I would have been zoomed out while panning so yes, I would have done considerably better.
Yes, because I'm sure that the oil companies are only using barely trained idiots to operate their multi million dollar ROVs for their exploration of oil worth billions.
Seriously, WTF? Do you think they spend all that money on oil exploration only to have some tool operating the ROV who doesn't know how it works?
If you knew the squid was going to be there and rehearsed it, you might have gotten a better shot. If you were operating the ROV in real time and saw this thing, your odds of doing better are pretty slim.
I was thinking about frying it in oil to make a new type of Calamari.
I think you'll find that the crude oil Shell is dealing with imparts a bitterness and some sulphurous notes that are too strong for the delicate flavor of the calamari.
You want to go with a more neutral oil, say, something like a 5W50 synthetic should do nicely. It's got a nice high smoke point, so should be good for frying.
Maybe a diesel/kerosene blend as a dipping sauce to give it a nice tang. A little cracked white pepper would be a nice addition here.;-)
My guess is you just weren't paying very much attention.
While I can't definitely tell you what initiated the TV timeout, when I turned to my co-workers for an explanation they said it was a TV timeout. (Me, I am not a hockey fan and the tickets were free -- I just turned and said "WTF are they doing now??")
I'm sure there is some measurable rule which defines how it's done, it just wasn't obvious to me and I didn't know such a thing existed.
Television timeouts are taken at the first stoppage of play after 6, 10, and 14 minutes of elapsed time unless there is a power play or the first stoppage is the result of a goal. In these cases, the timeout will occur at the first stoppage after the penalty expires or the next stoppage after the goal, respectively. A new rule was introduced for the 2007-08 season that if the first stoppage of play is an icing, the TV timeout does not occur.
Which, to me, reads kinda like the rules for Fizzbin.;-)
All I'm saying is there are TV timeout in the game, likely even the three you detailed. Maybe not for every commercial break, but they do halt game play specifically for commercials at some points in the game.
I don't hate it because it's American, I hate it because it's boring. I actually tried watching it for a while and I found that it consists mostly of commercials, with short bursts of football in between. If they would just get on with playing instead of having constant advertisement filled breaks it might be more interesting.
Well, the same is true for hockey.
I got tickets to a corporate box a bunch of years ago to watch a pro-hockey game. Now, I'm no expert on hockey, but then they were all skating around in circles and apparently doing nothing concerning a puck, I asked what was happening -- apparently, they were in a TV timeout.
NHL hockey stops game play when they cut to commercial.
If it's in North America, and it's televised the commercial interests trump the sport. I don't know if they all stop or not.
Sure, GH isnt playing music; but its interacting with it and i can tell that having progressed to expert, hand-hand and hand-eye coordination does improve, even for a past-30-year-old, like myself. Ive also found that ones ear gets more tuned to aspects of songs now, that you've focused on certain instruments.
I have to agree with you on this one.
One of the reasons I think that GH-style games are so popular is that you do get to interact with the music. It's fun, but, it also lets you learn a little more about what is actually happening in the music. I find myself saying "oh, wow, that was actually chords" or starting to understand the beat structure of some punk/metal stuff that I've always stayed away from.
It's definitely made itself popular with people completely outside of the "normal" set of gamers. My brother and his wife have it, and it's not uncommon for them to have friends over and pull out GH. All of a sudden you get a bunch of people over 40 who are rocking out in the living room!!
Ultimately, things like GH4 and RB which allow you to have four players really just expand the fact that it's a fun party game. If you have more people than instruments, then you spell off and chat with someone until someone needs a break!
Does anyone have a suggestion for those who have one of the two?
No direct personal experience with either, but you might be SOL.
When I first started playing after 3-4 songs my hand was sore and I needed a break -- over time it became easier. It's hard on the hands for anyone who doesn't have those issues.
Seems like it would be an action almost guaranteed to exacerbate those conditions.
Guitar Hero is already designed with brainless people in mind.
Ummm... Harmonix was a spinoff from the MIT Media Lab.
Meaning, a bunch of very smart people got together and came up with some notions for "different" kinds of musical instruments and how to simplify it. I seem to recall lots of stuff they were doing whereby they could have a bunch of school kids play with a symphony with very little training.
