We don't have trains to speak of, outside maybe ten cities, and if we have a bus system it usually sucks and/or has very limited range which requires us to drive 1/2 of the way to our destination to reach the nearest stop.
I'd take the train if we had one, and I'd take the bus if it wouldn't double my commute time (at best) and still require several miles' worth of driving.
Not everyone can afford to blow $80+ just to get to and from their night out. I practically never go out for that reason, and because I know being a DD sucks and wouldn't impose on someone like that. I go to a bar maybe a couple times a year, but I'd be far more inclined to accompany other friends who go more frequently if the transportation weren't an issue.
As for MADD, they have a history of pursuing policy that has more to do with neo-Prohibition than keeping people safe. I don't dislike them because they're against drunk driving--hooray for that, in fact--but because they appear to be anti-alcohol. My comment about them trying to find some way to make this technology not a legal option for inebriated transportation was serious; I bet they would.
It'd be awesome not to need a DD (or risk a DUI) to go to the bar in the many US cities with no or inadequate public transit... though I bet the MADD assholes will lobby to make it still illegal, somehow, and probably try to force a breathalyzer to turn the damn auto-drive on in the first place.
Cities will have to step up drug enforcement big time to make up for budget shortfalls, if these become common. No more traffic tickets means dramatically lower revenue for many towns.
Especially if, as he says, he's not going to be traveling around the text very much, VI is exactly the wrong tool. It's designed to let you move around a ton without leaving your normal typing position, and to re-arrange bits of text quickly. This ability comes at the price of a painful learning curve and a non-intuitive interface for doing simple shit like moving over a few characters to replace a letter or two in the last word.
If you're just typing text but want few distractions, something like Nano/Pico or one of those newer editors that run in the graphical OS but turn the whole screen black and show only what you've typed would make way more sense--especially the latter, which are designed precisely for this situation. VI's modes and other useful-for-code features are, for the purposes of writing, just another form of counter-productive bloat; it's not remotely worth learning VI if you're not going to be moving blocks of code around and bouncing about your document almost as often as you actually modify the text.
It is also imperative that professionals be able to work with OTHER professionals in the field using industry standard tools, and I have yet to see a design or art job ad requesting knowledge of GIMP.
This is a critical point, and one that's often overlooked.
The GIMP might be OK if you're working alone, but even a lowly web developer who only works with graphics (generally) rather than creating them will need to switch to Photoshop if their graphic designer uses it, since receiving a.psd is way more useful (if you're using Photoshop) than any other format, and The GIMP has poor support for it.
It only takes one "ok, here's the cut-up and CSS'd layout, look OK?" "uh, yeah, but where'd X, Y, and Z go? And I know there was a drop shadow on that and that" to prod one to switch in a situation like that.
Plus, though I've used The GIMP way more than Photoshop and my first "real" image editing app wasn't Photoshop (Paint Shop Pro), if you gave me a graphics task I'd never done and told me to do it in the program of my choice I'd pick Photoshop in a heartbeat. It's just way the hell easier to use, especially when trying to figure out something new. The way it handles layers (fucking vital) is especially WAAAAY better.
The unions have become willing to voilate non-union members' rights and derived freedoms.
I don't think saying "you work only with us, or with none of us (but with whomever else you please, in the latter case)" is a violation of anyone's rights, assuming that's what you're talking about. I don't see how we could force the union members to work on projects that also hire non-union workers without that being at least as large a violation of freedom.
Or perhaps (most likely) I'm just not getting what you're referring to in that sentence.
As for rights: I think it's a convenient term to use in colloquial speech, and maybe even a useful term to designate extra-special or dear freedoms, but I'm not sure that such a thing as a natural right has much logical support, unless you admit God to the argument (thus ending any possibility of an argument, except perhaps over what God says). There are some rights that are widely agreed upon as being especially important, but I don't think that means they are inherent, and I don't think they have much meaning outside of a social framework.
Lacking that as an absolute guide, I tend to stick to supporting what I think will generally help us all get along better without unduly inconveniencing anyone else. It's arbitrary, but then I think rights are too, and anyway I find that it's not usually so at odds with what I might have come up with if I'd used the core rights as a guide, though I do tend to be more flexible in supporting a loss of individual freedom when I see significant benefits and other freedoms becoming possible only as a result of that loss.
The best example to illustrate this approach is the topic of health care. After doing a fair bit of studying on the subject, I concluded that the loss of freedom that comes with having more income taken and certain basic insurance provided in return would be more than worth it*, given the combination of both a probable massive savings on health care spending and significantly increased freedom of job mobility and entrepreneurial opportunity. Moreover, many existing health care systems that enjoy those same benefits manage to do it without onerous restrictions on freedom, as they still allow the purchase of supplementary insurance.
