>>As I understand it downloading a file isn't illegal, rather uploading the file is what constitutes a copyright violation. In this case even if you could argue that the file was offered to you legitimately that does not give you an implicit right to go on providing it to others (uploading).
What if your share ratio is below 1.0? Then you haven't provided a useful copy of the software to anyone.
And in any event, if they put it up on bittorrent, they shouldn't be complaining when people use bittorrent to download it.
>>I think youd have a tough time convincing the courts that you thought being offered a single chunk from a "torrent sneaking firm" constituted permission to download the game;
How about pointing to TFA? The company itself put a version of their software up on a torrent site for people to download from freely. How can they then say said downloads were illegal?
As copyright holders, they have the right to put their software up for free download, but they can't complain when people take them up on it.
>>Of course 99.5% of the people who claim to be audiophiles and claim they can 'tell the difference' don't need one either
I bought one of those X-Fi cards and intended to return it if I didn't like it.
Doing some benchmarks in WoW (which I still played at the time) found a 5-10fps increase.
Playing with the advanced audio settings, I was able to get a noticeably better sound quality out of it. I can tell just by listening to my music if it's running in entertainment (more audio filters) or game (faster) mode, and click it over to the one I want.
>>Tribes 1 was superior to Tribes 2. Otherwise, I like the cut of your jib.
Kind of like how Quake1/Quakeworld multiplayer was vastly superior to Quake2 and Halflife.
On the positive side of things, there's a bunch of fan mods for Quake that make it look somewhat modern, with bloom and whatnot. Best of all, they're network compatible with the original servers.
When I went to Beijing, the air really was crazy bad. As in, it drove you crazy to breathe it.
It's not just the air quality, which is like breathing soup and makes you feel sick, but also the open sewer vents all over town. My taxi got stuck in traffic, windows down, next to one of these sewer-gas-venting holes in the ground for half an eternity, and I was literally ready to leap out of the cab and run to my destination to get away from it.
>>Even if a 9/11 scale event happened every single year, it would take more than four years to match a single year of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S.
That's a poor way of thinking about it, kind of like saying that banks shouldn't have security guards because over 99% of robberies take place outside of banks.
That said, though, our national security system is incredibly brain dead in some parts. Janet Napolean, what can I carry in my shoes that I can't carry in my pockets?
>>I've been looking at my game shelves and thinking about this myself recently. Like the author(s) of TFA, I find myself completing a far lower proportion of the games I buy than I used to.
Ditto.
I find it more to be a factor of two things: 1) I have a lot more disposable income now than when I was younger, so I buy more games that catch my fancy. It used to be I'd get a couple games a year, and play them until I'd done just about everything possible in them. Now, I beat ME2 (for example) and move on to the next game queuing up for my attention.
2) Games aren't necessarily better now. ME2, for example, is a corridor-shooter ala the crap that is FF13. ME1 had some issues, sure, but when you were running around the Citadel doing all the different side quests, it felt a lot more open ended than ME2. I got bored of it about halfway through, but I soldiered through to the end anyway, since it didn't really take that long (less than 20 hours to do every Loyalty mission and beat the game on Hard difficulty, my first time through). I started again on the hardest setting, and got bored for real, and uninstalled it.
3) DLC has a paradoxical effect on me - they make me enjoy a game less. In other words, if I've beaten ME2, I don't want to go back and install something that takes place before the end of the game. (Why on earth would I?) And I hate it when they've obviously taken stuff OUT of a game in order to charge extra for it as DLC. For example, see Dragon Age: Origins, in which there's an NPC sitting in your campsite that will redirect you to the Bioware Store to charge you an extra $8 or so to do a 20 minute long quest. DLC makes more sense in a game like MAG or a Halo, that is ongoing, rather than RPGs.
