All I can say is if the inventory system is once again designed for some crappy console on a 320 line screen like Oblivion's was, I'll be waiting to buy this until the PC-mods come out.
Other games have had that issue, but I never played a game (up to that point) on a PC that was so clearly designed out of the box for a console/gamepad that it made PC play almost painful.
Political Correctness is pandering to the perceived sensitivities of all sorts of defined 'victim' groups - ethnic minorities, the handicapped, women, homosexuals, etc. If your group is large enough not to be marginal and could possibly be construed to have been 'victims' by someone at sometime in history, you can jump on the 'political correctness' train, with a token representative in advertising pictures, instructional manuals, etc.
For example: casting a black man in a wheelchair as Hamlet because he's the best actor available? Not PC. Casting a black man in a wheelchair SPECIFICALLY for his skin color and because his ethnicity and disabled status make his performance somehow more 'reachable' for 'disadvantaged' audiences, is political correctness.
Perhaps instead of just reflexively dismissing it according to your political biases, you could try to understand the criticism and address the fact of it?
I'm a gay black man and even I find it grossly politically correct that they would 're-engineer' Spiderman so as to try to provide a character appealing to people of particular ethnicities and sexual preferences.
I'm not white, but I too am annoyed by the crass pandering to ethnic balkanism. Does that make me an "angry white man"?
Contrary to what most people in Argentina (apparently believe) "what most people in the US believe" is sometimes hard to generalize.
I'd guess most intellectually-engaged Americans understand Latino is a stupid concept.
By the way - the GERMAN pope is "Latino"? That's a novel interpretation.
Personally, I'd love it if the US government was color-blind, and never even COLLECTED demographic data at all. Unfortunately (and this is elemental to political correctness) this is critical to the particular culture of victimization and entitlement that empowers an entire side of US politics...how can you declare your voters 'victims of racial oppression' without statistics identifying them?
It was a great concept - take the basic 'wander around and shoot stuff' ethos of Fallout, add in some lite rpg stuff, use the "randomly generated item of awesomeness" system of WoW (where the quality of the drop is determined by random seed for each drop, displayed for the character by color, and the quality then provides the budget from which the randomly-determined stats for the weapon are generated), rinse, repeat.
The only shortcoming was fairly characteristic of console shooters and that was the default 4 characters. IIRC it was designed as a console game and ported to PC.
It was a shallow, entertaining shooter. Personally I got bored with it, but it was executed brilliantly and deserved its success. I kind of figured it was a platform test for some concepts applicable to a WoW-style MMO set in post-apocalypse setting. They could have easily done so.
No, the cocks are the folks at Nature publishing his article and we need to remember it. (assuming he's not lying about that).
We *rely* on scientific journals to be gatekeepers, of a sort, for their relevant field - to cull out the shenanigans, the hucksters, the self-promoters, etc. - so that we can assume that what they're publishing has some value.
If they're too gullible to prevent this, that lowers their journalistic credibility.
This is aside from wondering why an article on search tech would be published in Nature. What's next, recipes in JAMA?
I am not a lunar scientist, but if we're talking about a slow-moving collision with another orbiting body coming from either L4 or L5, wouldn't that have been a collision with the leading or trailing sides of the moon?
It seems...particular...that one of these impacts would have occurred and would have *just* put enough spin on the moon that the moon turned this side away from earth, and then stopped?
Or are they asserting that this body was so low-density that whatever layer it accreted onto the moon then introduced a dishomogenous bias in the moon's density, and earth's gravity then turned the moon 'heavy-side' toward the earth? I'm not sure that's how it would work, mechanically....do satellites turn their 'heavy end' toward earth?
Perhaps you've seen the videos about some groundbreaking "unlimited detail" rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4 Well, it is a scam. They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That's cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let's assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.
So obviously, it's not made up of that many unique voxels. In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don't need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine. Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It's possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it's not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do. It's a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they're carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they're pretending like what they're doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it's been done several times before. There's the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw And there's more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFEhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc They're hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It's a scam. Donâ(TM)t get excited."