Existing health care systems allowed me to draw these conclusions from real-world results, which are the main thing I care about, though admittedly the real world is lacking in examples of OECD nations with less-"socialist" health care systems than that in the U.S. (AFAIK there aren't any at all, in fact) so there's an outside possibility that we're currently at the bottom of a U-shaped curve and a move either toward more or less government interference would improve things—but I doubt it.
If I held individual rights as my primary guide, I might have concluded differently, deciding that because it's possible to be better off without that system, the system should not be implemented, despite the fact that most would be better off with it and few would be significantly hampered by it. I might have chosen to trade certain freedoms (better job mobility, the ability to start a business at much lower risk) to avoid even a small infringement on core "rights".
There are other examples, but that's a biggie, and I think it well-illustrates the difference between considering rights just a few of many (extant or possible) freedoms and considering them a given, of the utmost importance, and the fount of most or all other freedoms.
* it should be noted that that's not what we ended up with after our recent debate of the issue here in the U.S., but I'm convinced it's what we should have ended up with.
I don't believe that taking of freedom is ever justified
There's no way that's true. I'm not sure all anarchists would even go that far, without qualification. Surrender of freedom is key to every form of collective action I can think of, including (certainly) ALL government, however benign. That's like saying you don't believe society should exist.
This only holds if the union doesn't provide enough benefit to stop people from wanting to break ranks. And if there not doing that then there's no reason for them to be there at all.
If a person can get away with reaping the benefit of others' actions while simultaneously betraying them to their benefit, they generally will. An economist would call someone doing this a "rational actor", but on a large enough scale it kills collective action, even when everyone wants the action to be successful.
Political scientists call it the Free Rider Problem.
It's a big problem for groups like non-profit organizations, but it's also one of several key issues raised in the Tragedy of the Commons thought experiment, and it's why sometimes government action is necessary to cause everyone to behave a certain way, since even 100% approval for enacting such a law doesn't mean that 100% of people--or even a majority--will act that way without the law.
In other words, no, simple economics (providing enough benefit to entice free actors to compliance) doesn't always work, or can become prohibitively expensive, even if all the members of your group think everyone should comply. There are not always market solutions to a problem.
Sometimes taking away some individual freedom enables a group to provide better benefits to its members--that is, together, by giving up a bit of freedom, they can do or accomplish things that would otherwise be very difficult or impossible. It doesn't fit nicely with a the narrow understanding of freedom usually intended by the word (at least here in the U.S.) but it's true. Hell, it's the whole idea behind the Social Contract. More regulation doesn't always mean less freedom; done right it just means different freedom, and, every now and then, it means more freedom.
Of course everyone (well, everyone who has a chance of actually fighting, at least) in the military is a soldier. The "marines aren't soldiers" shit is part of the brainwashing (not judging, but that's what it is; we could call it "institutionalization", but that almost sounds worse).
Ditto the "no such thing as an ex-Marine". Of course there is. Within the organization there may be meaning and/or purpose to saying that there isn't--even if that purpose is to construct a reality, rather than describe one--but in a context outside that system it's just nonsense. These ideas are promoted to cause the inductee to make the organization seem more important and make their membership to it seem more valuable.
A civilian isn't a Marine but I always will be, it's a brotherhood for life or WTF ever, marines aren't soldiers--they're better, blah blah blah.
Pro tip: the same shit--toned down a bit, obviously--is very effective in encouraging better group dynamics and stronger efforts in groups of children. Probably useful for managers of adults too, I'd think. The Marine Corp (and other branches) don't do this crap because they genuinely believe it, they do it because it works.
Another triumph! they bought a bunch of password crackers, keygens, scanners and sniffers. Any bets on how much of it was really secret and how much of it was merely secret to people who haven't a clue about where such tools can be found normally?
Any bets on how much of the space on that disc was used by the "hacker tools" versus how much was used by the viruses and trojans infecting the "hacker tools"?
1. The disc shows up in the "video" section 2. Hitting the button that usually stops a video playing asks you (via the PS3, not the Netflix software) if you want to "quit playback", the same way it does if you hit it during any other video, and saying "yes" doesn't end the playback of the current movie or whatever, it drops out of the Netflix software entirely. The Netflix disc has to get around this by having another button be its "stop playing and go back to (our) menu" button. In other words, the Netflix software is a BluRay "video". Likely very confusing to any non-tech-savvy people trying to use it. 3. It stores data in the BluRay video data folder (whatever it's called, I don't remember)
I've got a Wii and a PS3. Even after the Move, the Wii remains the king of fucking expensive controllers.
