I played it when it came out, and thought it was extremely boring after getting about 15 hours in. It was neat that it had combat both in ships and on the ground, but neither was great.
My brother liked it a lot, but quit when he found out I was. I asked what was so great, and he just said "There's something extremely satisfying about going around and blowing up Klingons."
I think my brother's statement sums up the game well. If you are a shallow person, and and love just blowing up Klingons because they are Klingons, then this game will scratch that itch. Otherwise, it's probably not worth the monthly cost.
Once it goes free, I'll probably check it out again.
A *liberal* concept? Hast thou forgotten which President *created* the TSA and the DHS?
Nope, I remember. It was the least conservative republican president that I've experienced. I also remember a very liberal congress going along with it at the time. In fact, Ernest Hollings (D) was the one who introduced the bill to the senate.
Looking at the TSA today, with it's $8.1 billion budget, and very few successes, I think it is certainly time to reconsider its usefulness. I doubt you listen to Rush Limbaugh, but he despises the TSA as much as anyone, and I've never heard anyone accuse him of being a liberal.
Americans fear their government more now than at any time in history. Kind of funny if your from foreignland.
You don't know much about American history, then.
200 years ago, The Federalist Party wanted a strong centralized government, and couldn't compete with the Democrat-Republican Party. People opposed any expansion of government at the time, and the idea that the federal government could run their own bank and carry their own debt was so hated by people that they lost every election from 1800 to 1820, and eventually folded. Today, if any politician wanted the government to shrink to that size, they would just be laughed away by all current parties (except maybe libertarian)
100 years ago, no one would have trusted the government to even regulate schools. Now, the government owns the school system, and teachers can't discuss their own religion because they are government employees!
75 years ago, there was incredible opposition to Social Security, even though the average SS check to a retired person would only be $17.50 per month, and would be based on that individual's wages over the previous 5 years. Today, SS provides enough income that many people live off of it, and all retired citizens are eligible.
In 1973, the Federal government wanted to implement a national speed limit. The current opinion was that it was obviously unconstitutional. Finally the law was made, but it wasn't a mandate. States only had to comply if they wanted to continue receiving federal funding for their roads. The courts decided to let it slide. This set the standard for how laws were crafted for 20 years. Today, our legislatures don't even give a second thought for stuff like this. The courts don't even challenge them.
If US citizens feared the government just half as much as they did 100 years ago, then we wouldn't have HUD. We wouldn't have the TSA. The FDA would only regulate selling drugs with incorrect labels, and there would be no banned substances list. We wouldn't have government schools. We wouldn't have the DMV. We wouldn't have Food Stamps or Welfare. We wouldn't have government backed student loans or government backed car companies. Our cars would not need to pass emission testing, and would not be limited by cafe standards. Our showers could put out any amount of water that the customer chose, and we wouldn't have laws regulating what method we use for generating light in our houses. And no one would even think of trying to implement government health care.
The security stuff is rather strange. I don't think the government should be allowed to track you any more than I am allowed to track you. If people wake up and suddenly realize that the government is controlling too much and becoming dangerous because of this, then it's a good discussion.
Reminds me of plan9, beautiful design and concept.
I agree about it being a beautiful design and concept. Why send expensive aggressive robots to dominate a new species you find on a new planet, when you can just raise their dead and control the masses with slow moving zombies?
I sure hope I'm not misunderstanding your reference.
I've had the issues as the original poster. So, about 6 years ago, when I was about to change email addresses anyway, I signed up for an account at Spamgourmet.com. I hoped that I would never need to worry about unsubscribing again.
It works perfectly. I place unique characters in every address that I give out online. The first 'n' messages to a particular address get forwarded to my main address. After that, they get eaten by spamgourmet. I have to manually increase the limit or designate an exclusive sender if I want more than the first 'n' messages to go through.
You can set 'n' to be anything from 1 to 20. I use 5 typically.
