Steam's offline mode works for LAN gaming, and might work fully online, depending on the game. For something not using the Steam server browser, RUSE probably can't tell what mode you're in.
And I, for one, never play RTSes online. Too many obsessive experts, too hard to find someone who just wants to have fun. LAN gaming with your friends works for that.
Let's face it, he's going up against the most powerful organizations on the planet. Odds are, he's not going to win forever. That's not a threat, that's a sad truth.
But why should removing one person stop WikiLeaks? It won't, really. The rebel alliance will keep fighting. Sure, a good man will be in jail, but that's just a cost of operating.
Hell, even if they shut down WikiLeaks, put everyone involved behind bars, and melt the servers, the movement will still go on. Now that someone's tried it, you can't stop "organized information leaking via internet". If WikiLeaks goes down, ten more will sprout up in it's place.
I will concede that I'm not attending a prestigious or even selective college, but literally half my class wouldn't have made it through my (prestigious and selective) high school.
Most of them aren't all that dumb or ignorant, but, once they start typing, the intelligence starts dropping. Of course, there's the one guy who turns everything into a "legalize-marijuana" argument, or the people who thought "A Modest Proposal" was serious, or the one who thinks a chain email counts as a reputable statistic, or the one who let out a yell during a discussion because she discovered Facebook had been blocked, or the one who literally started smoking during class...
OK, you're right. These kids shouldn't have made it through secondary school. I can only hope the actual tech classes have more qualified students. Then again, I rather enjoyed being able to code circles around my high-school programming teachers...
Many current students are as familiar with "books" and "literature" as they are with LP records or horseback riding. Should classes stop requiring actual literacy, beyond text messaging, to accommodate them?
I'm completely serious about that above claim, by the way. Many of my college classmates seem unable to find the apostrophe key, let alone spellcheck. Even using proper English is beyond them, in some cases. I considered putting an actual example up, but I decided not to subject you all to that level of linguistic abuse. Suffice it to say that the entire assignment lacked a single capital letter, the logic was on par with Glenn Beck, and the tone, well, imagine a stereotype of a poor urban youth, and make it an actual person. Yeah, it was that bad.
Ah, forgot ARM doesn't have a built-in FPU as standard. Which would make almost any game server too slow anyways. Actually, it would make almost anything slow.
Is there a reason for no FPU? Is it some extreme power-saving measure?
Buy a couple dozen of them. Hook them up to the cheapest router that will handle that many. Set them up with Yafray or similar. Instant, low-power render farm. Might not be high-performance, but I bet the frames per watt are better than most.
Or set one of them up as a Quake server. Old-school FTW.
I can't speak for all schools, but my old middle school had horrible water. I actually did a side-by-side microscope comparison of fresh-from-the-tap to mudwater, and the school had more bacteria. Less sediment, but still more bacteria.
First time a teacher regretted me actually doing my homework.
No way, man. I was scared out of my pants playing it under full lighting at noon. Of course, I also refuse to play Resident Evil 4 past sundown, and I even turn up the lights for the Ravenholm chapter of HL2.
That's a bit too extreme. I for one would fix copyright terms at ten, maybe twenty years. Probably just a decade, though. That is ample time for the author to get all deserved profit, but short enough for the work to still be culturally relevant when it enters the public domain.
Some game engines tie the physics calculations to the framerate, so having higher FPS in those does make the movement more realistic.
Additionally, most engines poll the input devices only once per frame. If you have a high-end mouse or gamepad that actually responds more than 60 times a second, having higher framerates will make input more fluid.
Finally, I like having a buffer zone. I usually tune my games to render about 80 fps, so if I run into a scene a bit more complex than normal, I still see 60 frames a second.
Every military has a history of war crimes. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Any other military would have the same problems. Your ignorant, if "trendy", anti-Americanism just doesn't let you see that. Seriously, the last time SECDEF was a "Richard" was 1993. Richard "Dick" Cheney was Vice President under Bush Jr., a post now filled by Joseph Biden.
