Car hit stopped car due to winter conditions. Airbag hit me with enough force to cause me to black out for a split second. It felt longer but had to be nearly instant. Gathered my wits. Noticed pool of blood forming in my lap. Felt blood on neck. Moment of panic thinking my neck was cut. Got out of car, found my glasses, noticed bent earpiece. Several people come over to help and tell me about my ear. I didn't even know where I was injured. Put two and two together in time to stave off the paramedics worries that my head slammed the side window hard enough to do that.
It was a fairly surreal experience. Afterwards I was simply glad the earpiece had gotten my ear instead of say, my eye socket.
I had a subscription to PC Gaming Magazine in the late 90s. Even then the reviews were more like advertisements. I've not trusted them since. These days I just look for gameplay footage on YouTube if I'm iffy about a game. No amount of news articles or fancy CG trailers will convince me a game is worth buying. I rely on direct, face-to-face word of mouth and gameplay videos.
When Planetside 1 came out it was a utopia for the FPS fan + MMO fan crowd for the first month. Then the first subscription time hit and the population dropped like a rock. That first month was a wonderful thing though... Giant battles with firm lines (there might as well have been trenches) and the hotshots darting between the two. There was so much that was new to FPS games at the time. The array of vehicles, choosing your skills to spec in vehicles or weapons or body armor suits. Hacking to take over bases. So much to encourage team play among your faction.
I feel that if the free to play movement had been stronger back then and Planetside had gone with that it would have done so much better. No one wanted to pay a subscription for a shooter though. Planetside 2 can be fun, but it doesn't come close to the first game due to the sheer scale of battles during that release month.
On topic, I'm considering getting an XBox One just for Destiny. I'd probably get D3 on it as well just for convenience.
As a gamer that's played PC games long enough to remember when everything used the arrow keys...WASD was a considerable improvement over the horror that was using the arrow keys for games. If you're using a standard keyboard for input then WASD is about as good as it gets. If you aren't using a standard keyboard / mouse then the entire argument is invalid as you have more options available.
I've sprained my wrist using my hand to vault over the hood of a car that decided it didn't have to check for pedestrians before making a turn...or look up during the turn itself I guess. I was crossing on the same intersection side, from the far side of the road. In a crosswalk. With the go ahead. I have zero faith in anyone else's ability to not be a complete and total retard at any given time.
That said, there's not any way to get people to follow the no-texting-while-driving laws without invading privacy on a whole new level. I know people that will text while changing lanes. I know other people that will let the phone make all the noise it wants and ignore it till a red light. I don't agree with halting voice communications while driving either. With hands free setups it's no different than chatting with a passenger in the car. Yes, it statistically raises your chances of having a crash, but I'll be damned if you're going to get my approval to make it completely illegal.
If you made a Venn diagram of people willing to pay for this service and people so braindead that they need it, how much overlap are you really going to have? How did this fact not come to their attention while making this?
Have you been in a car crash where the airbag deployed? Your seatbelt is the most important thing, yes, but god damn that airbag is powerful. I can still taste the blood 8 years later. I can honestly say I've never been hit by anything as hard as that airbag, and that was a low speed crash. I almost lost half of an ear to it as well, since I wear glasses. My glasses flew forwards from the initial impact, then the airbag hit with enough force to push the earpiece through my ear and rip the top half nearly all the way off. A tiny piece of skin was the only thing holding it on. To this day I can't wear in-the-ear earbuds because the one on that side works itself out.
So yeah, as the poster above you said... Airbags are good in life or death situations. For any other crash, they're easily as much of a danger as the crash itself.
Decentralization. It's not like the people supplying the data get to directly see how it's used. I'm sure plenty of them aren't even aware of just who they're supplying data to. And the people compiling the data don't necessarily know where it comes from or what the output will be used for.
You can guess an awful lot, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
I play RPGs for the RP. I grew up freeform RPing on IRC. I'm one of the small margin of RPGers that actually loves rolling stats one at a time with do-overs only for min values. Nowadays everyone has to be equal, even in a fantasy world. That's boring to me.