It's a simplified interface, it's not brainless.
Me, I think making the musicality of it so easy and accessible is key to why the game is such a success. As a non-musician, I've learned more about what's actually happening in rock songs than I ever had any insight into. Heck, I've even learned to like some styles of music I've previously been averse to.
Does this make me a musician? Nope. Is it something I find amusing to play with friends on a Friday night with some beers? Abso-fucking-lutely!!
So this means he WILL have to let go of his Blackberry after all
I'm pretty sure he'll have to get rid of it.
Let's face it -- POTUS has a whole fleet of people who make sure he's got secure and reliable comms, and a group of people to get him to his next appointment on time.
I just can't see it being practicable to have Obama running around with is own damned blackberry/cellphone.
If for no other reason, it just seems stunningly bizarre than anyone who travels in a motorcade and has a 747 at his disposal crammed full of the most advanced communications gear would answer his own damned phone!! There are now people for that. If you're important enough to call through to the president of the United States, some navy guy in white gloves will bring it to him.:-P
The apparatus around POTUS is just too huge for him to continue to carry a cell phone and not have that be odd. Heck, does POTUS even need to carry a wallet?? It's not like he has to stop and buy gas or a quick coffee or anything.
Though I disagree with Apple profitting off OSS which they did not initially create.
They started with BSD code. Which is released under a BSD license which expressly allows this. What's the problem? You are free to make money off that stuff too if you like.
You can do that with Apache stuff too. Some OSS licenses expressly allow you to use their stuff as a basis for your own stuff. This is a good thing.
Assuming you don't have to enter or exit any atmospheres, it could work. The catching site would be messy, and would give Mike Rowe an excuse to go into space.
It would just be a "dead pigeon" protocol.
Any way we could change this to the "interstellar monkey excrement" protocol?
Monkeys test way better in the 9-50 set.:-P
Just imagine, monkeys flinging interstellar poo-communiques throughout the universe. Damn the spice, give me monkeys!;-)
As has always been the case and the #1 reason Microsoft products suck in general, marketing makes the product technology decisions.
Are you under the impression that MS is the only place where this happens? Personal experience tells me that absurd requests for features from high-profile customers, and sales guys who over promise is a problem most anywhere else.
I just don't think most places have the luxury of having a well planned, development driven process.
As much as I'm usually pretty down on MS, I'm just not convinced they're any different in this case.
I mean, come on, just because someone slaps a sticker on a machine and says it's "Vista Ready", do you expect that to work?
For a very long time when Microsoft lists the "minimum system requirements" for a machine to run their stuff, if you only ever had the minimum you're going to have a slow, unusable piece of junk. Windows has simply never really been usable on a "minimum" platform.
I remember back in the day of the 486 people buying machines with 4 MB of RAM, because they were told you could run Windows with that. Technically, you could, but an application like Word would drag the whole machine to a crawl and it would page itself to death.
And, for those of us who remember the whole 'Winmodem' things from the early 90's know that Microsoft has always tried to get us to buy crippled hardware on the basis that if Windows says it supports it, then it must be good. Or at least, have vendors sell something specific to Windows and let the consumer deal with the fallout.
Microsoft is the one getting sued, but Intel is at least as culpable and incompetent, IMHO.
I think this isn't even about incompetence -- it's about collusion and deceiving customers. This isn't a case where they thought it would work, this is a case where they outright asked that the program be changed to allow stuff they already knew wouldn't work well enough to be sold as if it did.
I think you can only argue incompetence if you didn't do something which you damned well knew to be false. The fact that Microsoft may have had some internal misgivings doesn't change the fact that they still allowed it to happen.
so did they take pix of the supposed apollo landing site to prove once and for all whether or not the moon landing was fake?
So, I know this is a recurring joke around here on Slashdot... but you can actually demonstrate this fact by using the Lunar Laser Ranging thingy they installed.
That is, if you're willing to take the time to educate yourself on the hard science behind this.
This is a fairly simple question: if your mail/DNS/storage/internet link/print queue goes down, how long would it take for someone in the organization to fix it, or (failing that as an option) how much will it cost to bring in an outside contractor to fix it, and how long will you be down for??