Were the incidents you referred to tragic? Yes. But look at the bigger picture. A handful of tragedies amongst an entire occupied country does not invalidate the entire system.
I don't have time to give you a point-by-point rebuttal, so I'll limit myself to what you said in Case 2.
"Torture" is a massively overused term these days. People are calling pepper spray and tasers torture. The term is so diluted now that it is essentially a meaningless word with powerful emotion, but no logic.
In any case, "torture" as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture, is simply beyond the purview of infantry. Front-line troops neither interrogate nor punish.
You yourself seem to have no knowledge of angry crowds. There is no peaceful way to disperse an antagonistic crowd. None. The best you will get is a nonlethal one.
And again you bring up civilians getting killed. Get over it. People die every day for a million reasons, and the one you're most worked up about is military accidents? Yes, accidents. No soldier wants to shoot a civilian. Soldiers are not blind aggressors, at least not in the US. They see themselves as noble warriors, fighting for truth, justice, etc. They want to kill the bad guys and go home, in that order. Civilians do not fall into the category of "bad guys"; they are not military targets; they are only killed when something goes wrong. Civilian deaths would decrease even further if the enemy followed the Geneva Convention. In particular, the part where they have to wear uniforms, so they can be identified as combatants, which protects the noncombatants.
The US Army, and all other major armies, are designed to do one thing: destroy other armies. In a word, to kill. The American military is the best in the world at fighting other armies. They blew through the Iraqi army in literally hours. They haven't lost in a fair fight since Korea.
If the US wanted to, they could just let their military do their thing, and completely annihilate every country they're fighting in. They wouldn't even need nukes, just let the tanks roll and shoot everything that moves. Pave it, sell it to Disney, put up a theme park.
Of course, no leader in their right mind would do that. Most of the ones that aren't in their right mind still wouldn't.
The problem is threefold. First, no sane insurgent will go against the Army or Marine in "fair" combat. Second, soldiers aren't trained for nonlethal combat. You can't exactly pull punches with 5.56mm full metal jacket. Third, you can't deploy police to a country halfway across the globe.
So, the solution is what America always goes with: invent something. Make a poison gas that doesn't kill. Invent bullets made of rubber. Give the soldiers some kind of sci-fi non-death ray.
Sure, it won't be perfect. It'll probably kill people. But that's the thing people forget. You recall the saying, "shit happens"? That applies triple in a warzone. Shit happens. Jammed rifles. Friendly fire. Helicopter crashes. Civilians get shot.
War is the ultimate necessary evil. It takes homicide to the level of science, mass-produced murder. It is also completely necessary, and probably always will be.
You can unilaterally declare war. You can NOT unilaterally declare peace.
The Kolokol-1 article states "129 hostages died during the ensuing raid; nearly all of these fatalities were attributed to the effects of the aerosolised incapacitating agent". I'd rather be blind than dead, thank you very much.
The Agent 15 one is also debatable. Sure, it's quite safe on it's own, but it looks like a very poor choice for using on antagonistic forces. Many of the listed symptoms (from the exact article you linked" actually make it more likely that violence will be needed. "Failure to obey orders", "hallucinations", and "irrational fear" would be major ones.
Besides, which is more likely to have unknown side effects: a chemical, or EM radiation?
I'm sorry, but you need to shut the fuck up. The military is not some gang of murderers.
Soldiers already have automatic weapons, high explosives, and incendiary weapons. If some sociopath in the military wanted to hurt someone, they are already better able to do it.
Scenario: There's a bunch of protestors, unarmed, but they're filling the streets, keeping soldiers from getting to the actual enemy.
Case 1: They don't have the ADS, or any other less-than-lethal weapon. They fire several rounds into the air, which fails to disperse the crowd. They then fire on the crowd, killing dozens and wounding many more.
Case 2: They have ADS. They use it, and the crowd disperses enough for them to pass through. Several people suffer 1st-degree burns, and one goes blind in one eye.