4) As you say, repetition is a game-ender for me. The second an RPG asks me to start grinding monsters or faerie wings or whatever, I uninstall it. I hate having to grind friends in Fable 3. And, as you can imagine, I don't play many MMORPGS any more. Stronghold Kingdoms is the only one I've played recently (I came in 170th out of 18,000 people in the last Alpha test), and I tried and rejected DDO, Runes of Magic, FF14, and so forth, and I may go back into WoW:Cataclysm just for the single player content, as with WotLK (which was pretty solid). I can't stand the notion that a game development team got together and said, "Okay, how long are we going to make Billy run in circles until we let him hit 18th level?", especially when the answer is A Lot Of Time. By contrast, in Fallout New Vegas (an awesome game), you just sort of level as you go along, and don't worry about it too much.
>>Mythbusters Adam and Jamie, Dean Kamin, and even Mike Rowe come to mind.
How about some women? Everyone knows about Marie Curie, but few people know about Lise Meitner, who was like Anne Frank - a Jew who fled to the Netherlands to avoid Nazis - but also discovered nuclear fission.
Some fun excerpts from her life involve using the Physicist Underground Railroad (I shit you not) to escape from Germany, including several of her physicist friends running interference when an Evil Nazi Physicist was trying to rat her out, and who published papers that would be used to develop the nuclear bomb (Chain Reaction + E=mc^2 = Boom) anonymously... while living in mortal fear for her life.
For her accomplishments, her partner was awarded the Nobel Prize.
>>Unless the law specifically conflicts with a right stated in that agreement (the Constitution)... the majority of the elected representatives has decided you will be subject to it.
James Madison would like a word with you outside.
This might be how it works under European Constitutions, but the American Constitution has it the other way around. Unless the government has been granted a certain power, it cannot use that power.
Or, at least it used to work that way before FDR (and the Civil War, to a certain extent).
>>Just like the other 90% of us. Sad but true. What will it take for more citizens to actually do something? Take away our TV? Our Internet? Our books? What?
Janet Napolitano said "Well, you have other options than flying" - applying the same logic to the internet (especially now that they can shut you down for violating the ADA, as all websites do), "Well, you can always read a newspaper". The internet is a right, not a privilege, blah blah blah.
I'm actually very happy this story is making the rounds - you know that if a pro-government organization like CNN is calling the TSA out of line, that maybe somebody will finally change something.
>>I see a screaming child. I don't see a Parent that is standing up for their child and bring a civil suit or insisting that the TSA officer be arrested for sexual molestation of a child.
No? The father is a news reporter, and brought the story of the TSA molesting his 3 year old to national attention.
I think that's about as much as a I-don't-want-to-be-arrested citizen can do to stand up for their kids these days.
>>The level of backward-compatibility almost every release of Windows since 3.11 has managed to achieve is nothing short of amazing.
Sure, like how MATLAB7 R14 doesn't work on Vista or Win7, meaning our licensed code (which only runs on that specific version of MATLAB - newer versions cause it to crash) will only run on XP or 2000.
Yeah, Microsoft talks a lot about how they made Barbie Horsie Adventures for MSDOS 5.1 work under Vista, but if they can't get fucking *MATLAB* to run, their backwards compatibility is all a pile of shit.
My biggest problem with Wikipedia is the direct source of stories like this. It's become a little pool and everyone is trying to be the biggest fish, for two reasons: First, that way they can create their own little kingdom of articles which they've "adopted", bullying people into a consensus which matches their own ideals/agenda. Second, they just want to feel important. Take that Access Denied fellow's name/signature thing for example. Bright red, obnoxious, disrupts the page flow, and yells to everyone, "Look at me, look at me!"
Basically... yeah.
Like the recent stories with the TSA has shown, the best way to create a bully is to give a small man a small amount of power. I've known many wiki admins to squelch debates on topics that they personally disagreed with, flagrantly violated the rules (and had their own admin friends step in to defend themselves when needed) and otherwise conduct business more appropriate to an elementary school playground than what has become the reference website of record in our modern times.
>>The break even point on corn is roughly $4.25 per bushel. Before the big ethanol push, corn was selling for, if you were lucky, $3.00 per bushel. That is a sizeable loss that farmers were eating on ever bushel produced.
Educate yourself, read the CBO report on ethanol on corn prices... prices shot up to around $8/bushel mainly due to the pressure from ethanol production.
