I think the point of the post was that the US gets shit on no matter what it does. If you are going to get shit, you should at least stop inflicting harm on yourself. If anyone recalls, the attempt to feed Somalia turned into a cluster fuck with a pile of dead Americans and a waste of money. It is pretty damned hard to feed people while they are shooting at you.
Some days I think the parent has it right. Fuck the rest of the world. Pull out of all aid programs, stop using the US military to feed people, and for the love of fucking god, if a dictator wants to kill his own damned people, let him. Christ, we whacked Saddam and suddenly we are the bad guys for violating his sovereign right to commit genocide against his own people.
Everyone bitches that we are not doing enough in Sudan, but the second we try and push a resolution through to meekly threaten then to stop raping their own people, France threatens a veto until the watered down crap that we sent out last week is all that is left.
Maybe it would be better just to take the money spread out across the rest of the world, flip the bird to South Korea, Taiwan, and any other country that has US protection, and let them deal with their own affairs. Then pull out of the UN, stop funding them, stop adding troops to NATO, tell Afghanistan to work out their own shit, tell Iraq to fuck it and let them deal with their own damned insurgents, and make it clear to Israel, Palestine, and everyone else involved that we just don't give a fuck any more who wins. Then, just to seal the deal, after we have cut off our welfare check to the rest of the world, then go ahead cut the American military down until it is just big enough to keep Canada from getting any funny ideas.
Could you even begin to imagine how much money and lives that would save? Flying to the moon? Fuck the moon. We could go to Pluto.
Pointing out that the US is not always the shit is a no brainer. Super powers tend to fuck up because they are run by humans. Until we get rid of pesky humans, you can expect the US (and all other nations for that matter) to fuck it up and do bad things. Because the US is that last remaining super power, you can expect that when the US fucks up, it fucks up big.
All of that said, the world is better off because of the existence of the US. People accuse Americans of having a short memory, but that seems to be a human condition, not just an American condition.
If you recall 60 or so years ago there was World War II. Now it can be easily argued that the US stirred the pot for that war in its own way, though, if you are talking about Germany (Japan being a much different story), you can place the blame pretty squarely on Europe, and give the US credit for trying to prevent World War II. The US was one of the few countries not to demand 'reparation' payments from Germany over World War I, and in fact the US even made an attempt to pay off some of Germany's debt. A large hunk of the rest of the world did not take this approach and led Germany to complete and utter economic ruin, giving rise to fascism.
We could talk a long time about World War II, but I think it can be summed up by saying that Russia would have fallen without a second front, and the second front would not have existed unless the US hadn't pumped resources to those brave Brits and eventually joined the fight themselves.
On to the an interesting piece of history, the Cold War. First, the US saved West Berlin. Without the massive airlift effort in the face of the Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin would have had the option of starving to death or surrendering to the Soviets. Zooming back a little further, it should be realized that the US spent the entire Cold War acting in the defense of democracy. It is naïve to think that the rest of Europe could have held back the Soviet Union on its own. Hell, half of Europe was already taken, and you can be certain they at least wanted the rest of Germany.
The US spent countless trillions of dollars fighting the Soviet Union on every front. I don't think people understand what a large fraction of the US productivity and wealth was sacrificed in the Cold War simply to hold the Soviet Union back. That doesn't even begin to touch on the thousands of lives that were given up in places like Korea and Vietnam to fight them directly with guns and bullets. The world IS a better place because South Korea is not the festering pit of despair that North Korea is. The world IS a better place because West German remained free of Soviet oppression.
The US fought the Soviets with a level of fanaticism that makes your average terrorist look mild mannered. The US had a finger leveled over the button to wipe out both the USSR and the US if it came down to that. The US was fully prepared to wipe itself out if that was the only way to hold the Soviets back. During the Cuban missile crisis, many Americans expected the end of the world. That moment where Kennedy brought the US to near nuclear oblivion over a stupid symbolic stand against the Soviets is revered in American history and made Kennedy a hero. Threatening to utterly wipe out the Soviet Union, and thus commit to having the Soviet Union wipe out the US is one of the prouder moments in American history.
Love or hate it, the US has been fanatical for democracy and freedom since World War II. They have been fanatical enough to wipe themselves off the face of the earth in nuclear oblivion if it meant protecting the rest of the world from the Soviet Union. In that fanaticism more then a few horrible mistakes were made. The US has help more then its fair share of lesser evils to keep the greater evil at bay. Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden come to mind as people the US backed simply because they looked to be the lesser of two evils at the time. To say the US has never made a mistake would be silly. The
...that would rather make less money and piss you off rather then make more money, or at least that is what the claim is being made.
Look, I don't like copywriter laws the way they are written. I fucking hate the way music is distributed. I make liberal use of P2Ps. That said, dumb shit like this is counter productive propaganda. If you want to win a point, you need to throw the lies out the window, even the ones that serve your purpose. If the RIAA thought for a second they were making money off P2Ps, they wouldn't be trying so hard to stop them. Even if it was making money off P2Ps, you would need an actual credible study to come out before they would bother to take notice. Right now there is no credible agreement that P2Ps are doing anything but harm to the RIAA. Like I said, the fact that RIAA is getting harmed doesn't cause me to stay awake at night, but we need to be honest with ourselves.
Stuff like this makes my blood boil. We need to be mature enough to address the opposition's points honestly and fairly. This is neither honest nor fair. It is a worthless database with no value at best and pure propaganda at worst. Propaganda that you agree with is still propaganda. I might want Bush out of office, but I still felt physically ill after watching Fahrenheit 9/11 because it was such a blatant piece of pure, unadulterated, one sided, vile propaganda that used every single trick in the propaganda book, and worse still, people at that shit up like it was a war rally from the book 1982 just because they agreed with the message. Yeah, that's irony.
People are too obsessed with 'winning' their point. Argue your damned point, but be honest with yourself and those you agree and disagree with. If you need to employ dishonest tactics to win, you need to reexamine your core beliefs and why exactly it is you feel so strongly. P2P, politics, everything needs to be looked at with a level head. So, want to argue for P2P? Great, I am with you. Just be honest about it and realize that there are gaping holes in both sides of the argument. The holes should be plugged with honest discourse and creative solutions, not propaganda with absolutely zero statistical meaning like this database.
In that regard I do agree with you, but the problem isn't RFID. The problem is the government's willingness to abuse it. There is nothing wrong the technology. The technology has the potential to make everyone's lives easier and save a few bucks. It would rock beyond words just to swipe my debit card and walk out of a store with a shopping cart full of shit. The efficiency gains could be potentially massive if you consider how much merchandise gets lost this day and age simply because it is hard to always keep an eye on it.
The core of the problem is with the government. RFID is just one technology the government has the ability to use. We could stop RFID and alls it would mean is that the next year a new technology would be developed that could be abused. You can't stop technological progression. Hell, you don't want to stop technological progression. We as humans don't live a sustainable life style. We have two choices, go forward or go back. I don't know about you, but I won't go back. I am alive because modern technology and medicine keeps me alive. The only choice then is to barrel on forward and try and fix the mistakes we are going to make. Realizing that we couldn't stop technological progression without dismantling our civilization and pissing off/kill a lot of people in the process, we need to work to make a government that is more able to handle the exponentially increasing powers that technology is going to empower it with.
So, I think the best solution is to take off the tin foil hats and work at reforming the very nature of our democracy such that it won't trample on our liberties.
Are those possibilies the same possibilities involved with the camera that TRACKS WHERE YOU GO whenever you go to the gas station? If just being at a gas station next to a terrorist hide out makes you guilty, you better hope they don't look at the camera at the gas station or your credit card purchases.
And how exactly do you envision this trial being conducted?
"Your honor, this man is clearly guilty. He went to a gas station near a terrorist hide out."
Time to take the tinfoil hat off. The reason why merchants are slavering over RFID is not because they are stroking their evil beards while thinking up ways to trick you into the matrix vats. The biggest reason why RFID is exciting is because it means they can inventory a shelf just by having a guy sweep a scanner across it in a matter of seconds. Hell, they could inventory an entire warehouse in a matter of seconds. They are excited because you can go to the checkout line, swipe your credit card and grab your recipe on the way out without ever having to glance at a human.
Now, could RFID be used to track your movements? Potentially, but so could a camera with facial recognition. RFID chips could simply be implanted with the ability to deactivate once the transaction is complete.
Even taking the worst case scenario, all the evil corporations collaborate to track what you buy and where you go, what do you think they are going to do with that data, send in a corporate death squad to off you? At worst, they are going to take all that data, shove it into a computer, decide what it is you seem to be inclined to buy, and try and sell you stuff some computer algorithm thinks you are likely to want. Annoying if it results in more spam in your mail box? Sure. The end of liberty? Hardly.
Honestly, corporations worry me the least. When I deal with a corporation, it is generally a voluntary transaction. Abercrombie can't put a gun to my head and force me to pay double the price to buy a shirt with their ugly corporate logo smeared across it. If I am dumb enough to buy it, well, I was dumb enough to buy it. If anything gives me pause, it is the government. If I tell the government I don't feel like paying for social security this year because I would rather invest that money myself, they CAN point a gun to my head and tell me that I am mistaken and I in fact DO want to buy social security this year.
At the risk of a troll, conspiracy theories aside, I would say the US is anything but an apathetic nation. Perhaps you could point the Europe as being apathetic these days, but the US seems very much hell bent on changing the world. Forget whether it is changing for better or for worse. I would say in the past 60 years the US touched just about everything in this world, and done it with a great passion. The Cuban missile crisis was the US stating pretty clearly that they care enough to risk a nuclear war. In fact, the entire cold war was a pretty strong declaration of a lack of apathy. Two nations sitting with their finger hovering over the button to end it all and utterly dead serious about pressing it is not a sign of apathy. The cold war was no bluff. The US would have sent everything and anything to defend Europe if the USSR ever game, and the US cared enough that it was more then willing to wipe everyone and everything out to make sure the communist couldn't have it if they had to.