I don't feel guilty in the slightest about my illicitly-gained music. I'll go to concerts, should any of the bands I like ever tour nearby, but I won't pay cent for the CDs. Maybe I'll send a check directly to the musicians, along with a license, saying that, by cashing that check, they agree to license me their music for personal use. That's held up in courts for software, right? Probably wouldn't actually work, but it would convince the jury.
I had a hilarious argument with a salesperson about this. I went into a CD store, mostly for shits and giggles, and checked the price on my favorite album, Metallica's S&M. $25 bucks. For a recording of a live concert that paid for itself. A concert that happened almost a decade ago. When I was leaving, the cashier asked if I wasn't buying anything today. I said, "Not at these prices."
Well, we got into an argument, about piracy, DRM, and crap like that. But the cashier kept trying to make one point: CDs sound better. I told him that a) 99% of people can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD, b) FLAC is identical to the CD. He remained absolutely convinced that a CD has higher-quality sound than a losslessly-compressed copy of the same.
I thought about asking him about DVD-Audio and the other "better-than-CD" formats, but I had already wasted enough of my time.
NASA probably has a very good reason for handing distribution over to Valve. Most likely because they do it better.
Whenever the US government tries to distribute files larger than half a gig, they run into problems. I remember being unable to download the first America's Army because the website couldn't handle the demand. I was trying to do so several months after release. I can only imagine how bad it would be near release, or from another country. NASA probably doesn't have many web servers outside the US. Steam does.
NASA probably doesn't give a shit about DRM. As in, they don't care. If it's added, fine. If it isn't, fine. They just handed distribution over to a company that's quite good at it.
Not only that, but apparently they used a few of the Steam libraries, adding leaderboards and stat tracking, plus the VAC anticheat system. So, they have a good reason to distribute on Steam - the game works better that way.
As a final bonus, they got a lot more coverage this way. I first learned of the game via Steam announcement, and it's likely that many people did as well.
Finally, most gamers don't care. Moonbase Alpha is a video game. It is targeted, essentially, at gamers, and gamers generally have no problem with Steam. It has about 70% of the Digital Distribution market. So, while you may not like Steam, you probably aren't in the target audience.
I understand your complaint. You want something NASA made, without extra baggage. I get that. It is, in fact, a bit odd that there isn't a non-Steam version. Most likely, it's either in-progress, or is considered a non-priority.
After all, it's just a game. NASA has better things to do.
Why not? As far as DRM goes, Steam is the least evil. It has offline mode, so it works even if you can't access the net. It doesn't encrypt things that have been released, so you can access the game data files if you wish. It has a massive install base, so it's not going away anytime soon. I haven't heard of any major security flaws, although it is a major target for social engineering scams. It uses it's powers for good, letting you store game saves and configs in the cloud, and doesn't tie itself to a specific machine at all. It lets you opt out from any data collection. It's much more stable than it was at release, especially since it switched from the IE renderer to WebKit. It's been ported to the Mac, and may be coming to Linux.
Really, if you're complaining about Steam, you probably don't trust Windows not to be spying on you. And if you're an active gamer, you come to realize that Steam's DRM is actually very lenient, compared to other recent games. Since almost no games get released sans DRM of some type, you may as well get over it, and choose the one that's the least evil.
Most likely, nothing. They'll probably just register the domain and leave it empty, or make it redirect to a.com. I just tried mcdonalds.tk, it loaded a blank page. By extension, they'll do the same to.xxx. So that will get blocked by a blanket ban, but it won't really affect anything. How often do you go to slashdot.com?
I don't foresee many false positives. Besides a few puns like ro.xxx, I think anything in.xxx will be porn.
Slashdot Mirror
Steam's offline mode works for LAN gaming, and might work fully online, depending on the game. For something not using the Steam server browser, RUSE probably can't tell what mode you're in.
And I, for one, never play RTSes online. Too many obsessive experts, too hard to find someone who just wants to have fun. LAN gaming with your friends works for that.
Depends who's on your jury.