Lol, no. The only benefits to corn ethanol are... well, there aren't any. It's just a subsidy to the corn farmers that vote first for presidents, and raises the price of food to boot.
If our glorious leaders actually cared about eliminating dependence on oil (and they don't, we talked with Bush's energy secretary a few years back), we could convert our coal to gasoline, and use nuclear to run our power plants instead of dirty coal.
But the response of everyone in power is that gassification, which has been in use since the 1920s, is an unproven technology. Fucking Feinstein said this with a straight face on CSPAN. I think only the senator from WV was really pushing for it, for obvious reasons.
Sorry to respond to myself, but I should also add the corridors-with-monsters paradigm dominates a lot of FPSs these days, too. Gears of War, Killzone, etc.
>>Which is why the author of the linked article also asked people to "Stop giving quality reviews to broken games".
I'd say it's more important to stop giving quality reviews to polished games that are actually crap, like Final Fantasy 13. IGN gave it an "Editor's Choice" award, for fuck's sake.
Fallout New Vegas is an amazing game. If I was a reviewer, I'd knock it down half a point for the occasional glitches and bugs, since they're not enough to take away my enjoyment of it, and give it a 9.5.
We need to reward companies for making non-linear roleplaying games. If I have to walk down one more FF13-style RPG based on corridor-with-monsters again... and yeah, I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 2 and Fable 3... I'll snap the disc and send it back to the publisher.
>>Personally, I think you're exactly the kind of person that lets them get away with that crap. Hell, you've put me off the game for life in a few short paragraphs
You shouldn't - you're missing out on one of the best RPGs of all time.
I've put 40 hours into FONV, and I just picked up and started playing Fable 3 last night. While Fable 3 is a polished, beautiful game, it's so much a walk-down-the-corridors-and-kill-things game, like the crap that was FF13, that I felt like tearing my eyes out. Multiplayer is horrendously bad - for a game designed to support 2 player coop, a lot of the quests involve one person just standing around aimlessly for 10 minutes while the other person plays the game. You can't get quests unless both players are standing in the same spot, and you can't travel unless they're both together as well.
Guess which game I'm playing today? Fallout New Vegas. It's an amazing game, and it's much less buggy and crashy than Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Redguard, and Fallout 3, so I consider that an overall win. Sure, the crashes are annoying, but the load time on the game is actually pretty fast, and I'm not going to let petty annoyances make me miss out on one of the best games ever made.
>>While the article summary doesn't mention Fallout: New Vegas, it's clear from both the context and TFA itself that this is really a New Vegas issue.
Nah, it's all Bethesda games. Ever play Daggerfall? I tried to, back in the day, but it wasn't playable on my machine until a year and 24(!) patches later. Play Battlespire, or whatever it was called? Was billed as a multiplayer game, but multiplayer never worked. Ever. Shame too, since it had some nice castles for some interesting CTF action. Game was buggy as hell, too. Redguard never worked more than five minutes at a time.
Oblivion and Morrowind were very buggy, too, some fatally so, making it impossible to complete the game. I once had to revert back three hours in Morrowind and it very nearly made me punch a fist through my monitor.
Oblivion was an AMAZINGLY crashy game, especially once you started modding it - but you HAD to mod it in order to enable basic functionality and to get landscapes that didn't look overwhelmingly terrible. I once spent 8 hours getting Oblivion all set up for my wife with all the mods she wanted, getting the load orders all straightened out... then she disabled OOO, and the game would never run again. No matter what mods I turned on or off, it would crash at launch. I had to uninstall and reinstall the whole thing, and then I told her she should really just play it stock. She mainly just used the Oblivion Editor anyway, so things like OOO didn't matter to her anyway. She did want Ren's hair, though, which always caused problems.
