The fact is, that majority of people who have problems even with drugs and alcohol are more like you than the classic portrayal of an alcoholic. They realize that they have a problem, re-evaluate their priorities, and either quit or cut back effectively.
Back in Revolutionary times, Americans were pretty much the hardest drinkers in the world, considering amount of pure alcohol consumed per person. We even outdrank the Irish. While everyone thinks of Prohibition as a huge failure, the truth is that, considering how laxly it was enforced, it looks like a major success as far as social engineering goes because it severly and permanently reduced the amount of drinking per capita.
There were taboos about sex and modesty which are largely nonexistant in most European countries.
And yet... they still managed to have a full THIRD of all children concieved out of wedlock. And they had sex in front of their kids, often in the same bed. Just goes to show you that the "conservative" mores of one age don't always translate directly into what we think of as the conservative mores of today.
Insensitive, because you just suggest, from the comfort of your couch, that other people's lives should be put at risk.
So you'll just assume that whatever government leaders tell you risks lives actually does? Yes commandant! I understand! If they told you that democracy risks lives, would you sing their praises?
What is with this? Everyone seems to think that Zion was destroyed. But this is never mentioned in the movie. What is mentioned is that the expiditionary force is destroyed: the one that went out to stop the Sentinels. Zion is still waiting around to be destroyed in the next movie.
Oh good: philosophically indefensible relatavism. I don't think the Matrix is any sort of deep insightful film, but people have a right to decide for themselves what to see and not to see. The average Egyptian isn't forced to go see a movie: they can choose to. That you so easily buy the "we know what's best for everyone in society" stance of the censors is pretty scary, and borders on a weird racialist stance wherein you see all "Egyptians" as some monolithic entity that has a common perception.
Actually, as a smoker you are LESS of a strain on the system than other people. Because smokers tend to die young, they save the country millions in extra entitlement payouts. Also, the medical care demanded by he eldery is far more expensive than jsut one lost bout with cancer when you're 40.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but if the ONLY thing we cared about is "strains on the system" then we would be subsidizing smoking, not taxing it. But, of course, money saved isn't the only thing we care about: we're also patenalists who don't want you to do something we don't like you doing.
No, I am not familiar with the SIN or Aracronox issues. Please inform me.
SIN was almost unplyable out of the box. Which pretty much sunk the game, and was really too bad because a patch that came out later fixed most of the issues. Ara (sp?) had the same sorts of issues, though not anywhere near as bad. Both were well known because people complained. Loudly. Everywhere. The same thing happened with HL's original netcode (which they've since completely revamped, allowing it the success it has today) and the DeusEx multiplayer (which was just a free addon, but which people bitched about anyway)
I think the problem isn't just hardware, but configuration of that hardware and other software living on the system. People don't always have the latest drivers, or set things the same way, and especially in Windows, all sorts of glut can pile up in the registry, little programs resident in memory, problems from old system crashes that muck up certain very specific operations (that some games might make use of, and some don't). You can try to simulate this when testing a game, but there's really only so much a company can reasonably do on this score. That's one reason why id's had some success with using public beta demos to get feedback from a much wider spread of users than they could assemble in a testing center. Again, I'm not saying that the issues were or weren't the designer's fault in this case. I never bought the retail version of those mods: just downloaded the latest versions of them.
I expect reasonably good quality from mods primarily BECAUSE they can get such wide playtesting and bug reports, at least potentially. In a large part, however, a lot of the credit has to go to the game designers, who basically developed the environment within which one modifies things. If it's robust enough to support new ideas, then it will just work without introducing new issues to be resolved. The big 3 standard FPS game companies (Epic, Valve, id) have done a fairly good job with this. And the result are mods like Natural Selection, which can depart from the standard interfaces and gameplay modes, but still work without mucking things up too much. The bugs you generally find in mods are things like exploits that find holes in the extensibility of the engine that the mod makers fail to patch up with gameplay decisions. For instance, in NS, you can slow crash a server by planting an endless number of tripwire mines everywhere. In this case, the game designers never figured that their game would be used in this way, and their own MP game had failsafes (like blowing up extraneous entities that were clogging up a server) that the modmakers did not implement. Again, it's not clear who's at fault here. Should the game designers have hardcoded the failsafes into the engine, constraining, perhaps, people finding other solutions to the problem? Or are the mod makers for not realizing that servers can't take an infinate amount of entities? It's a tricky balance between giving modmakers freedom (to suceed or to screwup) and tying their hands (which may be reasonable, or may just conceal bad programming on the part of the designers, or even just a limited engine and programming environment).
