I think you are overestimating the matrix, heavily. They shied away from the truly thought provoking possibilities and instead pulled a lovely switcheroo and dumbed the entire series down to drooling moron level with the last one. I understood it quite fine.. but it didn't have much depth when all was said and done, they just hinted that it might have depth and failed to follow through. So I don't know what it is you plan on debating there, unless you're trying to pick what denomination Neo adheres to....
The Lord of the Rings is an Epic story. It's not a work of philosophy. As an epic story, it's one of the finest ever told, and Jackson has done a fantastic job of adapting the most widely read story ever (except *maybe* the bible but I think he beat that too?) to a VERY well done screen format. This is modern mythology, a modern parable perhaps, not a research project. You know, exactly what the Matrix wanted to be but fell flat on its face long before it reached this level of storytelling maturity.
You, sir, are quite obviously smoking crack. The only way they could have made more religious overtones is if Neo decided to dress like the Pope. I mean seriously man, the second one left things up for interpetation.. "Is Zion still in the matrix, or does Neo really have magic powers outside of the matrix now?".. and now he's the second coming of christ. Fan fucking tastic.
Talk about a knee jerk reaction. Unconstitutional? Ridiculous.
I've seen no indication that electronic voting has been well implemented yet. But if a solution can be created that isn't any more open to abuse than our current one is... and make no mistake about it, our current system is not "hack proof" by any stretch of the imagination... then the benefits of allowing voters real time access to the voting procedure could be the biggest leap forward for democracy we've seen since we had to step back from town meetings.
Because iD software in its infinite wisdom decided awhile back that they should be paid for games played in high end tournaments like this.
Suddenly, Quake was no longer a CPL or WCG pick. Go figure, eh? They still have Quakecon though so it's not like they don't have any top tier outlets for their game.
that's fine for private universities, if that's what it takes to attract top notch professors. In the grade and high school levels though, it seriously cripples the entire hiring process as well as makes it impossible to get rid of dead weight.
Not an even trade off IMO for basic level education. Save it for the private schools.
But I will never vote for it until the entire idea of tenure is scrapped. Screw paying for an incompetant boob for the rest of his/her entire adult life to continue to screw up kid's educations generation after generation...
Who's brainchild was that anyway? it makes the hiring process a nightmare, causes any kind of a black mark at all to result in the firing of a teacher while it's still possible, just in case, and serves no one's interest except teachers that aren't good enough to stay on based on merit. Dumbest idea ever.
Or, as all you geeks will probably call it, Peer to Peer Power Sharing. I wonder if the utilities will sue for infringing on their turf if it gets big enough?:D
Maybe towns and cities could just invest in their own battery banks? Even if this kind of power generation really takes off... and I hope it does.. there has to be storage somewhere. Not every town could build a double resevoir to pump water uphill during the day and run hydroelectric at night...
How would the issue of storage be solved for a fully decentralized, 100% solar grid? I bet someone has ideas on that...
He doesn't want a "fair shot" against experienced players. He wants to find games where he doesn't have to PLAY the experienced players as a newbie, because he just wants to have a FUN, low level game. He doesn't care about skill progression or becoming better. He just wants to sit down and play a few games for fun here and there and have it ACTUALLY BE FUN.
I know an assload about competition and I'm one of those people who plays to improve. But you can't fault someone for just wanting to screw around without having to dedicate most of their free time to a game just to make it fun, finally, after weeks of work.
trick is, you can't do that either. Even CDkey security gets hacked and the lamers just download lists of CDkeys that have been pilfered, stolen from stores, or tricked out of unsuspecting players. Since fully 50% or more of everyone who buys an MP enabled game doesn't ever even try to play online, it goes undetected most of the time.
Nothing is perfect!!! But allowing people to choose their own difficulty/gameplay level and simply installing safeguards to identify the slummers and remove them is, IMHO, still the best and simplest option. Any other solution wouldn't allow you to punish a player for being "too good", it wouldn't even be appropriate. But this one would, in appropriate servers, and would prompt but leave that punishment up to the players as the final check against fully automated kicks breaking up a tip session or something.
I often do too, but what killed the idea of ranking-based matchmaking for me is Warcraft 3. To put it plainly, I suck at it. Which is to say I had about a 30% win ratio. But every other match I played was some guy who was starting over to clear his record, or starting a "for fun" account, or some other variant of a very skilled player being identified incorrectly. When you've played five games of something and you're faced with UBERDOOD13 with hundreds of battles behind him, it's not a lot of fun. I could have kept playing and improved, but I just wasn't having fun, so I played about twenty matches (i really tried to like it) and gave up.
