I have said this before and I am not the only one: This entire debate is misdirection. Firstly the debate about human vs natural global warming is a sub-misdirection within the global warming debate. If global warming is a problem for mankind we need to cut it back regardless of who caused it. If your house is on fire you get out FIRST and then argue about whether it was arson or an electrical fault. Secondly the entire climate change debate is a misdirection within the wider environmentalism debate. I am not denying climate change, or it's dangers, it is a misdirection because it is a complex problem that is difficult to quantify. This enables an endless debate which in turn enables people to continue profiting from the inaction that a continuous debate supports. To extend the analogy, we are now arguing about arson vs electrical fault while the city our house is in is being carpet bombed. There is little argument against the fact that groundwater pollution, fishstock depletion and deforestation are occurring, and are bad for the human race. Fixing these problems however would require great costs and great loss of profits for great multinational corporations. Whenever they lose a debate, they find a new one that will take even longer to lose, and this way keep the environmentalist lobby tangled up in the debate while they continue to log, overfish and pollute.
If anyone here cares about the destruction of our habitat, I beg you, don't get bogged down in these debates. We have our top climatologists working on the problem. Can we please focus on those areas where we know that mankind is destroying the environment and we also have viable solutions to prevent further destruction and reverse the damage. I will say it again: fishstocks, deforestation, pollution. I realise this is not a comprehensive list either. If you have another example of an imminent threat to the biosphere which we could prevent/reverse, then feel free to go with that. I want to see at least a few other people bring up these more relevant and solvable problems in climate change debates.
What they really need is deep enough gameplay to utilise such a feature. What are they going to do with emotion reading games if the games are all two dimensional characterless rehashes? You are playing a first person shooter, a bot shoots you, it makes you sad, so the bot stands out in the open and lets you shoot him back? Yay what a game altering feature. What about a scripted one dimensional storyline game where you watch endless cutscenes and you only real choice is "continue?". Oh the player is disgusted at the lovey dovey scene, we can skip this (guess I did find a real use for the tech, but nothing a skip button couldn't also have fixed;-), the player is not sad about the love interest dying/being kidnapped, we need to make the music even more poignant and emotional...
My point is that unless you have a deep and detailed open world, with characterful npcs, detailed pc back story and REAL LANGUAGE processing or something similar that allows you to actually effect the players emotions, then there is little you can do about the players emotions other than recommend they quit the game and try something else.
Well I guess it would be a great tool for advertising, testing reactions to products and formats. They better give the hardware away for free though if that's all it is for
Agreed - I generally find my answers on the first page of a Google search.
But, I can't get past the definition for "success" in the summary. There are times when I Google something, and the answer appears in the summary - no need to click any links.
On the other hand if I am searching for something that doesn't lend itself to quick answers or is hard to formulate a query for, ie. the searches that really separate good and bad search engines, I will usually have to click two or three links on the first page to see if the article/post has any mention of the piece of information I need. This results in the statistic getting a success point regardless of the fact that I may have to search again.
A third problem I have with the methodology is you need to factor in what people are searching for. If a high percentage of people on one search engine are making searches like 'amazon.com' and on the other search engine it's more like '"europa universalis" meiou shogun|shogunate problem|bug japan' then in the latter case it will take more attempts to refine the search in order to find the right information.
I have only used bing half a dozen times in my life and maybe it is just because the queries are structured differently but I always ended up with a page of useless nonsense. I can't authoritatively say which search engine is better, but I can say this article and the statistics they quote are a bit suspect.
and there are people in the world who actually believe that facebook is the cause of riots? That riots might stop if there was no facebook? Please, even the british government isn't that retarded. They want to stop political activism, they know the will always have to deal with riots.
There's something wrong with this thread. It starts in the summary. Giving examples of games that are supposed to be realistic. It is followed by a series of comments debating the relative realism and surrealism of games that are not good examples of either. If you want to talk realism we have the armed assault series, the rainbow six series, the hidden and dangerous series, the Forgotten Hope mod series, IL2 Sturmovik, Rise of Flight and many other flight sims, Men of war and total war series' for strategy. Dwarf fortress is a strange mixture of uber realism (damage system, geology) and surrealism (fantasy setting, weird underground creatures), and other surrealistic games include Planescape, Baldurs gate, Monkey Island, to name a few old school favourites, Portal was at least mentioned in a couple of comments. There was that xbox only dark horror sidescroller with the kid being mutilated by giant spiders, minecraft is also pretty surreal. Maybe I am missing something here, but it seems to me that this entire discussion has so far been dedicated to games that are neither realistic nor surrealistic, unless you include a basic lazy inability to make a realistic game as a form of surrealism. Perhaps the posters have only ever played games that they saw a minimum of 50 hours advertising for in the last 2 years.