New Vegas... isn't as bad as their other games. I'm 40 hours into it, and there's only three serious bugs I've encountered. (Like you, I've had some freezes and CTDs, but they don't happen often enough to bother me, maybe once every 4 hours. I also quicksave a lot.) 1) Monorail quest bug. It's bugged for everybody who does the quest the wrong/easy way. If you do it the right/hard way, which is to use stealth to overhear a conversation, it works fine. If you just go in and shoot the guy, and take the code off of him, the monorail will bug out and will blow up even if you save it, or it will launch as soon as you enter the terminal room. Workaround: Don't do (the final part of) the quest. 2) Dog hates cows. For some reason, my dog will aggro on the brahmins at the Mojave Caravn Outpost (he's hungry?) Even if you reload, he'll flip out and attack them again, which results in a giant clusterfuck with NCR troopers, caravan guards, and everyone else shooting you. Your companions will shoot back, and will drive your reputation into the ground. And then they all die. (I'm playing hardcore mode, so it matters.) 3) There's a random event where a NCR trooper attacks you when you leave the strip, saying "Aha, you shouldn't have come here to this backwater location alone!" Unfortunately, it triggered while I was in the NCR ambassadors office, which means that I was basically stuck getting into a firefight with the entire NCR detachment in New Vegas... including aggroing the NCR ambassadir / quest-giver. Workaround: some quick reloads, I ended up being able to run him around a desk and escape out to Freeside, where I still lost rep for killing him (went from liked to neutral, the dick), but at least didn't cause me to fail the quests.
Also some minor bugs, like doing the cohort's special quest to increase their hitpoints actually decreasing their hitpoints substantially (from 370 to 240) and permanently, and a couple time I shot a guy he flew into the air and landed on a lamppost, but nothing more than what I'd expect from such a large game.
All that aside, I still think it's actually replace Planescape: Torment as my favorite RPG of all time. It's an amazing game. The only thing I'd change is a bit more variety for energy weapons, and to have more crafting recipes in the game - that whole element seems entirely undeveloped beyond building Weapon Repair Kits.
>>That is a very good critique, however it actually cuts against the idea of less government intervention.
Who said I was? Our largest expenditure in the United States is for health care for the elderly and poor, to a tune of $700B a year (federal+state contributions) to cover 70M Americans, so it's not like the government isn't or won't be involved in any realistic scenario. If we could go back in time, that's one thing, but we're sort of stuck with some sort of government health care now. I'm more concerned with it being done 1) right and 2) cheaply than worry about philosophical issues with it, since that train left the station a long time ago.
>>The British NHS is just like the VA and the NHS is among the most efficient socialized health care systems in the world.
Well, the VA runs on a lower budget than the NHS per patient, but as I said, it's an imperfect comparison (actually, I didn't say that, I had a typo. =) The VA counts everybody that it can treat as potential patients, even dependents of veterans that don't know they can take advantage of it.
The NHS serves 50M people at a cost of $160B per year, or $3500/person, (including the 8% additional being spent on private insurance). Again, this shows that we're doing it wrong. If we paid $3500 per patient, we could cover 200M Americans at the same amount we're paying for now, which is more than enough to cover all the people currently doing without insurance. Or we could cover everybody that needed it and save the rest to help balance the budget.
Health, SSN, and Defense together comprise the lion's share of our federal budget, and fixing Medicare seems to be the biggest opportunity for gain at the smallest price.
>>Managed care has its own problems that are different from fee-for-service. There is no magic bullet; there are only trade-offs.
True, but the numbers speak for themselves, I think.
>>Quite frankly, I'm for some sort of socialized catastrophic-only coverage
Yeah, I think that might be the best option, as it'd let the free market try to fix the horrendous mess we have right now. Have every hospital post on their front door (just like when you go to an auto shop) their list of prices for the most common, and inexpensive services. Or on a website. I've been pushing for that for years - you could probably dig it up from my old posts on here on/. - and while we have it here in California (I hear), I've never been able to find the website. Obama, I think, is on the same page as that, but it really depends if it'd work any better than the CA system.
The way HSAs work is kind of close to what you're talking about, though I wish it was a bit less cumbersome to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
>>As I understand it downloading a file isn't illegal, rather uploading the file is what constitutes a copyright violation. In this case even if you could argue that the file was offered to you legitimately that does not give you an implicit right to go on providing it to others (uploading).