When I read books I don't expect every character to be an in-your-face war hero, and I certainly don't look down on the characters that support them in things outside of combat. Remember the days when a rogue loaded with social skills and charisma could be just as pivotal to the adventure as some ninja assassin rogue? You can't even make that character under the newest editions; most of the skills were cut out to give more room for combat/trap skills so you didn't end up with "useless" rogues.
I've played in several systems with perks/flaws and they're normally fun. It encourages people to take personality traits that they otherwise wouldn't bother with, and also gives it a solid spot on their sheet to remind them.
That said, I stopped buying D&D stuff after 3.5 was announced and I realized WotC was going to just keep changing the game every few years. 3.5 was still mostly compatible, but I saw the writing on the wall. Nowadays I just make my own systems for fun, keeping die rolls to a minimum and trying to avoid encouraging min/maxing.
My manager at work has actually had HR completely reverse a firing for someone that didn't come to work for three work days in a row with no notice whatsoever, while calling up at the end of each day and promising to be in the next. Reason? Not enough paperwork on said person.
Of course on the flip side, if you follow the policies at my workplace to the letter, each and every employee should be fired roughly once per week. It's not possible to follow every policy at once.
I have TL1 and 2, Titan Quest, D2 (and even that other abomination). PoE has a lot more variables in item stats, and you have a lot more influence on your items due to the "currency items". The game also seems to be a lot harder than most hack and slash games I've played before. High level monsters don't mess around, and there are bosses that will pretty much one-shot you. Reflect mobs remind me of the old iron maiden mobs in D2.
Overall the game feels very different than any of the other games listed. Whether the differences are good or bad is up to each individual. I do agree that the spin of the summary seems forced and comes off as pure marketing, but the game is worth trying.
As a US veteran I actually got teary eyed when I saw the newspaper headlines after Osama was killed with the President saying that "Justice has been served". The President of the United States, calling that justice. The country we have now and the one I enlisted to defend are not the same country.
The older I get, the harder I find it to be truly patriotic.
The interesting bit is the possibility of schools being able to get their hands on cheap scale models of some of these things. Getting a child interested in science and history makes the learning process go a lot more smoothly than just cramming a bunch of facts down their throat. Even viewing the 3d models on the computer is actually fairly interesting. Rotating around the mold of Lincoln's face is very much different than just "looking at a picture". The same for things like the Wright brothers' plane, with all of its individual parts.
Just because you aren't interested doesn't mean that other people aren't.
Despite the massive amount of bashing going back and forth here, I feel compelled to point out that I've swapped back and forth between both AMD/ATI and NVidia over the years and I've run into problems with brand new games having glitches with one or the other on both sides. Even having said that, I'm talking two or three times in over a decade. Aside from that I've had fans go out on one card, and it still lasted long enough after that that I didn't feel bad when it came time to buy a new one.
For most people it really doesn't matter what card you get as long as it isn't ancient. For enthusiasts, compare specs and get what you need. If the specs look like they're in Klingon to you, take the time to learn what's what. If you can't be arsed to do that, then you aren't an enthusiast in the first place.
This isn't like rooting for your home sports team. There is no justifiable reason to give complete loyalty to any company when weighing your purchases.
Given how ridiculously elitist people already get when playing MMOs, that picture-in-picture demo horrifies me. I'm sure it could be useful in some games, but please keep that as far from MMOs as possible.
Why would you need a second PC? There are plenty of ways to use your television to display without putting your PC right next to it. I have a 25 ft HDMI cable, with my computer desk in the back of the living room. The cable sits coiled by the TV when I'm not using it.
Also, if you DO get a 2nd computer for that function, it doesn't have to be a massive gaming powerhouse. You can hook up a cheap laptop and push video from your main PC to it.
He was restating the parent post, only from the view of years earlier. The point is that at one time, the connection speeds we have now would have been considered excessive in much the same manner. Somehow some of us still manage to use all of the bandwidth we can get without sharing movies and other media. Maybe not always, but sometimes. (How 'bout that summer Steam sale? My ISP must've hated that...)