Gotta have a Wiimote for each set, to be the body of your absurd controller-squid. $40. Now you've got a pointer, no analog stick, and you can turn it sideways and PRESTO CHANGO it turns in to the least ergonomic Nintendo game controller since the NES. Terrific.
So you're gonna need an analog stick, plus motion sensing for your other hand if you want to use any of the games that take advantage of that, including one that comes with your Wii. That's another, what, $30?
Now to take care of the fact that the Wiimote is a shitty traditional controller and, surprise surprise, hasn't completely replaced traditional controls with arm waving and controller shaking, you'll need to buy a real controller to plug in to your controller (I put a controller in your controller so you can...) Another $30 or so.
$100 for a mostly-complete controller (since the IR pointer's highest purpose is obviously to be used in rail shooters, you'll still need a gun frame to stick the Wiimote in, otherwise what's the point? But I'll leave that aside for argument's sake), versus $50+$40 for a Sixaxis plus Move.
It's the hidden cost of a Wii, I've discovered; the console's cheaper but it's much more expensive to outfit (or at least was much more expensive before the Move, and is now--assuming enough games come out the the Move becomes a must-have--only slightly more expensive). Add in that you'll have to buy a recharge station and battery packs--another thing you don't need for the PS3--and you've got a console that's only cheap if you play it alone.
I don't hate the Wii (I would have sold mine if I did) but it's not that much cheaper than the other consoles if you game with friends, it's (oddly enough) far less travel-friendly (console+3x4 controller parts+IR thingy+charger=15 parts, vs. 5 for a PS3+4 controllers, plus you can use the PS3 controllers even if you forgot to charge them first) and it's not really a very good system out-of-the-box, until you pick up some of the extra crap.
Oh, and I forgot about Plus. Jesus. I swear Nintendo's whole business model this generation is to nickle-and-dime its customers to death with peripherals.
I once read an account--I'd link to the site, but I don't remember where it was--of the reason JRPGs and Western RPGs are so different:
Western computer RPGs came first, but were on such limited hardware that they were only able to imitate the simplest (to program) parts of the the pen-and-paper/tabletop games that they were based on--that is, the dungeon crawling, stats, and combat system. Putting actual role playing in a game is pretty damn hard as it turns out, and it took even the West quite a while to even sort-of pull it off, but that was the direction the Western version of the genre was intended to head from the start, though it couldn't manage it at the time.
In short, very early Western computer RPGs had only the (to most people) least interesting parts of an RPG, which in pen-and-paper gaming only form the framework to support the actual role-playing, decision making, characterization, scenes, etc. that are the real meat of such games for most people.
JRPGs are based not on pen-and-paper games, but on the early Western computer RPGs, which were much more influential in Japan than pen-and-paper RPGs had been. In other words, they got completely the wrong idea, which explains why there are so few of the core things that make an RPG and RPG in most Japanese Role Playing Games, even after they had the technology to at least try to add it in. Later, they added (generally) linear stories, turning their dungeon crawlers in to barely-interactive fiction with stats and turn-based fighting.
In the mean time, Western RPGs kept advancing and developers tried their best to replicate the experience of a live role-playing session, eventually meeting with some success, and diverging wildly from the differently-inspired JRPGs.
Frankly I have no idea how true that account is, but if it is true then it sure sheds some light on why JRPGs are so heavily focused on boring, repetitive random encounters and fighting. Hell, I even like JRPGs and I think much of the genre's game mechanics are total shit.
This whole generation sucks. IMO there aren't many more titles worth owning on the PS3 and 360, there are just fewer really bad knock-off casual games than on the Wii so the problem isn't as obvious.
All the good games seem to be on the DS and PSP this generation. Not one of the actual consoles has even ten great games yet, which, considering that the winner in the "epically huge library with loads of good games" department in the last three generations (SNES, PSX, PS2) each had so many great games that it's hard to even narrow it down to a top 25, is pretty damn sad.
In the Wii's favor, it's got a re-make of Goldeneye on the way in a couple months, and it looks pretty friggin' good. Finally, a splitscreen shooter this generation to play with my friends that isn't that piece of shit CoD:WM2, which we play only for lack of anything better. Makes me feel less bad about selling my 360 for a PS3, since the 360 got a port of Perfect Dark, which gives it exactly one exclusive that I give a damn about (there might be one or two more that it has and the PS3 doesn't, but I have a gaming PC, so...)