"However visible light signals can easily be blocked, such as when a hand is passed in front of the transmitter."*
*depending on the power of the light, and the translucence of the object. Visible light signals cannot be easily blocked, for example, if they are emitted by say an 80-million candlepower searchlight. For example, this would not be stopped by a hand, nor eyelids. Such might prove to complicate use on-board an airplane in other ways, however.
WinXP runs every modern browser. WinXP runs every modern piece of software. WinXP is (now) damn stable. WinXP runs not only on my quad-core desktop, but also on the ancient 1.2 GHz Intel box I have sitting over there. Same interface, same management, no new learning curve.
Joe User: Sure, I keep hearing that "MS stopped supporting XP" but I keep seeing updates, and in any case my system runs fine.
Windows 7 Home Premium (full) is $200. I just bought a great new laptop for $500 - 17" screen, 500g HD, 6 gigs RAM....INCLUDING Win7 home premium.
So....Really? Is it that *shocking* that people aren't interested in dropping $200 for no increase in function, and for an OS that will immediately render most of their legacy systems obsolete?
I'll migrate to Win7 as my old systems die, not sooner.
I am not a radio scientist, but... if the new tech pulls power out of the radio signal, isn't this going to a) degrade the signal for anyone 'downstream' of the absorber, and/or force broadcasters to pump MORE power out to maintain signal generally?
Any industry heavy with government subsidies - defense, social welfare, medicine, and now 'renewables' - attracts opportunists of both the legitimate and illegitimate sort.
Legitimate businesses are interested because they know that having a politically-attractive industry can make a lot of low-/no-interest money available as well as making the government paperwork (permits, etc.) all move much quicker than usual. Finally, it's a truism that once established government programs almost never die (for God's sake, the TVA's REA is still alive and flourishing - conveniently renamed to the RUS "Rural Utilities Service" - to legitimize its ever-spreading 'responsibilities' hahaha).
Illegitimate business (con men, criminals, etc.) are attracted because government investment typically now means at least dollars in the 10^6 range, that until they reach 10^9 these numbers are considered 'trivial' and barely worth notice/mention by Federal agencies (how many pallets of $$billions have been untraceably 'lost' in Iraq/Afghanistan?) - a perfect environment for fraud.
26 issues a year, maybe 12-14 pages each. Extremely good information across all the fields of science, essentially synopses of all the cutting-edge stuff because if it's interesting you're going to dig into it on the web anyway. Serious coverage, not simplified for 'popular consumption'. Usually one or two focus articles on something of particular significance, these run a couple of pages.
Read it at online - I think pretty much everything in print is there.
"Parental education is a better place to start with reform. Getting them to care about their kids future, and teaching them that their kids have more than just McDonalds and WalMart in their employment future is what is needed."
You can't legislate away apathy.
How do you "get someone to care" about something, really?
I mean, if people won't care about THEIR CHILDREN, I'm going to guess it's not just a matter of a little motivation needed.
How about a school system (and a society)that leaves parenting to...parents? 1) we're not going to teach your kids about sex. If your little JuJuBee decides to get pregnant/makes someone pregnant at age 15, society's not paying a dime - it's coming out of YOU. 2) we're not going to waste time disciplining your little monster. If he/she is deemed a behavioral nuisance (or danger) to the other students TOTALLY BY OUR OPINION, we'll have you come pick them up. If nobody comes pick them up, the police will, and you will be charged with neglect. 3) the state will not subsidize daycare. Head start, sure, you get them there we'll provide some ECE. But this is not a 6a-6p day care.
In short: if this makes it absurdly inconvenient, expensive, and generally a giant pain in the ass to be a parent - DON'T MAKE A BABY.
It used to be that having a child was a serious, serious decision - mainly because there weren't oodles of support networks and systems to rescue people from their bad decisions. If you had one, at least the next 20 years of your life was screwed (assuming you didn't give it away for adoption).
