U7-U10 were one big Kill Foozle serial with a "meh" ending.
Eh? You didn't really kill a big boss at the end of U7/U7 part 2. There were big battles at the end, for sure though. You sort of did in U8, but in any case you never killed the Guardian.
First, developing a parser that could handle several languages could be a huge job and the translations themselves would be lot more work -- this might not be evident if you only speak latin languages but this really isn't a trivial task.
Ultima 4 through 6 only recognized 4 characters. For example, "compassion" was actually just recognizing "comp". I'm not saying it would be a cakewalk, but it would most certainly be possible.
Second, while you can often sell the english version of a game to people who are not 100% fluent in english, the requirement to "form sentences" raises the bar considerably.
Well, honestly I think it's something else. I know a Chinese guy that I worked with who learned English playing Ultima and Sierra games. Playing games like those are one of the best ways, if you're not 100% fluent in English, to improve.
I think the real reason is that games used to be made for much smarter people than they are now. They were also made for more upper-class people, as computers were mostly owned by upper-middle class and above people in the 1980's. (Remember, a PC used to cost thousands of 1980s dollars) Nowadays, seeing how game companies have to sell to a mass market, games are much more dumbed down.
As a person who played all of the Ultima games (actually just starting with U3; I was too young for U1 and U2), I'm really stoked about this.
And, as a side note, I've always thought that Ultima 7: Part II - The Serpent Isle is one of the most underrated PC games of all time. It was, simply put, amazing. A long lost civilization that was built over the ruins of an even longer-lost civilization, with different religions and end of the world scenarios.
To all of you who say that the free market says that scalpers should be able to buy and sell tickets as they please, F off. I have had to purchase tickets for three to four times the original amount because of scalpers. BTW, scalping is not a free market "feature" but a problem, because it is generating fake scarcity. Imagine a situation where someone goes to the store and buys all the bread and sells it outside at three times the original price; that's not the free market, because the regular market forces are no longer determining the prices, but instead a single entity/monopoly.
No, dumbass, read it again. Gays were making less money than you, and now they will make the same amount of money as you. Not more. Also, it relates to taxes on domestic partner benefits. Unless you are paying for your girlfriend/boyfriend's health insurance, which is rare, then it wouldn't even apply to your situation.
Do not be deceived ; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
That's not what the bible says. It's what NAS says. The actual word that was translated into the word "homosexual" was actually a male prostitute; male prostitutes would have had sex with men and women. But prostitute is much more appropriately what was meant in the year ~100 AD than the what the word "homosexual" means in 2010 AD.
Well, everyone is playing word games. Straights can marry the people they are in love with, gay people generally cannot. I don't really know if there is such a thing as a "right to marry" even for straight people. In any case, you are implying that the rules apply equally to both straight and gays, therefore the argument is moot. Gays rightly argue that they don't have the same rights as straight married couples do.
Another way of putting this is saying that, before the 1970's, blacks had a right to marry too. They just couldn't marry white people.
You just made a whole bunch of counter-argument to an argument that isn't being made. Besides your weird statements about your perceived persecution, the answer to your question "why is this necessary" is that, it is not necessary. It's just that, some gay employees used to make less money because of tax laws than their straight counterparts. Google change its pay structure to attempt to have gay employees make the same amount as their straight employees. Existence is not, by definition, alternate reality. There's only one real reality.
It isn't discrimination against gays, it's discrimination against singles. And I, for one, am sick of it. Married people have partners to help with the bills, I don't. And I can no more find a suitable woman to marry than a gay man can.
I hear you... as a gay man, I do have a serious problem with the government taking sides on the argument about whether or not a church should be allowed to have gay marriages. That being said, it's just political pandering to one subset of the population. The most fair way to do it would be to have everyone, regardless of ANYTHING, to pay the exact same percentage of taxes.
but my point again is only that if google wants to balance unfair laws it should be to fair to everyone instead of catering to a single group.
Soon, Google will be able to change laws as they see fit. (insert scary music here)
Anyways, you've made your point and I mine. I basically jumped at the thought of "me" being a higher-risk category. I never thought you had any non-logical problems with gays; the conversation has been reasonable (despite me disagreeing, and I was pretty grumpy this morning).