Having better internet access available universally can at worst have no effect on some people that really don't use it that much. For the rest of us, it's a bonus. To even imply that it should be seen as a negative thing is ridiculous.
Because he obviously has never thought about this issue before now, right? It didn't affect or influence him in any way prior to this story being posted.
When you have a mental condition and people tell you they just don't believe that you have it, it makes you question your own sanity. Your post makes a rather large assumption about someone you have never met and could be detrimental to the person it's aimed at. Apparently he's not the only one that has problems with emathy and filtering his output...
You say he should just be careful what he discloses... You are failing to see the problem. Until he's had a lot of experience with a new social situation, he doesn't know what is acceptable and what isn't. And even then, that doesn't mean he understands WHY. Combined with the fact that he can't fully erase any actions or statements he makes online after making them, that leaves avoiding that media altogether or remaining anonymous. You are telling him to do the thing he has problems doing to begin with.
If this is true, I highly doubt that MS will work with stores like Gamestop for this. They simply have no reason to. Even if they do, the small local game stores have MUCH better prices on nearly any game, and they are going to be SOL in this matter either way simply because they aren't big companies.
I have a locked XBox Live account with +half a year or so paid on it. Being a yearly subscription, I forgot to update it when I canceled my bank account (due to another bank that I dislike buying out my bank). Instead of cancelling my account, MS left it running for another 4 or 5 months, THEN closed and locked the account for nonpayment. I went out and bought a year prepaid card, entered it in my account. The next day I was locked out again. The response I got from MS? "We don't take time cards as payment for debt owed." I also couldn't get any prepaid credit cards to work with their system.
Their system was more than happy to eat the $50 subscription card and bring my account back into the positive, but still keep me from accessing my account. Customer service told me I was out of luck. My Live account has hundreds of dollars of DLC and games on it. I sold my XBox within a week and haven't looked back. I'm done with consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
How are there no references to the Jackie Chan cartoon show here? C'mon people...
Car hit stopped car due to winter conditions.
Airbag hit me with enough force to cause me to black out for a split second. It felt longer but had to be nearly instant.
Gathered my wits. Noticed pool of blood forming in my lap. Felt blood on neck. Moment of panic thinking my neck was cut.
Got out of car, found my glasses, noticed bent earpiece.
Several people come over to help and tell me about my ear. I didn't even know where I was injured.
Put two and two together in time to stave off the paramedics worries that my head slammed the side window hard enough to do that.
It was a fairly surreal experience. Afterwards I was simply glad the earpiece had gotten my ear instead of say, my eye socket.
I had a subscription to PC Gaming Magazine in the late 90s. Even then the reviews were more like advertisements. I've not trusted them since. These days I just look for gameplay footage on YouTube if I'm iffy about a game. No amount of news articles or fancy CG trailers will convince me a game is worth buying. I rely on direct, face-to-face word of mouth and gameplay videos.
When Planetside 1 came out it was a utopia for the FPS fan + MMO fan crowd for the first month. Then the first subscription time hit and the population dropped like a rock. That first month was a wonderful thing though... Giant battles with firm lines (there might as well have been trenches) and the hotshots darting between the two. There was so much that was new to FPS games at the time. The array of vehicles, choosing your skills to spec in vehicles or weapons or body armor suits. Hacking to take over bases. So much to encourage team play among your faction.
I feel that if the free to play movement had been stronger back then and Planetside had gone with that it would have done so much better. No one wanted to pay a subscription for a shooter though. Planetside 2 can be fun, but it doesn't come close to the first game due to the sheer scale of battles during that release month.
On topic, I'm considering getting an XBox One just for Destiny. I'd probably get D3 on it as well just for convenience.
And your proposed solution is....?
As a gamer that's played PC games long enough to remember when everything used the arrow keys...WASD was a considerable improvement over the horror that was using the arrow keys for games. If you're using a standard keyboard for input then WASD is about as good as it gets. If you aren't using a standard keyboard / mouse then the entire argument is invalid as you have more options available.