When I heard of this way back when, this kind of tax was supposed to replace most other taxes. That part seems to have been lost somewhere along the way though.
So, if I go and buy a hotdog from a street vendor with cash, and he keeps the cash, and uses it to buy gas later, there is no tax on the money?
On the other hand, if I pay with debit card, and his vending service pays him through a check, and then he pays for his gas using a debit card, then it is taxed 3 times?
If this is the case, I see a quick resurgence in cash, followed by a host of new payment types that get around the letter of the law.
People in the U.S. are very cynical when it comes to believing UFO claims. We have by far the greatest number of non-believers.
I believe Mexico and Russia are at the other end of the spectrum. Very few people in either of those countries doubt that aliens are the cause of most UFO outbreaks.
I think public perception in the US is changing, though. For example, the former governor of Arizona has admitted that he did cover up what he knew about the 1997 Phoenix lights, and has now revealed that he and his wife did witness them also, and believes it was an alien ship. Once high profile people start coming forward as believers, the general public follows quickly.
Cygwin and Msys are basically pointless. Windows already has a native UNIX subsystem
Unfortunately, MS announced back in 2005 that the current release was going to be the last. It's been reported that Windows 8 does not contain the necessary components for it to run any more.
I've used SFU a little, and found it to be more lacking than cygwin in support for standard command line type stuff. I have doubts whether you could get kmail to work correctly with it, but I could be wrong. I don't have a Windows machine with me at the moment.
It can be easily done with Outlook and some VBA scripting. But I remember that at least last time VBA support under Linux wasn't really that good. So you need Windows for this task.
Hey, when us linux guys taunt you Windows folk with "a one-line perl script could do that", we actually include the perl script, along with instructions on how to run it.
I can see that you are trying to reverse this meme, but you failed to post any details on how to actually do this. It may be because navigation through Outlook menus and wizards is gross, and doing anything with Outlook rules (as I'm sure is needed for a VBA script) is particularly difficult to teach without showing someone in person.
Maybe this explains why this particularly meme is never reversed.
I thought it was as mediocre then as it is now. Am I the only one who just doesn't get the popularity of this game?
I agree completely. I download a lot of IOS games, and this one is probably not quite as good as the average weekly release from Donut Games. I think the marketing for Angry Birds has been better, so I guess I'm not completely puzzled by the success, but I'm still a bit shocked by it.
You are confused about both systems yourself. The systems, by the way are not "metric" and "imperial", but "long scale" and "short scale". And, you got the details of both systems wrong!
American English and modern British English: 10^6 = million, 10^9 = billion, 10^12 = trillion. non-English speaking Europe: 10^6 million, 10^9 = thousand million, 10^12 = billion.
As you see, million is the same on both systems. Billion is different.
Even though Rovio is Finnish, he appears to be using the English system in his quote. The journalist understood everything correctly, but just mistyped the title. You'll see later in the article that it refers to "half a million downloads" and to "500,000 downloads". The word billion is used in the article only when referring to "number of levels completed", "number of birds launched", and "number of stars acquired." It looks like the title was just a sloppy error.
The author doesn't really need to specify that he is using short scale. I believe that all English speaking countries use the short scale. The UK, for example moved to the short scale in 1974, so if an article is in English, you should just assume short scale.
There's a lot of crap in the app stores, and a lot of ways to make that crap look good (ie. fake reviews). Putting down $2.99 for a game that you think you will play a lot is a risk if you haven't played it yet.
I'm happy with the current model. I've put down $1 in two different games (in one case to remove ads, and in the other, just because I liked the game so much I wanted to support it). Both of them were significantly better than the 30-40 games I've tried and not paid for.
To me, it's like the shareware days (before the internet). You would get a floppy with a ton of free games, and if you were significantly impressed with any, you would send money (through the mail) to the authors.
Thumbs up to this post. People who have tried out Minecraft for an afternoon and then left, thinking that they have seen everything should come back and give this mod a try.
