And no, I am not an Obama supporter. I am a Canadian...
There are a few reasons why I hope that the fraud is real and can be proven.
1) It will make for good television, and be highly entertaining to me. 2) It will force people to realize that such fraud is possible, and force a solution to be created before the next US Federal Election.
I may be a Canadian, but I am not naive enough to think that your election results wont have an effect on my country. Also, I suspect that the kind of people willing to rig an election are not the sort you want to have running the show.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
It was actually Eric Noah's grandmother, not Morrus's. Morrus took over running the site a few years ago when Eric decided to step down.
My understanding was that the moderators on EnWorld starting wielding the BanHammer Of Doom because many of the discussions were getting derailed into personal attacks. A related problem is that normally, EnWorld gets frequent visits / comments from active Wizards of the Coast designers. Since 4th edition was announced, there has been a non trivial amount of hostility from some very vocal posters. That hostility was causing the Wizards people to stay away. Why bother to explain your thinking when all your going to get for it is personal attacks?
Slashdots moderation system would fix that particular sort of problem.
I actually liked Attacks of Opportunity. However, I do agree that 3rd edition did end up being more complicated to run at times than it should have been. There are three particular problem areas.
1) Too many AoO rules. If there had been either fewer triggers, or fewer exceptions, it would not have been so bad. The AoO's themselves were fine. They add an interesting tactical element to the game, and they give a much better way for fighter types to interrupt spells. But arguements about what does and does not trigger an AoO are a problem.
2) Grapple: Way too many steps and way too many modifiers. If grapple was reduced to requiring a single roll to resolve, it would have been fine. But you have a potential AoO (good, since every similar action also provoked them), then a touch attack (not so good), than the opposed grapple check (bad, since it requires very specific modifiers for size). Then you have to make yet another grapple check to do anything with the grapple (very bad). A better system would be to just have an opposed grapple check followed by the attacker declaring what he would do to the opponent in the round he had him grappled.
3) Too many Variables: Many people on En-World will complain about 3rd edition math getting too difficult. This is not a case of the addition / subtraction being too hard. This is a case of having to juggle and track way too many variables, and having to recalculate multiple things if a single value was changed.
Unlike Lord Argents complaints about 3rd edition, I can empathize with your reasons for being dissatisfied. They are all flaws in the mechanical / crunchy aspects in the game.
Having said that, I do suggest you at least take a good look at the rules for 4th edition when it comes out. Based on what I have read, I think that most of your complaints about 3rd edition will be addressed. It seems a great deal of effort has been put into trying to simply the overcomplicated parts of the game.
I got into the game only at 2nd edition around 1993, but I am hardly a 12 year old munchkin.
I am sure that 1E is a great game, and worth playing, but I am often amused by people who seem to think that new editions are all crap.
The simple fact is that the state of gaming has advanced considerably since the mid / late 1970's. Aside from competing game systems like GURPS, many electronic games have come out. You may find World Of Warcraft inferior to tabletop gaming. I myself have never gotten into any of the MMO's. But discarding everything done in those games as a bad idea is a mistake.
Simply put, alot of new fantasy fiction has come out, and people who grew up with that fiction and who would like to play a D&D type game are going to want to see the stylistic touches that they like. Making the game awesome to 12 year olds is not a bad thing at all.
The stereotype of a teenage geek with no girlfriend in a basement playing D&D is a pathetic one. But without new gamers, the stereotype will be of a 62 year old virgin playing pen and paper games will be much worse.
Appealing to new gamers who grew up on World of Warcraft is a good thing.
This sort of question / rant comes up from time to time on enworld and every other D&D site. There are a few simple responses to your statements.
1) New edition does not mean you are any more obligated to buy it and play it than you are obligated to trade in WinXP for WinVista, (or your System 5 Unix for Linux).
2) Most rule changes are generally applied to elements of the game that nearly no one pays attention to anyway. Demi-human level limits were dropped because no one used them.
3) Nitpicking about flavor elements (dwarven wizards) is generally stupid. Flavor issues are the easiest thing to customize / change. The core of the game is not a pseudo tolkein world. The core of the game is "roll 1d20 to kill monsters and take their stuff".
4) People who are satisfied with the current version of any consumer project that choose not to upgrade are not the sort of customers that sustain a company. New material will be published whether you like it or not.
5) Despite the sneak peeks to the new rules being given, it is still way too early to know what it will be like to play the new edition. If your not a play tester or designer of the new edition, than your opinion is not based on all the facts.