From the in-game videos released so far, the game looks fantastic. But it still has the same color scheme that id (and many other companies) have decided must haunt FPSs since the early 90's: grey, brown, beige, and some chrome. I get that it's part of the environment, but at least some departure would have been nice.
--
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Two things: firstly, if you damage your graphics card in just the right way, or unpack the game's archives and mess with the texture files, you can have psychedelic rainbow colours. Would that suit you better?
Secondly, entomology is the study of insects, spiders are not insects. Possible corrections to the sig: "Arthropodologically/Arachnidologically Speaking..." or "Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a subject worthy of study."
When I used to own a car, I had a mechanical kills switch installed anyway. It is a good idea. It meant I could leave the doors unlocked which in turn meant that no one tried to smash my windows to get in. I think they will try something more expensive and failure prone than that though. Since when do national governments ever go with the simple, cheap, effective option?
When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
or THIS. I use a version of the "gold plated" tileset that I modified myself to perfect a few nuances. Not that I am disagreeing with your recommendation of stone soup, it is awesome. It is just that for a DF thread there seem to be a lot of people here that don't seem to realise DF supports custom Tilesets.
I warned about this previously. For some reason the big study I submitted that blasted electric cars as being unsustainable and economically nonviable never made it into the main slashdot news. Some people even suggested an agenda behind it on the part of me or the publishers of the study. Let me assure you I am a environment hugging hippy and if electric cars had a real potential for saving the planet I would be right behind them. But the facts are that electric cars will only be viable when we have an excess of electrical power generation. Currently we have the opposite, and the opposition to nuclear power plants (which I also agree with) is yet another giant nail in the coffin of electric cars. The idea that we simply stop spending the trillions of kwh of energy that we currently get from petrol and diesel and fill the gap with electricity generation or corn ethanol is a fantasy. No amount of funding will produce an EV which defies physics.
Same here, currently there is exactly one game out that I want to play that requires DX11, and many many favourites that require endless hacks to get working on seven. Not only that but in three years the XP market share will be so low that no one will bother writing malware or viruses for it anymore and regular security updates will no longer be necessary. It's not like I run to ms support whenever anything goes wrong anyway. Microsoft doesn't support linux or mac os and they seem to be doing fine:-p
So now the US government has to take LSD off Schedule 1 on the controlled substances list. Mind you they should have taken it off in the 1960's when it was shown to be usable in the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction. They should have taken cannabis off schedule 1 ages ago as well when medical uses for that were acknowledged in some states. But they don't, so cocaine, opium, and methamphetamine users get less jail time than cannabis users. That seems fair.
Anyone need further evidence that the war on drugs is not about health, safety or the public good?
the problem we have here is that the consumers as a whole are lazy and simply don't care until it lands in their front lawns.
The problem we have here is that the consumers as a whole are deliberately misinformed and kept in the dark so that they don't understand what is going on until it lands in their front lawns.
So your argument is its cheaper to shoot someone than to do anything else with the bullets. I would like to hear that used as a defence in civil court. I would like to hear any of the arguments for killing people in this thread and tfa used in civil court. "Your honour, it was not hostile of me because I built a remote control robot and made the robot shoot my next door neighbour for playing loud music, in addition, it was the cheapest way I could find to dispose of the bullets"... "Not guilty!"
the public having a right of veto over every piece of legislation.
Are you mad? No one said that.What is being argued for is that the people are able to voice an opinion on the legislation and then the government decides. Also the argument that people are stupid and shouldn't be allowed to govern is a total fallacy. Where do you think politicians come from? A special magic land called politicia? No, they are people too, and therefore by this reasoning too stupid to govern. What this whole argument amounts to is saying "All the people are too stupid to govern, therefore governing must be done by the smallest group of people possible" To be honest in many countries the politicians seem to be the stupidest of all.
you'd get enraged special interest groups making laws left right and centre to suit their agendas
And that would differ from the current reality how exactly? I know the answer to that: the special interest groups would be able to influence laws without being extremely wealthy which would be just like the status quo except that big corporations wouldn't be the only ones with a vote. If you genuinely think that the political leaders should govern without being answerable to the people, why don't you just move somewhere where that is the case, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Leave those of us who approve of Democracy to govern the democratic countries.
If society were dealing with these risks in an appropriate, rational manner rather than how Italy and Germany chose to do so, then either they'd ban bean sprouts or they'd sensibly regulate nuclear power as they do bean sprouts.