I seriously do not understand how Kinniken has built this mod so quickly. In any given month, Millenaire has more changes, and with greater quality than Minecraft itself.
I did not know you were a slashdotter! I'm proud that people like you are on Slashdot!
Are you running 1.8 or the 1.9 release candidate? Some of the changes put into 1.9 are very cool.
I've played all of the 1.9 pre-releases. The server I play on has been on PR 5 since an hour after the jar was available. I still enjoy 1.8.1 with mods (such as Twilight Forest and Weeping Angels) more than the changes in 1.9.
I disagree that the 1.9 changes are great. Villagers have villagers now, but they still do nothing. Animals can breed, but it's a pain. The enchantments are interesting, but not as exciting as lots of mods that have done the same thing . I'd take the "Bone Sticks" mod over enchantments and potions any day. Tundra biomes have been fixed, but Taigas (pine forests) are still without snow. The nether ruins are a good addition, but the blazes are too hard in their current state. I much prefer the zombie-ghosts from Twilight Forest mod. Mooshrooms are idiotic, and the End is a very boring place. This list of changes for 1.9 is too long, and nothing on that list was really thought out properly.
I'm pretty happy with my statement that the game thrives today because of the mods. Minecraft has been immensely successful because it is new, not because it is good. Within the next year, I'm quite sure that a company who is actually good at game development will put out a clone that makes Minecraft nothing but a piece of forgotten gaming history. It won't take much, and there's a ton of profit for whichever studio can do it right. Indie games exist for this reason. They bring good ideas to light so that the mainstream studios pay attention.
I think Portal 2 is a much better game, but for every hour I've spent in it, I've spent 20 in Minecraft.
This is mis-placed credit, though. The recent changes to Minecraft have been uninteresting and poorly implemented. The real value is in the mods created by the user community. Without them, I would have quit playing a long time ago!
Your comment has gotten a lot of replies, but it seems to be missing some essential information.
How frequently did the person you watch die go for screenings with their type of cancer? Was that amount above or below the recommended amount? How much did they pay for those screenings? Could the cancer have been treated into remission if caught early? If they would have doubled the amount of screenings, would the cancer been caught early to prevent death?
My aunt died of ovarian cancer. It was caught early, but there are no magical treatments, and even though she endured intense chemotherapy that essentially destroyed her quality of life, it wasn't enough. I don't have enough facts and figures to know whether she would have been better off or worse with less screenings.
If tests were free and non-invasive, and early detection guaranteed successful treatment, then obviously we should be increasing the number of screenings. Your one line comment seems to make those assumptions. It's hard for any of us with just anecdotal evidence to know whether we are screening too much or too little. Making broad generalizations like yours are just not helpful.
Now that they've been interviewed on Slashdot, they can finally change their name to "They Who Are Giants".
I fully hope that a contract dispute with their label occurs that forces them to change their name to "The Artists Who Formally May Have Been Giants". At that point the most pedantic of their fans will ask if the former variableness of their Giant-status formally forbids their current Giant-status from still being variable.
I've always thought the $0.50 surcharge for HD was low enough to make the choice obvious. I never even looked at what DVDs they had.
Now that it is only a $0.30 difference, hopefully more of their customers will be using Blu-ray. And, hopefully that means that more of the stock in the machines will also be Blu-ray. For the first time ever, I'm a customer that is pleased with an increase in prices!
Slashdot Mirror
Probably.
I played it when it came out, and thought it was extremely boring after getting about 15 hours in. It was neat that it had combat both in ships and on the ground, but neither was great.
My brother liked it a lot, but quit when he found out I was. I asked what was so great, and he just said "There's something extremely satisfying about going around and blowing up Klingons."
I think my brother's statement sums up the game well. If you are a shallow person, and and love just blowing up Klingons because they are Klingons, then this game will scratch that itch. Otherwise, it's probably not worth the monthly cost.