You'd have to be an awfully small shop with a lot of people who can do all of your tasks before most places could realistically get rid of their IT people -- doing so would mean that the first technical glitch would mean you're dead in the water. Heck, if you're a small enough shop, complete failure could be catastrophic to your business.
Having said that, that doesn't mean some companies might not seriously ponder getting rid of IT and then get blindsided when they discover why they had it in the first place. Companies make short sighted decisions all the time.
Pro-actively trying to justify your existing by coming up with your own metrics is a suckers game. It means someone will then try to use your own damned metrics to squeeze more out of you or do the same with one fewer people.
If your organization has no idea of why they have IT people around and why they're of value, you're already in deep trouble.
Interesting because I see DLC as the true replay value. I'm not up to snuff on costs for the DLC but for me, the value of not having to swap game disks to get new content is more valuable.
*shrug* Could be an age thing. For me, the entire concept of DLC is just something that has no appeal to me. Give me a decent game, and I'll play it.
Hooking my gaming console to the internet and paying for DLC and all that stuff is just something that I can't convince myself provides actual value to me.
Then again, I'm pushing 40, so I might have a slightly different view on games. The good news is, we both get our own choice. =)
but I just could NOT justify buying RB or GH for the Wii without REAL dlc.
See, for me, DLC is a non issue. I have no interest in it, and I'm not really willing to pay for it.
I want it all contained on the game disk, and I don't want to fsck around with it or pay some greedy bugger money for each additional track. I hate having my game play being monetized by some greedy bastard -- I'll pay for the game, but add on content has little or no value for me.
Guess it's all what you want to get outta the game.
So can someone clarify the instrument compatibility state right now?
My understanding is that everything is compatible between RB2 and GH:WT. But what about RB1?
Depends on your platform. I can speak to two, the Wii (mine) and XBox ( a friends).
The Wii has far less compatibility of instruments. The XBox seems to have the most.
The the XBox, I know the GH guitars work pretty much with everything. On the Wii, the guitars only work with the game they came with -- GH used a wireless guitar using the Wii-mote, RB used a wireless guitar using a USB hub and a dongle. Because of the way the games did their stuff, the games can't read each others guitars.
Also on the XBox, my friend can use his RB drum kit with RB, RB2, as well as GH4. On the Wii, RB drum kit can't be identified by the GHWT game.
The USB mic I got with RB for the Wii works with GHWT.
Sadly, when I bought my Wii I didn't even know about the GH/RB type games, and my GF didn't game at all. Now she's crazy addicted to the rhythm games, and if it weren't for the sheer amount of money we've spent getting it for the Wii, I'd almost consider buying an XBox.
From a pure stand point of graphics and instrument compatibility, I'm afraid I gotta say the XBox is a far better choice. Seeing it on my friend's HDTV hooked up to an XBox is pretty slick.
was in a garage band in high school, but even if it required me to pick up an instrument from scratch I think it would be a lot more fun than playing a video game version. I realize they aren't the same thing, and each to their own, but the reward is so much greater when you actually play that I'm surprised by the popularity of the group game
I guess it's a matter of differing tastes.
Up until I started playing these games in the spring, I hasn't really heard much about them and thought they were silly. Now, on a fairly regular basis I play with either just my GF, or with a couple of friends. We variously play the GH and RB games as we pretty much own as many as we've been able to get so far.
For us, it's just sorta major league fun, with a pretty low ramp-up time. You can be playing on the easiest of levels almost right away, and once you've played a while you can play on harder levels of new games straight outta the box because the "skills" transfer pretty easily.
I've tried learning to play "real" guitar, and I must admit, I sucked at it and found it frustrating. I find these games to just simply be fun -- and, it has the added bonus that it's really broadened by musical horizons. I find myself actually digging on some of the tunes I simply never would have been exposed to.
You don't have to like 'em, but being able to throw a couple of people together on a Friday night drinking some beverages and rocking out like a bunch of dorky people in our mid-late 30's/40's is utterly hilarious. The fact that you can bring someone new into the mix and have them playing along in literally 5 minutes is huge -- you simply can't do that with real musical instruments, and most people wouldn't be willing to try. I've gotten my brother and his wife hooked (mid 40's) and they routinely have people over to their place to play.