What if your share ratio is below 1.0? Then you haven't provided a useful copy of the software to anyone.
And in any event, if they put it up on bittorrent, they shouldn't be complaining when people use bittorrent to download it.
>>I think youd have a tough time convincing the courts that you thought being offered a single chunk from a "torrent sneaking firm" constituted permission to download the game;
How about pointing to TFA? The company itself put a version of their software up on a torrent site for people to download from freely. How can they then say said downloads were illegal?
As copyright holders, they have the right to put their software up for free download, but they can't complain when people take them up on it.
Are you writing a fantasy novel or something?
>>Of course 99.5% of the people who claim to be audiophiles and claim they can 'tell the difference' don't need one either
I bought one of those X-Fi cards and intended to return it if I didn't like it.
Doing some benchmarks in WoW (which I still played at the time) found a 5-10fps increase.
Playing with the advanced audio settings, I was able to get a noticeably better sound quality out of it. I can tell just by listening to my music if it's running in entertainment (more audio filters) or game (faster) mode, and click it over to the one I want.
>>Tribes 1 was superior to Tribes 2. Otherwise, I like the cut of your jib.
Kind of like how Quake1/Quakeworld multiplayer was vastly superior to Quake2 and Halflife.
On the positive side of things, there's a bunch of fan mods for Quake that make it look somewhat modern, with bloom and whatnot. Best of all, they're network compatible with the original servers.
>>Desperately seeking emphatic adjective...
When I went to Beijing, the air really was crazy bad. As in, it drove you crazy to breathe it.
It's not just the air quality, which is like breathing soup and makes you feel sick, but also the open sewer vents all over town. My taxi got stuck in traffic, windows down, next to one of these sewer-gas-venting holes in the ground for half an eternity, and I was literally ready to leap out of the cab and run to my destination to get away from it.
>>Even if a 9/11 scale event happened every single year, it would take more than four years to match a single year of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S.
That's a poor way of thinking about it, kind of like saying that banks shouldn't have security guards because over 99% of robberies take place outside of banks.
That said, though, our national security system is incredibly brain dead in some parts. Janet Napolean, what can I carry in my shoes that I can't carry in my pockets?
>>I've been looking at my game shelves and thinking about this myself recently. Like the author(s) of TFA, I find myself completing a far lower proportion of the games I buy than I used to.
Ditto.
I find it more to be a factor of two things:
1) I have a lot more disposable income now than when I was younger, so I buy more games that catch my fancy. It used to be I'd get a couple games a year, and play them until I'd done just about everything possible in them. Now, I beat ME2 (for example) and move on to the next game queuing up for my attention.
2) Games aren't necessarily better now. ME2, for example, is a corridor-shooter ala the crap that is FF13. ME1 had some issues, sure, but when you were running around the Citadel doing all the different side quests, it felt a lot more open ended than ME2. I got bored of it about halfway through, but I soldiered through to the end anyway, since it didn't really take that long (less than 20 hours to do every Loyalty mission and beat the game on Hard difficulty, my first time through). I started again on the hardest setting, and got bored for real, and uninstalled it.
3) DLC has a paradoxical effect on me - they make me enjoy a game less. In other words, if I've beaten ME2, I don't want to go back and install something that takes place before the end of the game. (Why on earth would I?) And I hate it when they've obviously taken stuff OUT of a game in order to charge extra for it as DLC. For example, see Dragon Age: Origins, in which there's an NPC sitting in your campsite that will redirect you to the Bioware Store to charge you an extra $8 or so to do a 20 minute long quest. DLC makes more sense in a game like MAG or a Halo, that is ongoing, rather than RPGs.
4) As you say, repetition is a game-ender for me. The second an RPG asks me to start grinding monsters or faerie wings or whatever, I uninstall it. I hate having to grind friends in Fable 3. And, as you can imagine, I don't play many MMORPGS any more. Stronghold Kingdoms is the only one I've played recently (I came in 170th out of 18,000 people in the last Alpha test), and I tried and rejected DDO, Runes of Magic, FF14, and so forth, and I may go back into WoW:Cataclysm just for the single player content, as with WotLK (which was pretty solid). I can't stand the notion that a game development team got together and said, "Okay, how long are we going to make Billy run in circles until we let him hit 18th level?", especially when the answer is A Lot Of Time. By contrast, in Fallout New Vegas (an awesome game), you just sort of level as you go along, and don't worry about it too much.