Once it goes free, I'll probably check it out again.
I remember when it was announced, and it was big news then. In fact, I actually had intended to buy it when it came out.
When it did come out, I never even heard of it, and I read a lot of game magazines. I completely had forgotten about it until now.
A *liberal* concept? Hast thou forgotten which President *created* the TSA and the DHS?
Nope, I remember. It was the least conservative republican president that I've experienced. I also remember a very liberal congress going along with it at the time. In fact, Ernest Hollings (D) was the one who introduced the bill to the senate.
Looking at the TSA today, with it's $8.1 billion budget, and very few successes, I think it is certainly time to reconsider its usefulness. I doubt you listen to Rush Limbaugh, but he despises the TSA as much as anyone, and I've never heard anyone accuse him of being a liberal.
You don't know much about American history, then.
200 years ago, The Federalist Party wanted a strong centralized government, and couldn't compete with the Democrat-Republican Party. People opposed any expansion of government at the time, and the idea that the federal government could run their own bank and carry their own debt was so hated by people that they lost every election from 1800 to 1820, and eventually folded. Today, if any politician wanted the government to shrink to that size, they would just be laughed away by all current parties (except maybe libertarian)
100 years ago, no one would have trusted the government to even regulate schools. Now, the government owns the school system, and teachers can't discuss their own religion because they are government employees!
75 years ago, there was incredible opposition to Social Security, even though the average SS check to a retired person would only be $17.50 per month, and would be based on that individual's wages over the previous 5 years. Today, SS provides enough income that many people live off of it, and all retired citizens are eligible.
In 1973, the Federal government wanted to implement a national speed limit. The current opinion was that it was obviously unconstitutional. Finally the law was made, but it wasn't a mandate. States only had to comply if they wanted to continue receiving federal funding for their roads. The courts decided to let it slide. This set the standard for how laws were crafted for 20 years. Today, our legislatures don't even give a second thought for stuff like this. The courts don't even challenge them.
If US citizens feared the government just half as much as they did 100 years ago, then we wouldn't have HUD. We wouldn't have the TSA. The FDA would only regulate selling drugs with incorrect labels, and there would be no banned substances list. We wouldn't have government schools. We wouldn't have the DMV. We wouldn't have Food Stamps or Welfare. We wouldn't have government backed student loans or government backed car companies. Our cars would not need to pass emission testing, and would not be limited by cafe standards. Our showers could put out any amount of water that the customer chose, and we wouldn't have laws regulating what method we use for generating light in our houses. And no one would even think of trying to implement government health care.
The security stuff is rather strange. I don't think the government should be allowed to track you any more than I am allowed to track you. If people wake up and suddenly realize that the government is controlling too much and becoming dangerous because of this, then it's a good discussion.
Reminds me of plan9, beautiful design and concept.
I agree about it being a beautiful design and concept. Why send expensive aggressive robots to dominate a new species you find on a new planet, when you can just raise their dead and control the masses with slow moving zombies?
I sure hope I'm not misunderstanding your reference.
I've had the issues as the original poster. So, about 6 years ago, when I was about to change email addresses anyway, I signed up for an account at Spamgourmet.com. I hoped that I would never need to worry about unsubscribing again.
It works perfectly. I place unique characters in every address that I give out online. The first 'n' messages to a particular address get forwarded to my main address. After that, they get eaten by spamgourmet. I have to manually increase the limit or designate an exclusive sender if I want more than the first 'n' messages to go through.
You can set 'n' to be anything from 1 to 20. I use 5 typically.
When I heard of this way back when, this kind of tax was supposed to replace most other taxes. That part seems to have been lost somewhere along the way though.
So, if I go and buy a hotdog from a street vendor with cash, and he keeps the cash, and uses it to buy gas later, there is no tax on the money?
On the other hand, if I pay with debit card, and his vending service pays him through a check, and then he pays for his gas using a debit card, then it is taxed 3 times?