In this day in age the US is still very much not an apathetic player in the game. Conspiracy theories of corporate overlords and Saudi families aside, the US seems pretty hell bent on making Iraq a democracy regardless of the pain either side has to suffer. The strategy might be stupid and counter productive, but it certainly is not apathetic. If WMDs were the issue the US could have just wiped Iraq's government and military off the face of the earth and left the people of Iraq to fight over a new government that might or might not have democratic ideals. Instead though, the US is slugging through, pissing off the rest of the world, restraining from using its full might to gain control of the situation, and taking their licks. Further, the US isn't showing any signs of backing off from the rest of the world.
Even if you look beyond the Middle East, lack of apathy is easy to see. The US has set up shop off the cost of Taiwan with every intention of fighting one of the most powerful nations in the world to defend a tiny island thousands of miles away and sitting on the enemy's doorstep. Risking a war with China for a little island where democracy seems to have taken hold might be a sign of madness, but not apathy.
I don't care if you agree with what the US is doing; though I am sure an idiot is going to reply anyways telling me the US is evil and in doing so utterly miss my point. What the US isn't doing is being apathetic or complacent. The US might be sowing the seeds of its own demise, but it is digging its own grave with great enthusiasm, and not slowing rotting with apathy or complacency. With the track the US is headed down right now, if the US goes down, it is going down with a bang, not a whimper.
As much I absolutely hate to bring up the new SW movies, Clone Wars did show a great many scenes of how you slip to the dark side without being insane and stupid.
Namely, the two points that stuck out in my mind was Anakin's desire to love that annoying princess wench and his destruction of the Tuskin raiders camp. The raider camp is straightforward. His mother died and he wanted revenge, rightfully so. In the case of the wench, he selfishly wanted to experience love, and placed this desire over the greater good. A Jedi is supposed to put the greater good above himself, and he can't possibly do that if he is being lead by his passions.
I personally think they could make a more complex and interesting game if they took this idea and ran with it in KOTOR2. Let the love of someone be what leads to the dark side. Make it an actual struggle to avoid the dark side by making the decision and actual struggle.
In KOTOR I never felt like it was a challenge to avoid the dark side. Just be a generally okay guy, don't randomly murder people, and the dark side is easily enough avoided. The light side always lead to the most satisfying and happy ending. Whenever I picked a dark side decision I felt like an ass because the dark side decision was generally you just being malicious for the sake of being malicious. There was never anything satisfying about it and there was never any temptation to fall into the dark side. Playing the game purely on feeling left you easily running to the light side and feeling good about it.
Now, if they had instead toyed with the idea of putting love over the greater good leading to the dark side, it could have been a far more interesting game. Perhaps Bastille could have been killed by the Jedi in order to prevent her from using her Battle Meditation against them when she got turned to the dark side. Now you are faced with wanting revenge against the Jedi. For the fun of it, make it so that the Star Forge can revive her. NOW you have a real incentive to go to the dark side. Choose the light side and accept the death of your love and stop the Star Forge, or in a fit of rage take the Star Forge for yourself, revive Bastille, and wreak revenge against the Jedi for destroying your love. Now you have an interesting game and interesting decision to make between dark and light.
The choice between Dark and Light is between the greater good and the personal good. Instead of making the 'personal good temptation' a stupid thing you don't really care about, like a few extra credits for mugging a guy, make it a real choice. Make the gamer choose between what is most satisfying to appease his emotions, or to do the right thing for the greater good. Wiping out the Jedi just because you like power isn't a satisfying dark side ending. Wiping out the Jedi in a fit of rage and furry because they decided to sacrifice something you love to preserve what they thought was the greater good is satisfying. Bonus points if the sacrifice the Jedi made ends up having no positive effect of consequence. I know it goes against all attempts to 'teach' a moral in these games, but you will know that you have done the Dark Side justice when you complete the game on the dark side and feel satisfied with the ending.
Regulation absolutely does equal censorship. If government controls dictate that certain types of programming can't be on until after 9 P.M. that IS censorship. If the FCC fines NBC (or whoever) because someone flops a boob around on TV, that IS censorship. Yes, even a mandated rating system is censorship is because it means that you can't show something unless you jump through a certain hoop. If you are not allowed to show something unless the government reviews it first, that, my friend, is without a doubt censorship. You can not 'regulate' speech without censoring.
As to your kids, take some fucking control or don't complain. I am sorry you don't want to be a 'control freak' but the minor inconvenience of knowing what your kids are watching and/or setting up some parental locks is worth censorship of the rest of the population can see. I honestly don't give a damn about your kids and am at a loss as to why you think it makes any sort of sense that the rest of the population should have to endure censorship of what they can view because you don't want your kids to think you are a mean Daddy/Mommy.
I find abhorrent that people think it is okay to use the force of the government to get around being 'control freaks' with their children. This same stupid line of reasoning would dictate that the Internet needs to be controlled by the government because your kids might run into a porn site and you don't want to be a 'control freak' that uses a filter on your computer. Hell, this line of reasoning says that people shouldn't be allowed to swear in public or talk about sex on the streets because your kid might overhear it, and you really don't want to have to be a 'control freak' and always be with your kids to protect them from such vile behavior.
Parents need to take responsibility for themselves and their damned kids. Don't want your kids to see violence or sex on TV? Lock out all channels but PBS and Discovery (although, be careful, god forbid they learn about science of sex through the Discovery channel). Any modern TV can do this simply and easily. Still paranoid PBS might do a special on sexual reproduction or violence, throw away the damn TV. Whatever the case, I, an adult without kids, shouldn't have to suffer because you are manically trying to protect your kids from depictions of sex and violence, yet are too lazy to put in the effort to shield your kids from the fact that violence exists and most adults not only have sex, but have it often.
If you want to shove puritan values down your kids throats yet are too lazy to actually put in the effort to do it, do everyone a favor and don't breed.
I actually found light side to be sickenly over powered if you went the guardian rout. My guardian smuggler could have easily beaten the entire game by himself without breaking a sweat, but I know that my dark side guy was in pain for that last level. Few things are more badass then a speed/forcejump with full buffs. Most things died first round.
As to your point about dark/light, I agree completely. Often times in KOTOR I would have to make a decision. Then sensible thing to do is the light side option. The stupid things to do is the dark side option. The light side offers the greatest reward, while the dark side offers and equal or lesser reward. I found it more then a little annoying that I would have to be a jack ass to be on the dark side.
So, let's consider one of the earliest situations you run into in KOTOR. You find an alien getting kicked around by some Sith troopers. The Sith troopers see you, attack, and of course die. You talk to the alien. You can either rough up and kill the alien for no reason, mug him, or be nice. The two jack ass things to do would be to kill or mug the guy. Killing or mugging the guy nets you a few credits and is all around a worthless action. Why draw attention to yourself by killing or mugging a some poor bastard? That isn't the dark side thing to do; that is the stupid thing to do. The smart thing to do is to be friendly to the guy you saved and pump him for information that might help you in your mission to get off the alien world you know nothing about. What I would propose is that you keep the option to kill/mug him for the truly insane people out there, but also include the ability be friendly in a 'dark side' way. Namely, be friendly not because you are a nice guy, but because you know he is in debt to you and you can probably get some quality information if you just crack a little smile for thirty seconds.
This same sort of dilemma presents itself all over the game. The sensible thing to do is the light side option, while the stupid thing to do is the dark side option. The game ignores that you might do something 'nice' for purely selfish reasons.
Another thing that would improve dark/light decisions would be to make it so that the light side choice doesn't always resolve itself nicely, and have the dark side choice some times resolve better then the light side choice. So, a hypothetical example might be that you are tasked with stopping a terrorist from blowing up the shipping yard (for whatever reasons). The dark side option is to simply confront the terrorist before he attacks and kill him, thus completing the mission and saving the shipping yard. The light side option is to talk the terrorist out of it, believe that you have succeeded, but have the shipyard blow up anyways because the terrorist was just bluffing because he knew he couldn't beat you in a fight. The dark side decision in this case is the one that has the fewest consequences, while the light side decision makes you feel like a jack ass for letting the guy go. In this case the dark side decision saves the ship yard, gets revered by whoever sent them to do the task, and saves a pile of lives. The light side decision results in the deaths of innocent lives, no reward, and some people pissed that you didn't stop the terrorist when you had the chance.
Basically, I am saying that you should be able to play the dark side without playing like you are some stupid and crazy maniac who would rather burn an orphanage and rape the charred bodies rather then complete a vital mission.
I say take care of your own damned kids and leave me alone. I am an adult, I don't want a fucking V-chip in my TV and I don't want the FCC to decide what program I can and can not watch. The networks are already squeamish enough about what they show, I don't need the FCC to kill entirely kill any hope for a TV show being gritty.
One reason why I love HBO is because they flip the bird to censorship and guess what? Every single year they rake in the awards for their programming. Censorship kills intelligent programming. Why the hell can't the government get the fuck out of my TV, out of my house, and stop punishing me because some parent is too fucking stupid to take care of their own kid?
Is your kid a little shit who likes to watch bad things behind your back and you are unable to control the little brat? Here is a solution, throw out your fucking TV or lock it in your room. I am so fucking pissed at how much I have to pay for other people's stupidity these days. I can't fucking smoke pot, can't watch violent/sexual TV, my fucking city closes at 2 am (hurray Boston curfew laws!), the rave seen as all been shut down in my area, I can't buy liquor at a bar past 1 am (another hurray for Boston's blue light laws!), violent video games are on the decline because Lieberman takes every chance he can get to threaten the industry, I can't gamble, and I can't even find an all night dinner (one more cheer for Boston curfew laws!) all because somewhere someone out there is too fucking stupid to handle these 'major' responsibilities. I am pissed and I am sick of seeing my liberties being slowly sucked away because some dumbass out there needs the government to protect themselves from themselves or watch their fucking kids.
So let me state it clearly. If you can't take care of yourself or your kids, please do me a favor and go fuck yourself. Don't beg the government to save you from your own incompetence at life. Go move to a nation that gets off on baby sitting its citizens or just purge your worthless genes from the pool. If you can take care of yourself, but really want to help other people take care of themselves, for fucks sake, stop being such a whiny little hypocritical bitch, get off your ass, and go help. Don't beg the government to do the work you want done for you. Want to keep kids from watching violent TV? Get off your fucking ass, make the rounds in your neighborhood and tell parents how to raise their kids. Someone might even listen to. Hell, offer to baby sit the little shits 24/7 and make sure the job gets done right. Just stay the fuck away from me.