>>People thought DNA was a gay disease? /sigh...
HIV is a retrovirus.
>>Being a scientist means doing original scientific research i.e. something that nobody has done before, otherwise it is called history.
Replication of results is a critical part of doing science.
You train to do science by repeating classical experiments.
>>Mythbusters Adam and Jamie, Dean Kamin, and even Mike Rowe come to mind.
How about some women? Everyone knows about Marie Curie, but few people know about Lise Meitner, who was like Anne Frank - a Jew who fled to the Netherlands to avoid Nazis - but also discovered nuclear fission.
Some fun excerpts from her life involve using the Physicist Underground Railroad (I shit you not) to escape from Germany, including several of her physicist friends running interference when an Evil Nazi Physicist was trying to rat her out, and who published papers that would be used to develop the nuclear bomb (Chain Reaction + E=mc^2 = Boom) anonymously... while living in mortal fear for her life.
For her accomplishments, her partner was awarded the Nobel Prize.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner
>>Unless the law specifically conflicts with a right stated in that agreement (the Constitution)... the majority of the elected representatives has decided you will be subject to it.
James Madison would like a word with you outside.
This might be how it works under European Constitutions, but the American Constitution has it the other way around. Unless the government has been granted a certain power, it cannot use that power.
Or, at least it used to work that way before FDR (and the Civil War, to a certain extent).
If you're worried about getting molested, you probably shouldn't be riding Greyhound... Terrorism may be rare, but creepy Greyhound riders are not.
Obligatory link to My First Cavity Search: A Children's Guide to Understanding Why He May Be a Threat to National Security.
http://gizmodo.com/5688087/the-tsas-sense-of-humor-makes-me-nervous
(But seriously, TSA? Child molestation is cool now?)
>>Just like the other 90% of us. Sad but true. What will it take for more citizens to actually do something? Take away our TV? Our Internet? Our books? What?
Janet Napolitano said "Well, you have other options than flying" - applying the same logic to the internet (especially now that they can shut you down for violating the ADA, as all websites do), "Well, you can always read a newspaper". The internet is a right, not a privilege, blah blah blah.
I'm actually very happy this story is making the rounds - you know that if a pro-government organization like CNN is calling the TSA out of line, that maybe somebody will finally change something.
>>I see a screaming child. I don't see a Parent that is standing up for their child and bring a civil suit or insisting that the TSA officer be arrested for sexual molestation of a child.
No? The father is a news reporter, and brought the story of the TSA molesting his 3 year old to national attention.
I think that's about as much as a I-don't-want-to-be-arrested citizen can do to stand up for their kids these days.
>>The level of backward-compatibility almost every release of Windows since 3.11 has managed to achieve is nothing short of amazing.
Sure, like how MATLAB7 R14 doesn't work on Vista or Win7, meaning our licensed code (which only runs on that specific version of MATLAB - newer versions cause it to crash) will only run on XP or 2000.
Yeah, Microsoft talks a lot about how they made Barbie Horsie Adventures for MSDOS 5.1 work under Vista, but if they can't get fucking *MATLAB* to run, their backwards compatibility is all a pile of shit.
Basically... yeah.
Like the recent stories with the TSA has shown, the best way to create a bully is to give a small man a small amount of power. I've known many wiki admins to squelch debates on topics that they personally disagreed with, flagrantly violated the rules (and had their own admin friends step in to defend themselves when needed) and otherwise conduct business more appropriate to an elementary school playground than what has become the reference website of record in our modern times.
>>The break even point on corn is roughly $4.25 per bushel. Before the big ethanol push, corn was selling for, if you were lucky, $3.00 per bushel. That is a sizeable loss that farmers were eating on ever bushel produced.