So, that's what I'm excited about. An updated re-make of an N64 game on this generation's weakest console. Other than that and the too-far-off-to-worry-about Arkham City, everything I'm waiting for is on (or will be best on) the PC. Just sad.
I'll be happy when someone releases a one-click make-Wiimotes-work-on-your-PC installer.
It works now, but it's a pain in the ass and requires all kinds of voodoo magic to make it work. I have to use BlueSoleil to get it going, because my native Win7 BT stack will connect and work fine but will suddenly drop the connection after 30 seconds or so. Sometimes opening a Wii emulator (that I don't even use for anything else) and having it read the Wiimote makes it work better. The lights seem to do something different every damn time I connect it, and doing anything to the lights in GlovePIE (yet another support app required to make the damn thing work) other than turning them off does work, but causes it to stop reading any input from the device.
Then, if you want two of them for, say, rail shooters, you've got to install ANOTHER application to pretend to be a joystick so GlovePIE can "move" it and "push buttons" on it when it reads input from the Wiimote.
Three apps, one of which costs about $30, to maybe get it working on your PC, which is way more open than the PS3, even post-hack. Somehow I don't think you need to be worrying about seamless PS3 connectivity to the Wiimote any time soon.
I do it, but I think I've only seen others do it a couple times. I'm not sure the people going the other way even understand what I'm "saying" to them.
In Missouri, so it's (sort of) known in the Midwest.
It's a more useful language than you might think; France itself has a pretty high population, and Quebec+Switzerland+Belgium doesn't hurt, but there are also millions of Africans and Caribbean people who speak it, plus quite a few in the Middle East and North Africa.
Wikipedia lists it as 14th for native speakers, but 4th for total speakers. I'd guess that a lot of the difference comes from Africans who speak another, local language as their mother tongue but speak French when they leave that area, Arabic speakers who also learned French, and continental Europeans who learned French (probably as a third language, after their own and English)
That's just talking sheer numbers, too--French has not only a history of great art, but continues to be a language in which many great films are produced, and the occasional great book. France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Quebec are all economically powerful, compared to the nations where the more-widely-spoken Spanish is used, making it arguably at least as useful as a business language.
Overall, of European languages, it's easily the third most useful after English and Spanish, unless you're talking about a specific area (obviously it'd only come in a distant 4th if you were only considering South America, for example). One can easily name scenarios where French would be far less helpful to know than other languages, but taking a general big-picture approach, it's pretty damn far up the list.
I think there are fields (like idioms) which can greatly benefit from games, like history, geography
I have probably learned at least as much history from video games as I did in primary and secondary school, and I've definitely learned more geography.
Geography? Shadow President taught me the location of just about every country. It also included the CIA fact files for all of them, giving huge amounts of info about their economies, demographics, etc.
History? Medieval: Total War taught me at least as much about medieval Europe as I learned in school (in the US, anyway; we neglect European history pretty badly here in the US, or at least in the Midwest, to give us time to spend a few weeks on settlers and a few more on Native Americans every year in elementary school and a bit more in high school *eyeroll*)
Thanks to the Europa Barbarorum realism mod for Rome: Total War I know the ancient names for many cities in Europe in the tongue of the people who lived in them. Hell, for some of them I know those names better than the modern one--I know there's a major city on Italy's "heel" that was named Taras in Greek and Tarantum in Latin, but I can never remember its modern name, for instance.
That mod also taught me WAAAAAY more about the mid-to-late Hellenic/early Roman period of European history than I learned in K-12. More than college did, too, for that matter, but then I wasn't a history major. It teaches you about Epirus and his campaigns, the collapse and re-ordering of Alexander's empire, the Punic Wars, and all kinds of other things that we barely covered in school, if at all.
Robert E. Lee: Civil War General and its (much better) semi-sequel Civil War Generals taught me a rough timeline for the major battles of the Civil War, the major movements of troops, and the general disposition and positioning of forces on both sides. I probably know about as much about that as a fairly good college course on Civil War battles would teach, and all I had to do was play a game. Took longer than taking the class, but it was fun as hell.
They are also taxed the same on the same income, thanks to marginal tax rates. Everyone pays nothing (well, no income tax anyway) on the first $10,000 (or so). Everyone pays the same on the next $20,000, then on the next $40,000 after that (just making up numbers) and so on. Everyone pays the same on the same chunks of income.
The wealthy also pay far less in social security tax, so their rates can actually come out to about the same as the middle class. The ultra wealthy likely don't pay over 20% on average, and possibly less, meaning they have a lower tax rate than most of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Americans.