Stats and Rankings are wonderful.. rankings got me hooked on Unreal Tournament and made me play it for ungodly hours a week for six months trying to stay in the top ten of the gametype Domination.. and I've been a hardcore fan of the series for years since then. But I think both of these ideas could exist side by side, it's not an either or proposition. Newbie servers: no ranking (maybe stats for fun). Seperate Intermediate and Pro stats/rankings so there is no benefit to dropping below your skill level to whore points which, yes, still happens in ELO based systems.
The hardest part of the idea is deciding what level of gameplay performance would trigger the "do you wanna boot this slumming lamer" message:D
You don't even need to have any kind of stats or calculations to do skill matching.
You know on single player games, where you choose your difficulty? Why not just look for "newbie", "intermediate", or "pro" games?
If someone joins a newbie server and is whupping ass on everyone, have the game prompt the newbies on whether or not they want to kick the person who is kicking ass. If he's beating on them that bad he should be on a different server or skill level anyway.
Server admins could set their servers to whatever level they want to cater to, or let the server advertise itself everywhere and the first player to join causes it to settle on that player's skill level until it's empty again.
Of course it's not perfect, but it would be an easy implementation and should help. Finding games of people about your skill level should be convenient and easy, and why have to wait for X number of games for the ranking system to figure out where you should be, or spend your time playing hardcore players who started new accounts to clear their records? Just tell the game what you want...
If you want to talk a publisher into *paying*, not loaning, artists lump sums of money to buy or create works, then go for it. But until the risk is shifted from the artists, why should someone else get the money for selling his works when he took the risk and spent his time creating it for NOTHING? Does your job require you to go sometimes years either without pay or on "advances" that you owe in return that will only be recouped by the distribution channels that also produce your work into useable forms? Assuming, of course, that you do in fact sell mass quantities to pay back the advances?
"Frankly, I'd much rather free diversity with no equality than controlled diversity."
To paraphrase you'd rather have the corporations control the level of diversity rather than our government. While some days I would agree, in general, no thanks. At least we have the potential to affect our government to some degree.
Saying you would prefer "free diversity with no equality" is pretty much exactly the same as saying you prefer controlled diversity, how could you miss such a blatantly obvious point? The only difference is do we actively control it as a country for the good of all, or do we just let the corporations duke it out and whoever wins controls it for their own good? Maybe in your happy fantasyland no one, or even two corporations ever rise to such prominence that they could dictate the terms of the market they work in, but here in the real world, it happens. All the time. Especially if you don't control them. Look at the financial industry which immediately lost practically all of its diversity when their regulations were relaxed years ago. You don't think that will happen here? You don't think that's why the big boys are pushing so hard for these changes? You don't think that there will be a reduction, a substantial reduction in diversity once they conglomerate even further?
You're freaking dreaming if so. News on these rules changes didn't even hit mainstream news until we actually made a really big deal about it such that omission would be completely obvious now. How's that for your "free diversity"? You had to watch PBS to see anyone say a freaking thing about this for months! Was it "not important" or was it just not what the big boys wanted to talk to you about for some reason?
Corporate interests do not correspond to those of a well informed populace. Thus they should not be in control of the media in which most of the populace will gather their information.
sure it was an improvement in many respects, but for top games of all time I'll be more inclined to grant the title to the original rather than a refinement. Plus elite was 3-D where EV is not, with vastly inferior hardware to run on, that's pretty impressive by itself. Originality and progressiveness need to be taken into account IMHO:D
The new one, Nova, is very good. But if you feel this way, its granddaddy "Elite" was one of the most progressive games of its time. Immersive 3-D space trader with a gigantic universe and plenty of things to do, completely non-linear and open ended, and you could play it on an Apple IIe. 3-D polygon "line" graphics like asteroids come to live but still you felt it when the ships flew over your cockpit.
That's interesting. I've been playing primarily violent videogames (fighters and shooters) between the levels of regularly and obsessively for ten years. Yet I'll let someone hit me twice without fighting back and I haven't raised a hand in anger in more than 15 years.
Guess I'm just the lucky exception huh? Or maybe it's not the games, eh? Ever stop to think that violent kids may be attracted to violent games rather than games making kids violent?
Your experience is limited. That's why we have studies instead of story circles when we are trying to determine trends. Fact is no study has determined any kind of causative link between playing violent games and violent behaviour. Some excitability/aggression has been shown directly afterwards. Much like excitibility and aggression is shown after sporting events as well. It's competitive. Competition makes boys aggressive for awhile. What a shocker eh?
All cutting edge games have lower than ideal fps when they are released. First off, 60 FPS is more than adequate for a pretty smooth gaming experience. Of course it'll drop and you'll get chug from time to time, but overall, it's not an insurmountable obstacle.