Honestly, if we start flinging rockets to mars or asteroids I'll sign up and be the first guy to start a new world. Maybe then in my pressurized habitat in the middle of a barren wasteland I can enjoy some nice violent and sexual explicitly TV in peace.
I don't see why you are weary of eliminating levels all together. I personally think that is a dead on solution. Just replace levels with various player skill based activities. The most obvious way would be to make combat more like a FPS and crafting more like a puzzle (like puzzle pirates), but that certainly is not the only solution.
If you want to keep skills, you could make it so that everyone has the same number of skill points to spend on whatever they want within race/class/whatever restriction. Of course, if you go that rout you actually have to make combat fun because there is no longer a skill/exp reward for it.
Another solution would be to create more tactical game play. If anyone played the Wheel of Time FPS back in the day multiplayer, that was a perfect example of very tactical combat. There was very little twitch to it. Often times two mages would just basically stand still and launch various attacks and defenses. There was a great deal of tactical skill to it. MMORPGs could take this more tactical approach - which means that they would have to get off their asses and make combat complex and balanced.
Whatever the case, I think that there a LOT of options that all MMORPG makers seem to be afraid to try. Instead they all look roughly the same in terms of combat with only different window dressing. I am not terribly worried though. A few more MMORPGs are going to get shoved out the door and either fail or meet a luke warm reception. At some point a developer will get a clue and try and change the formula. If anything, the MMORPGs today remind me a lot of the days just after Doom was released. There were a horde of Doom clones that took the Doom formula and a couple more features, changed the window dressing. There were many Doom clone failures until Quake fundamentally changed the way we though about mods and multiplayer, and before Counter Strike blew us away by changing the death match formula.
Someone is going to grow some balls and try something new, and they are going to be remembered as the Quake, Half-Life, or Counter Strike of MMORPGs - oh, almost forgot, they are also going to make a wad of cash in the process.
PlanetSide did do it - kinda. The problem with PlanetSide is that it ignores the MMORPG element almost all together. It is not much different then a big version of tribes. Just because the meat of a game is based around skill instead of the old time = power equation doesn't mean that you have to cut out all role playing elements like PlanetSide does. Things like houses, clothing, an economy, and in general the entire social scene of an MMORPG do not need to be cut in order to make the game player skill based and attractive to a casual gamer. PlanetSide doesn't have much more of a social scene then any other FPS. People might bullshit during a fight, but really there is little beyond that. The appeal of an MMORPG is a vast world to play AND socialize in. I am not putting down PlanetSide, but it isn't a new breed of MMORPG, just a sophisticated large scale FPS.
I personally find the utter lack of imagination in MMORPG developers to be disappointing. They tout features that are just refinements on a bad formula. World of WarCraft is not going to be any sort of holy grail. It is going to be the same old MMORPG done in the refined manner that Blizzard is famous for. Certainly it will be a great MMORPG compared to the rest, but they are not changing the formula. It is still a game where your character's skill means the most, and your character's skill is based purely on the time you can throw at the game.
I foresee an MMORPG some time in the next five years that is going to break all the rules. Alls it takes is a gutsy developer and some designers who can convince the money men that the casual gamer is the target. They are going to build a world based upon player skill, and it is going to be big. Imagine if you will a world with the size and exploration potentials of any current MMORPG, along with solid role playing and socializing features that we expect in an MMORPG, but with a combat system like that of a FPS. Such a game would be big. It would attract those into FPS, those who like the socialization aspects of MMORPGs, and those who can only play a limited amount each day. Hell, you might even bring in the people who like to play the Sims if you make your socialization features robust enough. The only people getting the shaft in such a system are the people who blow 10 hours a day on a computer game to be the best... but who really gives a shit about them? If you are spending 10 hours a day on a game, chances are you don't have a credit card, and you certainly fall into a very small minority. Attract the people who play Unreal 2004 and/or the people who like the socialization aspect of MMORPGs and you have a massive audience that dwarfs the crazy 15 year olds who can blow half of their day on a video game.
Hell, just imagine collecting a monthly fee from just the people who play Unreal 2004. Believe me, that number make what MMORPGs bring in now look like pocket change.
I think the thing that people miss is that middle aged (and by that I mean gamers with jobs) gamers are becoming more and more common. True, the kids are the ones who really got into gaming, but now a generation of gaming kids are becoming adults and getting jobs. They are running into the frustration of not being able to game any more because they can't blow 40 hours a week on a game. This problem is no more evident then in MMORPGs.
MMORPGs are designed around time sinks. EVERYTHING in MMORPGs these days revolves squarely around time. The equation is simple, time = power = fun. For this reason many gamers with a job are giving up on such games and going to things like Unreal.
For me personally, I am a great gamer. I pop into a FPS and generally rock the hell out of it after playing it a couple of rounds. This means that when Unreal 2004 came out I could jump in and start having fun right off the bat. The game design was fun and it didn't require anything other then skill to play. I didn't have to sit in a field killing rats before I could play it. The same thing would be true if you dumped me into an MMORPG with a level 50 character. Learning the ins and out is not a problem. It might take some time, but not much in the grand scheme of things. The big problem is that I simply don't have the time to be level 50. If I play an MMORPG I am pretty much relegated to running around in a field by myself killing rats. Oh joy.
MMORPGs need to take a clue from FPS and RTS games. Make the game based upon player skill, not time. This does not wreck the fundamental formula of an RPG. It just changes the nature of the game. Imagine for a moment SWG done in this style. If you wanted to smuggle, you would play the game like it was a space simulator and occasionally perhaps play the game like it was Thief. If you wanted to go explore you would jump on your land vehicle of choice, ride around, jump off, and the game would play like Jedi Knight or Dark Forces. If you wanted to be a Jedi the game would be more of a social game with elements from a Tail in the Desert combined with combat elements from Jedi Knight.
The real important thing to do is to be sure that any reward that increases someone's power is balanced. A n00b with skill should be able to kill the most jacked out person in the game. So perhaps it takes a little work to be a Jedi Knight, a total newbie with a blaster should still be able to cap you in the back of the head or stab you in the back killing you.
MMORPGs are obsessed with steep power curves, and nothing - absolutely nothing, is going to drive away a gamer with limited time more then that. Nothing pisses me off more then logging into an MMORPG and knowing that there will always be people I can never, under any circumstance kill, not because they are so skilled, but simply because I can't spend the 10 hours a day to actually gain the power to inflict any harm. In most MMORPGs a newbie could attack someone who is high leveled and AFK and still not be able to kill them. This is wrong.
Err yeah. They sure are a sign of a bigger social problem - boredom. I have had my fling with drugs, yet have never been impoverished, don't have any mental illness, don't really have any problems, and all around really enjoy life. I have tried drugs for the fun of it. I suppose if society could cure boredom we wouldn't use drugs, but until then society is pretty helpless to stop people from wanting drugs. Drugs are fun. Until people don't want to have fun, people will always want drugs.
Your argument would be true - if there was only one company in the world. Consider a pharmistucal company working in AIDs. They currently don't have the top line in AIDs drugs. The market is just too crowded. They run across a cure for AIDs. Do you think they wouldn't sell it? Why would they care if they destroy a market they were never in? More so, why would you even think the market would be destroyed? We have vaccines for all sorts of drugs, but most of them are still around despite the ability to erradicate them.
Claiming that the drug companies don't want to find cures is just silly. A cure for cancer, AIDs, or anything else would be the holy grail for most companies. Find a cure for AIDs and you are going to make a few billion sales within the year.
Humans are never going to 'run out of land' such that it makes sense to build in space or on mars. Walk to the east coast of the US and look east. See that massive blue thing out there? That is 2/3 of the world's surface and there is absolutely nothing on it. Now consider that there is plenty of room under the ocean and plenty of room both above and below all the land we currently inhabit. Hell, look at Canada. The population could easily grow ten times and there would still be enough room for everyone.
The bigger issue of course are resouces and places to grow. Growing is probably less of an issue then resources. By the time it becomes an issue, we will probably easily be able to produce soil easily for underground/underocean/skyscrapper green houses and have the power to keep the lights on. The much bigger issue is just getting enough raw resources to meet our ever expanding needs and desires, which is where space comes in.
There is a lot of stuff out there we could harvest and a lot of ways that that stuff could make our life better. Aside from this, a lot of people just have an exploration spirit and would jump at the chance to live some place other then earth. While this might not offer any immediet rewards, it would in the very least spread the human seed around such that we are not so dependent upon earth always existing.
Sure I work differently when my boss is standing over my shoulder, especially if I have a habbit of not working all that hard. My boss can fire me for being a lazy bastard if he wants, and he can give me a raise for being hard working and productive. The same is not true of the government. So long as the laws are just and right, they can watch me all they want. What are they going to see?
Do you behave differently when you walk into a 7/11 with a video camera if you don't intend to steal anything? No, of course not. You completely ignore it because you know that nothing you do is going to break any of the laws of the store. You merrily pick your nose, scratch your balls, and wipe your nose on your sleeve. The same is true for cameras on buildings or even walking by police. I don't alter my behavior so long as what I am doing is legal.
The problem is what is and is not legal behavior. If it is legal to kiss your homosexual partner in public, smoke some pot, or do whatever it is that tickles your fancy in public, then the fact that a camera is watching shouldn't stop you. After all, other people are going to watch, why would one more set of eyes be a bother? The only time it is a problem is when you are doing something illegal, in which case the law is either unjust or you deserve to have your ass hauled to prison.
Now, as to your point about bringing these cameras to bear on the government, I completely and utterly agree, and to an extent this already happens. Cameras on police cars are a fairly common fixture these days. When the technology allows for a small portable camera to be on the officers clothing and constantly up streaming data back to base, they should do that too. Further, they should add it to the public record in a timely manner, only delaying and censoring what needs to be censored to prevent covers from being blowing and disrupting ongoing investigations. Hell, in cases when there is nothing sensitive it should be instantly in the public record.