We don't have trains to speak of, outside maybe ten cities, and if we have a bus system it usually sucks and/or has very limited range which requires us to drive 1/2 of the way to our destination to reach the nearest stop.
I'd take the train if we had one, and I'd take the bus if it wouldn't double my commute time (at best) and still require several miles' worth of driving.
Not everyone can afford to blow $80+ just to get to and from their night out. I practically never go out for that reason, and because I know being a DD sucks and wouldn't impose on someone like that. I go to a bar maybe a couple times a year, but I'd be far more inclined to accompany other friends who go more frequently if the transportation weren't an issue.
As for MADD, they have a history of pursuing policy that has more to do with neo-Prohibition than keeping people safe. I don't dislike them because they're against drunk driving--hooray for that, in fact--but because they appear to be anti-alcohol. My comment about them trying to find some way to make this technology not a legal option for inebriated transportation was serious; I bet they would.
It'd be awesome not to need a DD (or risk a DUI) to go to the bar in the many US cities with no or inadequate public transit... though I bet the MADD assholes will lobby to make it still illegal, somehow, and probably try to force a breathalyzer to turn the damn auto-drive on in the first place.
Cities will have to step up drug enforcement big time to make up for budget shortfalls, if these become common. No more traffic tickets means dramatically lower revenue for many towns.
Especially if, as he says, he's not going to be traveling around the text very much, VI is exactly the wrong tool. It's designed to let you move around a ton without leaving your normal typing position, and to re-arrange bits of text quickly. This ability comes at the price of a painful learning curve and a non-intuitive interface for doing simple shit like moving over a few characters to replace a letter or two in the last word.
If you're just typing text but want few distractions, something like Nano/Pico or one of those newer editors that run in the graphical OS but turn the whole screen black and show only what you've typed would make way more sense--especially the latter, which are designed precisely for this situation. VI's modes and other useful-for-code features are, for the purposes of writing, just another form of counter-productive bloat; it's not remotely worth learning VI if you're not going to be moving blocks of code around and bouncing about your document almost as often as you actually modify the text.
Fuck, I guess I better check my car, since I too have stated the obvious.
Also, all things on Earth are mere reflections of perfect Forms of those things that exist on another plane.
This is a critical point, and one that's often overlooked.
The GIMP might be OK if you're working alone, but even a lowly web developer who only works with graphics (generally) rather than creating them will need to switch to Photoshop if their graphic designer uses it, since receiving a .psd is way more useful (if you're using Photoshop) than any other format, and The GIMP has poor support for it.
It only takes one "ok, here's the cut-up and CSS'd layout, look OK?" "uh, yeah, but where'd X, Y, and Z go? And I know there was a drop shadow on that and that" to prod one to switch in a situation like that.
Plus, though I've used The GIMP way more than Photoshop and my first "real" image editing app wasn't Photoshop (Paint Shop Pro), if you gave me a graphics task I'd never done and told me to do it in the program of my choice I'd pick Photoshop in a heartbeat. It's just way the hell easier to use, especially when trying to figure out something new. The way it handles layers (fucking vital) is especially WAAAAY better.
Huh, I hadn't heard anything about the game performing poorly. Odd, since it looks worse than Quake.
I'm not complaining about it looking bad, mind you; I'm just surprised that it can't run on a Pentium 1 with all its settings turned up to full.
Damnit, that was me. No idea how the AC checkbox got hit.
I don't think saying "you work only with us, or with none of us (but with whomever else you please, in the latter case)" is a violation of anyone's rights, assuming that's what you're talking about. I don't see how we could force the union members to work on projects that also hire non-union workers without that being at least as large a violation of freedom.
Or perhaps (most likely) I'm just not getting what you're referring to in that sentence.
As for rights: I think it's a convenient term to use in colloquial speech, and maybe even a useful term to designate extra-special or dear freedoms, but I'm not sure that such a thing as a natural right has much logical support, unless you admit God to the argument (thus ending any possibility of an argument, except perhaps over what God says). There are some rights that are widely agreed upon as being especially important, but I don't think that means they are inherent, and I don't think they have much meaning outside of a social framework.
Lacking that as an absolute guide, I tend to stick to supporting what I think will generally help us all get along better without unduly inconveniencing anyone else. It's arbitrary, but then I think rights are too, and anyway I find that it's not usually so at odds with what I might have come up with if I'd used the core rights as a guide, though I do tend to be more flexible in supporting a loss of individual freedom when I see significant benefits and other freedoms becoming possible only as a result of that loss.