Perhaps if only the people that can handle having a child are the only ones that have them, we'll see an improvement? I doubt we'll see anything until then.
From what I understand it's time-limited licensing. If it's confusing, blame the studios for requiring closure dates for license agreements to ancient movies that are not going to see any dvd or theater re-release.
Personally, though, Netflix could go a LONG way to improving its communication on this - show that "this movie will no longer stream after August 14, 2011" or whatever.
FWIW, try to find a phone number to call Netflix, or even an email address to submit suggestions on netflix.com. There aren't any.
1) the amendments have to do with what speech is limited by the government, ie basically none. Was he prosecuted? Was he even seriously inconvenienced?
2) congratulations, you have the 'freedom of speech' to be a douche. You're still a douche, and to expect people to somehow give you a pass on it is idiotic. Be a douche, and people will respond. Contrary to what you might believe, police are human beings. Personally I'd have preferred that an 'anonymous' tip be received that you're smuggling drugs and kiddie porn in your car, forcing them to pull you over, strip your car while you stand there in the hot sun, and then saying 'sorry, didn't find anything, have a nice day'.
What's funny is that you were being a douche, got called on it, and somehow feel you're the victim.
You weren't tazed, shot, jailed, beaten, or anything.
You were INCONVENIENCED. Oh noes!
Here's a test: drive by, and shout a random comment to a bunch of MS-13's in Los Angeles. Trust me, you won't merely be 'inconvenienced' by their response.
Perhaps your post should have been titled, "I've learned not to be a dick that yells at people as they/I drive by"
No, iD isn't being creative. They haven't been creative in a content sense since Quake2.
That doesn't mean that John Carmack doesn't deserve long-term kudos for what he (largely) developed in terms of the genre. But while he's applying his prodigious technical intellect to developing phone games (?), in the PC game arena I'm more and more convinced that iD/Carmack belong in the hall of fame like Garriot, Meier, Bunten, and Molyneux - all of which are legends whose creative time has seemingly passed.
You posted AC, so you'll never come back but wth, I'll respond anyway.
First, you DO understand what the word infinite means, right? Space is indeed infinite, but the distances to get to useful places (L5, the moon, an asteroid, Mars, Titan) are not only known and finite, but WE'VE ALREADY DONE IT - in each case multiple times.
Further, therefore, the energy needed to "do anything" is also calculable and has been accomplished. In fact, the energy costs aren't even relatively high, depending on how much time you have to spend. (cf ITN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network)
So the distances and energy required is known and relatively low, in fact. Once you get into space and have access to again, nearly limitless energy (on human scales), many things are possible.
And I'd agree that perhaps what I'm proposing may be juvenile, in the sense that it is formed in a basis of optimism. But the rest of your dismissive p.o.v. is as ignorant as your beginning assertions.
Not sure why one would post that AC. Seems like a reasonable starting point - I may disagree, but it's as valid a starting point as any.
Of course, I would point out: Cost of (largely Bush's) Iraq and Afghanistan wars over 10 years: $1.2 trillion (http://costofwar.com/en/) Cost of (largely Obama's) bank bailouts $3.27 trillion (I've seen reasonable speculations of $8 trillion and $23 trillion as the total cost, but lets be conservative -http://www.examiner.com/right-side-politics-in-national/obama-s-bailout-to-cost-3-27-trillion)
So the first thing I'd start with is to stop wasting multiple trillions bailing out commercial businesses that made bad choices. Then yes, stop wasting trillions in unnecessary wars.
It's a matter of value. It always was about that too.
Designing a game requires a basic set of resources. Programming, art, and content.
No matter how long your game is, you have to program the mechanics. That's essentially a fixed-cost. Content is what determines the length of the game - the number of levels, the number of puzzles, the scripted scenes, etc. Art investment is roughly linear in proportion to content. You don't necessarily need to generate new art for every scene, but you also can't make (much of) a game with one character in one room with nothing ever new.
