sure. Is it essential in a game ripped from Hollywood like the Chronicles of Riddick? Probably. Should your average game company piss away their budget on a SAG member to deliver a few hours worth of dialog instead of hiring another programmer to pump his extra 40+ man hours a week into the game? Hell - fucking - no.
Voice acting is a luxury. If you have the money to splurge, knock yourself out. If you are struggling to meet deadlines and have a publisher on yours ass to get your game out NOW, do the gamers a favor, hire some pore theater kids who have not yet been able get into the union yet to do the voice acting, and hire another programmer or writer. Mediocre voice acting is a slight annoyance. Poor writing or a buggy game is unforgivable.
I would rather video game makers drag people in off the street and hand out the voice acting spots to desperate college kids who will work for pennies then get some 'high quality' voice acting at the expense of a couple of programmers. Of all the things I would like to see video games focus more on, voice acting is exactly last. I would pick a fiction writer to write a good story, another programmer to debug, another programmer to optimize performace, a dozen more beta testers, or a number of other things over voice actors. The thought of giving risiduals to voice actors makes me sick. I can't think of a bigger waste of money. If SAG can't get its shit together and offer a reasonable contract, I hope the gaming industry merrily points them to the picket lines where they can rot until hell freezes over and have no one care.
Good voice acting is nice, but it is hardly on my top 10 as a consumer of games. I can stomach half assed voice acting if the game is bug free and well written. I can't stomach a game with bugs and poor writing though, even if the voice acting kicks ass.
You know the industry is completely stagnent when the following are considered earth shattering 'innovations' in gameplay.
1) The ability to change your skills.
2) The bare semblance of a story.
3) PvP arenas
4) "some unique areas"
Wake me up when the MMORPG industry shows even and the faintest signs of innovation. Until then, excuse me while I completely avoid these complete drought in creativity. Remember that period after Doom and before Quake when everyone and their dog made a shitty unoriginal FPS trying to capitalize off Doom? This period is roughly a hundred times worse, but for MMORPGs instead of FPS.
It is bad... if you are the dumb sucker shelling out money for the crappy music covered in DRM. Here is a novel idea... don't buy music. Hell, don't even pirate the music. Just stop supporting the entire stupid system and watch and be amazed at how easy it is to not care about the other million dumb suckers who are still shelling out their dollars.
Mindless consumering (which is the real complaint you are making) is easy to avoid. Just don't buy into it. Will it stop the herd if you go your own way? No. Should you care? Hell no. If someone asks if you have heard the new mindless crap MTV is plugging with its half hour music spot in the day, just give them a blank glazed over stare.
There are plenty of alternatives out there. There is the Creative Commons, countless college radios on the net, and a pile of other places that offer up free music. Will you know what everyone else is talking about when they talk about the new corporate mass produce CD? No. Is that a bad thing? Only if you are into consumerism... and if you are into consumerism, what in the hell are you complaining about? That it isn't free?
I have a feeling they are not going to be sending up robots on their own. Getting stuff into space is expensive. The best way to get into space is to ask a super power (read that as the US) or a crumbling super power with left over cold war toys (Russia) to get you up there. I don't think it is unreasonable that Japan might play a role, especially in robotics.
Building a moon base is simply beyond NASA's capability. NASA will do logistics, pay for the shuttles, and provide warm bodies. I have a feeling the majority of the technology being blasted up there will be contracted from pirvate companies. In this way, I think Japan has a reasonable shot at getting in on the action. Japan's space agency might even kick up some funding, but I think the private sector is where you will really see the equipment for this little venture coming from.