Imagine a bunch of couples who have left the kids with baby sitters rocking our hardcore -- it's just something completely new and fun, and lends itself well to groups.
Trust me, for a lot of us, the money we spend on plastic instruments and playing them has far more value than trying to mess around with real instruments. For an awful lot of people in their 30's and 40's, these games represent a kind of gaming we've simply never had before, and people who have never gamed at all are playing them like mad.
Interesting that you do agree that there are public venues where speech can be restricted, but you don't feel that the publicly licensed airwaves which permeate everybody's residences should be one of them.
Curious. Since I didn't speak to the FCC issue anywhere in that post.
My response was purely to a parent asserting that if I'm swearing in front of his children he'll call the cops who would promptly make me leave or talk sternly to me.
I'm afraid unless you can show me the specific part of my post which supports your assertion, you're talking out of your ass.:-P
Free speech can only go so far. If you were to be constantly swearing in front of my kids I would call the police on you and they would make you go away or stop.
Is that even remotely true?? Or are you just wishing it were?
Unless I'm on your property, or in a school, or at Disney, I'm not convinced you actually could call the cops and get any result you'd like. Seriously, you think I'm going to get charged with public cussing? If it's private property someone who is an agent of the property owner can ask me to leave. But, I don't believe that the police can enforce whether or not I swear while walking down a sidewalk.
See, part of free speech is the ability to offend. In the vast majority of places if I happen to swear and your kids overhear it... I'm going to tell you to fucking deal with it. If I have to hear your screaming brats, you might hear me cursing about it.
The world is not always kid-friendly. That doesn't mean that the police will show up and enforce your view on how I should be speaking. Short of my disturbing the peace, I have no idea on what basis you think the police are going to give me a stern talking to about my language.
Heck, the F word is so over-used that it really isn't that offensive. "We fucked" can mean "we had sex in a lustful, vigorous manner". "fuck you, I'm quitting" can mean "this job does not compensate me at what I consider market value for my services, good day sir".
And, my all time favorite... "fuck you, you fucking fuck.":-P
Of course, the trick is to see how many times (and for how many parts of speech) you can use fuck in a single sentence, and still have it be (essentially) grammatically correct and convey its meaning. I leave that as an exercise for whoever chooses to try.;-)
Since when was porn illegal? If some nosy cunt wanted to "breath test" my pc for porn, i'd just hold up a nice gynacological centrefold and say "look! i think i can see her kidneys! Now fuck off!"
Ah, but once crossing a border requires you to be scanned for any infractions, you won't have a choice.
Soon, it will be considered perfectly normal to subject yourself to full scrutiny in order to prove that you don't have anything they deem unacceptable.
Me, I find it appalling, as we throw away most forms of civil liberties in Western countries on the presumption that someone might have done something wrong, so we inspect everyone.
Oh great, expect that in a few years they will be running this on international travellers as a standard part of customs.
Sadly, this seems to be a part of a trend. Part of travel now means that you need to be subjected to complete search and inspection to make sure you haven't done anything wrong.
This includes fingerprinting, gathering of biometrics, and having all of your personal stuff exhaustively searched to ensure you have no porn, terrorist material, copyrighted material you can't prove you bought, or anything critical of the government of the country you're entering.
If you have probable cause that I'm smuggling something, maybe. But, in the case you point out where we scan everyone so they can prove themselves innocent... well, modern society is pretty much hosed in that case. However, that seems to be where we're going lately.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because I'm sure that the oil companies are only using barely trained idiots to operate their multi million dollar ROVs for their exploration of oil worth billions.
Seriously, WTF? Do you think they spend all that money on oil exploration only to have some tool operating the ROV who doesn't know how it works?
If you knew the squid was going to be there and rehearsed it, you might have gotten a better shot. If you were operating the ROV in real time and saw this thing, your odds of doing better are pretty slim.
Cheers
I think you'll find that the crude oil Shell is dealing with imparts a bitterness and some sulphurous notes that are too strong for the delicate flavor of the calamari.
You want to go with a more neutral oil, say, something like a 5W50 synthetic should do nicely. It's got a nice high smoke point, so should be good for frying.