Do you ever think through what you say? The e. coli outbreak has not been traced to a specific crop with any certainty, and whatever plant or plant types it is eventually traced to, the same form of contamination could happen for any food plant, so according to your logic it would be appropriate and rational to ban all plant based food sources. Last year the big food scare in Germany was meat and animal products, which were found to contain carcinogenic dioxin so it would be appropriate and rational to ban all animal food products as well. Then people could just live on salt and water. But salt is linked to a lot of deaths and so is water. So we should ban those too. And don't you dare say I am taking the argument to extremes, do you really think banning bean sprouts will make a serious dent in world wide e. coli death rates?
I also object to the summary's suggestion that banning nuclear will slow down progress. Even if you pretend it really meant progress and not profits, progress in power generation is clearly in the developement of fuel-less solutions as Tesla argued over 100 years ago. Nuclear power is not progress, as far as mass electricity generation is concerned nuclear has already been around for about half as long as there have been power stations.
Lastly, I am aware that coal is worse than nuclear. That doesn't make nuclear good.
I am currently starting my own independent game company. If you tell all the big players what they are doing wrong and how to do it better, my chances for success will drop drastically. Sure I could then just go and work for them and get my ideas published anyway, but I don't see any downside to letting major labels die in puddle of their own mediocrity and letting small new startups pick up the slack.
'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.'
Like it has anything to do with republicans vs democrats. This is why your country is in such a shambles, the pretense that there is a left and right wing of in US politics and the incessant arguing over who is ruining the country. THEY BOTH ARE. This current debate is about media corporations, of course they will give money to whoever can help them make more money. Of course they don't care what label their puppets campaign under. By arguing about this you are causing the problem. STOP IT.
You should take him up on this. The world outside really is much nicer, I wouldn't go to the US for a million bucks. Someone offering you a free plane ticket out? Take it. I recommend Europe, but if you want an english speaking country New Zealand and Australia are also very nice. Just tell them you are from Canada.
I hate to break it to you, but the official line on the world trade center is that it was a conspiracy. Perhaps the US government is feeble minded to believe that as you suggest, and that the planes were all flown by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Slashdot Mirror
I have said this before and I am not the only one: This entire debate is misdirection. Firstly the debate about human vs natural global warming is a sub-misdirection within the global warming debate. If global warming is a problem for mankind we need to cut it back regardless of who caused it. If your house is on fire you get out FIRST and then argue about whether it was arson or an electrical fault. Secondly the entire climate change debate is a misdirection within the wider environmentalism debate. I am not denying climate change, or it's dangers, it is a misdirection because it is a complex problem that is difficult to quantify. This enables an endless debate which in turn enables people to continue profiting from the inaction that a continuous debate supports. To extend the analogy, we are now arguing about arson vs electrical fault while the city our house is in is being carpet bombed. There is little argument against the fact that groundwater pollution, fishstock depletion and deforestation are occurring, and are bad for the human race. Fixing these problems however would require great costs and great loss of profits for great multinational corporations. Whenever they lose a debate, they find a new one that will take even longer to lose, and this way keep the environmentalist lobby tangled up in the debate while they continue to log, overfish and pollute.
If anyone here cares about the destruction of our habitat, I beg you, don't get bogged down in these debates. We have our top climatologists working on the problem. Can we please focus on those areas where we know that mankind is destroying the environment and we also have viable solutions to prevent further destruction and reverse the damage. I will say it again: fishstocks, deforestation, pollution. I realise this is not a comprehensive list either. If you have another example of an imminent threat to the biosphere which we could prevent/reverse, then feel free to go with that. I want to see at least a few other people bring up these more relevant and solvable problems in climate change debates.
What they really need is deep enough gameplay to utilise such a feature. What are they going to do with emotion reading games if the games are all two dimensional characterless rehashes? You are playing a first person shooter, a bot shoots you, it makes you sad, so the bot stands out in the open and lets you shoot him back? Yay what a game altering feature. What about a scripted one dimensional storyline game where you watch endless cutscenes and you only real choice is "continue?". Oh the player is disgusted at the lovey dovey scene, we can skip this (guess I did find a real use for the tech, but nothing a skip button couldn't also have fixed ;-), the player is not sad about the love interest dying/being kidnapped, we need to make the music even more poignant and emotional...
My point is that unless you have a deep and detailed open world, with characterful npcs, detailed pc back story and REAL LANGUAGE processing or something similar that allows you to actually effect the players emotions, then there is little you can do about the players emotions other than recommend they quit the game and try something else.
Well I guess it would be a great tool for advertising, testing reactions to products and formats. They better give the hardware away for free though if that's all it is for
Agreed - I generally find my answers on the first page of a Google search.