Therefore the costs to develop a game have some floors.
Your customers' willingness to invest falls off as you increase price or decrease length (perceived value). $50 for a 50 hour game seems to be an acceptable price point for many, so lets call the commercially viable curve $1/hour (all the while aware that this may not be a consistent relationship over the length of the curve, but let's go with it). So a 10 hour game would sell at $10.
Can an AAA title be developed - including the 'floor' costs of basic programming and art - and generate per-unit revenue at this price point? Arguably, there's SOME market (essentially DLC is trying this out already - we'll sell you some more content with a small amount of new art and no new programming - for $10). But that's usually for a game that they've already sold successfully, so there's already a consumer market 'primed' to like it.
Otherwise, buying games are a risk, like buying a book or movie. There's no way to tell if you'll like it. So gamers may be more willing to drop $10 for a 10 hour game just because the absolute risk of loss is less than the $50 for the full game. Right now, the paradigm is to give away 15min-1hour of content as a 'demo' (free) to allow potential consumers to test the game and see if they like it. While the content is substantially longer, there's the possibility that consumers would still see the 10-hour game for $10 as 'trying to sell the demo'.
Perceived need is infinite. Resources are finite. Further, as we push back the boundaries of knowledge, the experiments get more and more expensive.
We can argue all day about priorities, but let's actually talk about those priorities - simple, pointless whinging (such as 'US particle physicists have to drive from the back seat' because the Euros have the LHC....) is little more than tantrum-throwing.
In a democracy, there is ALWAYS going to be a pressure from the mass to address their needs with Bread and Circuses. It's not the best long-term solution for anything (well, unless your goal is to breed a larger underclass), but the fact is that you have to sell your idea, or implement a tyranny in which your priorities 'win'.
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is if the inventory system is once again designed for some crappy console on a 320 line screen like Oblivion's was, I'll be waiting to buy this until the PC-mods come out.
Other games have had that issue, but I never played a game (up to that point) on a PC that was so clearly designed out of the box for a console/gamepad that it made PC play almost painful.
Political Correctness is pandering to the perceived sensitivities of all sorts of defined 'victim' groups - ethnic minorities, the handicapped, women, homosexuals, etc. If your group is large enough not to be marginal and could possibly be construed to have been 'victims' by someone at sometime in history, you can jump on the 'political correctness' train, with a token representative in advertising pictures, instructional manuals, etc.
For example: casting a black man in a wheelchair as Hamlet because he's the best actor available? Not PC.
Casting a black man in a wheelchair SPECIFICALLY for his skin color and because his ethnicity and disabled status make his performance somehow more 'reachable' for 'disadvantaged' audiences, is political correctness.
Perhaps instead of just reflexively dismissing it according to your political biases, you could try to understand the criticism and address the fact of it?
I'm a gay black man and even I find it grossly politically correct that they would 're-engineer' Spiderman so as to try to provide a character appealing to people of particular ethnicities and sexual preferences.
I'm not white, but I too am annoyed by the crass pandering to ethnic balkanism. Does that make me an "angry white man"?
Contrary to what most people in Argentina (apparently believe) "what most people in the US believe" is sometimes hard to generalize.
I'd guess most intellectually-engaged Americans understand Latino is a stupid concept.
By the way - the GERMAN pope is "Latino"? That's a novel interpretation.
Personally, I'd love it if the US government was color-blind, and never even COLLECTED demographic data at all. Unfortunately (and this is elemental to political correctness) this is critical to the particular culture of victimization and entitlement that empowers an entire side of US politics...how can you declare your voters 'victims of racial oppression' without statistics identifying them?
It was a great concept - take the basic 'wander around and shoot stuff' ethos of Fallout, add in some lite rpg stuff, use the "randomly generated item of awesomeness" system of WoW (where the quality of the drop is determined by random seed for each drop, displayed for the character by color, and the quality then provides the budget from which the randomly-determined stats for the weapon are generated), rinse, repeat.