Video cameras are not the problem. Video cameras are no different then adding another police officer to the street. The only difference is that video cameras are much harder to make lie then a police officer. The problem is the laws that are being enforced.
Now, it might be that the democratic system we have is so incapable of ensuring that all laws are just that it is simply better to make it harder to enforce such laws. Of course, that is probably an argument for a different time.
I am a civil libertarian, and yet cameras do not bother me all that much. It does not bother me that a camera might be watching me do something illegal in public. A cop could watch me do something illegal in public. Why does it matter if it is a cop or a computer? If a cop, cop watching a TV screen, or a computer manages to catch a criminal before he does something bad, good.
The real issue, in my opinion, is not the surveillance. It is the laws being enforced by surveillance. What makes the cameras scary is that they might be used to enforce bad laws. There are a lot of laws that we as a people simply accept because we don't expect them to truly be enforced strongly enough for it to be a concern. The risk is that these cameras will make it easy to enforce bad laws imposed by a slim majority. Drug laws a prime example. We do not want them truly enforced. If everyone who has committed a drug violation at one point in there life was suddenly jailed, over half of the population would be in jail. Many people would be facing very long prison sentences. It isn't an issue because few people are actually caught breaking these crimes. Surveillance and improved policing powers such as cameras wouldn't bother me if there were not a lot of fundamentally bad laws in existence. I don't mind the push to monitoring public spaces for criminals so long as that push is also followed by an effort to eliminate unjust laws passed by the majority on the minority, or laws that have simply been around for a while and no on bothers to question any more.
The secondary issue to this is the matter of who controls the information. We don't want corruption and secrecy. We want an open and fair society. If we truly want to push towards a society that has surveillance on itself, then it should be done in an open manner. Hook up the cameras to the internet and take an open source approach. Let the masses monitor themselves instead of doing it secretly in a police building. This sort of control is far too large to be trusted to only a few. It should be entrusted to everyone.
The point is that we do not have a sacrifice freedom so long as the laws are made such that you don't have to be a criminal to be free. If someone wants to bring out their pipe during the DNC and take a few drags of old Mary J, they should absolutely be able to. You shouldn't have to be a criminal to be free. Our society should spend less time trying to control the guy next door and more time trying to snag the bastard looking to commit real crimes, like homicide, rape, and terrorism.
The parliamentary system is indeed more efficent at getting things done, but that is one the features of the American system. The American system is slow to get things done. It is by design inefficent and excludes extreme points of view. The result is a slow progression down the middle. As American's we tend to think ourselves sharply divided when it comes to politics, but compared to Europe, American's are generally fairly united in their political views.
I am not saying one system is better then the other, but realize that inefficeny is not always a bad thing. It has its advantages. Some people even go so far to argue that we should make our system even more inefficent at passing laws by putting a cap on the total number of laws allowed at one time. The idea would be that this would force law makers to remove old bad laws before making new ones, forcing the system to simplify, instead of being the library of law that it is today.
So, each have their ups and downs, but realize that such inefficeny is not totaly without reason or rationality.
One thing I think people fail to realize is that voting is not exact. If we recounted the vote last election, the number would have changed every single time. The two were so close that statistically, they were tied. Voting is not exact and there is always error. This is the reason why when there was a recount I didn't really care what the outcome was. Sure, I wanted my canidate to win, but the simple fact of the matter was that the two tied and all that was left to do was to play according to the rules of the game to decide who won the tie breaker. Who won the tie breaker had little to do with who actually had more votes.
My biggest concern with voting is that the occasional ballot will be lost or miscounted. This will happen, and so long as it is random it probably is not going to have much of an effect. The real concern is that someone can break into these machines and really mess up the numbers they spit out. A few hanging chads here and there don't mean anything and are just an excuse to keep recounting until one guy likes the result. Someone maliciously changing votes with one of these e-machines on the other hand can cause some serious damage.
Personally, I would rather they simply stick to simple paper ballots. True, they get miscounted, but a few random miscounts are a small price to pay prevent real election fraud. People need to keep things in perspective. The real fear is not that every vote isn't counted. The real fear is that votes are counted that are faked. Our goal should be to eliminate voting fraud and work towards reducing voting miscount, but never at the expense of making fraud easier.
This is sort of a mixed bag for me. On one hand Bethesda has a history of being ambitious in thier game design and opting for a more open ended game style. On the other hand they consistantly fail when it comes to producing polished game play and up to date technology. Morrowind, while wounderfully ambitious, flat out failed when it came to producing a bug free and polished game. I know a lot of RPG fanatics loved Morrowind, but the simple fact the matter is that the raw gameplay was horrible - and lets not even talk about the anti-piriting technology they put in that literally made the game unplayable. Only the immensity of the world and the open ended game play saved it from its self.
The real question is whether or not Bethesda has learned from thier mistakes. They clearly have the right mentality, but remains to be seen is wheather or not they can actually build a decent engine with decent gameplay mechanics.
Personally, if I had my choice someone would just snag the FarCry engine. The FarCry engine could easily handle the typical Fallout town and then some. Just tweak it to handle RPG aspects and add an overland map. Now you have a solid RPG that is beautiful, full of atomic powered cars, in real time, and has game play mechanics to appeal to a broad audience... but that is just my pipe dream.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Horizons will always be a bottom of the barrel game just scraping by on the margins. More likely, they will tank within a year or two.
Horizons runs purely off of the Everquest model. Now before you get your panties in a bundle over me calling Horizons Everquest, realize what the Everquest model is. It isn't the silly little features an experienced MMORPG player recognizes. It is the basic and fundimental game play. The fundamental gameplay of Horizons is the same as Everquest. Spend many hours killing shit to level and gain loot. Whatever else Horizons offers, it can not be argued that is at its core the game play offered.
That sort of game play is appealing only to a very small portion of the gamers market, and it is utterly without appeal outside of the gamers market. Most people can not afford to spend even a single hour a day playing video games. They sneak on when they can and that is all. MMORPGs have utterly failed to recognize this. In the current crop MMORPGs time is directly proportional to power and fun. Few working people, for who shelling out 50 dollars and then 15 or 20 more a month is no big deal are willing to play a game where they are always stuck on the bottom and deprived of the most interesting aspects of the game. It doesn't matter that some consider it 'fair' that people who blow more of their time should get a greater reward. 'Fair' isn't going to pay the bills. More importantly, this idea of fairness is shortsighted and limited to high school kids and the unemployed. Fair or not, working people can not be so wasteful with their time.
MMORPGs need to come up with a new paradigm. They need to develop a model that follows the idea of a cohesive and permanent world, yet doesn't require massive amounts of time to enjoy. How they do it, I don't care. The solution is probably as simple as eliminating leveling and making it twitched based so that any idiot who can play Quake can do a decent job in an MMORPG. Then make the game play based around something other then mindlessly slaughtering NPCs. Maybe you still slaughter NPCs, but do it in an interesting way that doesn't instantly get boring. Maybe the NPCs are inclined to attack villages and people need to defend them. Maybe there is a constant war. Who knows and who cares. I'll leave it to someone else to figure out. Whatever the case, they need to change the very nature of the game play so that it reaches a broad audience. Maybe they will never reach out and get the people who loved Sims, but they should be able to get the working person who has the time to play a little Unreal Tournament 2004 every now and then.
MMORPGs should be accessible to the average gamer, not just high school students and the unemployed. Do this and not only will numbers go through the roof, but you can charge more. I see lots of bitching and moaning about 10 dollar a month charges. Make a game available for people with jobs and credit cards for who 20 dollars a month is pocket change, and then the real money will start to roll in.
I fail to see the 'ethical' question that you point out. Let's say that there is indeed a pool on Titan where the basic building blocks of life are about to form. In order for a satellite to really screw it up it needs to both hit that pool and hit that pool at the right time. You are more likely to win the lottery three times in a row then hit such an exact spot and time with a satellite smaller then truck.
The real danger is that we crash something with bacteria on it that manages to find a way to proliferate and kill existing life. This is a danger probably with considering, but more for the purposes of making sure we don't contaminate such a bed of science. It would be nice to know if life exists somewhere else that isn't from Earth. Spreading around Earth microbes will inhibit our ability to pick out life from earth and life that originated from elsewhere.
This all leads to a much bigger ethical question. Is it our duty to spread life throughout what could potentially be a dead galaxy, or do we let it take its natural course, which might very well mean a complete lack of life. Personally, I think that it is foolish to magically exclude humans from the grand design of the galaxy simply because we are human. Suns exploding and planets forming are no more or less natural then humans jumping into space ships and spreading life around. Humans are a creation of this universe, it seems silly to exclude ourselves now that we have a chance to influence the universe.
I personally think that we should fling life to every part of the galaxy until it is teeming with life. Certainly look for life that is already there and try and avoid ruining the life that might exist, but if after a reasonable search it looks like some place is devoid of life, I think we should go spread the seed of life to that barren and dead place. A Mars or Titan teeming with life is a far more interesting place then a chemical laboratory.
The idea of a Fallout MMOG is not a bad one. The problem is two fold though. First, Fallout can not be Everquest. If you want to appeal to a broad audience and actually make a hit, they will need to take a risk in terms of game play. What that translate to could be debated forever, but the simple fact of the matter is that they need a breakout hit that smashes some rules. Maybe it means no leveling, maybe it means some new style of game play. Who the hell knows. If we knew the answer they would already be building it.
So, what they need to do is to take a big risk. They need to make something new and original with this great title. In other words, they need money. The problem is that they don't have any, and the project they are going to need to make this worthwhile is going to be very risky. No one is going to want to invest in a risky hit or miss project from a dying company. Everquest in Fallout skin is just not going to cut it, and it isn't going to make money.
Honestly, I think Interplay is dead. They don't have the money to take the risks they need to take, and they are not going to get the money they need to take such a risk. I think the best thing to do is patiently wait for Interplay to break up and sell off their property and release their programmers. Hopefully, after everything is done falling apart a good gaming company will have the Fallout title and some good programs will find their way along with that title.
