Slashdot Mirror


User: AmiMoJo

AmiMoJo's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
35,594
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 35,594

  1. I expect there will be a lot of hastily made crapware designed to test Valve's limits.

    Remember the outrage over Wolfenstein having the player kill Nazis and depicting them as evil? I'm expecting a badly made FPS where you play Nazis repelling an SJW invasion and purifying the fatherland to appear soon.

  2. Games are a form of art, and all art is both expressive and inherently political. You can't separate the two, and nor should you.

    Valve should just own it. Yes, they are happy to make money selling games about shooting up schools. No need to distance themselves from it, any more than PornHub needs to distance itself from making money out of legal pornography.

  3. It really depends if it hurts their bottom line or not. Since they are not funded by advertising it comes down to if developers and retailers (who sell Steam products like game cards) decide they don't want to be associated with this. Since Steam is so popular it will be hard for developers to move away from them even if they want to.

  4. Re:Need education first on Majority of Americans Believe It Is Essential That the US Remain a Global Leader in Space (pewinternet.org) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The difference being that China is on the way up and for the most people there life is getting steadily better, often much better. In the US it goes in cycles.

    Actually there is a more fundamental difference than that. The Chinese government believes in making things better for as many people as possible (even if its methods are questionable), where as large parts of the US government think that is un-American socialist communism.

  5. Mars makes more sense for a self-sufficient base because it has more resources. The greater gravity is also quite helpful for humans living there long term.

  6. To rebuild the Jedi Order, Luke would have had to become the new Yoda. Luke doesn't seem like the wise, aloof leader, or the follower of sacred texts.

    Luke was always more about his friends and taking action. Building a new order sounds very boring. Where would the strife come from? What would the plot be, new Jedi Order crushes the First Order with some lame CGI light-sabre duelling? Seems more like something that would have been in the prequels.

  7. Really, Luke making bad, hasty decisions is out of character? Like when he abandoned his training with Yodo and rushed off to face Vader, only to lose badly? Or his brilliant plan to rescue Han and Leia from Jabba's Palace?

  8. Anakin's switch to the dark side makes sense in light of how little the Jedi seem to care about him or his family.

    They didn't even try to help his mother, despite clearly having the resources to do so. They disapproved of his marriage so he had to keep it secret, and were thus unable to really help with his nightmares too.

    From his perspective it was a choice between the uncaring Jedi who nearly rejected him, and the Sith who at least acknowledge him and seem to want to help. Having just seen his mother die and knowing that the Jedi won't do anything to help Padme either, the Emperor's offer must have seemed attractive.

    It's still badly acted, written and directed of course.

  9. Or more free, as in freedom.

    Less free as in free for commercial outfits to pilfer.

  10. I'll bite. What is wrong with Black Panther?

  11. Look at Obi-Wan and Qai-Gon's attitude towards slavery. They rescue Anakin because he has Force abilities, but don't seem at all bothered about helping anyone else, even is mother. And the result of that is that his mother dies of neglect by her owners and it firmly sets Anakin on the path to becoming Vader.

    When they take Anakin back to their HQ it's lavish and expensive looking. For some reason Anakin doesn't question why they couldn't free his mother, given that they apparently have great power and wealth.

    In fact, the Jedi just seem to accept that slavery is a thing and even for Anakin's sake they won't do anything about it. They clearly don't view his non-Force-powered mother's life as important or valuable, and actively seek to separate Anakin from her. Obi-Wan tells him not to think about her.

  12. It's a joke, but not entirely wrong...

    Killmonger's father wanted to give Wakandan weapons to black people so they could fight their oppressors. Wakanda doesn't want to be involved.

    The king of Wakanda tried to stop him and ended up killing him. His son has the same basic plan, but decides to become king himself in order to enact it.

    Eventually he is defeated, but Wakanda adopts his ideas and opens up to the world, starting outreach programmes for poor black kids in the US.

  13. Re:It wasn't a terrible movie on 'Solo' Will Lose $50+ Million In First Defeat For Disney's 'Star Wars' Empire (hollywoodreporter.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Luke faced torture and certain death to save his father, who he barely knew, from the darkside. And here we have that same Luke about to murder his own nephew, whom he has known his entire life, in his sleep! For just starting to fall to the dark side.

    The Jedi were afraid of the Dark Side, and painted it as a dichotomy between absolute good and absolute evil. That lead Luke to make that very bad decision out of fear.

    Later he sees Rey not afraid of the dark side, but engaging with it and looking for answers to the questions she has about her parents in it. He could have done the same thing, but he realizes that Rey isn't evil and that the Jedi were wrong. Rey is fundamentally a good person and not so easily corrupted, able to handle the complex emotions of both sides of the Force.

  14. It's the Jedi's broken moral framework that caused a lot of the problems. Like most religious dogma, it was too rigid and too often followed unquestioningly.

  15. I don't think these games were really "lost", just not dumped by anyone else yet. The first one, Labyrinthe, is a PC CD-ROM game and is actually listed on Amazon. Copies appear on auction sites from time to time. I wouldn't be surprised if a copy was available on the Perfect Dark P2P platform, but no-one on this forum bothered to check.

  16. Piracy is massive in Japan, just like everywhere else. In fact their ultra high speed internet connections are perfect for it.

    There used to be magazines on sale in major book shops that were nothing but 100 pages of how to pirate stuff. Lists of web sites, translations of the word "download" into Chinese, Korean and English, how to set up various P2P apps, how to avoid malware and scams... I think I still have one somewhere, I should scan it.

    The main worry is getting caught, which would be extremely embarrassing. Hence the desire to use anonymous P2P systems, coupled with high upload speeds making them feasible. This was back in the early 2000s. In the west a lot of downloaders feel the same way, but use VPNs to achieve the same result.