The best example to illustrate this approach is the topic of health care. After doing a fair bit of studying on the subject, I concluded that the loss of freedom that comes with having more income taken and certain basic insurance provided in return would be more than worth it*, given the combination of both a probable massive savings on health care spending and significantly increased freedom of job mobility and entrepreneurial opportunity. Moreover, many existing health care systems that enjoy those same benefits manage to do it without onerous restrictions on freedom, as they still allow the purchase of supplementary insurance.
Existing health care systems allowed me to draw these conclusions from real-world results, which are the main thing I care about, though admittedly the real world is lacking in examples of OECD nations with less-"socialist" health care systems than that in the U.S. (AFAIK there aren't any at all, in fact) so there's an outside possibility that we're currently at the bottom of a U-shaped curve and a move either toward more or less government interference would improve things—but I doubt it.
If I held individual rights as my primary guide, I might have concluded differently, deciding that because it's possible to be better off without that system, the system should not be implemented, despite the fact that most would be better off with it and few would be significantly hampered by it. I might have chosen to trade certain freedoms (better job mobility, the ability to start a business at much lower risk) to avoid even a small infringement on core "rights".
There are other examples, but that's a biggie, and I think it well-illustrates the difference between considering rights just a few of many (extant or possible) freedoms and considering them a given, of the utmost importance, and the fount of most or all other freedoms.
* it should be noted that that's not what we ended up with after our recent debate of the issue here in the U.S., but I'm convinced it's what we should have ended up with.
There's no way that's true. I'm not sure all anarchists would even go that far, without qualification. Surrender of freedom is key to every form of collective action I can think of, including (certainly) ALL government, however benign. That's like saying you don't believe society should exist.
If a person can get away with reaping the benefit of others' actions while simultaneously betraying them to their benefit, they generally will. An economist would call someone doing this a "rational actor", but on a large enough scale it kills collective action, even when everyone wants the action to be successful.
Political scientists call it the Free Rider Problem.
It's a big problem for groups like non-profit organizations, but it's also one of several key issues raised in the Tragedy of the Commons thought experiment, and it's why sometimes government action is necessary to cause everyone to behave a certain way, since even 100% approval for enacting such a law doesn't mean that 100% of people--or even a majority--will act that way without the law.
In other words, no, simple economics (providing enough benefit to entice free actors to compliance) doesn't always work, or can become prohibitively expensive, even if all the members of your group think everyone should comply. There are not always market solutions to a problem.
Sometimes taking away some individual freedom enables a group to provide better benefits to its members--that is, together, by giving up a bit of freedom, they can do or accomplish things that would otherwise be very difficult or impossible. It doesn't fit nicely with a the narrow understanding of freedom usually intended by the word (at least here in the U.S.) but it's true. Hell, it's the whole idea behind the Social Contract. More regulation doesn't always mean less freedom; done right it just means different freedom, and, every now and then, it means more freedom.
Of course everyone (well, everyone who has a chance of actually fighting, at least) in the military is a soldier. The "marines aren't soldiers" shit is part of the brainwashing (not judging, but that's what it is; we could call it "institutionalization", but that almost sounds worse).
Ditto the "no such thing as an ex-Marine". Of course there is. Within the organization there may be meaning and/or purpose to saying that there isn't--even if that purpose is to construct a reality, rather than describe one--but in a context outside that system it's just nonsense. These ideas are promoted to cause the inductee to make the organization seem more important and make their membership to it seem more valuable.
A civilian isn't a Marine but I always will be, it's a brotherhood for life or WTF ever, marines aren't soldiers--they're better, blah blah blah.
Pro tip: the same shit--toned down a bit, obviously--is very effective in encouraging better group dynamics and stronger efforts in groups of children. Probably useful for managers of adults too, I'd think. The Marine Corp (and other branches) don't do this crap because they genuinely believe it, they do it because it works.
Any bets on how much of the space on that disc was used by the "hacker tools" versus how much was used by the viruses and trojans infecting the "hacker tools"?
It is. Evidence:
1. The disc shows up in the "video" section
2. Hitting the button that usually stops a video playing asks you (via the PS3, not the Netflix software) if you want to "quit playback", the same way it does if you hit it during any other video, and saying "yes" doesn't end the playback of the current movie or whatever, it drops out of the Netflix software entirely. The Netflix disc has to get around this by having another button be its "stop playing and go back to (our) menu" button. In other words, the Netflix software is a BluRay "video". Likely very confusing to any non-tech-savvy people trying to use it.