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I think the point of the post was that the US gets shit on no matter what it does. If you are going to get shit, you should at least stop inflicting harm on yourself. If anyone recalls, the attempt to feed Somalia turned into a cluster fuck with a pile of dead Americans and a waste of money. It is pretty damned hard to feed people while they are shooting at you.
Some days I think the parent has it right. Fuck the rest of the world. Pull out of all aid programs, stop using the US military to feed people, and for the love of fucking god, if a dictator wants to kill his own damned people, let him. Christ, we whacked Saddam and suddenly we are the bad guys for violating his sovereign right to commit genocide against his own people.
Everyone bitches that we are not doing enough in Sudan, but the second we try and push a resolution through to meekly threaten then to stop raping their own people, France threatens a veto until the watered down crap that we sent out last week is all that is left.
Maybe it would be better just to take the money spread out across the rest of the world, flip the bird to South Korea, Taiwan, and any other country that has US protection, and let them deal with their own affairs. Then pull out of the UN, stop funding them, stop adding troops to NATO, tell Afghanistan to work out their own shit, tell Iraq to fuck it and let them deal with their own damned insurgents, and make it clear to Israel, Palestine, and everyone else involved that we just don't give a fuck any more who wins. Then, just to seal the deal, after we have cut off our welfare check to the rest of the world, then go ahead cut the American military down until it is just big enough to keep Canada from getting any funny ideas.
Could you even begin to imagine how much money and lives that would save? Flying to the moon? Fuck the moon. We could go to Pluto.
Pointing out that the US is not always the shit is a no brainer. Super powers tend to fuck up because they are run by humans. Until we get rid of pesky humans, you can expect the US (and all other nations for that matter) to fuck it up and do bad things. Because the US is that last remaining super power, you can expect that when the US fucks up, it fucks up big.
All of that said, the world is better off because of the existence of the US. People accuse Americans of having a short memory, but that seems to be a human condition, not just an American condition.
If you recall 60 or so years ago there was World War II. Now it can be easily argued that the US stirred the pot for that war in its own way, though, if you are talking about Germany (Japan being a much different story), you can place the blame pretty squarely on Europe, and give the US credit for trying to prevent World War II. The US was one of the few countries not to demand 'reparation' payments from Germany over World War I, and in fact the US even made an attempt to pay off some of Germany's debt. A large hunk of the rest of the world did not take this approach and led Germany to complete and utter economic ruin, giving rise to fascism.
We could talk a long time about World War II, but I think it can be summed up by saying that Russia would have fallen without a second front, and the second front would not have existed unless the US hadn't pumped resources to those brave Brits and eventually joined the fight themselves.
On to the an interesting piece of history, the Cold War. First, the US saved West Berlin. Without the massive airlift effort in the face of the Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin would have had the option of starving to death or surrendering to the Soviets. Zooming back a little further, it should be realized that the US spent the entire Cold War acting in the defense of democracy. It is naïve to think that the rest of Europe could have held back the Soviet Union on its own. Hell, half of Europe was already taken, and you can be certain they at least wanted the rest of Germany.
The US spent countless trillions of dollars fighting the Soviet Union on every front. I don't think people understand what a large fraction of the US productivity and wealth was sacrificed in the Cold War simply to hold the Soviet Union back. That doesn't even begin to touch on the thousands of lives that were given up in places like Korea and Vietnam to fight them directly with guns and bullets. The world IS a better place because South Korea is not the festering pit of despair that North Korea is. The world IS a better place because West German remained free of Soviet oppression.
The US fought the Soviets with a level of fanaticism that makes your average terrorist look mild mannered. The US had a finger leveled over the button to wipe out both the USSR and the US if it came down to that. The US was fully prepared to wipe itself out if that was the only way to hold the Soviets back. During the Cuban missile crisis, many Americans expected the end of the world. That moment where Kennedy brought the US to near nuclear oblivion over a stupid symbolic stand against the Soviets is revered in American history and made Kennedy a hero. Threatening to utterly wipe out the Soviet Union, and thus commit to having the Soviet Union wipe out the US is one of the prouder moments in American history.
Love or hate it, the US has been fanatical for democracy and freedom since World War II. They have been fanatical enough to wipe themselves off the face of the earth in nuclear oblivion if it meant protecting the rest of the world from the Soviet Union. In that fanaticism more then a few horrible mistakes were made. The US has help more then its fair share of lesser evils to keep the greater evil at bay. Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden come to mind as people the US backed simply because they looked to be the lesser of two evils at the time. To say the US has never made a mistake would be silly. The
...that would rather make less money and piss you off rather then make more money, or at least that is what the claim is being made.
Look, I don't like copywriter laws the way they are written. I fucking hate the way music is distributed. I make liberal use of P2Ps. That said, dumb shit like this is counter productive propaganda. If you want to win a point, you need to throw the lies out the window, even the ones that serve your purpose. If the RIAA thought for a second they were making money off P2Ps, they wouldn't be trying so hard to stop them. Even if it was making money off P2Ps, you would need an actual credible study to come out before they would bother to take notice. Right now there is no credible agreement that P2Ps are doing anything but harm to the RIAA. Like I said, the fact that RIAA is getting harmed doesn't cause me to stay awake at night, but we need to be honest with ourselves.
Stuff like this makes my blood boil. We need to be mature enough to address the opposition's points honestly and fairly. This is neither honest nor fair. It is a worthless database with no value at best and pure propaganda at worst. Propaganda that you agree with is still propaganda. I might want Bush out of office, but I still felt physically ill after watching Fahrenheit 9/11 because it was such a blatant piece of pure, unadulterated, one sided, vile propaganda that used every single trick in the propaganda book, and worse still, people at that shit up like it was a war rally from the book 1982 just because they agreed with the message. Yeah, that's irony.
People are too obsessed with 'winning' their point. Argue your damned point, but be honest with yourself and those you agree and disagree with. If you need to employ dishonest tactics to win, you need to reexamine your core beliefs and why exactly it is you feel so strongly. P2P, politics, everything needs to be looked at with a level head. So, want to argue for P2P? Great, I am with you. Just be honest about it and realize that there are gaping holes in both sides of the argument. The holes should be plugged with honest discourse and creative solutions, not propaganda with absolutely zero statistical meaning like this database.
In that regard I do agree with you, but the problem isn't RFID. The problem is the government's willingness to abuse it. There is nothing wrong the technology. The technology has the potential to make everyone's lives easier and save a few bucks. It would rock beyond words just to swipe my debit card and walk out of a store with a shopping cart full of shit. The efficiency gains could be potentially massive if you consider how much merchandise gets lost this day and age simply because it is hard to always keep an eye on it.
The core of the problem is with the government. RFID is just one technology the government has the ability to use. We could stop RFID and alls it would mean is that the next year a new technology would be developed that could be abused. You can't stop technological progression. Hell, you don't want to stop technological progression. We as humans don't live a sustainable life style. We have two choices, go forward or go back. I don't know about you, but I won't go back. I am alive because modern technology and medicine keeps me alive. The only choice then is to barrel on forward and try and fix the mistakes we are going to make. Realizing that we couldn't stop technological progression without dismantling our civilization and pissing off/kill a lot of people in the process, we need to work to make a government that is more able to handle the exponentially increasing powers that technology is going to empower it with.
So, I think the best solution is to take off the tin foil hats and work at reforming the very nature of our democracy such that it won't trample on our liberties.
Are those possibilies the same possibilities involved with the camera that TRACKS WHERE YOU GO whenever you go to the gas station? If just being at a gas station next to a terrorist hide out makes you guilty, you better hope they don't look at the camera at the gas station or your credit card purchases.
And how exactly do you envision this trial being conducted?
"Your honor, this man is clearly guilty. He went to a gas station near a terrorist hide out."
"OMFG n00b, get the fuck out of my court."
Time to take the tinfoil hat off. The reason why merchants are slavering over RFID is not because they are stroking their evil beards while thinking up ways to trick you into the matrix vats. The biggest reason why RFID is exciting is because it means they can inventory a shelf just by having a guy sweep a scanner across it in a matter of seconds. Hell, they could inventory an entire warehouse in a matter of seconds. They are excited because you can go to the checkout line, swipe your credit card and grab your recipe on the way out without ever having to glance at a human.
Now, could RFID be used to track your movements? Potentially, but so could a camera with facial recognition. RFID chips could simply be implanted with the ability to deactivate once the transaction is complete.
Even taking the worst case scenario, all the evil corporations collaborate to track what you buy and where you go, what do you think they are going to do with that data, send in a corporate death squad to off you? At worst, they are going to take all that data, shove it into a computer, decide what it is you seem to be inclined to buy, and try and sell you stuff some computer algorithm thinks you are likely to want. Annoying if it results in more spam in your mail box? Sure. The end of liberty? Hardly.
Honestly, corporations worry me the least. When I deal with a corporation, it is generally a voluntary transaction. Abercrombie can't put a gun to my head and force me to pay double the price to buy a shirt with their ugly corporate logo smeared across it. If I am dumb enough to buy it, well, I was dumb enough to buy it. If anything gives me pause, it is the government. If I tell the government I don't feel like paying for social security this year because I would rather invest that money myself, they CAN point a gun to my head and tell me that I am mistaken and I in fact DO want to buy social security this year.
At the risk of a troll, conspiracy theories aside, I would say the US is anything but an apathetic nation. Perhaps you could point the Europe as being apathetic these days, but the US seems very much hell bent on changing the world. Forget whether it is changing for better or for worse. I would say in the past 60 years the US touched just about everything in this world, and done it with a great passion. The Cuban missile crisis was the US stating pretty clearly that they care enough to risk a nuclear war. In fact, the entire cold war was a pretty strong declaration of a lack of apathy. Two nations sitting with their finger hovering over the button to end it all and utterly dead serious about pressing it is not a sign of apathy. The cold war was no bluff. The US would have sent everything and anything to defend Europe if the USSR ever game, and the US cared enough that it was more then willing to wipe everyone and everything out to make sure the communist couldn't have it if they had to.