If this is the case, I see a quick resurgence in cash, followed by a host of new payment types that get around the letter of the law.
People in the U.S. are very cynical when it comes to believing UFO claims. We have by far the greatest number of non-believers.
I believe Mexico and Russia are at the other end of the spectrum. Very few people in either of those countries doubt that aliens are the cause of most UFO outbreaks.
I think public perception in the US is changing, though. For example, the former governor of Arizona has admitted that he did cover up what he knew about the 1997 Phoenix lights, and has now revealed that he and his wife did witness them also, and believes it was an alien ship. Once high profile people start coming forward as believers, the general public follows quickly.
That's not what he needs. He wants to generate a "Recipient Not Found" rejection, not just forward it on with the same headers.
Cygwin and Msys are basically pointless. Windows already has a native UNIX subsystem
Unfortunately, MS announced back in 2005 that the current release was going to be the last. It's been reported that Windows 8 does not contain the necessary components for it to run any more.
I've used SFU a little, and found it to be more lacking than cygwin in support for standard command line type stuff. I have doubts whether you could get kmail to work correctly with it, but I could be wrong. I don't have a Windows machine with me at the moment.
It can be easily done with Outlook and some VBA scripting. But I remember that at least last time VBA support under Linux wasn't really that good. So you need Windows for this task.
Hey, when us linux guys taunt you Windows folk with "a one-line perl script could do that", we actually include the perl script, along with instructions on how to run it.
I can see that you are trying to reverse this meme, but you failed to post any details on how to actually do this. It may be because navigation through Outlook menus and wizards is gross, and doing anything with Outlook rules (as I'm sure is needed for a VBA script) is particularly difficult to teach without showing someone in person.
Maybe this explains why this particularly meme is never reversed.
Anybody caught making a Frickin' Sharks joke will be permanently labeled a virgin.
Too late. Take a look at TFM. The shark joke was made in the original Discovery.com article
Fixed that for you.
You are trying to be reasonable, which is wholly unacceptable in this type of discussion.
Didn't you get the memo? Both sides are supposed to yell about how stupid the other side is without actually discussing the facts about the video.
I thought it was as mediocre then as it is now. Am I the only one who just doesn't get the popularity of this game?
I agree completely. I download a lot of IOS games, and this one is probably not quite as good as the average weekly release from Donut Games. I think the marketing for Angry Birds has been better, so I guess I'm not completely puzzled by the success, but I'm still a bit shocked by it.
You are confused about both systems yourself. The systems, by the way are not "metric" and "imperial", but "long scale" and "short scale". And, you got the details of both systems wrong!
American English and modern British English: 10^6 = million, 10^9 = billion, 10^12 = trillion.
non-English speaking Europe: 10^6 million, 10^9 = thousand million, 10^12 = billion.
As you see, million is the same on both systems. Billion is different.
Even though Rovio is Finnish, he appears to be using the English system in his quote. The journalist understood everything correctly, but just mistyped the title. You'll see later in the article that it refers to "half a million downloads" and to "500,000 downloads". The word billion is used in the article only when referring to "number of levels completed", "number of birds launched", and "number of stars acquired." It looks like the title was just a sloppy error.
The author doesn't really need to specify that he is using short scale. I believe that all English speaking countries use the short scale. The UK, for example moved to the short scale in 1974, so if an article is in English, you should just assume short scale.
Or... just the content of the games you buy.
There's a lot of crap in the app stores, and a lot of ways to make that crap look good (ie. fake reviews). Putting down $2.99 for a game that you think you will play a lot is a risk if you haven't played it yet.
I'm happy with the current model. I've put down $1 in two different games (in one case to remove ads, and in the other, just because I liked the game so much I wanted to support it). Both of them were significantly better than the 30-40 games I've tried and not paid for.