It's certainly hard to tell, but games that have had widespread bug problems ARE bitched about quite a bit by people. Remember SIN? Aracronox? Comparatively, I saw very little of that with HL, and have had no problems myself.
The problem is, everyone has such quirky and unique hardware and OS configurations that there's always some small percentage of people who have a hard time with any game. Just because one particular game didn't work for you and others don't is no reason at all to assume that it was buggy and the others were not: you just happened to hit the jackpot on that particular game. The next guy over could have it work fine, but the others games won't work right for him. You can't even really tell whose fault it is most of the time unless it's really obviosuly the game designers'.
The vast majority of people haven't had any problems with them: what do you mean by "buggy?" Often, problems are caused by really tiny and easily fixable things, like having the wrong video mode running or accidentally putting spaces in a cfg file. TFC is a great start on the team thing, but NeoTF and Natural Selection both improve on it by making team coordination much more necessary.
This is actually not a new idea at all: it was proposed back in the QuakeWorld days, and a couple of people even tried to make it work. The basic problem is that servers are of such different quality that it doesn't give a very consistent play experience. It also doesn't help that so much extra content would be necessary to even make going from server to server worthwhile. However, that was then, this is now. It might work: couldn't hurt to give it a shot.
DeusEx2 is not really a MP game, and D3 less of one. HL2 hasn't even announced what their MP will be (though it's sure to be something thoughtful, since they're keeping it secret): DoD and CounterStrike and TF2 appear to be heading towards being their own games. The real problem is not so much whether UT2k9 or whatever is a great engine, but about winning clients back from other online games. The problem is all about network externalities: the more people are playing a given game, the better the experience (generally, though bigger games sometimes attract lamers more quickly): you have many more servers to choose from with a greater variation of gameplay and that actually have people playing in them. Right now, Half-life has a big lead thanks to Counter-Strike. But with CS2 and HL2 being basically a new start (people have to choose what to purchase), Epic might well have an opportunity to win people over before HL2 and its variants take over for HL1.
As for HL2, its nice... but... I wasn't impressed with the first Half Life's engine, too blocky, cheap light mapping.
Yeah, that Commander Keen engine sucked too: I mean look at it compared to even the Quake3 engine! It suxored!
And yeah, I can't believe they are just re-using the HL1 (a modded Quake engine) engine for HL2: what are they thinking?!
Also if they are going to make it work on consoles, that means that they are probably sacrificing the brute force a good PC can...blah blah blah...
Why do we hear this so often? First of all, it's easy to scale DOWN detail and content for console versions. Second of all, if this is really true, just about EVERY PC FPS game is being designed to be released on consoles: including D3, the Unreals, etc.
From screens, the Doom3 engine is prettier, but MUCH more system intensive.
Maybe, maybe not. If you can scale it down enough to run it comfortably on an Xbox, it's not THAT intensive. It's not like it demands a 3Ghz Radeon9800 to even boot up: just a cheap Geforce4 card.
[quote]do you feel that nVidia is peddling an inferior product on you?[/quote]
For reference, it was called the FX5800.:) Luckily, they've fixed most of the problems in the FX5900 but raised the price back up to "new" top-o-the-line card level.
No, China not necessarily need more farmland. China need have food, not same as need grow food it-self. Importing it, especially in the form of grains and such, is harldy as bad as you describe, and I think the major reason has less to do with sound infastructure policy than it does with a resurgent nationalism bordering on racialism. Economic production should happen where it can be most effectively done for hte fewest spent resources.