Educate yourself, read the CBO report on ethanol on corn prices... prices shot up to around $8/bushel mainly due to the pressure from ethanol production.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/100xx/doc10057/04-08-Ethanol.pdf
Lol, no. The only benefits to corn ethanol are... well, there aren't any. It's just a subsidy to the corn farmers that vote first for presidents, and raises the price of food to boot.
If our glorious leaders actually cared about eliminating dependence on oil (and they don't, we talked with Bush's energy secretary a few years back), we could convert our coal to gasoline, and use nuclear to run our power plants instead of dirty coal.
But the response of everyone in power is that gassification, which has been in use since the 1920s, is an unproven technology. Fucking Feinstein said this with a straight face on CSPAN. I think only the senator from WV was really pushing for it, for obvious reasons.
Sorry to respond to myself, but I should also add the corridors-with-monsters paradigm dominates a lot of FPSs these days, too. Gears of War, Killzone, etc.
Excellent web comic on the subject:
http://i.imgur.com/BITmX.jpg
>>Which is why the author of the linked article also asked people to "Stop giving quality reviews to broken games".
I'd say it's more important to stop giving quality reviews to polished games that are actually crap, like Final Fantasy 13. IGN gave it an "Editor's Choice" award, for fuck's sake.
Fallout New Vegas is an amazing game. If I was a reviewer, I'd knock it down half a point for the occasional glitches and bugs, since they're not enough to take away my enjoyment of it, and give it a 9.5.
We need to reward companies for making non-linear roleplaying games. If I have to walk down one more FF13-style RPG based on corridor-with-monsters again... and yeah, I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 2 and Fable 3... I'll snap the disc and send it back to the publisher.
>>Personally, I think you're exactly the kind of person that lets them get away with that crap. Hell, you've put me off the game for life in a few short paragraphs
You shouldn't - you're missing out on one of the best RPGs of all time.
I've put 40 hours into FONV, and I just picked up and started playing Fable 3 last night. While Fable 3 is a polished, beautiful game, it's so much a walk-down-the-corridors-and-kill-things game, like the crap that was FF13, that I felt like tearing my eyes out. Multiplayer is horrendously bad - for a game designed to support 2 player coop, a lot of the quests involve one person just standing around aimlessly for 10 minutes while the other person plays the game. You can't get quests unless both players are standing in the same spot, and you can't travel unless they're both together as well.
Guess which game I'm playing today? Fallout New Vegas. It's an amazing game, and it's much less buggy and crashy than Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Redguard, and Fallout 3, so I consider that an overall win. Sure, the crashes are annoying, but the load time on the game is actually pretty fast, and I'm not going to let petty annoyances make me miss out on one of the best games ever made.
>>While the article summary doesn't mention Fallout: New Vegas, it's clear from both the context and TFA itself that this is really a New Vegas issue.
Nah, it's all Bethesda games. Ever play Daggerfall? I tried to, back in the day, but it wasn't playable on my machine until a year and 24(!) patches later. Play Battlespire, or whatever it was called? Was billed as a multiplayer game, but multiplayer never worked. Ever. Shame too, since it had some nice castles for some interesting CTF action. Game was buggy as hell, too. Redguard never worked more than five minutes at a time.
Oblivion and Morrowind were very buggy, too, some fatally so, making it impossible to complete the game. I once had to revert back three hours in Morrowind and it very nearly made me punch a fist through my monitor.
Oblivion was an AMAZINGLY crashy game, especially once you started modding it - but you HAD to mod it in order to enable basic functionality and to get landscapes that didn't look overwhelmingly terrible. I once spent 8 hours getting Oblivion all set up for my wife with all the mods she wanted, getting the load orders all straightened out... then she disabled OOO, and the game would never run again. No matter what mods I turned on or off, it would crash at launch. I had to uninstall and reinstall the whole thing, and then I told her she should really just play it stock. She mainly just used the Oblivion Editor anyway, so things like OOO didn't matter to her anyway. She did want Ren's hair, though, which always caused problems.