Let's face it, he's going up against the most powerful organizations on the planet. Odds are, he's not going to win forever. That's not a threat, that's a sad truth.
But why should removing one person stop WikiLeaks? It won't, really. The rebel alliance will keep fighting. Sure, a good man will be in jail, but that's just a cost of operating.
Hell, even if they shut down WikiLeaks, put everyone involved behind bars, and melt the servers, the movement will still go on. Now that someone's tried it, you can't stop "organized information leaking via internet". If WikiLeaks goes down, ten more will sprout up in it's place.
I will concede that I'm not attending a prestigious or even selective college, but literally half my class wouldn't have made it through my (prestigious and selective) high school.
Most of them aren't all that dumb or ignorant, but, once they start typing, the intelligence starts dropping. Of course, there's the one guy who turns everything into a "legalize-marijuana" argument, or the people who thought "A Modest Proposal" was serious, or the one who thinks a chain email counts as a reputable statistic, or the one who let out a yell during a discussion because she discovered Facebook had been blocked, or the one who literally started smoking during class...
OK, you're right. These kids shouldn't have made it through secondary school. I can only hope the actual tech classes have more qualified students. Then again, I rather enjoyed being able to code circles around my high-school programming teachers...
Many current students are as familiar with "books" and "literature" as they are with LP records or horseback riding. Should classes stop requiring actual literacy, beyond text messaging, to accommodate them?
I'm completely serious about that above claim, by the way. Many of my college classmates seem unable to find the apostrophe key, let alone spellcheck. Even using proper English is beyond them, in some cases. I considered putting an actual example up, but I decided not to subject you all to that level of linguistic abuse. Suffice it to say that the entire assignment lacked a single capital letter, the logic was on par with Glenn Beck, and the tone, well, imagine a stereotype of a poor urban youth, and make it an actual person. Yeah, it was that bad.
I thought it was funny. Maybe there should be a "Unintentional Comedy" section.
Ah, forgot ARM doesn't have a built-in FPU as standard. Which would make almost any game server too slow anyways. Actually, it would make almost anything slow.
Is there a reason for no FPU? Is it some extreme power-saving measure?
Buy a couple dozen of them. Hook them up to the cheapest router that will handle that many. Set them up with Yafray or similar. Instant, low-power render farm. Might not be high-performance, but I bet the frames per watt are better than most.
Or set one of them up as a Quake server. Old-school FTW.
I can't speak for all schools, but my old middle school had horrible water. I actually did a side-by-side microscope comparison of fresh-from-the-tap to mudwater, and the school had more bacteria. Less sediment, but still more bacteria.
First time a teacher regretted me actually doing my homework.
I think there was a mod that did it. And they did copy a few set-pieces over into Doom 3, but they were hard to identify.
No way, man. I was scared out of my pants playing it under full lighting at noon. Of course, I also refuse to play Resident Evil 4 past sundown, and I even turn up the lights for the Ravenholm chapter of HL2.
I guess I'm just not a horror guy.
I've never actually played, but I recall that you can earn game time while playing.
That's a bit too extreme. I for one would fix copyright terms at ten, maybe twenty years. Probably just a decade, though. That is ample time for the author to get all deserved profit, but short enough for the work to still be culturally relevant when it enters the public domain.
Some game engines tie the physics calculations to the framerate, so having higher FPS in those does make the movement more realistic.
Additionally, most engines poll the input devices only once per frame. If you have a high-end mouse or gamepad that actually responds more than 60 times a second, having higher framerates will make input more fluid.
Finally, I like having a buffer zone. I usually tune my games to render about 80 fps, so if I run into a scene a bit more complex than normal, I still see 60 frames a second.
Every military has a history of war crimes. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Any other military would have the same problems. Your ignorant, if "trendy", anti-Americanism just doesn't let you see that. Seriously, the last time SECDEF was a "Richard" was 1993. Richard "Dick" Cheney was Vice President under Bush Jr., a post now filled by Joseph Biden.