From what I have read on Enworld, there are alot of players who tend to stick to earlier editions. You are one of the few that seems to like 2nd edition more than 1st or 3rd.
Blu-Ray is a Sony invention, and the primary means by which Sony has promoted the technology was to integrate it into the PS3. The consumer base for videogamers who are willing to spend huge amounts of money is easier to leverage than people who are content with standard DVD. This strategy has not worked out as well as Sony has hoped, since between Blu-Ray and the Cell Processor, the PS3 is a very expensive bit of consumer technology. Never the less, Sony is starting to make some more progress with the PS3 as the price drops, and even the less than hoped for PS3 install base is small, it makes for a much larger Blu-Ray install base than there would be otherwise.
Microsoft has chosen to back HD-DVD, and there is supposed to be an HD-DVD player add on for the Xbox 360. But because it is an add on, there is not a great deal of incentive to buy it.
To answer your first question, I would say it is the same reasoning as to why chemical castration of sex offenders is not done unless the offender consents to it. My information may be incorrect though, so if anyone wishes to correct me on that, go for it.
As to the second question, I think you do have a point there. Not being a drug user myself, I do not really have a relevant opinion on these matters. I do concede right now that the way in which any given substance is deemed illegal is not exactly rational in most cases. However, if we were to assume that any given drug were only to be made illegal for recreational use for entirely rational and well thought out reasons, I do not see why an 'instant cure' for an addiction to that drug would necessarily be enough to push a drug from being legal to being illegal.
I expected some responses to this topic to be against the notion of the vaccine on the basis of 'OMG Next they come for anything else that is fun'. But the number of those responses surprises me.
Now, I am sure there are many people on this site who (gasp!) smoke marijuanna. And I am sure there are people here who like to cap their weekends here with hookers and blow. And I am sure they also have such many wonderful stories as "I put a half kilo up my nose every week and I am a fully productive member of society". To all of those people, I say the following:
Get a clue.
For one, I highly doubt westernized society would be quick to start to inflict any form of medical procedure on someone who does not wish it. We let plenty of idiots choose not to vaccinate their children against measles and the like. I am sure plenty of nutjobs out there would like to see an anti-cocaine vaccine be made manditory, but I do not think it will happen.
For another, I am also sure there are plenty of people who would like to end their addictions, but find themsleves unable to. I do not think that there are many people out there who would wake up one day and say "Wow, I really wish I was still addicted to cocaine."
I agree, however, that there is danger in this vaccine in that it can also affect a lot of anesthetic's used for medical purposes. That danger should be very carefully looked into.
I wont dispute the idea that someone working outside the home to earn money may be doing a great deal more total work than someone staying home and raising the kids / doing standard housework. It is a very reasonable point, and one worth discussing.
But your supporting arguments do not quite account for one thing.
Someone who chooses to make a career out of housekeeping / raising children essentially finds themselves in a job where there are never truly days off or weekends.
While it may work out that doing the bulk of the domestic work is the appropriate 'fair share', it is not unreasonable for the person doing such work to want to be able to have days where they can escape those responsibilities.
I would say that if someone is not given adequate chances to get the hell away from their work responsibilities, be it bread earning work or domestic work, they are entitled to complain.
I am hardly an expert in middle eastern politics, but I somehow doubt most of the posters in this thread are either.
What makes Iranian religious radicalness worse than U.S. religious radicalism are the following.
1) Their church dictates their laws, so the church is the state. 2) The extreme forms of this religion are known to encourage things like holy war suicide bombing 3) Incidents like advocating the execution of cartoonists and teachers who name a teddy bear after a religious figure are hardly the mark of particularly rational thought processes.
I am not saying that Christian Extremists are any better, but at least the worst of those excesses were discarded after the Inquisition went out of style.
The primary problem as I understand it is that Iran is the sort of nation that wants a because they want to use it directly, as opposed to just using it as a deterrent to invasion. People who believe they are doing 'the good works of god' do not exactly have the best track record on these things.
Tazers as a means to take someone down without putting bullets into them are a good thing. However, like any tool, once it is proven useful for one thing, its not long until you start looking for other uses. And that is the danger. If a Tazer is a safe way to take down a drunken and violent man easily, what about someone who is resisting, but not violently?