There are two things, which I don't think we should have conflated together: taxes and healthcare. I vehemently disagree that the government (i.e. taxes) should ever discriminate about who pays more or less in taxes, but it does via the whole marriage thing. What Google did was in response to that aspect, but not healthcare.
As for the healthcare argument, you are saying that the pay/taxes sorta bleeds into the healthcare costs (also part of everyone's salary), and that, taking everything into account, the the gays healthcare is more expensive than the straights. My main point is that I don't want gays or blacks or Jewish Koreans or whatever to be a "category" for higher costs; gay/black/Korean/etc. is not a choice (acting out on gay desire are technically choices, but please let's not go there, it will create a different argument which doesn't relate to this one). You believe that it should be, and I disagree because I don't find the "smoker" category the same as the non-choice "gay/black/etc." category. Even though I am statistically at a higher risk, I personally am not at a higher risk of anything because I am gay as opposed to straight. The same would not true if I said "smoker as opposed to non-smoker". And seriously, please replace "gay" with "black", and think about that argument... yes, it's true black people are statistically higher costing that white people, but that's ridiculous to expect the healthy black group be segregated from the healthy white group just because the ratio of healthy white:non-healthy white is higher than healthy black:non-healthy black.
While what you're saying makes sense (pay penalties for the sickness - not the risk), it sort of defeats the purpose of health insurance.
I agree; if you want me to start paying for people with AIDS, but not you, then it sort of defeats the concept of pooled-risk group health insurance. You want ME to pay for someone else, but not YOU. Well, that's what group health insurance is... paying for someone else!
OK I probably typed too much for someone who is supposed to be finishing the argument. Take it easy.
Btw, thanks for calming down - it's easier to debate when there's less rambling;-).
Sorry about that.
Anyways, Google is not a healthcare provider. They have nothing to do with charging more for healthcare. What they did was change their pay structure so that gay couples, in the end, get the same amount as straight couples.
Onto the separate question of whether or not health insurance companies should charge more for gays because of the AIDS correlation: I do not think they should charge more to gay people, they should charge more to people with AIDS. Same thing goes for black people, Jewish people, Eastern Europeans, etc. Don't charge the correlation, charge the cause.
I agree that it sucks that you have to pay more taxes because you are married.
I still think it is appropriate to attempt to have gay couples take home the same amount at straight couples, which is what Google is attempting to do. Your problem only lies in tax laws, gay peoples problems are in many, many other areas of law.
The real answer is to end all types of discrimination in the law, without regards to marriage, gays, etc. Google can't do that... yet.
Of course, they also should offer benefits to non-married heterosexual couples. Anything else is unfair and discriminatory.
Well, sorta. The problem all lies with the fact that heterosexuals can marry, and gays can't. So your suggestion would not make everything balanced, it would just create a 3rd category. I believe most gays don't want multiple categories, they want just 1 category.
This is mistakenly presuming that you can tell your employer you are gay and that you would like more money. At my work I needed both an notarized document and have to be paying for my partner's health benefits.
It costs me $200/month to have a domestic partner in health benefits, so I doubt anyone would want to do that. I don't know for sure, but I figure the extra taxes have to do mostly with health care.
2. No, it was an example. I am trying to make you see why your statistics aren't being applied properly. Gay is not the appropriate category, promiscuous is. I should not be forced to pay for promiscuous people because I am gay.
3. Choosing to commit gay acts makes no difference in health care costs. This is the part that makes me mad; you are trying to correlate a higher incidence of STDs with gay people, and therefore that being gay means you are less healthy. There's nothing unhealthy about being gay. There is something unhealthy about many things that some gay people do, yes, (same as straight people), but there is nothing unhealthy about me and my partner.
4. See above comments. Fat/smokers/etc. is a category which directly causes health costs. Being gay or being black does not directly cost anything.
Lots of people think a dude banging a girl in the ass is sick, too.
It certainly is a matter of brain chemistry, just like left-handedness. The idea of it being "correctable" is like saying left-handedness needs to be "corrected" because left-handed people are sinister, devil people.
Slashdot Mirror
lol
Am I the only one who noticed that the colony pictured in the article is more likely a Standford Torus
Nope! We've all played Halo :)
am I just being picky?
Well, yeah!
lol...
Wow, sharks with frickin' laser beams are in space, saving humanity from impending doom!