Were the incidents you referred to tragic? Yes. But look at the bigger picture. A handful of tragedies amongst an entire occupied country does not invalidate the entire system.
I don't have time to give you a point-by-point rebuttal, so I'll limit myself to what you said in Case 2.
"Torture" is a massively overused term these days. People are calling pepper spray and tasers torture. The term is so diluted now that it is essentially a meaningless word with powerful emotion, but no logic.
In any case, "torture" as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture, is simply beyond the purview of infantry. Front-line troops neither interrogate nor punish.
You yourself seem to have no knowledge of angry crowds. There is no peaceful way to disperse an antagonistic crowd. None. The best you will get is a nonlethal one.
And again you bring up civilians getting killed. Get over it. People die every day for a million reasons, and the one you're most worked up about is military accidents? Yes, accidents. No soldier wants to shoot a civilian. Soldiers are not blind aggressors, at least not in the US. They see themselves as noble warriors, fighting for truth, justice, etc. They want to kill the bad guys and go home, in that order. Civilians do not fall into the category of "bad guys"; they are not military targets; they are only killed when something goes wrong. Civilian deaths would decrease even further if the enemy followed the Geneva Convention. In particular, the part where they have to wear uniforms, so they can be identified as combatants, which protects the noncombatants.
I would mod you up if I could.
The US Army, and all other major armies, are designed to do one thing: destroy other armies. In a word, to kill. The American military is the best in the world at fighting other armies. They blew through the Iraqi army in literally hours. They haven't lost in a fair fight since Korea.
If the US wanted to, they could just let their military do their thing, and completely annihilate every country they're fighting in. They wouldn't even need nukes, just let the tanks roll and shoot everything that moves. Pave it, sell it to Disney, put up a theme park.
Of course, no leader in their right mind would do that. Most of the ones that aren't in their right mind still wouldn't.
The problem is threefold. First, no sane insurgent will go against the Army or Marine in "fair" combat. Second, soldiers aren't trained for nonlethal combat. You can't exactly pull punches with 5.56mm full metal jacket. Third, you can't deploy police to a country halfway across the globe.
So, the solution is what America always goes with: invent something. Make a poison gas that doesn't kill. Invent bullets made of rubber. Give the soldiers some kind of sci-fi non-death ray.
Sure, it won't be perfect. It'll probably kill people. But that's the thing people forget. You recall the saying, "shit happens"? That applies triple in a warzone. Shit happens. Jammed rifles. Friendly fire. Helicopter crashes. Civilians get shot.
War is the ultimate necessary evil. It takes homicide to the level of science, mass-produced murder. It is also completely necessary, and probably always will be.
You can unilaterally declare war. You can NOT unilaterally declare peace.
Do you even read the articles you link to?
The Kolokol-1 article states "129 hostages died during the ensuing raid; nearly all of these fatalities were attributed to the effects of the aerosolised incapacitating agent". I'd rather be blind than dead, thank you very much.
The Agent 15 one is also debatable. Sure, it's quite safe on it's own, but it looks like a very poor choice for using on antagonistic forces. Many of the listed symptoms (from the exact article you linked" actually make it more likely that violence will be needed. "Failure to obey orders", "hallucinations", and "irrational fear" would be major ones.
Besides, which is more likely to have unknown side effects: a chemical, or EM radiation?
I'm sorry, but you need to shut the fuck up. The military is not some gang of murderers.
Soldiers already have automatic weapons, high explosives, and incendiary weapons. If some sociopath in the military wanted to hurt someone, they are already better able to do it.
Scenario: There's a bunch of protestors, unarmed, but they're filling the streets, keeping soldiers from getting to the actual enemy.
Case 1: They don't have the ADS, or any other less-than-lethal weapon. They fire several rounds into the air, which fails to disperse the crowd. They then fire on the crowd, killing dozens and wounding many more.
Case 2: They have ADS. They use it, and the crowd disperses enough for them to pass through. Several people suffer 1st-degree burns, and one goes blind in one eye.