In this day in age the US is still very much not an apathetic player in the game. Conspiracy theories of corporate overlords and Saudi families aside, the US seems pretty hell bent on making Iraq a democracy regardless of the pain either side has to suffer. The strategy might be stupid and counter productive, but it certainly is not apathetic. If WMDs were the issue the US could have just wiped Iraq's government and military off the face of the earth and left the people of Iraq to fight over a new government that might or might not have democratic ideals. Instead though, the US is slugging through, pissing off the rest of the world, restraining from using its full might to gain control of the situation, and taking their licks. Further, the US isn't showing any signs of backing off from the rest of the world.
Even if you look beyond the Middle East, lack of apathy is easy to see. The US has set up shop off the cost of Taiwan with every intention of fighting one of the most powerful nations in the world to defend a tiny island thousands of miles away and sitting on the enemy's doorstep. Risking a war with China for a little island where democracy seems to have taken hold might be a sign of madness, but not apathy.
I don't care if you agree with what the US is doing; though I am sure an idiot is going to reply anyways telling me the US is evil and in doing so utterly miss my point. What the US isn't doing is being apathetic or complacent. The US might be sowing the seeds of its own demise, but it is digging its own grave with great enthusiasm, and not slowing rotting with apathy or complacency. With the track the US is headed down right now, if the US goes down, it is going down with a bang, not a whimper.
As much I absolutely hate to bring up the new SW movies, Clone Wars did show a great many scenes of how you slip to the dark side without being insane and stupid.
Namely, the two points that stuck out in my mind was Anakin's desire to love that annoying princess wench and his destruction of the Tuskin raiders camp. The raider camp is straightforward. His mother died and he wanted revenge, rightfully so. In the case of the wench, he selfishly wanted to experience love, and placed this desire over the greater good. A Jedi is supposed to put the greater good above himself, and he can't possibly do that if he is being lead by his passions.
I personally think they could make a more complex and interesting game if they took this idea and ran with it in KOTOR2. Let the love of someone be what leads to the dark side. Make it an actual struggle to avoid the dark side by making the decision and actual struggle.
In KOTOR I never felt like it was a challenge to avoid the dark side. Just be a generally okay guy, don't randomly murder people, and the dark side is easily enough avoided. The light side always lead to the most satisfying and happy ending. Whenever I picked a dark side decision I felt like an ass because the dark side decision was generally you just being malicious for the sake of being malicious. There was never anything satisfying about it and there was never any temptation to fall into the dark side. Playing the game purely on feeling left you easily running to the light side and feeling good about it.
Now, if they had instead toyed with the idea of putting love over the greater good leading to the dark side, it could have been a far more interesting game. Perhaps Bastille could have been killed by the Jedi in order to prevent her from using her Battle Meditation against them when she got turned to the dark side. Now you are faced with wanting revenge against the Jedi. For the fun of it, make it so that the Star Forge can revive her. NOW you have a real incentive to go to the dark side. Choose the light side and accept the death of your love and stop the Star Forge, or in a fit of rage take the Star Forge for yourself, revive Bastille, and wreak revenge against the Jedi for destroying your love. Now you have an interesting game and interesting decision to make between dark and light.
The choice between Dark and Light is between the greater good and the personal good. Instead of making the 'personal good temptation' a stupid thing you don't really care about, like a few extra credits for mugging a guy, make it a real choice. Make the gamer choose between what is most satisfying to appease his emotions, or to do the right thing for the greater good. Wiping out the Jedi just because you like power isn't a satisfying dark side ending. Wiping out the Jedi in a fit of rage and furry because they decided to sacrifice something you love to preserve what they thought was the greater good is satisfying. Bonus points if the sacrifice the Jedi made ends up having no positive effect of consequence. I know it goes against all attempts to 'teach' a moral in these games, but you will know that you have done the Dark Side justice when you complete the game on the dark side and feel satisfied with the ending.
Regulation absolutely does equal censorship. If government controls dictate that certain types of programming can't be on until after 9 P.M. that IS censorship. If the FCC fines NBC (or whoever) because someone flops a boob around on TV, that IS censorship. Yes, even a mandated rating system is censorship is because it means that you can't show something unless you jump through a certain hoop. If you are not allowed to show something unless the government reviews it first, that, my friend, is without a doubt censorship. You can not 'regulate' speech without censoring.
As to your kids, take some fucking control or don't complain. I am sorry you don't want to be a 'control freak' but the minor inconvenience of knowing what your kids are watching and/or setting up some parental locks is worth censorship of the rest of the population can see. I honestly don't give a damn about your kids and am at a loss as to why you think it makes any sort of sense that the rest of the population should have to endure censorship of what they can view because you don't want your kids to think you are a mean Daddy/Mommy.
I find abhorrent that people think it is okay to use the force of the government to get around being 'control freaks' with their children. This same stupid line of reasoning would dictate that the Internet needs to be controlled by the government because your kids might run into a porn site and you don't want to be a 'control freak' that uses a filter on your computer. Hell, this line of reasoning says that people shouldn't be allowed to swear in public or talk about sex on the streets because your kid might overhear it, and you really don't want to have to be a 'control freak' and always be with your kids to protect them from such vile behavior.
Parents need to take responsibility for themselves and their damned kids. Don't want your kids to see violence or sex on TV? Lock out all channels but PBS and Discovery (although, be careful, god forbid they learn about science of sex through the Discovery channel). Any modern TV can do this simply and easily. Still paranoid PBS might do a special on sexual reproduction or violence, throw away the damn TV. Whatever the case, I, an adult without kids, shouldn't have to suffer because you are manically trying to protect your kids from depictions of sex and violence, yet are too lazy to put in the effort to shield your kids from the fact that violence exists and most adults not only have sex, but have it often.
If you want to shove puritan values down your kids throats yet are too lazy to actually put in the effort to do it, do everyone a favor and don't breed.
I actually found light side to be sickenly over powered if you went the guardian rout. My guardian smuggler could have easily beaten the entire game by himself without breaking a sweat, but I know that my dark side guy was in pain for that last level. Few things are more badass then a speed/forcejump with full buffs. Most things died first round.
As to your point about dark/light, I agree completely. Often times in KOTOR I would have to make a decision. Then sensible thing to do is the light side option. The stupid things to do is the dark side option. The light side offers the greatest reward, while the dark side offers and equal or lesser reward. I found it more then a little annoying that I would have to be a jack ass to be on the dark side.
So, let's consider one of the earliest situations you run into in KOTOR. You find an alien getting kicked around by some Sith troopers. The Sith troopers see you, attack, and of course die. You talk to the alien. You can either rough up and kill the alien for no reason, mug him, or be nice. The two jack ass things to do would be to kill or mug the guy. Killing or mugging the guy nets you a few credits and is all around a worthless action. Why draw attention to yourself by killing or mugging a some poor bastard? That isn't the dark side thing to do; that is the stupid thing to do. The smart thing to do is to be friendly to the guy you saved and pump him for information that might help you in your mission to get off the alien world you know nothing about. What I would propose is that you keep the option to kill/mug him for the truly insane people out there, but also include the ability be friendly in a 'dark side' way. Namely, be friendly not because you are a nice guy, but because you know he is in debt to you and you can probably get some quality information if you just crack a little smile for thirty seconds.
This same sort of dilemma presents itself all over the game. The sensible thing to do is the light side option, while the stupid thing to do is the dark side option. The game ignores that you might do something 'nice' for purely selfish reasons.
Another thing that would improve dark/light decisions would be to make it so that the light side choice doesn't always resolve itself nicely, and have the dark side choice some times resolve better then the light side choice. So, a hypothetical example might be that you are tasked with stopping a terrorist from blowing up the shipping yard (for whatever reasons). The dark side option is to simply confront the terrorist before he attacks and kill him, thus completing the mission and saving the shipping yard. The light side option is to talk the terrorist out of it, believe that you have succeeded, but have the shipyard blow up anyways because the terrorist was just bluffing because he knew he couldn't beat you in a fight. The dark side decision in this case is the one that has the fewest consequences, while the light side decision makes you feel like a jack ass for letting the guy go. In this case the dark side decision saves the ship yard, gets revered by whoever sent them to do the task, and saves a pile of lives. The light side decision results in the deaths of innocent lives, no reward, and some people pissed that you didn't stop the terrorist when you had the chance.
Basically, I am saying that you should be able to play the dark side without playing like you are some stupid and crazy maniac who would rather burn an orphanage and rape the charred bodies rather then complete a vital mission.
I say take care of your own damned kids and leave me alone. I am an adult, I don't want a fucking V-chip in my TV and I don't want the FCC to decide what program I can and can not watch. The networks are already squeamish enough about what they show, I don't need the FCC to kill entirely kill any hope for a TV show being gritty.
One reason why I love HBO is because they flip the bird to censorship and guess what? Every single year they rake in the awards for their programming. Censorship kills intelligent programming. Why the hell can't the government get the fuck out of my TV, out of my house, and stop punishing me because some parent is too fucking stupid to take care of their own kid?
Is your kid a little shit who likes to watch bad things behind your back and you are unable to control the little brat? Here is a solution, throw out your fucking TV or lock it in your room. I am so fucking pissed at how much I have to pay for other people's stupidity these days. I can't fucking smoke pot, can't watch violent/sexual TV, my fucking city closes at 2 am (hurray Boston curfew laws!), the rave seen as all been shut down in my area, I can't buy liquor at a bar past 1 am (another hurray for Boston's blue light laws!), violent video games are on the decline because Lieberman takes every chance he can get to threaten the industry, I can't gamble, and I can't even find an all night dinner (one more cheer for Boston curfew laws!) all because somewhere someone out there is too fucking stupid to handle these 'major' responsibilities. I am pissed and I am sick of seeing my liberties being slowly sucked away because some dumbass out there needs the government to protect themselves from themselves or watch their fucking kids.
So let me state it clearly. If you can't take care of yourself or your kids, please do me a favor and go fuck yourself. Don't beg the government to save you from your own incompetence at life. Go move to a nation that gets off on baby sitting its citizens or just purge your worthless genes from the pool. If you can take care of yourself, but really want to help other people take care of themselves, for fucks sake, stop being such a whiny little hypocritical bitch, get off your ass, and go help. Don't beg the government to do the work you want done for you. Want to keep kids from watching violent TV? Get off your fucking ass, make the rounds in your neighborhood and tell parents how to raise their kids. Someone might even listen to. Hell, offer to baby sit the little shits 24/7 and make sure the job gets done right. Just stay the fuck away from me.