    The industry has largely moved away from going after individuals though. There is little legal basis for doing so under Japanese civil law anyway, and a few cases where the police became involved ended up being PR disasters for the copyright owners. They have instead turned to site blocking court orders, similar to misguided media companies in the west. In fact only a few weeks ago one of the biggest pirate manga sites (using BitTorrent) was blocked on the country's largest ISP.

  17. Re:This doesn’t interest me on Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 850 Platform Targeted For Windows 10 PCs (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    The Raspberry Pi is probably as close as you can get to a fully open source device. The boot ROM is still proprietary but I think pretty much everything else can be used with open source drivers now.

  18. Re:It wasn't a terrible movie on 'Solo' Will Lose $50+ Million In First Defeat For Disney's 'Star Wars' Empire (hollywoodreporter.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Last Jedi really set up the final episode with the biggest and most necessary change in the Star Wars universe - the final admission that the Jedi were actually pretty terrible and that the true saviour, the one who will really bring balance to the Force and peace the universe, is not a Jedi.

    In the original trilogy the Jedi were described as virtuous knights, fighting for good and protecting the innocent. Luke bought into it, he didn't know any better and his initial exposure to Jedi training was pretty positive. But in reality the Jedi not only failed in their most important mission to prevent the rise of the Sith, but they were actually pretty awful all round. They considered themselves superior and claimed ownership of the Force, used it to manipulate people without a second thought, and didn't seem to care at all about injustices like slavery. The latter arguably resulted in Anakin turning to the dark side and the deaths of billions.

    Luke tried to emulate them but made the same mistakes, resulting in Kylo Ren. Then he meets Rey and sees that she doesn't fear the dark side, to her it's all just the Force and a part of her. Luke realizes that the Jedi order was the problem, as does Yoda, and that Rey and Kylo Ren are the future, free from all that baggage and liberated to do the right thing.

    The new trilogy has so far mirrored the first one to an extent, but this is where it really diverges. Rey isn't descended from some great bloodline, Kylo Ren isn't a Sith. Ren killed his master not to save someone he cared about, for his own personal gain. The resolution won't be the return of the Jedi, it will be the end of the Jedi and something new taking their place and starting with Rey.

  19. In this case I think a comma would have made more sense.

    "Capitalization and colons are what the cool kids use, claims msmash"

  20. Iceland.

    Snowden was actually on his way to South America for some reason... Ecuador was supposed to give him asylum, but I think I'd much rather live in Iceland.

  21. Re:Vulnerability? on Zip Slip Vulnerability Affects Thousands of Projects (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    While in theory it's fine, in practice two things tend to happen.

    1. The user doesn't pay attention and if asked answers "yes, overwrite all" because that's what humans are like.

    2. Automated extraction as part of installers and the like often overwrites everything to ensure re-installs work properly.

  22. Re:I remember this from a quarter century ago on Zip Slip Vulnerability Affects Thousands of Projects (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    This is what happens when you don't properly sanitize file names.

    The other classic one was to use an ASCII 255 character as a space on DOS. College had a Netware network that ran on top of DOS, and we found we could create files and directories that the admins couldn't delete simply by adding an alt-255 character to the file name, usually at the end so it wasn't obvious. Their file management tools helpfully filtered it out so couldn't delete it either.

  23. Re:There are none so blind on 'Solo' Will Lose $50+ Million In First Defeat For Disney's 'Star Wars' Empire (hollywoodreporter.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Star Wars fans would have thrown money at the franchise forever without a second thought if they hadn't put social evangelists in charge and allowed them to burn it down.

    Doubtful that had anything to do with it. Look at the list of top grossing films in the US we can see that number 3 is Black Panther, a film almost entirely made up of diversity hires where an SJW forces a bunch of conservatives to adopt his agenda and culminates in the creation of a reverse-racist outreach centre targeting poor black kids.

    We also have Avatar, about an SJW enviro-mentalist who thinks a primitive native tribe is more important than unobtanium that could bring prosperity and wealth to several rich white guys. Force Awakens is up there, which as we know is the ultimate Mary-Sue anti-male crapfest. Even the Last Jedi is in at number 8, right above proper fan favourite manly man film The Dark Knight.

    Worryingly, even femoid romantic crap like Titanic did really well. Even AmiMojo couldn't sit through that one. Somehow Wonder Woman, a feminist nightmare of a movie, did better than all the other DC universe stuff.

    I know everything is SJWs' fault, but in this case maybe Solo is just a bad movie or people are fed up with Star Wars now.

  24. All the people were not healthy. They suffered from stress related illnesses and death.

    Given that they could not return for years (much of the area still needs decontamination, after the first few attempts failed) many of them have moved on. Found new homes, new jobs, started new businesses. The remaining ones tend to be the elderly, the ones who are retired or unable to set up a life somewhere else for whatever reason. They can't form a viable community by themselves, they need support services (staffed) and things like shops and local businesses.

    Those communities simply can't go back to how they were, and many are no longer viable.

    That's assuming people even wanted to go back. Many of the don't trust the government any more, after repeated failures to decontaminate the area, and concerns that the plant decommissioning process itself is not safe.

  25. Re:Lets make some "libel" on Flight-Sim Maker Threatens Legal Action Over Reddit Posts Discussing DRM (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Programs can install to AppData without admin rights. It's what most Google products do, for example.

    The advantages are no admin rights / UAC prompts needed. The app becomes part of the user's network profile and can follow them around with their other data. That can be an issue if the app is very large though. It's also a per-user thing, so if three local users want the app it has to be installed three times.

    I suppose that since this flight simulator is likely to be gigabytes in size AppData isn't suitable. Hopefully anti-virus software will pick up their malware though.