But, I can't get past the definition for "success" in the summary. There are times when I Google something, and the answer appears in the summary - no need to click any links.
On the other hand if I am searching for something that doesn't lend itself to quick answers or is hard to formulate a query for, ie. the searches that really separate good and bad search engines, I will usually have to click two or three links on the first page to see if the article/post has any mention of the piece of information I need. This results in the statistic getting a success point regardless of the fact that I may have to search again.
A third problem I have with the methodology is you need to factor in what people are searching for. If a high percentage of people on one search engine are making searches like 'amazon.com' and on the other search engine it's more like '"europa universalis" meiou shogun|shogunate problem|bug japan' then in the latter case it will take more attempts to refine the search in order to find the right information.
I have only used bing half a dozen times in my life and maybe it is just because the queries are structured differently but I always ended up with a page of useless nonsense. I can't authoritatively say which search engine is better, but I can say this article and the statistics they quote are a bit suspect.
and there are people in the world who actually believe that facebook is the cause of riots? That riots might stop if there was no facebook? Please, even the british government isn't that retarded. They want to stop political activism, they know the will always have to deal with riots.
There's something wrong with this thread. It starts in the summary. Giving examples of games that are supposed to be realistic. It is followed by a series of comments debating the relative realism and surrealism of games that are not good examples of either. If you want to talk realism we have the armed assault series, the rainbow six series, the hidden and dangerous series, the Forgotten Hope mod series, IL2 Sturmovik, Rise of Flight and many other flight sims, Men of war and total war series' for strategy. Dwarf fortress is a strange mixture of uber realism (damage system, geology) and surrealism (fantasy setting, weird underground creatures), and other surrealistic games include Planescape, Baldurs gate, Monkey Island, to name a few old school favourites, Portal was at least mentioned in a couple of comments. There was that xbox only dark horror sidescroller with the kid being mutilated by giant spiders, minecraft is also pretty surreal. Maybe I am missing something here, but it seems to me that this entire discussion has so far been dedicated to games that are neither realistic nor surrealistic, unless you include a basic lazy inability to make a realistic game as a form of surrealism. Perhaps the posters have only ever played games that they saw a minimum of 50 hours advertising for in the last 2 years.
From the in-game videos released so far, the game looks fantastic. But it still has the same color scheme that id (and many other companies) have decided must haunt FPSs since the early 90's: grey, brown, beige, and some chrome. I get that it's part of the environment, but at least some departure would have been nice. -- Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Two things: firstly, if you damage your graphics card in just the right way, or unpack the game's archives and mess with the texture files, you can have psychedelic rainbow colours. Would that suit you better?
Secondly, entomology is the study of insects, spiders are not insects. Possible corrections to the sig: "Arthropodologically/Arachnidologically Speaking..." or "Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a subject worthy of study."
Please excuse my pedantry
When I used to own a car, I had a mechanical kills switch installed anyway. It is a good idea. It meant I could leave the doors unlocked which in turn meant that no one tried to smash my windows to get in. I think they will try something more expensive and failure prone than that though. Since when do national governments ever go with the simple, cheap, effective option?
Well another 2 reasons, to go with their leading free to play competitor
When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Cuba?
Doesn't everyone play games now? Aren't we reaching the proverbial 'all murderers eat bread' argument by this time?
or THIS. I use a version of the "gold plated" tileset that I modified myself to perfect a few nuances. Not that I am disagreeing with your recommendation of stone soup, it is awesome. It is just that for a DF thread there seem to be a lot of people here that don't seem to realise DF supports custom Tilesets.
I warned about this previously. For some reason the big study I submitted that blasted electric cars as being unsustainable and economically nonviable never made it into the main slashdot news. Some people even suggested an agenda behind it on the part of me or the publishers of the study. Let me assure you I am a environment hugging hippy and if electric cars had a real potential for saving the planet I would be right behind them. But the facts are that electric cars will only be viable when we have an excess of electrical power generation. Currently we have the opposite, and the opposition to nuclear power plants (which I also agree with) is yet another giant nail in the coffin of electric cars. The idea that we simply stop spending the trillions of kwh of energy that we currently get from petrol and diesel and fill the gap with electricity generation or corn ethanol is a fantasy. No amount of funding will produce an EV which defies physics.