If you see an armed man about to harm someone, you shoot him. But what if he is not armed? You wont use a gun because you probably do not want to kill someone. So maybe a baton / club is justified, so you thump his skull a bit. But what about a retreating shoplifter? Beating a thief might be a bit of a stretch. But what if you do not want to cause injury like a broken arm or a concussion? Ok, go for the Tazer. How about some guy who is causing a public disturbance? Umm, why not use the tazer there too? Unruly protester? Tazer. A protester engaged in civil disobedience? Tazer again. Someone just being generally uncooperative? Tazer.
A tazer is essentially a means to apply force with what amounts to mimimal or no consequences. In 99.9% of the time it resolves the situation in the favor of the police with minimal effort and no harm to anyone. Once in a while, you get the guy with the bad heart, which sucks, but as they say, 'shit happens'. Tragedies of that sort aren't what you should worry about. What you should worry about are those cops who are just a bit too eager to resort to force. A thug cop who would not dream of pulling his gun in a given situation will be all to happy to get you to shut up and do as your told by zapping the crap out of you a whole bunch of times.
The use of Force is most likely to be abused when the consequences for it are minimal.
On the reasonable assumption that we are not the only technologically advanced species in this universe, it would seem to me that we are not the only ones who might be trying to observe these phenomena. In that instance, given the scale of time and the potential numbers of potential observances of dark matter, it would probably have happened already.
No sane leader threatens directly to use their nukes. At least not publicly.
Nations with nuclear weapons generally have a policy that they will not use them except under 2 conditions.
1) You invade us. 2) You nuke us first.
If everyone has nukes, and no one uses theirs first, then no one will use them at all.
Nukes on a submarine are a deterrent as a 2nd strike option. Targeting a nuke silo is fairly easy. You just figure out where it is and aim for them first, and enemy cities second. Targeting a nuclear submarine (or one of Russia's nuke trains) that move around all the goddamn time and are pretty hard to spot is effectively impossible.
1) Development purposes. When you design a game with a set of discreet levels or areas, it is easier to cut out a level than it is to do something like cut out 30% of a contiguous game world.
2) Narrative expedience If you have a game where the narrative jumps from London to Tokyo to Moscow, do you really want the developers to try to tack on a bunch of filler for parts of the world that have no importance to the story? In Knights of the Old Republic, you only ever visit 5 or 6 worlds. Is that game better served by providing you with a hundreds or thousands of habitable worlds when only those 5 or 6 are relevant to the game?
3) Not all games are about exploration. Wario ware would not be a reasonable type of game to set in a contiguous world. Trauma center is also not a game that really needs that kind of structure.
In any event, not all of your examples are good ones of continuous worlds. Metroid in particular has two types of loading screens. One shows up when your on a long elevator ride, say between an ice level and between a fire level. You may notice the cut scene that does a close up on Samus during that time. The other loading screen is when you shoot a door to open it, and then get to wait 20 to 30 seconds for the next chamber to load.
Russia had a non aggression pact with Japan. The only reason for this was because Stalin knew he would be getting into something with Germany, and did not want to try to fight on 2 fronts. He was pretty quick to drop that treaty once Germany had been taken out of it.
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It is the only lottery worth winning
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
With respect to SETI, it is very much like a lottery with extraordinarily poor odds of winnning, and what amounts to an infinite payout.
- We only need to find signs of extra terrestrial intelligence once to prove many assumptions wrong.
- If we do discover something we can either choose to contact it on our terms, or try to prepare ourselves for contact.
- If we do find evidence of a spacefaring civilization, it will let us know that certain technologies are possible and worth pursuing
And lastly:
- Proof of extra terrestrial intelligence will at the very least force most organized religions to rewrite much of their material, if not cause them to fall apart entirely.
Just how many parents actually know how to set the parental controls to block titles?
All that will happen is that Junior will either go online or read a manual to figure out how to reset or disable the time cap. Still, I think this is a good thing for Microsoft. It will provide a selling point for Microsoft to parents for a feature that will almost never be used and will be easily circumvented.
Manhunt 2 will not generate nearly as much heat on this as the original hot coffee. First, hot coffee was about leaving sex content in a game known for violence. This is leaving excessive violence content in a game that is primarily about violence.
Second, Hot Coffee was big news because the game was a huge seller. Unless Manhunt 2 can generate similar sales (which has not happened), it will not be as big a story.
This is nothing more than an echo of the original hot coffee.
A common platform for console games really only benefits companies the size of EA, and to a lesser extent, 3rd party multi platform publishers of any size. It would cut down on development costs.