Which case would you prefer?
I don't feel guilty in the slightest about my illicitly-gained music. I'll go to concerts, should any of the bands I like ever tour nearby, but I won't pay cent for the CDs. Maybe I'll send a check directly to the musicians, along with a license, saying that, by cashing that check, they agree to license me their music for personal use. That's held up in courts for software, right? Probably wouldn't actually work, but it would convince the jury.
I had a hilarious argument with a salesperson about this. I went into a CD store, mostly for shits and giggles, and checked the price on my favorite album, Metallica's S&M. $25 bucks. For a recording of a live concert that paid for itself. A concert that happened almost a decade ago. When I was leaving, the cashier asked if I wasn't buying anything today. I said, "Not at these prices."
Well, we got into an argument, about piracy, DRM, and crap like that. But the cashier kept trying to make one point: CDs sound better. I told him that a) 99% of people can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD, b) FLAC is identical to the CD. He remained absolutely convinced that a CD has higher-quality sound than a losslessly-compressed copy of the same.
I thought about asking him about DVD-Audio and the other "better-than-CD" formats, but I had already wasted enough of my time.
I haven't gone into a music store since.
Isn't that what they did before the lawsuits? Hell, I doubt anyone would have known if they just wiped the files and forgot about it.
NASA probably has a very good reason for handing distribution over to Valve. Most likely because they do it better.
Whenever the US government tries to distribute files larger than half a gig, they run into problems. I remember being unable to download the first America's Army because the website couldn't handle the demand. I was trying to do so several months after release. I can only imagine how bad it would be near release, or from another country. NASA probably doesn't have many web servers outside the US. Steam does.
NASA probably doesn't give a shit about DRM. As in, they don't care. If it's added, fine. If it isn't, fine. They just handed distribution over to a company that's quite good at it.
Not only that, but apparently they used a few of the Steam libraries, adding leaderboards and stat tracking, plus the VAC anticheat system. So, they have a good reason to distribute on Steam - the game works better that way.
As a final bonus, they got a lot more coverage this way. I first learned of the game via Steam announcement, and it's likely that many people did as well.
Finally, most gamers don't care. Moonbase Alpha is a video game. It is targeted, essentially, at gamers, and gamers generally have no problem with Steam. It has about 70% of the Digital Distribution market. So, while you may not like Steam, you probably aren't in the target audience.
I understand your complaint. You want something NASA made, without extra baggage. I get that. It is, in fact, a bit odd that there isn't a non-Steam version. Most likely, it's either in-progress, or is considered a non-priority.
After all, it's just a game. NASA has better things to do.
Why not? As far as DRM goes, Steam is the least evil. It has offline mode, so it works even if you can't access the net. It doesn't encrypt things that have been released, so you can access the game data files if you wish. It has a massive install base, so it's not going away anytime soon. I haven't heard of any major security flaws, although it is a major target for social engineering scams. It uses it's powers for good, letting you store game saves and configs in the cloud, and doesn't tie itself to a specific machine at all. It lets you opt out from any data collection. It's much more stable than it was at release, especially since it switched from the IE renderer to WebKit. It's been ported to the Mac, and may be coming to Linux.
Really, if you're complaining about Steam, you probably don't trust Windows not to be spying on you. And if you're an active gamer, you come to realize that Steam's DRM is actually very lenient, compared to other recent games. Since almost no games get released sans DRM of some type, you may as well get over it, and choose the one that's the least evil.
Except that's an invalid metaphor. Using a different WiFi channel would still give you the same access. It's more like arguing over parking spaces.
Which is still a big step towards flying cars.
Most likely, nothing. They'll probably just register the domain and leave it empty, or make it redirect to a .com. I just tried mcdonalds.tk, it loaded a blank page. By extension, they'll do the same to .xxx. So that will get blocked by a blanket ban, but it won't really affect anything. How often do you go to slashdot.com?
I don't foresee many false positives. Besides a few puns like ro.xxx, I think anything in .xxx will be porn.