Name one major cutting-edge 3-D shooter that was released that you could run at high resolution over 60 FPS at the time of release. I have never seen it. Typically if you are running 40-60 fps you are doing fine for a release game and when the next gen hardware comes out you'll go back over 100 in the "ideal" range for the serious hardcore gaming competitor.
That resolution, however, is completely adequate by any measure. You'd be surprised how many people still compete at 800x600 or so.
Finally, keep this in mind: most serious gamers who are so concerned with fps that 60 is not adequate, also turn all the extras down or off in their graphics setups. I'm willing to bet they didn't do that in the benchmark test. you can often double your fps by sacrificing unnecessary detail.
It's quite a step from knowing what to do if you are told to find something on the internet and becoming proficienct in internet research as a primary info gathering option. It's also a barrier to entry to poorer children who do not have regular computer access. Plus these program apparently is beneficial and the cost is hardly exhorbitant. So it's experimental. Shall we never, ever, change how education works then?
No, they aren't training kids to be programmers or Unix dudes or whatever: so what. What they are doing is ensuring that the entire educated populace in maine is comfortable with technology. And whether you like it or not, that is still becoming more and more a fundamental requirement of any form of employment, even if it's just on the administrative end. Hell if you want to work the cash register at the pizza place next to me you have to know the basics of computer usage.
The last story on this in maine highlighted greater attendance, fewer discipline problems, and greater attentiveness in class as easily spottable trends after the implementation of this program. The laptops stay with the classroom, not the students as they move on. But when the students move on they will know how to use the internet as a research tool, how to use spreadsheets and databases and word processors and such, in short they will be able to utilize technology.
In a state that is trying to update its workforce to keep pace with the times, that alone is a big step. Frankly, I think an educational system that IS NOT addressing the ever growing prescence of technology and its uses in our lives is woefully inadequate.
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I think you are overestimating the matrix, heavily. They shied away from the truly thought provoking possibilities and instead pulled a lovely switcheroo and dumbed the entire series down to drooling moron level with the last one. I understood it quite fine.. but it didn't have much depth when all was said and done, they just hinted that it might have depth and failed to follow through. So I don't know what it is you plan on debating there, unless you're trying to pick what denomination Neo adheres to....
The Lord of the Rings is an Epic story. It's not a work of philosophy. As an epic story, it's one of the finest ever told, and Jackson has done a fantastic job of adapting the most widely read story ever (except *maybe* the bible but I think he beat that too?) to a VERY well done screen format. This is modern mythology, a modern parable perhaps, not a research project. You know, exactly what the Matrix wanted to be but fell flat on its face long before it reached this level of storytelling maturity.
No, since the others failed, I'm guessing they were just prophets, not actually the sons of God like Neo apparently is.
"Fewer overt religious overtones."
You, sir, are quite obviously smoking crack. The only way they could have made more religious overtones is if Neo decided to dress like the Pope. I mean seriously man, the second one left things up for interpetation.. "Is Zion still in the matrix, or does Neo really have magic powers outside of the matrix now?".. and now he's the second coming of christ. Fan fucking tastic.
Talk about a knee jerk reaction. Unconstitutional? Ridiculous.
I've seen no indication that electronic voting has been well implemented yet. But if a solution can be created that isn't any more open to abuse than our current one is... and make no mistake about it, our current system is not "hack proof" by any stretch of the imagination... then the benefits of allowing voters real time access to the voting procedure could be the biggest leap forward for democracy we've seen since we had to step back from town meetings.
Because iD software in its infinite wisdom decided awhile back that they should be paid for games played in high end tournaments like this.
Suddenly, Quake was no longer a CPL or WCG pick. Go figure, eh? They still have Quakecon though so it's not like they don't have any top tier outlets for their game.
that's fine for private universities, if that's what it takes to attract top notch professors. In the grade and high school levels though, it seriously cripples the entire hiring process as well as makes it impossible to get rid of dead weight.
Not an even trade off IMO for basic level education. Save it for the private schools.
I want teachers to get raises.
But I will never vote for it until the entire idea of tenure is scrapped. Screw paying for an incompetant boob for the rest of his/her entire adult life to continue to screw up kid's educations generation after generation...
Who's brainchild was that anyway? it makes the hiring process a nightmare, causes any kind of a black mark at all to result in the firing of a teacher while it's still possible, just in case, and serves no one's interest except teachers that aren't good enough to stay on based on merit. Dumbest idea ever.