However, there is no way that this will happen, at least not voluntarily. Doing this would effectively kill all but one of the platform manufacturers. Nintendo is not likely to do this. Too much history, and institutional pride. Also, even when they do not excel or lead the market, they are always profitable. Why share the golden goose?
Sony would probably not go for this either, despite the current difficulties with the PS3. The last time they tried to collaborate with another console manufacturer, they got burned by Nintendo. And they did do pretty damn good with the PS1 and PS2. And finally, assuming they do not self destruct from bleeding money and need to spin off or shutter their game development, they are playing for the long term. The PS3 is a good strategy to push Bluray along, and I have no doubt that it will work out for that if nothing else.
Microsoft may go for this. They are primarily a software house. If EA's plan did come about, I would bet that the side that works with Microsoft would dominate. Game developers just love their development tools. Having worked with Wii, Xbox360, and PS3 dev hardware, I can say that Microsoft's dev gear is the best.
Still, I just do not see this happening. Unless EA decides to boot strap the damn thing into existence, it will just not happen.
If your mom plays the heck out of Wii Sports, that is ok for Nintendo. But if that is all your mom does with it, than things could be better. Sure, Nintendo is making a profit on every Wii sold, but they also want to make yet more money. They (and Sony and Microsoft) usually do this by getting you to keep buying new games.
For a 3rd party publisher, the fact that your mom really likes Wii Sports does not do them much good. They did not make Wii Sports, and they sure as hell aren't getting a cut of the profits on the hardware. If 3rd party publishers cannot make successful games on the Wii, than there will be problems down the line for the Wii.
Most 3rd party dev's were caught off guard by the Wii. In the past year, most of those that did not jump on early have only really managed a few quick and dirty port jobs. In order for the 3rd parties to do well, they have to figure out how to make games that appeal to the Wii install base.
I am certain that the first 3rd party game that will do well on the Wii will be Guitar Hero 3. Beyond that, I am not at all sure what else is in the pipeline for the Wii from 3rd parties that will work well. I myself want more core type games (Metroid 3) to come out on that system. But if the gamers who buy those games are all on the Xbox 360, than that is where those games will come out.
If Bioware stays as its own studio, and EA just acts as their backer, that may not be such a bad thing. Relic is owned by THQ, but as far as I know, they are still an independant entity. This could then just mean that Bioware ends up getting more reliable funding, and ends up churning out games in a more regular fashion. In addition, Bioware is not exactly known for extravagant salaries, so this may end up getting a bunch of them better pay. On top of that the Austin studio will get much better backing for the MMO.
If EA intends to get heavily involved in Bioware's day to day operations, than Bioware as an independant studio may not exist for too much longer. EA already has studio's in Vancouver and Montreal, and do not really need extra floor space. If that happens, I expect that alot of Bioware's core employees will just quit and form a new studio. Many of them have lived in Edmonton a long time and probably have some pretty deep roots in the community. Plenty may want to leave for milder weather in Vancouver though.
What will be really interesting is to see what Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk end up doing. If they stay with their Studio in Edmonton and stay in control of day to day operations, things should be fine. If they take their money and run, well they earned it.
Lumping all humans under the age of 18 into the same legal category is retarded. Selling Gears of War to a 16 year old is one thing. Selling it to a 10 year old is another. Selling it to 5 year old is yet another.
I do not think it would be entirely unreasonable to have some sort of ID card for minors that basically can be used to signify that they may be considered an adult for certain purposes. Not buying guns or voting. But for things like Violent Videogames, adult movies, cigarettes, and alcohol. Make it a pre-requisite for driving a car. Set it up so that the minor needs parental consent to obtain it, and you can let the parents decide when their children can start to be treated as an adult.
In Japan, they had to pass an act of parliament to prevent DragonQuest games from being released on a week day. Too many people were ditching from work or school to buy and play the game.
I can think of the following potential causes. Note however, that I am not an economist. I am a Canadian though, so its all good.
1) With the Euro gaining in populatity, alot of US dollars that were held in reserve are now circulating. More US dollars in circulation diminishes their value.
2) There was a real, fundamental change in the economy. Oil got very expensive. Canada has Oil. To buy that oil, at some point, they need to spend Canadian dollars. More demand for our dollar means our dollar is worth more. (This is why we have also been rising against the Euro / Yen, though not nearly as much).
Slashdot Mirror
And no, I am not an Obama supporter. I am a Canadian...
There are a few reasons why I hope that the fraud is real and can be proven.