Honestly, if we start flinging rockets to mars or asteroids I'll sign up and be the first guy to start a new world. Maybe then in my pressurized habitat in the middle of a barren wasteland I can enjoy some nice violent and sexual explicitly TV in peace.
I don't see why you are weary of eliminating levels all together. I personally think that is a dead on solution. Just replace levels with various player skill based activities. The most obvious way would be to make combat more like a FPS and crafting more like a puzzle (like puzzle pirates), but that certainly is not the only solution.
If you want to keep skills, you could make it so that everyone has the same number of skill points to spend on whatever they want within race/class/whatever restriction. Of course, if you go that rout you actually have to make combat fun because there is no longer a skill/exp reward for it.
Another solution would be to create more tactical game play. If anyone played the Wheel of Time FPS back in the day multiplayer, that was a perfect example of very tactical combat. There was very little twitch to it. Often times two mages would just basically stand still and launch various attacks and defenses. There was a great deal of tactical skill to it. MMORPGs could take this more tactical approach - which means that they would have to get off their asses and make combat complex and balanced.
Whatever the case, I think that there a LOT of options that all MMORPG makers seem to be afraid to try. Instead they all look roughly the same in terms of combat with only different window dressing. I am not terribly worried though. A few more MMORPGs are going to get shoved out the door and either fail or meet a luke warm reception. At some point a developer will get a clue and try and change the formula. If anything, the MMORPGs today remind me a lot of the days just after Doom was released. There were a horde of Doom clones that took the Doom formula and a couple more features, changed the window dressing. There were many Doom clone failures until Quake fundamentally changed the way we though about mods and multiplayer, and before Counter Strike blew us away by changing the death match formula.
Someone is going to grow some balls and try something new, and they are going to be remembered as the Quake, Half-Life, or Counter Strike of MMORPGs - oh, almost forgot, they are also going to make a wad of cash in the process.
PlanetSide did do it - kinda. The problem with PlanetSide is that it ignores the MMORPG element almost all together. It is not much different then a big version of tribes. Just because the meat of a game is based around skill instead of the old time = power equation doesn't mean that you have to cut out all role playing elements like PlanetSide does. Things like houses, clothing, an economy, and in general the entire social scene of an MMORPG do not need to be cut in order to make the game player skill based and attractive to a casual gamer. PlanetSide doesn't have much more of a social scene then any other FPS. People might bullshit during a fight, but really there is little beyond that. The appeal of an MMORPG is a vast world to play AND socialize in. I am not putting down PlanetSide, but it isn't a new breed of MMORPG, just a sophisticated large scale FPS.
I personally find the utter lack of imagination in MMORPG developers to be disappointing. They tout features that are just refinements on a bad formula. World of WarCraft is not going to be any sort of holy grail. It is going to be the same old MMORPG done in the refined manner that Blizzard is famous for. Certainly it will be a great MMORPG compared to the rest, but they are not changing the formula. It is still a game where your character's skill means the most, and your character's skill is based purely on the time you can throw at the game.
I foresee an MMORPG some time in the next five years that is going to break all the rules. Alls it takes is a gutsy developer and some designers who can convince the money men that the casual gamer is the target. They are going to build a world based upon player skill, and it is going to be big. Imagine if you will a world with the size and exploration potentials of any current MMORPG, along with solid role playing and socializing features that we expect in an MMORPG, but with a combat system like that of a FPS. Such a game would be big. It would attract those into FPS, those who like the socialization aspects of MMORPGs, and those who can only play a limited amount each day. Hell, you might even bring in the people who like to play the Sims if you make your socialization features robust enough. The only people getting the shaft in such a system are the people who blow 10 hours a day on a computer game to be the best... but who really gives a shit about them? If you are spending 10 hours a day on a game, chances are you don't have a credit card, and you certainly fall into a very small minority. Attract the people who play Unreal 2004 and/or the people who like the socialization aspect of MMORPGs and you have a massive audience that dwarfs the crazy 15 year olds who can blow half of their day on a video game.
Hell, just imagine collecting a monthly fee from just the people who play Unreal 2004. Believe me, that number make what MMORPGs bring in now look like pocket change.
I think the thing that people miss is that middle aged (and by that I mean gamers with jobs) gamers are becoming more and more common. True, the kids are the ones who really got into gaming, but now a generation of gaming kids are becoming adults and getting jobs. They are running into the frustration of not being able to game any more because they can't blow 40 hours a week on a game. This problem is no more evident then in MMORPGs.
MMORPGs are designed around time sinks. EVERYTHING in MMORPGs these days revolves squarely around time. The equation is simple, time = power = fun. For this reason many gamers with a job are giving up on such games and going to things like Unreal.
For me personally, I am a great gamer. I pop into a FPS and generally rock the hell out of it after playing it a couple of rounds. This means that when Unreal 2004 came out I could jump in and start having fun right off the bat. The game design was fun and it didn't require anything other then skill to play. I didn't have to sit in a field killing rats before I could play it. The same thing would be true if you dumped me into an MMORPG with a level 50 character. Learning the ins and out is not a problem. It might take some time, but not much in the grand scheme of things. The big problem is that I simply don't have the time to be level 50. If I play an MMORPG I am pretty much relegated to running around in a field by myself killing rats. Oh joy.
MMORPGs need to take a clue from FPS and RTS games. Make the game based upon player skill, not time. This does not wreck the fundamental formula of an RPG. It just changes the nature of the game. Imagine for a moment SWG done in this style. If you wanted to smuggle, you would play the game like it was a space simulator and occasionally perhaps play the game like it was Thief. If you wanted to go explore you would jump on your land vehicle of choice, ride around, jump off, and the game would play like Jedi Knight or Dark Forces. If you wanted to be a Jedi the game would be more of a social game with elements from a Tail in the Desert combined with combat elements from Jedi Knight.
The real important thing to do is to be sure that any reward that increases someone's power is balanced. A n00b with skill should be able to kill the most jacked out person in the game. So perhaps it takes a little work to be a Jedi Knight, a total newbie with a blaster should still be able to cap you in the back of the head or stab you in the back killing you.
MMORPGs are obsessed with steep power curves, and nothing - absolutely nothing, is going to drive away a gamer with limited time more then that. Nothing pisses me off more then logging into an MMORPG and knowing that there will always be people I can never, under any circumstance kill, not because they are so skilled, but simply because I can't spend the 10 hours a day to actually gain the power to inflict any harm. In most MMORPGs a newbie could attack someone who is high leveled and AFK and still not be able to kill them. This is wrong.
Err yeah. They sure are a sign of a bigger social problem - boredom. I have had my fling with drugs, yet have never been impoverished, don't have any mental illness, don't really have any problems, and all around really enjoy life. I have tried drugs for the fun of it. I suppose if society could cure boredom we wouldn't use drugs, but until then society is pretty helpless to stop people from wanting drugs. Drugs are fun. Until people don't want to have fun, people will always want drugs.
Your argument would be true - if there was only one company in the world. Consider a pharmistucal company working in AIDs. They currently don't have the top line in AIDs drugs. The market is just too crowded. They run across a cure for AIDs. Do you think they wouldn't sell it? Why would they care if they destroy a market they were never in? More so, why would you even think the market would be destroyed? We have vaccines for all sorts of drugs, but most of them are still around despite the ability to erradicate them.
Claiming that the drug companies don't want to find cures is just silly. A cure for cancer, AIDs, or anything else would be the holy grail for most companies. Find a cure for AIDs and you are going to make a few billion sales within the year.
Humans are never going to 'run out of land' such that it makes sense to build in space or on mars. Walk to the east coast of the US and look east. See that massive blue thing out there? That is 2/3 of the world's surface and there is absolutely nothing on it. Now consider that there is plenty of room under the ocean and plenty of room both above and below all the land we currently inhabit. Hell, look at Canada. The population could easily grow ten times and there would still be enough room for everyone.
The bigger issue of course are resouces and places to grow. Growing is probably less of an issue then resources. By the time it becomes an issue, we will probably easily be able to produce soil easily for underground/underocean/skyscrapper green houses and have the power to keep the lights on. The much bigger issue is just getting enough raw resources to meet our ever expanding needs and desires, which is where space comes in.
There is a lot of stuff out there we could harvest and a lot of ways that that stuff could make our life better. Aside from this, a lot of people just have an exploration spirit and would jump at the chance to live some place other then earth. While this might not offer any immediet rewards, it would in the very least spread the human seed around such that we are not so dependent upon earth always existing.
Sure I work differently when my boss is standing over my shoulder, especially if I have a habbit of not working all that hard. My boss can fire me for being a lazy bastard if he wants, and he can give me a raise for being hard working and productive. The same is not true of the government. So long as the laws are just and right, they can watch me all they want. What are they going to see?
Do you behave differently when you walk into a 7/11 with a video camera if you don't intend to steal anything? No, of course not. You completely ignore it because you know that nothing you do is going to break any of the laws of the store. You merrily pick your nose, scratch your balls, and wipe your nose on your sleeve. The same is true for cameras on buildings or even walking by police. I don't alter my behavior so long as what I am doing is legal.
The problem is what is and is not legal behavior. If it is legal to kiss your homosexual partner in public, smoke some pot, or do whatever it is that tickles your fancy in public, then the fact that a camera is watching shouldn't stop you. After all, other people are going to watch, why would one more set of eyes be a bother? The only time it is a problem is when you are doing something illegal, in which case the law is either unjust or you deserve to have your ass hauled to prison.
Now, as to your point about bringing these cameras to bear on the government, I completely and utterly agree, and to an extent this already happens. Cameras on police cars are a fairly common fixture these days. When the technology allows for a small portable camera to be on the officers clothing and constantly up streaming data back to base, they should do that too. Further, they should add it to the public record in a timely manner, only delaying and censoring what needs to be censored to prevent covers from being blowing and disrupting ongoing investigations. Hell, in cases when there is nothing sensitive it should be instantly in the public record.