Wow. Look up what the word "troll" means! It's also a little cooky that you think left-wing people/administrations de-emphasize or don't use science.
Wow, I just realized that it's a dungeon siege project; nobody told me!
:(
Crap, can't play
If so, why isn't it as successful? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious.
U7-U10 were one big Kill Foozle serial with a "meh" ending.
Eh? You didn't really kill a big boss at the end of U7/U7 part 2. There were big battles at the end, for sure though. You sort of did in U8, but in any case you never killed the Guardian.
First, developing a parser that could handle several languages could be a huge job and the translations themselves would be lot more work -- this might not be evident if you only speak latin languages but this really isn't a trivial task.
Ultima 4 through 6 only recognized 4 characters. For example, "compassion" was actually just recognizing "comp". I'm not saying it would be a cakewalk, but it would most certainly be possible.
Second, while you can often sell the english version of a game to people who are not 100% fluent in english, the requirement to "form sentences" raises the bar considerably.
Well, honestly I think it's something else. I know a Chinese guy that I worked with who learned English playing Ultima and Sierra games. Playing games like those are one of the best ways, if you're not 100% fluent in English, to improve.
I think the real reason is that games used to be made for much smarter people than they are now. They were also made for more upper-class people, as computers were mostly owned by upper-middle class and above people in the 1980's. (Remember, a PC used to cost thousands of 1980s dollars) Nowadays, seeing how game companies have to sell to a mass market, games are much more dumbed down.
As a person who played all of the Ultima games (actually just starting with U3; I was too young for U1 and U2), I'm really stoked about this.
And, as a side note, I've always thought that Ultima 7: Part II - The Serpent Isle is one of the most underrated PC games of all time. It was, simply put, amazing. A long lost civilization that was built over the ruins of an even longer-lost civilization, with different religions and end of the world scenarios.
To all of you who say that the free market says that scalpers should be able to buy and sell tickets as they please, F off. I have had to purchase tickets for three to four times the original amount because of scalpers. BTW, scalping is not a free market "feature" but a problem, because it is generating fake scarcity. Imagine a situation where someone goes to the store and buys all the bread and sells it outside at three times the original price; that's not the free market, because the regular market forces are no longer determining the prices, but instead a single entity/monopoly.
No, dumbass, read it again. Gays were making less money than you, and now they will make the same amount of money as you. Not more. Also, it relates to taxes on domestic partner benefits. Unless you are paying for your girlfriend/boyfriend's health insurance, which is rare, then it wouldn't even apply to your situation.
Do not be deceived ; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
That's not what the bible says. It's what NAS says. The actual word that was translated into the word "homosexual" was actually a male prostitute; male prostitutes would have had sex with men and women. But prostitute is much more appropriately what was meant in the year ~100 AD than the what the word "homosexual" means in 2010 AD.
Well, everyone is playing word games. Straights can marry the people they are in love with, gay people generally cannot. I don't really know if there is such a thing as a "right to marry" even for straight people. In any case, you are implying that the rules apply equally to both straight and gays, therefore the argument is moot. Gays rightly argue that they don't have the same rights as straight married couples do.
Another way of putting this is saying that, before the 1970's, blacks had a right to marry too. They just couldn't marry white people.
You just made a whole bunch of counter-argument to an argument that isn't being made. Besides your weird statements about your perceived persecution, the answer to your question "why is this necessary" is that, it is not necessary. It's just that, some gay employees used to make less money because of tax laws than their straight counterparts. Google change its pay structure to attempt to have gay employees make the same amount as their straight employees. Existence is not, by definition, alternate reality. There's only one real reality.
It isn't discrimination against gays, it's discrimination against singles. And I, for one, am sick of it. Married people have partners to help with the bills, I don't. And I can no more find a suitable woman to marry than a gay man can.
I hear you... as a gay man, I do have a serious problem with the government taking sides on the argument about whether or not a church should be allowed to have gay marriages. That being said, it's just political pandering to one subset of the population. The most fair way to do it would be to have everyone, regardless of ANYTHING, to pay the exact same percentage of taxes.
but my point again is only that if google wants to balance unfair laws it should be to fair to everyone instead of catering to a single group.