1) It will make for good television, and be highly entertaining to me.
2) It will force people to realize that such fraud is possible, and force a solution to be created before the next US Federal Election.
I may be a Canadian, but I am not naive enough to think that your election results wont have an effect on my country. Also, I suspect that the kind of people willing to rig an election are not the sort you want to have running the show.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
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It was actually Eric Noah's grandmother, not Morrus's. Morrus took over running the site a few years ago when Eric decided to step down.
My understanding was that the moderators on EnWorld starting wielding the BanHammer Of Doom because many of the discussions were getting derailed into personal attacks. A related problem is that normally, EnWorld gets frequent visits / comments from active Wizards of the Coast designers. Since 4th edition was announced, there has been a non trivial amount of hostility from some very vocal posters. That hostility was causing the Wizards people to stay away. Why bother to explain your thinking when all your going to get for it is personal attacks?
Slashdots moderation system would fix that particular sort of problem.
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I actually liked Attacks of Opportunity. However, I do agree that 3rd edition did end up being more complicated to run at times than it should have been. There are three particular problem areas.
1) Too many AoO rules. If there had been either fewer triggers, or fewer exceptions, it would not have been so bad. The AoO's themselves were fine. They add an interesting tactical element to the game, and they give a much better way for fighter types to interrupt spells. But arguements about what does and does not trigger an AoO are a problem.
2) Grapple: Way too many steps and way too many modifiers. If grapple was reduced to requiring a single roll to resolve, it would have been fine. But you have a potential AoO (good, since every similar action also provoked them), then a touch attack (not so good), than the opposed grapple check (bad, since it requires very specific modifiers for size). Then you have to make yet another grapple check to do anything with the grapple (very bad). A better system would be to just have an opposed grapple check followed by the attacker declaring what he would do to the opponent in the round he had him grappled.
3) Too many Variables: Many people on En-World will complain about 3rd edition math getting too difficult. This is not a case of the addition / subtraction being too hard. This is a case of having to juggle and track way too many variables, and having to recalculate multiple things if a single value was changed.
Unlike Lord Argents complaints about 3rd edition, I can empathize with your reasons for being dissatisfied. They are all flaws in the mechanical / crunchy aspects in the game.
Having said that, I do suggest you at least take a good look at the rules for 4th edition when it comes out. Based on what I have read, I think that most of your complaints about 3rd edition will be addressed. It seems a great deal of effort has been put into trying to simply the overcomplicated parts of the game.
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Bluray does 1080p, and HD-DVD does 1080i, at least with the way things are set up right now.
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I got into the game only at 2nd edition around 1993, but I am hardly a 12 year old munchkin.
I am sure that 1E is a great game, and worth playing, but I am often amused by people who seem to think that new editions are all crap.
The simple fact is that the state of gaming has advanced considerably since the mid / late 1970's. Aside from competing game systems like GURPS, many electronic games have come out. You may find World Of Warcraft inferior to tabletop gaming. I myself have never gotten into any of the MMO's. But discarding everything done in those games as a bad idea is a mistake.
Simply put, alot of new fantasy fiction has come out, and people who grew up with that fiction and who would like to play a D&D type game are going to want to see the stylistic touches that they like. Making the game awesome to 12 year olds is not a bad thing at all.
The stereotype of a teenage geek with no girlfriend in a basement playing D&D is a pathetic one. But without new gamers, the stereotype will be of a 62 year old virgin playing pen and paper games will be much worse.
Appealing to new gamers who grew up on World of Warcraft is a good thing.
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This sort of question / rant comes up from time to time on enworld and every other D&D site. There are a few simple responses to your statements.
1) New edition does not mean you are any more obligated to buy it and play it than you are obligated to trade in WinXP for WinVista, (or your System 5 Unix for Linux).
2) Most rule changes are generally applied to elements of the game that nearly no one pays attention to anyway. Demi-human level limits were dropped because no one used them.
3) Nitpicking about flavor elements (dwarven wizards) is generally stupid. Flavor issues are the easiest thing to customize / change. The core of the game is not a pseudo tolkein world. The core of the game is "roll 1d20 to kill monsters and take their stuff".
4) People who are satisfied with the current version of any consumer project that choose not to upgrade are not the sort of customers that sustain a company. New material will be published whether you like it or not.
5) Despite the sneak peeks to the new rules being given, it is still way too early to know what it will be like to play the new edition. If your not a play tester or designer of the new edition, than your opinion is not based on all the facts.