I've sprained my wrist using my hand to vault over the hood of a car that decided it didn't have to check for pedestrians before making a turn...or look up during the turn itself I guess. I was crossing on the same intersection side, from the far side of the road. In a crosswalk. With the go ahead. I have zero faith in anyone else's ability to not be a complete and total retard at any given time.
That said, there's not any way to get people to follow the no-texting-while-driving laws without invading privacy on a whole new level. I know people that will text while changing lanes. I know other people that will let the phone make all the noise it wants and ignore it till a red light. I don't agree with halting voice communications while driving either. With hands free setups it's no different than chatting with a passenger in the car. Yes, it statistically raises your chances of having a crash, but I'll be damned if you're going to get my approval to make it completely illegal.
If you made a Venn diagram of people willing to pay for this service and people so braindead that they need it, how much overlap are you really going to have? How did this fact not come to their attention while making this?
Have you been in a car crash where the airbag deployed? Your seatbelt is the most important thing, yes, but god damn that airbag is powerful. I can still taste the blood 8 years later. I can honestly say I've never been hit by anything as hard as that airbag, and that was a low speed crash. I almost lost half of an ear to it as well, since I wear glasses. My glasses flew forwards from the initial impact, then the airbag hit with enough force to push the earpiece through my ear and rip the top half nearly all the way off. A tiny piece of skin was the only thing holding it on. To this day I can't wear in-the-ear earbuds because the one on that side works itself out.
So yeah, as the poster above you said... Airbags are good in life or death situations. For any other crash, they're easily as much of a danger as the crash itself.
Decentralization. It's not like the people supplying the data get to directly see how it's used. I'm sure plenty of them aren't even aware of just who they're supplying data to. And the people compiling the data don't necessarily know where it comes from or what the output will be used for.
You can guess an awful lot, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
I play RPGs for the RP. I grew up freeform RPing on IRC. I'm one of the small margin of RPGers that actually loves rolling stats one at a time with do-overs only for min values. Nowadays everyone has to be equal, even in a fantasy world. That's boring to me.
When I read books I don't expect every character to be an in-your-face war hero, and I certainly don't look down on the characters that support them in things outside of combat. Remember the days when a rogue loaded with social skills and charisma could be just as pivotal to the adventure as some ninja assassin rogue? You can't even make that character under the newest editions; most of the skills were cut out to give more room for combat/trap skills so you didn't end up with "useless" rogues.
I've played in several systems with perks/flaws and they're normally fun. It encourages people to take personality traits that they otherwise wouldn't bother with, and also gives it a solid spot on their sheet to remind them.
That said, I stopped buying D&D stuff after 3.5 was announced and I realized WotC was going to just keep changing the game every few years. 3.5 was still mostly compatible, but I saw the writing on the wall. Nowadays I just make my own systems for fun, keeping die rolls to a minimum and trying to avoid encouraging min/maxing.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...
2002. This has been brought up over and over. Apparently it isn't working well enough.
Same species, same proposed solution...back when they first appeared in the US.
My manager at work has actually had HR completely reverse a firing for someone that didn't come to work for three work days in a row with no notice whatsoever, while calling up at the end of each day and promising to be in the next. Reason? Not enough paperwork on said person.
Of course on the flip side, if you follow the policies at my workplace to the letter, each and every employee should be fired roughly once per week. It's not possible to follow every policy at once.
I have TL1 and 2, Titan Quest, D2 (and even that other abomination). PoE has a lot more variables in item stats, and you have a lot more influence on your items due to the "currency items". The game also seems to be a lot harder than most hack and slash games I've played before. High level monsters don't mess around, and there are bosses that will pretty much one-shot you. Reflect mobs remind me of the old iron maiden mobs in D2.
Overall the game feels very different than any of the other games listed. Whether the differences are good or bad is up to each individual. I do agree that the spin of the summary seems forced and comes off as pure marketing, but the game is worth trying.
"but there was no justice involved"
As a US veteran I actually got teary eyed when I saw the newspaper headlines after Osama was killed with the President saying that "Justice has been served". The President of the United States, calling that justice. The country we have now and the one I enlisted to defend are not the same country.
The older I get, the harder I find it to be truly patriotic.