---I'm not saying the Three Gorges project is good, just that trying to pretend that China doesn't have any use for more farmland show a lack of knowledge about the situation in China.---
The situation in China is that the economy is still plauged by the effect of the party on both economic decisions and the ability to criticize. Once the party announced that the dam was part of China's national destiny, do you think anyone was allowed to criticize it, or reveal in a study that it would be dangerous or foolish, and keep their jobs/freedom? That's a terrible way to make economic decisions.
He makes an argument, going from premises to conclusions. Do you disagree with the premises? If so, how? That's how you refute an argument, not by getting all huffy and expecting it to go away.
No, more people do not necessarily need more farmland (certainly with current technology outlook, we have too much farmland for the future, not too little: most countries are paying farmers NOT to operate at capacity), and certainly there is no need for it to be in any particular place, in any particular country.
The amount of power this will generate wont even remotely cover what China needs as far as their long term energy plans. This project has been a party glurge for decades: it was announced by the party to be a big demonstration of China's industrial might, and it's more of point of desperate pride-at-all-costs than a wise infastructure decision. The silliest thing is that no one, not even people in China, are really all that impressed by it. It's not exactly a truly groundbreaking feat of engineering: all it is is an ambitious scope. And it may well turn out to be a very, very dumb idea in a region that has huge earthquakes not so infrequently.
We don't need to do anything: just wait for the inevitable earthquake and yet another "Great Leap Forward" moment of head-slapping idiocy by our beloved party.
Boy, you do not have the slightest clue how to make or refute a metaphysical argument, do you? Your A,EPH is nothing like his argument, lacking the most basic elements of inevitable technological development.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance there are less than 10 documents that refer to the Trojen War in Greece but most historians believe that war happened.
Yes, but rather few of them believe that Circe turned Ulysses' men into pigs.
The fact is, that majority of people who have problems even with drugs and alcohol are more like you than the classic portrayal of an alcoholic. They realize that they have a problem, re-evaluate their priorities, and either quit or cut back effectively.
Back in Revolutionary times, Americans were pretty much the hardest drinkers in the world, considering amount of pure alcohol consumed per person. We even outdrank the Irish. While everyone thinks of Prohibition as a huge failure, the truth is that, considering how laxly it was enforced, it looks like a major success as far as social engineering goes because it severly and permanently reduced the amount of drinking per capita.
There were taboos about sex and modesty which are largely nonexistant in most European countries.
And yet... they still managed to have a full THIRD of all children concieved out of wedlock. And they had sex in front of their kids, often in the same bed. Just goes to show you that the "conservative" mores of one age don't always translate directly into what we think of as the conservative mores of today.
Don't try to argue with the zealots. They'll only say you're in denial and then pray to their higher power that you someday see the light.
Insensitive, because you just suggest, from the comfort of your couch, that other people's lives should be put at risk.
So you'll just assume that whatever government leaders tell you risks lives actually does? Yes commandant! I understand! If they told you that democracy risks lives, would you sing their praises?
What is with this? Everyone seems to think that Zion was destroyed. But this is never mentioned in the movie. What is mentioned is that the expiditionary force is destroyed: the one that went out to stop the Sentinels. Zion is still waiting around to be destroyed in the next movie.
Oh good: philosophically indefensible relatavism. I don't think the Matrix is any sort of deep insightful film, but people have a right to decide for themselves what to see and not to see. The average Egyptian isn't forced to go see a movie: they can choose to. That you so easily buy the "we know what's best for everyone in society" stance of the censors is pretty scary, and borders on a weird racialist stance wherein you see all "Egyptians" as some monolithic entity that has a common perception.
Actually, as a smoker you are LESS of a strain on the system than other people. Because smokers tend to die young, they save the country millions in extra entitlement payouts. Also, the medical care demanded by he eldery is far more expensive than jsut one lost bout with cancer when you're 40.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but if the ONLY thing we cared about is "strains on the system" then we would be subsidizing smoking, not taxing it. But, of course, money saved isn't the only thing we care about: we're also patenalists who don't want you to do something we don't like you doing.