From what I have read on Enworld, there are alot of players who tend to stick to earlier editions. You are one of the few that seems to like 2nd edition more than 1st or 3rd.
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Blu-Ray is a Sony invention, and the primary means by which Sony has promoted the technology was to integrate it into the PS3. The consumer base for videogamers who are willing to spend huge amounts of money is easier to leverage than people who are content with standard DVD. This strategy has not worked out as well as Sony has hoped, since between Blu-Ray and the Cell Processor, the PS3 is a very expensive bit of consumer technology. Never the less, Sony is starting to make some more progress with the PS3 as the price drops, and even the less than hoped for PS3 install base is small, it makes for a much larger Blu-Ray install base than there would be otherwise.
Microsoft has chosen to back HD-DVD, and there is supposed to be an HD-DVD player add on for the Xbox 360. But because it is an add on, there is not a great deal of incentive to buy it.
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To answer your first question, I would say it is the same reasoning as to why chemical castration of sex offenders is not done unless the offender consents to it. My information may be incorrect though, so if anyone wishes to correct me on that, go for it.
As to the second question, I think you do have a point there. Not being a drug user myself, I do not really have a relevant opinion on these matters. I do concede right now that the way in which any given substance is deemed illegal is not exactly rational in most cases. However, if we were to assume that any given drug were only to be made illegal for recreational use for entirely rational and well thought out reasons, I do not see why an 'instant cure' for an addiction to that drug would necessarily be enough to push a drug from being legal to being illegal.
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I expected some responses to this topic to be against the notion of the vaccine on the basis of 'OMG Next they come for anything else that is fun'. But the number of those responses surprises me.
Now, I am sure there are many people on this site who (gasp!) smoke marijuanna. And I am sure there are people here who like to cap their weekends here with hookers and blow. And I am sure they also have such many wonderful stories as "I put a half kilo up my nose every week and I am a fully productive member of society". To all of those people, I say the following:
Get a clue.
For one, I highly doubt westernized society would be quick to start to inflict any form of medical procedure on someone who does not wish it. We let plenty of idiots choose not to vaccinate their children against measles and the like. I am sure plenty of nutjobs out there would like to see an anti-cocaine vaccine be made manditory, but I do not think it will happen.
For another, I am also sure there are plenty of people who would like to end their addictions, but find themsleves unable to. I do not think that there are many people out there who would wake up one day and say "Wow, I really wish I was still addicted to cocaine."
I agree, however, that there is danger in this vaccine in that it can also affect a lot of anesthetic's used for medical purposes. That danger should be very carefully looked into.
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There is one particular flaw in your reasoning.
I wont dispute the idea that someone working outside the home to earn money may be doing a great deal more total work than someone staying home and raising the kids / doing standard housework. It is a very reasonable point, and one worth discussing.
But your supporting arguments do not quite account for one thing.
Someone who chooses to make a career out of housekeeping / raising children essentially finds themselves in a job where there are never truly days off or weekends.
While it may work out that doing the bulk of the domestic work is the appropriate 'fair share', it is not unreasonable for the person doing such work to want to be able to have days where they can escape those responsibilities.
I would say that if someone is not given adequate chances to get the hell away from their work responsibilities, be it bread earning work or domestic work, they are entitled to complain.
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I am hardly an expert in middle eastern politics, but I somehow doubt most of the posters in this thread are either.
What makes Iranian religious radicalness worse than U.S. religious radicalism are the following.
1) Their church dictates their laws, so the church is the state.
2) The extreme forms of this religion are known to encourage things like holy war suicide bombing
3) Incidents like advocating the execution of cartoonists and teachers who name a teddy bear after a religious figure are hardly the mark of particularly rational thought processes.
I am not saying that Christian Extremists are any better, but at least the worst of those excesses were discarded after the Inquisition went out of style.
The primary problem as I understand it is that Iran is the sort of nation that wants a because they want to use it directly, as opposed to just using it as a deterrent to invasion. People who believe they are doing 'the good works of god' do not exactly have the best track record on these things.
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Tazers as a means to take someone down without putting bullets into them are a good thing. However, like any tool, once it is proven useful for one thing, its not long until you start looking for other uses. And that is the danger. If a Tazer is a safe way to take down a drunken and violent man easily, what about someone who is resisting, but not violently?