Video cameras are not the problem. Video cameras are no different then adding another police officer to the street. The only difference is that video cameras are much harder to make lie then a police officer. The problem is the laws that are being enforced.
Now, it might be that the democratic system we have is so incapable of ensuring that all laws are just that it is simply better to make it harder to enforce such laws. Of course, that is probably an argument for a different time.
I am a civil libertarian, and yet cameras do not bother me all that much. It does not bother me that a camera might be watching me do something illegal in public. A cop could watch me do something illegal in public. Why does it matter if it is a cop or a computer? If a cop, cop watching a TV screen, or a computer manages to catch a criminal before he does something bad, good.
The real issue, in my opinion, is not the surveillance. It is the laws being enforced by surveillance. What makes the cameras scary is that they might be used to enforce bad laws. There are a lot of laws that we as a people simply accept because we don't expect them to truly be enforced strongly enough for it to be a concern. The risk is that these cameras will make it easy to enforce bad laws imposed by a slim majority. Drug laws a prime example. We do not want them truly enforced. If everyone who has committed a drug violation at one point in there life was suddenly jailed, over half of the population would be in jail. Many people would be facing very long prison sentences. It isn't an issue because few people are actually caught breaking these crimes. Surveillance and improved policing powers such as cameras wouldn't bother me if there were not a lot of fundamentally bad laws in existence. I don't mind the push to monitoring public spaces for criminals so long as that push is also followed by an effort to eliminate unjust laws passed by the majority on the minority, or laws that have simply been around for a while and no on bothers to question any more.
The secondary issue to this is the matter of who controls the information. We don't want corruption and secrecy. We want an open and fair society. If we truly want to push towards a society that has surveillance on itself, then it should be done in an open manner. Hook up the cameras to the internet and take an open source approach. Let the masses monitor themselves instead of doing it secretly in a police building. This sort of control is far too large to be trusted to only a few. It should be entrusted to everyone.
The point is that we do not have a sacrifice freedom so long as the laws are made such that you don't have to be a criminal to be free. If someone wants to bring out their pipe during the DNC and take a few drags of old Mary J, they should absolutely be able to. You shouldn't have to be a criminal to be free. Our society should spend less time trying to control the guy next door and more time trying to snag the bastard looking to commit real crimes, like homicide, rape, and terrorism.
The parliamentary system is indeed more efficent at getting things done, but that is one the features of the American system. The American system is slow to get things done. It is by design inefficent and excludes extreme points of view. The result is a slow progression down the middle. As American's we tend to think ourselves sharply divided when it comes to politics, but compared to Europe, American's are generally fairly united in their political views.
I am not saying one system is better then the other, but realize that inefficeny is not always a bad thing. It has its advantages. Some people even go so far to argue that we should make our system even more inefficent at passing laws by putting a cap on the total number of laws allowed at one time. The idea would be that this would force law makers to remove old bad laws before making new ones, forcing the system to simplify, instead of being the library of law that it is today.
So, each have their ups and downs, but realize that such inefficeny is not totaly without reason or rationality.
One thing I think people fail to realize is that voting is not exact. If we recounted the vote last election, the number would have changed every single time. The two were so close that statistically, they were tied. Voting is not exact and there is always error. This is the reason why when there was a recount I didn't really care what the outcome was. Sure, I wanted my canidate to win, but the simple fact of the matter was that the two tied and all that was left to do was to play according to the rules of the game to decide who won the tie breaker. Who won the tie breaker had little to do with who actually had more votes.
My biggest concern with voting is that the occasional ballot will be lost or miscounted. This will happen, and so long as it is random it probably is not going to have much of an effect. The real concern is that someone can break into these machines and really mess up the numbers they spit out. A few hanging chads here and there don't mean anything and are just an excuse to keep recounting until one guy likes the result. Someone maliciously changing votes with one of these e-machines on the other hand can cause some serious damage.
Personally, I would rather they simply stick to simple paper ballots. True, they get miscounted, but a few random miscounts are a small price to pay prevent real election fraud. People need to keep things in perspective. The real fear is not that every vote isn't counted. The real fear is that votes are counted that are faked. Our goal should be to eliminate voting fraud and work towards reducing voting miscount, but never at the expense of making fraud easier.
This is sort of a mixed bag for me. On one hand Bethesda has a history of being ambitious in thier game design and opting for a more open ended game style. On the other hand they consistantly fail when it comes to producing polished game play and up to date technology. Morrowind, while wounderfully ambitious, flat out failed when it came to producing a bug free and polished game. I know a lot of RPG fanatics loved Morrowind, but the simple fact the matter is that the raw gameplay was horrible - and lets not even talk about the anti-piriting technology they put in that literally made the game unplayable. Only the immensity of the world and the open ended game play saved it from its self.
The real question is whether or not Bethesda has learned from thier mistakes. They clearly have the right mentality, but remains to be seen is wheather or not they can actually build a decent engine with decent gameplay mechanics.
Personally, if I had my choice someone would just snag the FarCry engine. The FarCry engine could easily handle the typical Fallout town and then some. Just tweak it to handle RPG aspects and add an overland map. Now you have a solid RPG that is beautiful, full of atomic powered cars, in real time, and has game play mechanics to appeal to a broad audience... but that is just my pipe dream.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Horizons will always be a bottom of the barrel game just scraping by on the margins. More likely, they will tank within a year or two.
Horizons runs purely off of the Everquest model. Now before you get your panties in a bundle over me calling Horizons Everquest, realize what the Everquest model is. It isn't the silly little features an experienced MMORPG player recognizes. It is the basic and fundimental game play. The fundamental gameplay of Horizons is the same as Everquest. Spend many hours killing shit to level and gain loot. Whatever else Horizons offers, it can not be argued that is at its core the game play offered.
That sort of game play is appealing only to a very small portion of the gamers market, and it is utterly without appeal outside of the gamers market. Most people can not afford to spend even a single hour a day playing video games. They sneak on when they can and that is all. MMORPGs have utterly failed to recognize this. In the current crop MMORPGs time is directly proportional to power and fun. Few working people, for who shelling out 50 dollars and then 15 or 20 more a month is no big deal are willing to play a game where they are always stuck on the bottom and deprived of the most interesting aspects of the game. It doesn't matter that some consider it 'fair' that people who blow more of their time should get a greater reward. 'Fair' isn't going to pay the bills. More importantly, this idea of fairness is shortsighted and limited to high school kids and the unemployed. Fair or not, working people can not be so wasteful with their time.
MMORPGs need to come up with a new paradigm. They need to develop a model that follows the idea of a cohesive and permanent world, yet doesn't require massive amounts of time to enjoy. How they do it, I don't care. The solution is probably as simple as eliminating leveling and making it twitched based so that any idiot who can play Quake can do a decent job in an MMORPG. Then make the game play based around something other then mindlessly slaughtering NPCs. Maybe you still slaughter NPCs, but do it in an interesting way that doesn't instantly get boring. Maybe the NPCs are inclined to attack villages and people need to defend them. Maybe there is a constant war. Who knows and who cares. I'll leave it to someone else to figure out. Whatever the case, they need to change the very nature of the game play so that it reaches a broad audience. Maybe they will never reach out and get the people who loved Sims, but they should be able to get the working person who has the time to play a little Unreal Tournament 2004 every now and then.
MMORPGs should be accessible to the average gamer, not just high school students and the unemployed. Do this and not only will numbers go through the roof, but you can charge more. I see lots of bitching and moaning about 10 dollar a month charges. Make a game available for people with jobs and credit cards for who 20 dollars a month is pocket change, and then the real money will start to roll in.
I fail to see the 'ethical' question that you point out. Let's say that there is indeed a pool on Titan where the basic building blocks of life are about to form. In order for a satellite to really screw it up it needs to both hit that pool and hit that pool at the right time. You are more likely to win the lottery three times in a row then hit such an exact spot and time with a satellite smaller then truck.
The real danger is that we crash something with bacteria on it that manages to find a way to proliferate and kill existing life. This is a danger probably with considering, but more for the purposes of making sure we don't contaminate such a bed of science. It would be nice to know if life exists somewhere else that isn't from Earth. Spreading around Earth microbes will inhibit our ability to pick out life from earth and life that originated from elsewhere.
This all leads to a much bigger ethical question. Is it our duty to spread life throughout what could potentially be a dead galaxy, or do we let it take its natural course, which might very well mean a complete lack of life. Personally, I think that it is foolish to magically exclude humans from the grand design of the galaxy simply because we are human. Suns exploding and planets forming are no more or less natural then humans jumping into space ships and spreading life around. Humans are a creation of this universe, it seems silly to exclude ourselves now that we have a chance to influence the universe.
I personally think that we should fling life to every part of the galaxy until it is teeming with life. Certainly look for life that is already there and try and avoid ruining the life that might exist, but if after a reasonable search it looks like some place is devoid of life, I think we should go spread the seed of life to that barren and dead place. A Mars or Titan teeming with life is a far more interesting place then a chemical laboratory.
The idea of a Fallout MMOG is not a bad one. The problem is two fold though. First, Fallout can not be Everquest. If you want to appeal to a broad audience and actually make a hit, they will need to take a risk in terms of game play. What that translate to could be debated forever, but the simple fact of the matter is that they need a breakout hit that smashes some rules. Maybe it means no leveling, maybe it means some new style of game play. Who the hell knows. If we knew the answer they would already be building it.
So, what they need to do is to take a big risk. They need to make something new and original with this great title. In other words, they need money. The problem is that they don't have any, and the project they are going to need to make this worthwhile is going to be very risky. No one is going to want to invest in a risky hit or miss project from a dying company. Everquest in Fallout skin is just not going to cut it, and it isn't going to make money.
Honestly, I think Interplay is dead. They don't have the money to take the risks they need to take, and they are not going to get the money they need to take such a risk. I think the best thing to do is patiently wait for Interplay to break up and sell off their property and release their programmers. Hopefully, after everything is done falling apart a good gaming company will have the Fallout title and some good programs will find their way along with that title.