The only shortcoming was fairly characteristic of console shooters and that was the default 4 characters. IIRC it was designed as a console game and ported to PC.
It was a shallow, entertaining shooter. Personally I got bored with it, but it was executed brilliantly and deserved its success. I kind of figured it was a platform test for some concepts applicable to a WoW-style MMO set in post-apocalypse setting. They could have easily done so.
No, the cocks are the folks at Nature publishing his article and we need to remember it.
(assuming he's not lying about that).
We *rely* on scientific journals to be gatekeepers, of a sort, for their relevant field - to cull out the shenanigans, the hucksters, the self-promoters, etc. - so that we can assume that what they're publishing has some value.
If they're too gullible to prevent this, that lowers their journalistic credibility.
This is aside from wondering why an article on search tech would be published in Nature. What's next, recipes in JAMA?
I am not a lunar scientist, but if we're talking about a slow-moving collision with another orbiting body coming from either L4 or L5, wouldn't that have been a collision with the leading or trailing sides of the moon?
It seems...particular...that one of these impacts would have occurred and would have *just* put enough spin on the moon that the moon turned this side away from earth, and then stopped?
Or are they asserting that this body was so low-density that whatever layer it accreted onto the moon then introduced a dishomogenous bias in the moon's density, and earth's gravity then turned the moon 'heavy-side' toward the earth? I'm not sure that's how it would work, mechanically....do satellites turn their 'heavy end' toward earth?
A perfect cross thread argument against internet anonymity.
Someone posts a comment CLEARLY not intended to be serious.
And someone else responds (hiding behind AC), being a douchebag.
Thanks!
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam
"It's a scam!
Perhaps you've seen the videos about some groundbreaking "unlimited detail" rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4
Well, it is a scam.
They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That's cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let's assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.
So obviously, it's not made up of that many unique voxels.
In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don't need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.
Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It's possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it's not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.
It's a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they're carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they're pretending like what they're doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it's been done several times before.
There's the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y
Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw
And there's more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc
They're hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It's a scam. Donâ(TM)t get excited."
"However visible light signals can easily be blocked, such as when a hand is passed in front of the transmitter."*
*depending on the power of the light, and the translucence of the object. Visible light signals cannot be easily blocked, for example, if they are emitted by say an 80-million candlepower searchlight. For example, this would not be stopped by a hand, nor eyelids. Such might prove to complicate use on-board an airplane in other ways, however.
WinXP runs every modern browser.
WinXP runs every modern piece of software.
WinXP is (now) damn stable.
WinXP runs not only on my quad-core desktop, but also on the ancient 1.2 GHz Intel box I have sitting over there. Same interface, same management, no new learning curve.
Joe User: Sure, I keep hearing that "MS stopped supporting XP" but I keep seeing updates, and in any case my system runs fine.
Windows 7 Home Premium (full) is $200.
I just bought a great new laptop for $500 - 17" screen, 500g HD, 6 gigs RAM....INCLUDING Win7 home premium.
So....Really? Is it that *shocking* that people aren't interested in dropping $200 for no increase in function, and for an OS that will immediately render most of their legacy systems obsolete?
I'll migrate to Win7 as my old systems die, not sooner.
I am not a radio scientist, but ... if the new tech pulls power out of the radio signal, isn't this going to a) degrade the signal for anyone 'downstream' of the absorber, and/or force broadcasters to pump MORE power out to maintain signal generally?
But then who would be left to run for Congress?
Any industry heavy with government subsidies - defense, social welfare, medicine, and now 'renewables' - attracts opportunists of both the legitimate and illegitimate sort.
Legitimate businesses are interested because they know that having a politically-attractive industry can make a lot of low-/no-interest money available as well as making the government paperwork (permits, etc.) all move much quicker than usual. Finally, it's a truism that once established government programs almost never die (for God's sake, the TVA's REA is still alive and flourishing - conveniently renamed to the RUS "Rural Utilities Service" - to legitimize its ever-spreading 'responsibilities' hahaha).