Or, as all you geeks will probably call it, Peer to Peer Power Sharing. I wonder if the utilities will sue for infringing on their turf if it gets big enough? :D
Maybe towns and cities could just invest in their own battery banks? Even if this kind of power generation really takes off... and I hope it does.. there has to be storage somewhere. Not every town could build a double resevoir to pump water uphill during the day and run hydroelectric at night...
How would the issue of storage be solved for a fully decentralized, 100% solar grid? I bet someone has ideas on that...
Zenkai?
He doesn't want a "fair shot" against experienced players. He wants to find games where he doesn't have to PLAY the experienced players as a newbie, because he just wants to have a FUN, low level game. He doesn't care about skill progression or becoming better. He just wants to sit down and play a few games for fun here and there and have it ACTUALLY BE FUN.
I know an assload about competition and I'm one of those people who plays to improve. But you can't fault someone for just wanting to screw around without having to dedicate most of their free time to a game just to make it fun, finally, after weeks of work.
trick is, you can't do that either. Even CDkey security gets hacked and the lamers just download lists of CDkeys that have been pilfered, stolen from stores, or tricked out of unsuspecting players. Since fully 50% or more of everyone who buys an MP enabled game doesn't ever even try to play online, it goes undetected most of the time.
Nothing is perfect!!! But allowing people to choose their own difficulty/gameplay level and simply installing safeguards to identify the slummers and remove them is, IMHO, still the best and simplest option. Any other solution wouldn't allow you to punish a player for being "too good", it wouldn't even be appropriate. But this one would, in appropriate servers, and would prompt but leave that punishment up to the players as the final check against fully automated kicks breaking up a tip session or something.
I often do too, but what killed the idea of ranking-based matchmaking for me is Warcraft 3. To put it plainly, I suck at it. Which is to say I had about a 30% win ratio. But every other match I played was some guy who was starting over to clear his record, or starting a "for fun" account, or some other variant of a very skilled player being identified incorrectly. When you've played five games of something and you're faced with UBERDOOD13 with hundreds of battles behind him, it's not a lot of fun. I could have kept playing and improved, but I just wasn't having fun, so I played about twenty matches (i really tried to like it) and gave up.
:D
Stats and Rankings are wonderful.. rankings got me hooked on Unreal Tournament and made me play it for ungodly hours a week for six months trying to stay in the top ten of the gametype Domination.. and I've been a hardcore fan of the series for years since then. But I think both of these ideas could exist side by side, it's not an either or proposition. Newbie servers: no ranking (maybe stats for fun). Seperate Intermediate and Pro stats/rankings so there is no benefit to dropping below your skill level to whore points which, yes, still happens in ELO based systems.
The hardest part of the idea is deciding what level of gameplay performance would trigger the "do you wanna boot this slumming lamer" message
You don't even need to have any kind of stats or calculations to do skill matching.
You know on single player games, where you choose your difficulty? Why not just look for "newbie", "intermediate", or "pro" games?
If someone joins a newbie server and is whupping ass on everyone, have the game prompt the newbies on whether or not they want to kick the person who is kicking ass. If he's beating on them that bad he should be on a different server or skill level anyway.
Server admins could set their servers to whatever level they want to cater to, or let the server advertise itself everywhere and the first player to join causes it to settle on that player's skill level until it's empty again.
Of course it's not perfect, but it would be an easy implementation and should help. Finding games of people about your skill level should be convenient and easy, and why have to wait for X number of games for the ranking system to figure out where you should be, or spend your time playing hardcore players who started new accounts to clear their records? Just tell the game what you want...
So Lemmings are not alive?
If you want to talk a publisher into *paying*, not loaning, artists lump sums of money to buy or create works, then go for it. But until the risk is shifted from the artists, why should someone else get the money for selling his works when he took the risk and spent his time creating it for NOTHING? Does your job require you to go sometimes years either without pay or on "advances" that you owe in return that will only be recouped by the distribution channels that also produce your work into useable forms? Assuming, of course, that you do in fact sell mass quantities to pay back the advances?
Risk and reward.
"Frankly, I'd much rather free diversity with no equality than controlled diversity."
To paraphrase you'd rather have the corporations control the level of diversity rather than our government. While some days I would agree, in general, no thanks. At least we have the potential to affect our government to some degree.
Saying you would prefer "free diversity with no equality" is pretty much exactly the same as saying you prefer controlled diversity, how could you miss such a blatantly obvious point? The only difference is do we actively control it as a country for the good of all, or do we just let the corporations duke it out and whoever wins controls it for their own good? Maybe in your happy fantasyland no one, or even two corporations ever rise to such prominence that they could dictate the terms of the market they work in, but here in the real world, it happens. All the time. Especially if you don't control them. Look at the financial industry which immediately lost practically all of its diversity when their regulations were relaxed years ago. You don't think that will happen here? You don't think that's why the big boys are pushing so hard for these changes? You don't think that there will be a reduction, a substantial reduction in diversity once they conglomerate even further?