Maybe a diesel/kerosene blend as a dipping sauce to give it a nice tang. A little cracked white pepper would be a nice addition here. ;-)
Cheers
While I can't definitely tell you what initiated the TV timeout, when I turned to my co-workers for an explanation they said it was a TV timeout. (Me, I am not a hockey fan and the tickets were free -- I just turned and said "WTF are they doing now??")
I'm sure there is some measurable rule which defines how it's done, it just wasn't obvious to me and I didn't know such a thing existed.
According to wiki:
Which, to me, reads kinda like the rules for Fizzbin. ;-)
All I'm saying is there are TV timeout in the game, likely even the three you detailed. Maybe not for every commercial break, but they do halt game play specifically for commercials at some points in the game.
Cheers
Well, the same is true for hockey.
I got tickets to a corporate box a bunch of years ago to watch a pro-hockey game. Now, I'm no expert on hockey, but then they were all skating around in circles and apparently doing nothing concerning a puck, I asked what was happening -- apparently, they were in a TV timeout.
NHL hockey stops game play when they cut to commercial.
If it's in North America, and it's televised the commercial interests trump the sport. I don't know if they all stop or not.
Cheers
We're gonna throw dinner rolls at one another? :-P
Cheers
There's not nearly enough hops in Budweiser to be as bitter as Starbucks coffee. Not by a long-shot.
Cheers
I have to agree with you on this one.
One of the reasons I think that GH-style games are so popular is that you do get to interact with the music. It's fun, but, it also lets you learn a little more about what is actually happening in the music. I find myself saying "oh, wow, that was actually chords" or starting to understand the beat structure of some punk/metal stuff that I've always stayed away from.
It's definitely made itself popular with people completely outside of the "normal" set of gamers. My brother and his wife have it, and it's not uncommon for them to have friends over and pull out GH. All of a sudden you get a bunch of people over 40 who are rocking out in the living room!!
Ultimately, things like GH4 and RB which allow you to have four players really just expand the fact that it's a fun party game. If you have more people than instruments, then you spell off and chat with someone until someone needs a break!
Cheers
No direct personal experience with either, but you might be SOL.
When I first started playing after 3-4 songs my hand was sore and I needed a break -- over time it became easier. It's hard on the hands for anyone who doesn't have those issues.
Seems like it would be an action almost guaranteed to exacerbate those conditions.
Cheers
Ummm ... Harmonix was a spinoff from the MIT Media Lab.
Meaning, a bunch of very smart people got together and came up with some notions for "different" kinds of musical instruments and how to simplify it. I seem to recall lots of stuff they were doing whereby they could have a bunch of school kids play with a symphony with very little training.
It's a simplified interface, it's not brainless.
Me, I think making the musicality of it so easy and accessible is key to why the game is such a success. As a non-musician, I've learned more about what's actually happening in rock songs than I ever had any insight into. Heck, I've even learned to like some styles of music I've previously been averse to.
Does this make me a musician? Nope. Is it something I find amusing to play with friends on a Friday night with some beers? Abso-fucking-lutely!!
Cheers
I'm pretty sure he'll have to get rid of it.
Let's face it -- POTUS has a whole fleet of people who make sure he's got secure and reliable comms, and a group of people to get him to his next appointment on time.
I just can't see it being practicable to have Obama running around with is own damned blackberry/cellphone.
If for no other reason, it just seems stunningly bizarre than anyone who travels in a motorcade and has a 747 at his disposal crammed full of the most advanced communications gear would answer his own damned phone!! There are now people for that. If you're important enough to call through to the president of the United States, some navy guy in white gloves will bring it to him. :-P
The apparatus around POTUS is just too huge for him to continue to carry a cell phone and not have that be odd. Heck, does POTUS even need to carry a wallet?? It's not like he has to stop and buy gas or a quick coffee or anything.
Cheers
They started with BSD code. Which is released under a BSD license which expressly allows this. What's the problem? You are free to make money off that stuff too if you like.
You can do that with Apache stuff too. Some OSS licenses expressly allow you to use their stuff as a basis for your own stuff. This is a good thing.
Cheers
Any way we could change this to the "interstellar monkey excrement" protocol?
Monkeys test way better in the 9-50 set. :-P
Just imagine, monkeys flinging interstellar poo-communiques throughout the universe. Damn the spice, give me monkeys! ;-)
Cheers
Are you under the impression that MS is the only place where this happens? Personal experience tells me that absurd requests for features from high-profile customers, and sales guys who over promise is a problem most anywhere else.