Illegitimate business (con men, criminals, etc.) are attracted because government investment typically now means at least dollars in the 10^6 range, that until they reach 10^9 these numbers are considered 'trivial' and barely worth notice/mention by Federal agencies (how many pallets of $$billions have been untraceably 'lost' in Iraq/Afghanistan?) - a perfect environment for fraud.
http://www.sciencenews.org/
26 issues a year, maybe 12-14 pages each. Extremely good information across all the fields of science, essentially synopses of all the cutting-edge stuff because if it's interesting you're going to dig into it on the web anyway. Serious coverage, not simplified for 'popular consumption'. Usually one or two focus articles on something of particular significance, these run a couple of pages.
Read it at online - I think pretty much everything in print is there.
"Parental education is a better place to start with reform. Getting them to care about their kids future, and teaching them that their kids have more than just McDonalds and WalMart in their employment future is what is needed."
You can't legislate away apathy.
How do you "get someone to care" about something, really?
I mean, if people won't care about THEIR CHILDREN, I'm going to guess it's not just a matter of a little motivation needed.
How about a school system (and a society)that leaves parenting to...parents?
1) we're not going to teach your kids about sex. If your little JuJuBee decides to get pregnant/makes someone pregnant at age 15, society's not paying a dime - it's coming out of YOU.
2) we're not going to waste time disciplining your little monster. If he/she is deemed a behavioral nuisance (or danger) to the other students TOTALLY BY OUR OPINION, we'll have you come pick them up. If nobody comes pick them up, the police will, and you will be charged with neglect.
3) the state will not subsidize daycare. Head start, sure, you get them there we'll provide some ECE. But this is not a 6a-6p day care.
In short: if this makes it absurdly inconvenient, expensive, and generally a giant pain in the ass to be a parent - DON'T MAKE A BABY.
It used to be that having a child was a serious, serious decision - mainly because there weren't oodles of support networks and systems to rescue people from their bad decisions. If you had one, at least the next 20 years of your life was screwed (assuming you didn't give it away for adoption).
Perhaps if only the people that can handle having a child are the only ones that have them, we'll see an improvement? I doubt we'll see anything until then.
You're not concerned that the government boards issuing these TRILLIONS in loans are in many cases the same people benefiting?
You're not concerned that the gov't can lend out $16 trillion without Congress or the President knowing/signing off?
Seriously?
From what I understand it's time-limited licensing. If it's confusing, blame the studios for requiring closure dates for license agreements to ancient movies that are not going to see any dvd or theater re-release.
Personally, though, Netflix could go a LONG way to improving its communication on this - show that "this movie will no longer stream after August 14, 2011" or whatever.
FWIW, try to find a phone number to call Netflix, or even an email address to submit suggestions on netflix.com. There aren't any.
1) the amendments have to do with what speech is limited by the government, ie basically none. Was he prosecuted? Was he even seriously inconvenienced?
2) congratulations, you have the 'freedom of speech' to be a douche. You're still a douche, and to expect people to somehow give you a pass on it is idiotic. Be a douche, and people will respond. Contrary to what you might believe, police are human beings. Personally I'd have preferred that an 'anonymous' tip be received that you're smuggling drugs and kiddie porn in your car, forcing them to pull you over, strip your car while you stand there in the hot sun, and then saying 'sorry, didn't find anything, have a nice day'.
What's funny is that you were being a douche, got called on it, and somehow feel you're the victim.
You weren't tazed, shot, jailed, beaten, or anything.
You were INCONVENIENCED. Oh noes!
Here's a test: drive by, and shout a random comment to a bunch of MS-13's in Los Angeles. Trust me, you won't merely be 'inconvenienced' by their response.
Perhaps your post should have been titled, "I've learned not to be a dick that yells at people as they/I drive by"
No, iD isn't being creative.
They haven't been creative in a content sense since Quake2.