No, I am not familiar with the SIN or Aracronox issues. Please inform me.
SIN was almost unplyable out of the box. Which pretty much sunk the game, and was really too bad because a patch that came out later fixed most of the issues. Ara (sp?) had the same sorts of issues, though not anywhere near as bad. Both were well known because people complained. Loudly. Everywhere. The same thing happened with HL's original netcode (which they've since completely revamped, allowing it the success it has today) and the DeusEx multiplayer (which was just a free addon, but which people bitched about anyway)
I think the problem isn't just hardware, but configuration of that hardware and other software living on the system. People don't always have the latest drivers, or set things the same way, and especially in Windows, all sorts of glut can pile up in the registry, little programs resident in memory, problems from old system crashes that muck up certain very specific operations (that some games might make use of, and some don't). You can try to simulate this when testing a game, but there's really only so much a company can reasonably do on this score. That's one reason why id's had some success with using public beta demos to get feedback from a much wider spread of users than they could assemble in a testing center.
Again, I'm not saying that the issues were or weren't the designer's fault in this case. I never bought the retail version of those mods: just downloaded the latest versions of them.
I expect reasonably good quality from mods primarily BECAUSE they can get such wide playtesting and bug reports, at least potentially. In a large part, however, a lot of the credit has to go to the game designers, who basically developed the environment within which one modifies things. If it's robust enough to support new ideas, then it will just work without introducing new issues to be resolved. The big 3 standard FPS game companies (Epic, Valve, id) have done a fairly good job with this. And the result are mods like Natural Selection, which can depart from the standard interfaces and gameplay modes, but still work without mucking things up too much. The bugs you generally find in mods are things like exploits that find holes in the extensibility of the engine that the mod makers fail to patch up with gameplay decisions. For instance, in NS, you can slow crash a server by planting an endless number of tripwire mines everywhere. In this case, the game designers never figured that their game would be used in this way, and their own MP game had failsafes (like blowing up extraneous entities that were clogging up a server) that the modmakers did not implement. Again, it's not clear who's at fault here. Should the game designers have hardcoded the failsafes into the engine, constraining, perhaps, people finding other solutions to the problem? Or are the mod makers for not realizing that servers can't take an infinate amount of entities? It's a tricky balance between giving modmakers freedom (to suceed or to screwup) and tying their hands (which may be reasonable, or may just conceal bad programming on the part of the designers, or even just a limited engine and programming environment).
It's certainly hard to tell, but games that have had widespread bug problems ARE bitched about quite a bit by people. Remember SIN? Aracronox? Comparatively, I saw very little of that with HL, and have had no problems myself.
The problem is, everyone has such quirky and unique hardware and OS configurations that there's always some small percentage of people who have a hard time with any game. Just because one particular game didn't work for you and others don't is no reason at all to assume that it was buggy and the others were not: you just happened to hit the jackpot on that particular game. The next guy over could have it work fine, but the others games won't work right for him. You can't even really tell whose fault it is most of the time unless it's really obviosuly the game designers'.
The vast majority of people haven't had any problems with them: what do you mean by "buggy?" Often, problems are caused by really tiny and easily fixable things, like having the wrong video mode running or accidentally putting spaces in a cfg file. TFC is a great start on the team thing, but NeoTF and Natural Selection both improve on it by making team coordination much more necessary.
This is actually not a new idea at all: it was proposed back in the QuakeWorld days, and a couple of people even tried to make it work. The basic problem is that servers are of such different quality that it doesn't give a very consistent play experience. It also doesn't help that so much extra content would be necessary to even make going from server to server worthwhile. However, that was then, this is now. It might work: couldn't hurt to give it a shot.