I just don't think most places have the luxury of having a well planned, development driven process.
As much as I'm usually pretty down on MS, I'm just not convinced they're any different in this case.
Cheers
I mean, come on, just because someone slaps a sticker on a machine and says it's "Vista Ready", do you expect that to work?
For a very long time when Microsoft lists the "minimum system requirements" for a machine to run their stuff, if you only ever had the minimum you're going to have a slow, unusable piece of junk. Windows has simply never really been usable on a "minimum" platform.
I remember back in the day of the 486 people buying machines with 4 MB of RAM, because they were told you could run Windows with that. Technically, you could, but an application like Word would drag the whole machine to a crawl and it would page itself to death.
And, for those of us who remember the whole 'Winmodem' things from the early 90's know that Microsoft has always tried to get us to buy crippled hardware on the basis that if Windows says it supports it, then it must be good. Or at least, have vendors sell something specific to Windows and let the consumer deal with the fallout.
I think this isn't even about incompetence -- it's about collusion and deceiving customers. This isn't a case where they thought it would work, this is a case where they outright asked that the program be changed to allow stuff they already knew wouldn't work well enough to be sold as if it did.
I think you can only argue incompetence if you didn't do something which you damned well knew to be false. The fact that Microsoft may have had some internal misgivings doesn't change the fact that they still allowed it to happen.
I'll be curious to see how this plays out.
Cheers
So, I know this is a recurring joke around here on Slashdot ... but you can actually demonstrate this fact by using the Lunar Laser Ranging thingy they installed.
That is, if you're willing to take the time to educate yourself on the hard science behind this.
Cheers
This is a fairly simple question: if your mail/DNS/storage/internet link/print queue goes down, how long would it take for someone in the organization to fix it, or (failing that as an option) how much will it cost to bring in an outside contractor to fix it, and how long will you be down for??
You'd have to be an awfully small shop with a lot of people who can do all of your tasks before most places could realistically get rid of their IT people -- doing so would mean that the first technical glitch would mean you're dead in the water. Heck, if you're a small enough shop, complete failure could be catastrophic to your business.
Having said that, that doesn't mean some companies might not seriously ponder getting rid of IT and then get blindsided when they discover why they had it in the first place. Companies make short sighted decisions all the time.
Pro-actively trying to justify your existing by coming up with your own metrics is a suckers game. It means someone will then try to use your own damned metrics to squeeze more out of you or do the same with one fewer people.
If your organization has no idea of why they have IT people around and why they're of value, you're already in deep trouble.
Cheers
*shrug* Could be an age thing. For me, the entire concept of DLC is just something that has no appeal to me. Give me a decent game, and I'll play it.
Hooking my gaming console to the internet and paying for DLC and all that stuff is just something that I can't convince myself provides actual value to me.
Then again, I'm pushing 40, so I might have a slightly different view on games. The good news is, we both get our own choice. =)
Cheers
See, for me, DLC is a non issue. I have no interest in it, and I'm not really willing to pay for it.
I want it all contained on the game disk, and I don't want to fsck around with it or pay some greedy bugger money for each additional track. I hate having my game play being monetized by some greedy bastard -- I'll pay for the game, but add on content has little or no value for me.
Guess it's all what you want to get outta the game.
Cheers
Depends on your platform. I can speak to two, the Wii (mine) and XBox ( a friends).
The Wii has far less compatibility of instruments. The XBox seems to have the most.
The the XBox, I know the GH guitars work pretty much with everything. On the Wii, the guitars only work with the game they came with -- GH used a wireless guitar using the Wii-mote, RB used a wireless guitar using a USB hub and a dongle. Because of the way the games did their stuff, the games can't read each others guitars.
Also on the XBox, my friend can use his RB drum kit with RB, RB2, as well as GH4. On the Wii, RB drum kit can't be identified by the GHWT game.
The USB mic I got with RB for the Wii works with GHWT.
Sadly, when I bought my Wii I didn't even know about the GH/RB type games, and my GF didn't game at all. Now she's crazy addicted to the rhythm games, and if it weren't for the sheer amount of money we've spent getting it for the Wii, I'd almost consider buying an XBox.