New Vegas... isn't as bad as their other games. I'm 40 hours into it, and there's only three serious bugs I've encountered. (Like you, I've had some freezes and CTDs, but they don't happen often enough to bother me, maybe once every 4 hours. I also quicksave a lot.)
1) Monorail quest bug. It's bugged for everybody who does the quest the wrong/easy way. If you do it the right/hard way, which is to use stealth to overhear a conversation, it works fine. If you just go in and shoot the guy, and take the code off of him, the monorail will bug out and will blow up even if you save it, or it will launch as soon as you enter the terminal room. Workaround: Don't do (the final part of) the quest.
2) Dog hates cows. For some reason, my dog will aggro on the brahmins at the Mojave Caravn Outpost (he's hungry?) Even if you reload, he'll flip out and attack them again, which results in a giant clusterfuck with NCR troopers, caravan guards, and everyone else shooting you. Your companions will shoot back, and will drive your reputation into the ground. And then they all die. (I'm playing hardcore mode, so it matters.)
3) There's a random event where a NCR trooper attacks you when you leave the strip, saying "Aha, you shouldn't have come here to this backwater location alone!" Unfortunately, it triggered while I was in the NCR ambassadors office, which means that I was basically stuck getting into a firefight with the entire NCR detachment in New Vegas... including aggroing the NCR ambassadir / quest-giver. Workaround: some quick reloads, I ended up being able to run him around a desk and escape out to Freeside, where I still lost rep for killing him (went from liked to neutral, the dick), but at least didn't cause me to fail the quests.
Also some minor bugs, like doing the cohort's special quest to increase their hitpoints actually decreasing their hitpoints substantially (from 370 to 240) and permanently, and a couple time I shot a guy he flew into the air and landed on a lamppost, but nothing more than what I'd expect from such a large game.
All that aside, I still think it's actually replace Planescape: Torment as my favorite RPG of all time. It's an amazing game. The only thing I'd change is a bit more variety for energy weapons, and to have more crafting recipes in the game - that whole element seems entirely undeveloped beyond building Weapon Repair Kits.
>>That is a very good critique, however it actually cuts against the idea of less government intervention.
Who said I was? Our largest expenditure in the United States is for health care for the elderly and poor, to a tune of $700B a year (federal+state contributions) to cover 70M Americans, so it's not like the government isn't or won't be involved in any realistic scenario. If we could go back in time, that's one thing, but we're sort of stuck with some sort of government health care now. I'm more concerned with it being done 1) right and 2) cheaply than worry about philosophical issues with it, since that train left the station a long time ago.
>>The British NHS is just like the VA and the NHS is among the most efficient socialized health care systems in the world.
Well, the VA runs on a lower budget than the NHS per patient, but as I said, it's an imperfect comparison (actually, I didn't say that, I had a typo. =) The VA counts everybody that it can treat as potential patients, even dependents of veterans that don't know they can take advantage of it.
The NHS serves 50M people at a cost of $160B per year, or $3500/person, (including the 8% additional being spent on private insurance). Again, this shows that we're doing it wrong. If we paid $3500 per patient, we could cover 200M Americans at the same amount we're paying for now, which is more than enough to cover all the people currently doing without insurance. Or we could cover everybody that needed it and save the rest to help balance the budget.
Health, SSN, and Defense together comprise the lion's share of our federal budget, and fixing Medicare seems to be the biggest opportunity for gain at the smallest price.
>>Managed care has its own problems that are different from fee-for-service. There is no magic bullet; there are only trade-offs.
True, but the numbers speak for themselves, I think.
>>Quite frankly, I'm for some sort of socialized catastrophic-only coverage
Yeah, I think that might be the best option, as it'd let the free market try to fix the horrendous mess we have right now. Have every hospital post on their front door (just like when you go to an auto shop) their list of prices for the most common, and inexpensive services. Or on a website. I've been pushing for that for years - you could probably dig it up from my old posts on here on /. - and while we have it here in California (I hear), I've never been able to find the website. Obama, I think, is on the same page as that, but it really depends if it'd work any better than the CA system.
The way HSAs work is kind of close to what you're talking about, though I wish it was a bit less cumbersome to deal with.