The interesting bit is the possibility of schools being able to get their hands on cheap scale models of some of these things. Getting a child interested in science and history makes the learning process go a lot more smoothly than just cramming a bunch of facts down their throat. Even viewing the 3d models on the computer is actually fairly interesting. Rotating around the mold of Lincoln's face is very much different than just "looking at a picture". The same for things like the Wright brothers' plane, with all of its individual parts.
Just because you aren't interested doesn't mean that other people aren't.
Despite the massive amount of bashing going back and forth here, I feel compelled to point out that I've swapped back and forth between both AMD/ATI and NVidia over the years and I've run into problems with brand new games having glitches with one or the other on both sides. Even having said that, I'm talking two or three times in over a decade. Aside from that I've had fans go out on one card, and it still lasted long enough after that that I didn't feel bad when it came time to buy a new one.
For most people it really doesn't matter what card you get as long as it isn't ancient. For enthusiasts, compare specs and get what you need. If the specs look like they're in Klingon to you, take the time to learn what's what. If you can't be arsed to do that, then you aren't an enthusiast in the first place.
This isn't like rooting for your home sports team. There is no justifiable reason to give complete loyalty to any company when weighing your purchases.
Given how ridiculously elitist people already get when playing MMOs, that picture-in-picture demo horrifies me. I'm sure it could be useful in some games, but please keep that as far from MMOs as possible.
Why would you need a second PC? There are plenty of ways to use your television to display without putting your PC right next to it. I have a 25 ft HDMI cable, with my computer desk in the back of the living room. The cable sits coiled by the TV when I'm not using it.
Also, if you DO get a 2nd computer for that function, it doesn't have to be a massive gaming powerhouse. You can hook up a cheap laptop and push video from your main PC to it.
He was restating the parent post, only from the view of years earlier. The point is that at one time, the connection speeds we have now would have been considered excessive in much the same manner. Somehow some of us still manage to use all of the bandwidth we can get without sharing movies and other media. Maybe not always, but sometimes. (How 'bout that summer Steam sale? My ISP must've hated that...)
Having better internet access available universally can at worst have no effect on some people that really don't use it that much. For the rest of us, it's a bonus. To even imply that it should be seen as a negative thing is ridiculous.
Because he obviously has never thought about this issue before now, right? It didn't affect or influence him in any way prior to this story being posted.
When you have a mental condition and people tell you they just don't believe that you have it, it makes you question your own sanity. Your post makes a rather large assumption about someone you have never met and could be detrimental to the person it's aimed at. Apparently he's not the only one that has problems with emathy and filtering his output...
You say he should just be careful what he discloses... You are failing to see the problem. Until he's had a lot of experience with a new social situation, he doesn't know what is acceptable and what isn't. And even then, that doesn't mean he understands WHY. Combined with the fact that he can't fully erase any actions or statements he makes online after making them, that leaves avoiding that media altogether or remaining anonymous. You are telling him to do the thing he has problems doing to begin with.
Also, hindsight is 20/20, etc.
Yeah, can't be having noteworthy information presented to us for *free*. That would be ludicrous.
That reminds me, time to pay my /. subscription fees.
If this is true, I highly doubt that MS will work with stores like Gamestop for this. They simply have no reason to. Even if they do, the small local game stores have MUCH better prices on nearly any game, and they are going to be SOL in this matter either way simply because they aren't big companies.
I have a locked XBox Live account with +half a year or so paid on it. Being a yearly subscription, I forgot to update it when I canceled my bank account (due to another bank that I dislike buying out my bank). Instead of cancelling my account, MS left it running for another 4 or 5 months, THEN closed and locked the account for nonpayment. I went out and bought a year prepaid card, entered it in my account. The next day I was locked out again. The response I got from MS? "We don't take time cards as payment for debt owed." I also couldn't get any prepaid credit cards to work with their system.
Their system was more than happy to eat the $50 subscription card and bring my account back into the positive, but still keep me from accessing my account. Customer service told me I was out of luck. My Live account has hundreds of dollars of DLC and games on it. I sold my XBox within a week and haven't looked back. I'm done with consoles.