3. It stores data in the BluRay video data folder (whatever it's called, I don't remember)
I've got a Wii and a PS3. Even after the Move, the Wii remains the king of fucking expensive controllers.
Gotta have a Wiimote for each set, to be the body of your absurd controller-squid. $40. Now you've got a pointer, no analog stick, and you can turn it sideways and PRESTO CHANGO it turns in to the least ergonomic Nintendo game controller since the NES. Terrific.
So you're gonna need an analog stick, plus motion sensing for your other hand if you want to use any of the games that take advantage of that, including one that comes with your Wii. That's another, what, $30?
Now to take care of the fact that the Wiimote is a shitty traditional controller and, surprise surprise, hasn't completely replaced traditional controls with arm waving and controller shaking, you'll need to buy a real controller to plug in to your controller (I put a controller in your controller so you can...) Another $30 or so.
$100 for a mostly-complete controller (since the IR pointer's highest purpose is obviously to be used in rail shooters, you'll still need a gun frame to stick the Wiimote in, otherwise what's the point? But I'll leave that aside for argument's sake), versus $50+$40 for a Sixaxis plus Move.
It's the hidden cost of a Wii, I've discovered; the console's cheaper but it's much more expensive to outfit (or at least was much more expensive before the Move, and is now--assuming enough games come out the the Move becomes a must-have--only slightly more expensive). Add in that you'll have to buy a recharge station and battery packs--another thing you don't need for the PS3--and you've got a console that's only cheap if you play it alone.
I don't hate the Wii (I would have sold mine if I did) but it's not that much cheaper than the other consoles if you game with friends, it's (oddly enough) far less travel-friendly (console+3x4 controller parts+IR thingy+charger=15 parts, vs. 5 for a PS3+4 controllers, plus you can use the PS3 controllers even if you forgot to charge them first) and it's not really a very good system out-of-the-box, until you pick up some of the extra crap.
Oh, and I forgot about Plus. Jesus. I swear Nintendo's whole business model this generation is to nickle-and-dime its customers to death with peripherals.
I once read an account--I'd link to the site, but I don't remember where it was--of the reason JRPGs and Western RPGs are so different:
Western computer RPGs came first, but were on such limited hardware that they were only able to imitate the simplest (to program) parts of the the pen-and-paper/tabletop games that they were based on--that is, the dungeon crawling, stats, and combat system. Putting actual role playing in a game is pretty damn hard as it turns out, and it took even the West quite a while to even sort-of pull it off, but that was the direction the Western version of the genre was intended to head from the start, though it couldn't manage it at the time.
In short, very early Western computer RPGs had only the (to most people) least interesting parts of an RPG, which in pen-and-paper gaming only form the framework to support the actual role-playing, decision making, characterization, scenes, etc. that are the real meat of such games for most people.
JRPGs are based not on pen-and-paper games, but on the early Western computer RPGs, which were much more influential in Japan than pen-and-paper RPGs had been. In other words, they got completely the wrong idea, which explains why there are so few of the core things that make an RPG and RPG in most Japanese Role Playing Games, even after they had the technology to at least try to add it in. Later, they added (generally) linear stories, turning their dungeon crawlers in to barely-interactive fiction with stats and turn-based fighting.
In the mean time, Western RPGs kept advancing and developers tried their best to replicate the experience of a live role-playing session, eventually meeting with some success, and diverging wildly from the differently-inspired JRPGs.
Frankly I have no idea how true that account is, but if it is true then it sure sheds some light on why JRPGs are so heavily focused on boring, repetitive random encounters and fighting. Hell, I even like JRPGs and I think much of the genre's game mechanics are total shit.
This whole generation sucks. IMO there aren't many more titles worth owning on the PS3 and 360, there are just fewer really bad knock-off casual games than on the Wii so the problem isn't as obvious.
All the good games seem to be on the DS and PSP this generation. Not one of the actual consoles has even ten great games yet, which, considering that the winner in the "epically huge library with loads of good games" department in the last three generations (SNES, PSX, PS2) each had so many great games that it's hard to even narrow it down to a top 25, is pretty damn sad.
In the Wii's favor, it's got a re-make of Goldeneye on the way in a couple months, and it looks pretty friggin' good. Finally, a splitscreen shooter this generation to play with my friends that isn't that piece of shit CoD:WM2, which we play only for lack of anything better. Makes me feel less bad about selling my 360 for a PS3, since the 360 got a port of Perfect Dark, which gives it exactly one exclusive that I give a damn about (there might be one or two more that it has and the PS3 doesn't, but I have a gaming PC, so...)