From a pure stand point of graphics and instrument compatibility, I'm afraid I gotta say the XBox is a far better choice. Seeing it on my friend's HDTV hooked up to an XBox is pretty slick.
Cheers
I guess it's a matter of differing tastes.
Up until I started playing these games in the spring, I hasn't really heard much about them and thought they were silly. Now, on a fairly regular basis I play with either just my GF, or with a couple of friends. We variously play the GH and RB games as we pretty much own as many as we've been able to get so far.
For us, it's just sorta major league fun, with a pretty low ramp-up time. You can be playing on the easiest of levels almost right away, and once you've played a while you can play on harder levels of new games straight outta the box because the "skills" transfer pretty easily.
I've tried learning to play "real" guitar, and I must admit, I sucked at it and found it frustrating. I find these games to just simply be fun -- and, it has the added bonus that it's really broadened by musical horizons. I find myself actually digging on some of the tunes I simply never would have been exposed to.
You don't have to like 'em, but being able to throw a couple of people together on a Friday night drinking some beverages and rocking out like a bunch of dorky people in our mid-late 30's/40's is utterly hilarious. The fact that you can bring someone new into the mix and have them playing along in literally 5 minutes is huge -- you simply can't do that with real musical instruments, and most people wouldn't be willing to try. I've gotten my brother and his wife hooked (mid 40's) and they routinely have people over to their place to play.
Imagine a bunch of couples who have left the kids with baby sitters rocking our hardcore -- it's just something completely new and fun, and lends itself well to groups.
Trust me, for a lot of us, the money we spend on plastic instruments and playing them has far more value than trying to mess around with real instruments. For an awful lot of people in their 30's and 40's, these games represent a kind of gaming we've simply never had before, and people who have never gamed at all are playing them like mad.
Cheers
Curious. Since I didn't speak to the FCC issue anywhere in that post.
My response was purely to a parent asserting that if I'm swearing in front of his children he'll call the cops who would promptly make me leave or talk sternly to me.
I'm afraid unless you can show me the specific part of my post which supports your assertion, you're talking out of your ass. :-P
Cheers
Is that even remotely true?? Or are you just wishing it were?
Unless I'm on your property, or in a school, or at Disney, I'm not convinced you actually could call the cops and get any result you'd like. Seriously, you think I'm going to get charged with public cussing? If it's private property someone who is an agent of the property owner can ask me to leave. But, I don't believe that the police can enforce whether or not I swear while walking down a sidewalk.
See, part of free speech is the ability to offend. In the vast majority of places if I happen to swear and your kids overhear it ... I'm going to tell you to fucking deal with it. If I have to hear your screaming brats, you might hear me cursing about it.
The world is not always kid-friendly. That doesn't mean that the police will show up and enforce your view on how I should be speaking. Short of my disturbing the peace, I have no idea on what basis you think the police are going to give me a stern talking to about my language.
Cheers
And, my all time favorite ... "fuck you, you fucking fuck." :-P
Of course, the trick is to see how many times (and for how many parts of speech) you can use fuck in a single sentence, and still have it be (essentially) grammatically correct and convey its meaning. I leave that as an exercise for whoever chooses to try. ;-)
Cheers
Ah, but once crossing a border requires you to be scanned for any infractions, you won't have a choice.
Soon, it will be considered perfectly normal to subject yourself to full scrutiny in order to prove that you don't have anything they deem unacceptable.
Me, I find it appalling, as we throw away most forms of civil liberties in Western countries on the presumption that someone might have done something wrong, so we inspect everyone.
Cheers
Sadly, this seems to be a part of a trend. Part of travel now means that you need to be subjected to complete search and inspection to make sure you haven't done anything wrong.
This includes fingerprinting, gathering of biometrics, and having all of your personal stuff exhaustively searched to ensure you have no porn, terrorist material, copyrighted material you can't prove you bought, or anything critical of the government of the country you're entering.
If you have probable cause that I'm smuggling something, maybe. But, in the case you point out where we scan everyone so they can prove themselves innocent ... well, modern society is pretty much hosed in that case. However, that seems to be where we're going lately.
Cheers