DeusEx2 is not really a MP game, and D3 less of one. HL2 hasn't even announced what their MP will be (though it's sure to be something thoughtful, since they're keeping it secret): DoD and CounterStrike and TF2 appear to be heading towards being their own games. The real problem is not so much whether UT2k9 or whatever is a great engine, but about winning clients back from other online games. The problem is all about network externalities: the more people are playing a given game, the better the experience (generally, though bigger games sometimes attract lamers more quickly): you have many more servers to choose from with a greater variation of gameplay and that actually have people playing in them. Right now, Half-life has a big lead thanks to Counter-Strike. But with CS2 and HL2 being basically a new start (people have to choose what to purchase), Epic might well have an opportunity to win people over before HL2 and its variants take over for HL1.
There are still Q3 flamers out there? I thought everyone had moved onto being DeusEx2 and Doom3 flamers.
As for HL2, its nice... but... I wasn't impressed with the first Half Life's engine, too blocky, cheap light mapping.
...blah blah blah...
Yeah, that Commander Keen engine sucked too: I mean look at it compared to even the Quake3 engine! It suxored!
And yeah, I can't believe they are just re-using the HL1 (a modded Quake engine) engine for HL2: what are they thinking?!
Also if they are going to make it work on consoles, that means that they are probably sacrificing the brute force a good PC can
Why do we hear this so often? First of all, it's easy to scale DOWN detail and content for console versions. Second of all, if this is really true, just about EVERY PC FPS game is being designed to be released on consoles: including D3, the Unreals, etc.
From screens, the Doom3 engine is prettier, but MUCH more system intensive.
Maybe, maybe not. If you can scale it down enough to run it comfortably on an Xbox, it's not THAT intensive. It's not like it demands a 3Ghz Radeon9800 to even boot up: just a cheap Geforce4 card.
So, in conclusion, nice try, fanboy.
[quote]do you feel that nVidia is peddling an inferior product on you?[/quote] For reference, it was called the FX5800. :) Luckily, they've fixed most of the problems in the FX5900 but raised the price back up to "new" top-o-the-line card level.
---China certainly need more farm land.---
No, China not necessarily need more farmland. China need have food, not same as need grow food it-self. Importing it, especially in the form of grains and such, is harldy as bad as you describe, and I think the major reason has less to do with sound infastructure policy than it does with a resurgent nationalism bordering on racialism. Economic production should happen where it can be most effectively done for hte fewest spent resources.
---I'm not saying the Three Gorges project is good, just that trying to pretend that China doesn't have any use for more farmland show a lack of knowledge about the situation in China.---
The situation in China is that the economy is still plauged by the effect of the party on both economic decisions and the ability to criticize. Once the party announced that the dam was part of China's national destiny, do you think anyone was allowed to criticize it, or reveal in a study that it would be dangerous or foolish, and keep their jobs/freedom? That's a terrible way to make economic decisions.
He makes an argument, going from premises to conclusions. Do you disagree with the premises? If so, how? That's how you refute an argument, not by getting all huffy and expecting it to go away.
No, more people do not necessarily need more farmland (certainly with current technology outlook, we have too much farmland for the future, not too little: most countries are paying farmers NOT to operate at capacity), and certainly there is no need for it to be in any particular place, in any particular country.
The amount of power this will generate wont even remotely cover what China needs as far as their long term energy plans. This project has been a party glurge for decades: it was announced by the party to be a big demonstration of China's industrial might, and it's more of point of desperate pride-at-all-costs than a wise infastructure decision. The silliest thing is that no one, not even people in China, are really all that impressed by it. It's not exactly a truly groundbreaking feat of engineering: all it is is an ambitious scope. And it may well turn out to be a very, very dumb idea in a region that has huge earthquakes not so infrequently.
We don't need to do anything: just wait for the inevitable earthquake and yet another "Great Leap Forward" moment of head-slapping idiocy by our beloved party.
I guess we'll find out when HL2 comes out this September. :)
Boy, you do not have the slightest clue how to make or refute a metaphysical argument, do you? Your A,EPH is nothing like his argument, lacking the most basic elements of inevitable technological development.
Embryonic stem cell research WAS real theraputic research.