So, that's what I'm excited about. An updated re-make of an N64 game on this generation's weakest console. Other than that and the too-far-off-to-worry-about Arkham City, everything I'm waiting for is on (or will be best on) the PC. Just sad.
I'll be happy when someone releases a one-click make-Wiimotes-work-on-your-PC installer.
It works now, but it's a pain in the ass and requires all kinds of voodoo magic to make it work. I have to use BlueSoleil to get it going, because my native Win7 BT stack will connect and work fine but will suddenly drop the connection after 30 seconds or so. Sometimes opening a Wii emulator (that I don't even use for anything else) and having it read the Wiimote makes it work better. The lights seem to do something different every damn time I connect it, and doing anything to the lights in GlovePIE (yet another support app required to make the damn thing work) other than turning them off does work, but causes it to stop reading any input from the device.
Then, if you want two of them for, say, rail shooters, you've got to install ANOTHER application to pretend to be a joystick so GlovePIE can "move" it and "push buttons" on it when it reads input from the Wiimote.
Three apps, one of which costs about $30, to maybe get it working on your PC, which is way more open than the PS3, even post-hack. Somehow I don't think you need to be worrying about seamless PS3 connectivity to the Wiimote any time soon.
I do it, but I think I've only seen others do it a couple times. I'm not sure the people going the other way even understand what I'm "saying" to them.
In Missouri, so it's (sort of) known in the Midwest.
It's a more useful language than you might think; France itself has a pretty high population, and Quebec+Switzerland+Belgium doesn't hurt, but there are also millions of Africans and Caribbean people who speak it, plus quite a few in the Middle East and North Africa.
Wikipedia lists it as 14th for native speakers, but 4th for total speakers. I'd guess that a lot of the difference comes from Africans who speak another, local language as their mother tongue but speak French when they leave that area, Arabic speakers who also learned French, and continental Europeans who learned French (probably as a third language, after their own and English)
That's just talking sheer numbers, too--French has not only a history of great art, but continues to be a language in which many great films are produced, and the occasional great book. France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Quebec are all economically powerful, compared to the nations where the more-widely-spoken Spanish is used, making it arguably at least as useful as a business language.
Overall, of European languages, it's easily the third most useful after English and Spanish, unless you're talking about a specific area (obviously it'd only come in a distant 4th if you were only considering South America, for example). One can easily name scenarios where French would be far less helpful to know than other languages, but taking a general big-picture approach, it's pretty damn far up the list.
I have probably learned at least as much history from video games as I did in primary and secondary school, and I've definitely learned more geography.
Geography? Shadow President taught me the location of just about every country. It also included the CIA fact files for all of them, giving huge amounts of info about their economies, demographics, etc.
History? Medieval: Total War taught me at least as much about medieval Europe as I learned in school (in the US, anyway; we neglect European history pretty badly here in the US, or at least in the Midwest, to give us time to spend a few weeks on settlers and a few more on Native Americans every year in elementary school and a bit more in high school *eyeroll*)
Thanks to the Europa Barbarorum realism mod for Rome: Total War I know the ancient names for many cities in Europe in the tongue of the people who lived in them. Hell, for some of them I know those names better than the modern one--I know there's a major city on Italy's "heel" that was named Taras in Greek and Tarantum in Latin, but I can never remember its modern name, for instance.
That mod also taught me WAAAAAY more about the mid-to-late Hellenic/early Roman period of European history than I learned in K-12. More than college did, too, for that matter, but then I wasn't a history major. It teaches you about Epirus and his campaigns, the collapse and re-ordering of Alexander's empire, the Punic Wars, and all kinds of other things that we barely covered in school, if at all.
Robert E. Lee: Civil War General and its (much better) semi-sequel Civil War Generals taught me a rough timeline for the major battles of the Civil War, the major movements of troops, and the general disposition and positioning of forces on both sides. I probably know about as much about that as a fairly good college course on Civil War battles would teach, and all I had to do was play a game. Took longer than taking the class, but it was fun as hell.
They are also taxed the same on the same income, thanks to marginal tax rates. Everyone pays nothing (well, no income tax anyway) on the first $10,000 (or so). Everyone pays the same on the next $20,000, then on the next $40,000 after that (just making up numbers) and so on. Everyone pays the same on the same chunks of income.
The wealthy also pay far less in social security tax, so their rates can actually come out to about the same as the middle class. The ultra wealthy likely don't pay over 20% on average, and possibly less, meaning they have a lower tax rate than most of us.
I guess if their fake testimonials page convinces you that they're good enough to hire, then you've made a good choice.