Soon, Google will be able to change laws as they see fit. (insert scary music here)
Anyways, you've made your point and I mine. I basically jumped at the thought of "me" being a higher-risk category. I never thought you had any non-logical problems with gays; the conversation has been reasonable (despite me disagreeing, and I was pretty grumpy this morning).
There are two things, which I don't think we should have conflated together: taxes and healthcare. I vehemently disagree that the government (i.e. taxes) should ever discriminate about who pays more or less in taxes, but it does via the whole marriage thing. What Google did was in response to that aspect, but not healthcare.
As for the healthcare argument, you are saying that the pay/taxes sorta bleeds into the healthcare costs (also part of everyone's salary), and that, taking everything into account, the the gays healthcare is more expensive than the straights. My main point is that I don't want gays or blacks or Jewish Koreans or whatever to be a "category" for higher costs; gay/black/Korean/etc. is not a choice (acting out on gay desire are technically choices, but please let's not go there, it will create a different argument which doesn't relate to this one). You believe that it should be, and I disagree because I don't find the "smoker" category the same as the non-choice "gay/black/etc." category. Even though I am statistically at a higher risk, I personally am not at a higher risk of anything because I am gay as opposed to straight. The same would not true if I said "smoker as opposed to non-smoker". And seriously, please replace "gay" with "black", and think about that argument... yes, it's true black people are statistically higher costing that white people, but that's ridiculous to expect the healthy black group be segregated from the healthy white group just because the ratio of healthy white:non-healthy white is higher than healthy black:non-healthy black.
While what you're saying makes sense (pay penalties for the sickness - not the risk), it sort of defeats the purpose of health insurance.
I agree; if you want me to start paying for people with AIDS, but not you, then it sort of defeats the concept of pooled-risk group health insurance. You want ME to pay for someone else, but not YOU. Well, that's what group health insurance is... paying for someone else!
OK I probably typed too much for someone who is supposed to be finishing the argument. Take it easy.
Btw, thanks for calming down - it's easier to debate when there's less rambling ;-).
Sorry about that.
Anyways, Google is not a healthcare provider. They have nothing to do with charging more for healthcare. What they did was change their pay structure so that gay couples, in the end, get the same amount as straight couples.
Onto the separate question of whether or not health insurance companies should charge more for gays because of the AIDS correlation: I do not think they should charge more to gay people, they should charge more to people with AIDS. Same thing goes for black people, Jewish people, Eastern Europeans, etc. Don't charge the correlation, charge the cause.
I agree that it sucks that you have to pay more taxes because you are married.
I still think it is appropriate to attempt to have gay couples take home the same amount at straight couples, which is what Google is attempting to do. Your problem only lies in tax laws, gay peoples problems are in many, many other areas of law.
The real answer is to end all types of discrimination in the law, without regards to marriage, gays, etc. Google can't do that... yet.
Of course, they also should offer benefits to non-married heterosexual couples. Anything else is unfair and discriminatory.
Well, sorta. The problem all lies with the fact that heterosexuals can marry, and gays can't. So your suggestion would not make everything balanced, it would just create a 3rd category. I believe most gays don't want multiple categories, they want just 1 category.
It costs me $200/month to have a domestic partner in health benefits, so I doubt anyone would want to do that. I don't know for sure, but I figure the extra taxes have to do mostly with health care.
3. Choosing to commit gay acts makes no difference in health care costs. This is the part that makes me mad; you are trying to correlate a higher incidence of STDs with gay people, and therefore that being gay means you are less healthy. There's nothing unhealthy about being gay. There is something unhealthy about many things that some gay people do, yes, (same as straight people), but there is nothing unhealthy about me and my partner.
4. See above comments. Fat/smokers/etc. is a category which directly causes health costs. Being gay or being black does not directly cost anything.
Now you're just rambling - U mad?
Yes, I was when I first read all this crap.
Smoking is a direct cause of additional health care costs. Being gay is not the direct cause of additional health care costs.
Being fat is sometimes a direct cause (and effect) of additional health care costs. Being gay is not the direct cause of additional health care costs.
Your metaphor makes sense with fat people and smokers. It doesn't make sense with black and gay people.
That link is about AIDS, not STDs.
It certainly is a matter of brain chemistry, just like left-handedness. The idea of it being "correctable" is like saying left-handedness needs to be "corrected" because left-handed people are sinister, devil people.