If you see an armed man about to harm someone, you shoot him. But what if he is not armed? You wont use a gun because you probably do not want to kill someone. So maybe a baton / club is justified, so you thump his skull a bit. But what about a retreating shoplifter? Beating a thief might be a bit of a stretch. But what if you do not want to cause injury like a broken arm or a concussion? Ok, go for the Tazer. How about some guy who is causing a public disturbance? Umm, why not use the tazer there too? Unruly protester? Tazer. A protester engaged in civil disobedience? Tazer again. Someone just being generally uncooperative? Tazer.
A tazer is essentially a means to apply force with what amounts to mimimal or no consequences. In 99.9% of the time it resolves the situation in the favor of the police with minimal effort and no harm to anyone. Once in a while, you get the guy with the bad heart, which sucks, but as they say, 'shit happens'. Tragedies of that sort aren't what you should worry about. What you should worry about are those cops who are just a bit too eager to resort to force. A thug cop who would not dream of pulling his gun in a given situation will be all to happy to get you to shut up and do as your told by zapping the crap out of you a whole bunch of times.
The use of Force is most likely to be abused when the consequences for it are minimal.
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On the reasonable assumption that we are not the only technologically advanced species in this universe, it would seem to me that we are not the only ones who might be trying to observe these phenomena. In that instance, given the scale of time and the potential numbers of potential observances of dark matter, it would probably have happened already.
Or perhaps it did happen and no one noticed.
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No sane leader threatens directly to use their nukes. At least not publicly.
Nations with nuclear weapons generally have a policy that they will not use them except under 2 conditions.
1) You invade us.
2) You nuke us first.
If everyone has nukes, and no one uses theirs first, then no one will use them at all.
Nukes on a submarine are a deterrent as a 2nd strike option. Targeting a nuke silo is fairly easy. You just figure out where it is and aim for them first, and enemy cities second. Targeting a nuclear submarine (or one of Russia's nuke trains) that move around all the goddamn time and are pretty hard to spot is effectively impossible.
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And yeah, I am a game developer.
1) Development purposes.
When you design a game with a set of discreet levels or areas, it is easier to cut out a level than it is to do something like cut out 30% of a contiguous game world.
2) Narrative expedience
If you have a game where the narrative jumps from London to Tokyo to Moscow, do you really want the developers to try to tack on a bunch of filler for parts of the world that have no importance to the story? In Knights of the Old Republic, you only ever visit 5 or 6 worlds. Is that game better served by providing you with a hundreds or thousands of habitable worlds when only those 5 or 6 are relevant to the game?
3) Not all games are about exploration.
Wario ware would not be a reasonable type of game to set in a contiguous world. Trauma center is also not a game that really needs that kind of structure.
In any event, not all of your examples are good ones of continuous worlds. Metroid in particular has two types of loading screens. One shows up when your on a long elevator ride, say between an ice level and between a fire level. You may notice the cut scene that does a close up on Samus during that time. The other loading screen is when you shoot a door to open it, and then get to wait 20 to 30 seconds for the next chamber to load.
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Russia had a non aggression pact with Japan. The only reason for this was because Stalin knew he would be getting into something with Germany, and did not want to try to fight on 2 fronts. He was pretty quick to drop that treaty once Germany had been taken out of it.
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With respect to SETI, it is very much like a lottery with extraordinarily poor odds of winnning, and what amounts to an infinite payout.
- We only need to find signs of extra terrestrial intelligence once to prove many assumptions wrong.
- If we do discover something we can either choose to contact it on our terms, or try to prepare ourselves for contact.
- If we do find evidence of a spacefaring civilization, it will let us know that certain technologies are possible and worth pursuing
And lastly:
- Proof of extra terrestrial intelligence will at the very least force most organized religions to rewrite much of their material, if not cause them to fall apart entirely.
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Just how many parents actually know how to set the parental controls to block titles?
All that will happen is that Junior will either go online or read a manual to figure out how to reset or disable the time cap. Still, I think this is a good thing for Microsoft. It will provide a selling point for Microsoft to parents for a feature that will almost never be used and will be easily circumvented.
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Manhunt 2 will not generate nearly as much heat on this as the original hot coffee. First, hot coffee was about leaving sex content in a game known for violence. This is leaving excessive violence content in a game that is primarily about violence.
Second, Hot Coffee was big news because the game was a huge seller. Unless Manhunt 2 can generate similar sales (which has not happened), it will not be as big a story.
This is nothing more than an echo of the original hot coffee.
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A common platform for console games really only benefits companies the size of EA, and to a lesser extent, 3rd party multi platform publishers of any size. It would cut down on development costs.