To me, it's like the shareware days (before the internet). You would get a floppy with a ton of free games, and if you were significantly impressed with any, you would send money (through the mail) to the authors.
Thumbs up to this post. People who have tried out Minecraft for an afternoon and then left, thinking that they have seen everything should come back and give this mod a try.
I seriously do not understand how Kinniken has built this mod so quickly. In any given month, Millenaire has more changes, and with greater quality than Minecraft itself.
I did not know you were a slashdotter! I'm proud that people like you are on Slashdot!
Are you running 1.8 or the 1.9 release candidate? Some of the changes put into 1.9 are very cool.
I've played all of the 1.9 pre-releases. The server I play on has been on PR 5 since an hour after the jar was available. I still enjoy 1.8.1 with mods (such as Twilight Forest and Weeping Angels) more than the changes in 1.9.
I disagree that the 1.9 changes are great. Villagers have villagers now, but they still do nothing. Animals can breed, but it's a pain. The enchantments are interesting, but not as exciting as lots of mods that have done the same thing . I'd take the "Bone Sticks" mod over enchantments and potions any day. Tundra biomes have been fixed, but Taigas (pine forests) are still without snow. The nether ruins are a good addition, but the blazes are too hard in their current state. I much prefer the zombie-ghosts from Twilight Forest mod. Mooshrooms are idiotic, and the End is a very boring place. This list of changes for 1.9 is too long, and nothing on that list was really thought out properly.
I'm pretty happy with my statement that the game thrives today because of the mods. Minecraft has been immensely successful because it is new, not because it is good. Within the next year, I'm quite sure that a company who is actually good at game development will put out a clone that makes Minecraft nothing but a piece of forgotten gaming history. It won't take much, and there's a ton of profit for whichever studio can do it right. Indie games exist for this reason. They bring good ideas to light so that the mainstream studios pay attention.
I think Portal 2 is a much better game, but for every hour I've spent in it, I've spent 20 in Minecraft.
This is mis-placed credit, though. The recent changes to Minecraft have been uninteresting and poorly implemented. The real value is in the mods created by the user community. Without them, I would have quit playing a long time ago!
Your comment has gotten a lot of replies, but it seems to be missing some essential information.
How frequently did the person you watch die go for screenings with their type of cancer? Was that amount above or below the recommended amount? How much did they pay for those screenings? Could the cancer have been treated into remission if caught early? If they would have doubled the amount of screenings, would the cancer been caught early to prevent death?
My aunt died of ovarian cancer. It was caught early, but there are no magical treatments, and even though she endured intense chemotherapy that essentially destroyed her quality of life, it wasn't enough. I don't have enough facts and figures to know whether she would have been better off or worse with less screenings.
If tests were free and non-invasive, and early detection guaranteed successful treatment, then obviously we should be increasing the number of screenings. Your one line comment seems to make those assumptions. It's hard for any of us with just anecdotal evidence to know whether we are screening too much or too little. Making broad generalizations like yours are just not helpful.
Now that they've been interviewed on Slashdot, they can finally change their name to "They Who Are Giants".
I fully hope that a contract dispute with their label occurs that forces them to change their name to "The Artists Who Formally May Have Been Giants". At that point the most pedantic of their fans will ask if the former variableness of their Giant-status formally forbids their current Giant-status from still being variable.
The "perl users" referred to by the summary were in fact novices that had never used Perl before.
This is an example of how changing just a word or two makes an entirely different story.
Nice find! This is all that really matters.
I've always thought the $0.50 surcharge for HD was low enough to make the choice obvious. I never even looked at what DVDs they had.
Now that it is only a $0.30 difference, hopefully more of their customers will be using Blu-ray. And, hopefully that means that more of the stock in the machines will also be Blu-ray. For the first time ever, I'm a customer that is pleased with an increase in prices!
Technically Congressmen are also Senators.
Just as:
Of course even if he went to court and won, YouTube could still choose to take it down, due to the request of the record company.