You're freaking dreaming if so. News on these rules changes didn't even hit mainstream news until we actually made a really big deal about it such that omission would be completely obvious now. How's that for your "free diversity"? You had to watch PBS to see anyone say a freaking thing about this for months! Was it "not important" or was it just not what the big boys wanted to talk to you about for some reason?
Corporate interests do not correspond to those of a well informed populace. Thus they should not be in control of the media in which most of the populace will gather their information.
sure it was an improvement in many respects, but for top games of all time I'll be more inclined to grant the title to the original rather than a refinement. Plus elite was 3-D where EV is not, with vastly inferior hardware to run on, that's pretty impressive by itself. Originality and progressiveness need to be taken into account IMHO :D
The new one, Nova, is very good. But if you feel this way, its granddaddy "Elite" was one of the most progressive games of its time. Immersive 3-D space trader with a gigantic universe and plenty of things to do, completely non-linear and open ended, and you could play it on an Apple IIe. 3-D polygon "line" graphics like asteroids come to live but still you felt it when the ships flew over your cockpit.
They lead to violent behaviour?
That's interesting. I've been playing primarily violent videogames (fighters and shooters) between the levels of regularly and obsessively for ten years. Yet I'll let someone hit me twice without fighting back and I haven't raised a hand in anger in more than 15 years.
Guess I'm just the lucky exception huh? Or maybe it's not the games, eh? Ever stop to think that violent kids may be attracted to violent games rather than games making kids violent?
Your experience is limited. That's why we have studies instead of story circles when we are trying to determine trends. Fact is no study has determined any kind of causative link between playing violent games and violent behaviour. Some excitability/aggression has been shown directly afterwards. Much like excitibility and aggression is shown after sporting events as well. It's competitive. Competition makes boys aggressive for awhile. What a shocker eh?
All cutting edge games have lower than ideal fps when they are released. First off, 60 FPS is more than adequate for a pretty smooth gaming experience. Of course it'll drop and you'll get chug from time to time, but overall, it's not an insurmountable obstacle.
Name one major cutting-edge 3-D shooter that was released that you could run at high resolution over 60 FPS at the time of release. I have never seen it. Typically if you are running 40-60 fps you are doing fine for a release game and when the next gen hardware comes out you'll go back over 100 in the "ideal" range for the serious hardcore gaming competitor.
That resolution, however, is completely adequate by any measure. You'd be surprised how many people still compete at 800x600 or so.
Finally, keep this in mind: most serious gamers who are so concerned with fps that 60 is not adequate, also turn all the extras down or off in their graphics setups. I'm willing to bet they didn't do that in the benchmark test. you can often double your fps by sacrificing unnecessary detail.
I assume you are joking. You have to be. I wouldn't even play the original Unreal Tournament with less than 128RAM, and ram is cheap as hell.
If a what, three year old processor and 64M of ram puts this out of your reach, then you are not one for current 3-D technology. Stick with tetris.
Allow me to take a minute to pray that strategy wargames may resurface if this is true.
I sure miss Sixth Fleet, the Tank Leader series, Starfleet Battles... ah, good times, good times.
It's quite a step from knowing what to do if you are told to find something on the internet and becoming proficienct in internet research as a primary info gathering option. It's also a barrier to entry to poorer children who do not have regular computer access. Plus these program apparently is beneficial and the cost is hardly exhorbitant. So it's experimental. Shall we never, ever, change how education works then?
Consider it research money if you like.
Not knowing how to use one effectively, on the other hand, is quite a common issue.
No, they aren't training kids to be programmers or Unix dudes or whatever: so what. What they are doing is ensuring that the entire educated populace in maine is comfortable with technology. And whether you like it or not, that is still becoming more and more a fundamental requirement of any form of employment, even if it's just on the administrative end. Hell if you want to work the cash register at the pizza place next to me you have to know the basics of computer usage.
The last story on this in maine highlighted greater attendance, fewer discipline problems, and greater attentiveness in class as easily spottable trends after the implementation of this program. The laptops stay with the classroom, not the students as they move on. But when the students move on they will know how to use the internet as a research tool, how to use spreadsheets and databases and word processors and such, in short they will be able to utilize technology.
In a state that is trying to update its workforce to keep pace with the times, that alone is a big step. Frankly, I think an educational system that IS NOT addressing the ever growing prescence of technology and its uses in our lives is woefully inadequate.