This is back to front, we need an award system for the news providers
Same here, currently there is exactly one game out that I want to play that requires DX11, and many many favourites that require endless hacks to get working on seven. Not only that but in three years the XP market share will be so low that no one will bother writing malware or viruses for it anymore and regular security updates will no longer be necessary. It's not like I run to ms support whenever anything goes wrong anyway. Microsoft doesn't support linux or mac os and they seem to be doing fine :-p
So now the US government has to take LSD off Schedule 1 on the controlled substances list. Mind you they should have taken it off in the 1960's when it was shown to be usable in the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction. They should have taken cannabis off schedule 1 ages ago as well when medical uses for that were acknowledged in some states. But they don't, so cocaine, opium, and methamphetamine users get less jail time than cannabis users. That seems fair.
Anyone need further evidence that the war on drugs is not about health, safety or the public good?
If I presented a single screenshot as evidence of anything I would be laughed off the website.
p
the problem we have here is that the consumers as a whole are lazy and simply don't care until it lands in their front lawns.
The problem we have here is that the consumers as a whole are deliberately misinformed and kept in the dark so that they don't understand what is going on until it lands in their front lawns.
Fixed it for you.
So your argument is its cheaper to shoot someone than to do anything else with the bullets. I would like to hear that used as a defence in civil court. I would like to hear any of the arguments for killing people in this thread and tfa used in civil court. "Your honour, it was not hostile of me because I built a remote control robot and made the robot shoot my next door neighbour for playing loud music, in addition, it was the cheapest way I could find to dispose of the bullets" ... "Not guilty!"
the public having a right of veto over every piece of legislation.
Are you mad? No one said that.What is being argued for is that the people are able to voice an opinion on the legislation and then the government decides. Also the argument that people are stupid and shouldn't be allowed to govern is a total fallacy. Where do you think politicians come from? A special magic land called politicia? No, they are people too, and therefore by this reasoning too stupid to govern. What this whole argument amounts to is saying "All the people are too stupid to govern, therefore governing must be done by the smallest group of people possible" To be honest in many countries the politicians seem to be the stupidest of all.
you'd get enraged special interest groups making laws left right and centre to suit their agendas
And that would differ from the current reality how exactly? I know the answer to that: the special interest groups would be able to influence laws without being extremely wealthy which would be just like the status quo except that big corporations wouldn't be the only ones with a vote. If you genuinely think that the political leaders should govern without being answerable to the people, why don't you just move somewhere where that is the case, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Leave those of us who approve of Democracy to govern the democratic countries.
If society were dealing with these risks in an appropriate, rational manner rather than how Italy and Germany chose to do so, then either they'd ban bean sprouts or they'd sensibly regulate nuclear power as they do bean sprouts.
Do you ever think through what you say? The e. coli outbreak has not been traced to a specific crop with any certainty, and whatever plant or plant types it is eventually traced to, the same form of contamination could happen for any food plant, so according to your logic it would be appropriate and rational to ban all plant based food sources. Last year the big food scare in Germany was meat and animal products, which were found to contain carcinogenic dioxin so it would be appropriate and rational to ban all animal food products as well. Then people could just live on salt and water. But salt is linked to a lot of deaths and so is water. So we should ban those too. And don't you dare say I am taking the argument to extremes, do you really think banning bean sprouts will make a serious dent in world wide e. coli death rates?
I also object to the summary's suggestion that banning nuclear will slow down progress. Even if you pretend it really meant progress and not profits, progress in power generation is clearly in the developement of fuel-less solutions as Tesla argued over 100 years ago. Nuclear power is not progress, as far as mass electricity generation is concerned nuclear has already been around for about half as long as there have been power stations.
Lastly, I am aware that coal is worse than nuclear. That doesn't make nuclear good.
I am currently starting my own independent game company. If you tell all the big players what they are doing wrong and how to do it better, my chances for success will drop drastically. Sure I could then just go and work for them and get my ideas published anyway, but I don't see any downside to letting major labels die in puddle of their own mediocrity and letting small new startups pick up the slack.
'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.'
Like it has anything to do with republicans vs democrats. This is why your country is in such a shambles, the pretense that there is a left and right wing of in US politics and the incessant arguing over who is ruining the country. THEY BOTH ARE. This current debate is about media corporations, of course they will give money to whoever can help them make more money. Of course they don't care what label their puppets campaign under. By arguing about this you are causing the problem. STOP IT.
You should take him up on this. The world outside really is much nicer, I wouldn't go to the US for a million bucks. Someone offering you a free plane ticket out? Take it. I recommend Europe, but if you want an english speaking country New Zealand and Australia are also very nice. Just tell them you are from Canada.
I hate to break it to you, but the official line on the world trade center is that it was a conspiracy. Perhaps the US government is feeble minded to believe that as you suggest, and that the planes were all flown by Lee Harvey Oswald.