However, there is no way that this will happen, at least not voluntarily. Doing this would effectively kill all but one of the platform manufacturers. Nintendo is not likely to do this. Too much history, and institutional pride. Also, even when they do not excel or lead the market, they are always profitable. Why share the golden goose?
Sony would probably not go for this either, despite the current difficulties with the PS3. The last time they tried to collaborate with another console manufacturer, they got burned by Nintendo. And they did do pretty damn good with the PS1 and PS2. And finally, assuming they do not self destruct from bleeding money and need to spin off or shutter their game development, they are playing for the long term. The PS3 is a good strategy to push Bluray along, and I have no doubt that it will work out for that if nothing else.
Microsoft may go for this. They are primarily a software house. If EA's plan did come about, I would bet that the side that works with Microsoft would dominate. Game developers just love their development tools. Having worked with Wii, Xbox360, and PS3 dev hardware, I can say that Microsoft's dev gear is the best.
Still, I just do not see this happening. Unless EA decides to boot strap the damn thing into existence, it will just not happen.
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If your mom plays the heck out of Wii Sports, that is ok for Nintendo. But if that is all your mom does with it, than things could be better. Sure, Nintendo is making a profit on every Wii sold, but they also want to make yet more money. They (and Sony and Microsoft) usually do this by getting you to keep buying new games.
For a 3rd party publisher, the fact that your mom really likes Wii Sports does not do them much good. They did not make Wii Sports, and they sure as hell aren't getting a cut of the profits on the hardware. If 3rd party publishers cannot make successful games on the Wii, than there will be problems down the line for the Wii.
Most 3rd party dev's were caught off guard by the Wii. In the past year, most of those that did not jump on early have only really managed a few quick and dirty port jobs. In order for the 3rd parties to do well, they have to figure out how to make games that appeal to the Wii install base.
I am certain that the first 3rd party game that will do well on the Wii will be Guitar Hero 3. Beyond that, I am not at all sure what else is in the pipeline for the Wii from 3rd parties that will work well. I myself want more core type games (Metroid 3) to come out on that system. But if the gamers who buy those games are all on the Xbox 360, than that is where those games will come out.
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If Bioware stays as its own studio, and EA just acts as their backer, that may not be such a bad thing. Relic is owned by THQ, but as far as I know, they are still an independant entity. This could then just mean that Bioware ends up getting more reliable funding, and ends up churning out games in a more regular fashion. In addition, Bioware is not exactly known for extravagant salaries, so this may end up getting a bunch of them better pay. On top of that the Austin studio will get much better backing for the MMO.
If EA intends to get heavily involved in Bioware's day to day operations, than Bioware as an independant studio may not exist for too much longer. EA already has studio's in Vancouver and Montreal, and do not really need extra floor space. If that happens, I expect that alot of Bioware's core employees will just quit and form a new studio. Many of them have lived in Edmonton a long time and probably have some pretty deep roots in the community. Plenty may want to leave for milder weather in Vancouver though.
What will be really interesting is to see what Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk end up doing. If they stay with their Studio in Edmonton and stay in control of day to day operations, things should be fine. If they take their money and run, well they earned it.
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Lumping all humans under the age of 18 into the same legal category is retarded. Selling Gears of War to a 16 year old is one thing. Selling it to a 10 year old is another. Selling it to 5 year old is yet another.
I do not think it would be entirely unreasonable to have some sort of ID card for minors that basically can be used to signify that they may be considered an adult for certain purposes. Not buying guns or voting. But for things like Violent Videogames, adult movies, cigarettes, and alcohol. Make it a pre-requisite for driving a car. Set it up so that the minor needs parental consent to obtain it, and you can let the parents decide when their children can start to be treated as an adult.
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In Japan, they had to pass an act of parliament to prevent DragonQuest games from being released on a week day. Too many people were ditching from work or school to buy and play the game.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/whats_on/listings/article704332.ece
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I can think of the following potential causes. Note however, that I am not an economist. I am a Canadian though, so its all good.
1) With the Euro gaining in populatity, alot of US dollars that were held in reserve are now circulating. More US dollars in circulation diminishes their value.
2) There was a real, fundamental change in the economy. Oil got very expensive. Canada has Oil. To buy that oil, at some point, they need to spend Canadian dollars. More demand for our dollar means our dollar is worth more. (This is why we have also been rising against the Euro / Yen, though not nearly as much).
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