That doesn't mean that John Carmack doesn't deserve long-term kudos for what he (largely) developed in terms of the genre. But while he's applying his prodigious technical intellect to developing phone games (?), in the PC game arena I'm more and more convinced that iD/Carmack belong in the hall of fame like Garriot, Meier, Bunten, and Molyneux - all of which are legends whose creative time has seemingly passed.
You posted AC, so you'll never come back but wth, I'll respond anyway.
First, you DO understand what the word infinite means, right? Space is indeed infinite, but the distances to get to useful places (L5, the moon, an asteroid, Mars, Titan) are not only known and finite, but WE'VE ALREADY DONE IT - in each case multiple times.
Further, therefore, the energy needed to "do anything" is also calculable and has been accomplished. In fact, the energy costs aren't even relatively high, depending on how much time you have to spend. (cf ITN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network)
So the distances and energy required is known and relatively low, in fact.
Once you get into space and have access to again, nearly limitless energy (on human scales), many things are possible.
And I'd agree that perhaps what I'm proposing may be juvenile, in the sense that it is formed in a basis of optimism. But the rest of your dismissive p.o.v. is as ignorant as your beginning assertions.
Not sure why one would post that AC. Seems like a reasonable starting point - I may disagree, but it's as valid a starting point as any.
Of course, I would point out:
Cost of (largely Bush's) Iraq and Afghanistan wars over 10 years: $1.2 trillion (http://costofwar.com/en/)
Cost of (largely Obama's) bank bailouts $3.27 trillion (I've seen reasonable speculations of $8 trillion and $23 trillion as the total cost, but lets be conservative -http://www.examiner.com/right-side-politics-in-national/obama-s-bailout-to-cost-3-27-trillion)
So the first thing I'd start with is to stop wasting multiple trillions bailing out commercial businesses that made bad choices.
Then yes, stop wasting trillions in unnecessary wars.
It's a matter of value. It always was about that too.
Designing a game requires a basic set of resources. Programming, art, and content.
No matter how long your game is, you have to program the mechanics. That's essentially a fixed-cost.
Content is what determines the length of the game - the number of levels, the number of puzzles, the scripted scenes, etc.
Art investment is roughly linear in proportion to content. You don't necessarily need to generate new art for every scene, but you also can't make (much of) a game with one character in one room with nothing ever new.
Therefore the costs to develop a game have some floors.
Your customers' willingness to invest falls off as you increase price or decrease length (perceived value). $50 for a 50 hour game seems to be an acceptable price point for many, so lets call the commercially viable curve $1/hour (all the while aware that this may not be a consistent relationship over the length of the curve, but let's go with it). So a 10 hour game would sell at $10.
Can an AAA title be developed - including the 'floor' costs of basic programming and art - and generate per-unit revenue at this price point? Arguably, there's SOME market (essentially DLC is trying this out already - we'll sell you some more content with a small amount of new art and no new programming - for $10). But that's usually for a game that they've already sold successfully, so there's already a consumer market 'primed' to like it.
Otherwise, buying games are a risk, like buying a book or movie. There's no way to tell if you'll like it. So gamers may be more willing to drop $10 for a 10 hour game just because the absolute risk of loss is less than the $50 for the full game.
Right now, the paradigm is to give away 15min-1hour of content as a 'demo' (free) to allow potential consumers to test the game and see if they like it. While the content is substantially longer, there's the possibility that consumers would still see the 10-hour game for $10 as 'trying to sell the demo'.
Really, people.
Perceived need is infinite. Resources are finite. Further, as we push back the boundaries of knowledge, the experiments get more and more expensive.
We can argue all day about priorities, but let's actually talk about those priorities - simple, pointless whinging (such as 'US particle physicists have to drive from the back seat' because the Euros have the LHC....) is little more than tantrum-throwing.
In a democracy, there is ALWAYS going to be a pressure from the mass to address their needs with Bread and Circuses. It's not the best long-term solution for anything (well, unless your goal is to breed a larger underclass), but the fact is that you have to sell your idea, or implement a tyranny in which your priorities 'win'.