1. It was always a basic human right. 2. Around the same time freedom of association became a basic human right. 3. Around the same time the idea of basic human rights developed.
As a matter of American law, it goes back at least as far as 1967 with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also mentions marriage:
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Why is the government involved pro or con with it to begin with?
By law and custom, marriage is a special relationship. It involves things like formalized joint property ownership, inheritance rights, power of attorney, and responsibility for and authority over children. Historically, marriage sometimes involved a legal union of two people into one person, with the woman's identity disappearing. (This is a bad thing and is no longer done in the U.S., but it was there.)
Why is it only limited to two people?
It may be possible to create a form of marriage that works for three people, but it's not necessarily straightforward. One example is automatic power of attorney when one partner is in the hospital and unable to make decisions. With a bilateral marriage, their spouse has full decision-making power. With a multilateral marriage, what do you do if two spouses disagree about treatment? I don't know if that's showstopping problem, but it doesn't exist in the context of gay marriage, which is functionally identical to straight marriage.
People here tend to forget that the UN is filled to the brim with corruption.
Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.
That their human rights body is chaired by countries with the worst human rights records -- and worse, that this is allowed to continue -- demonstrates why everything that comes out of the UN should be looked at with the greatest scepticism.
Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.
But computers in 2004 may have had a 20GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Today they have 2TB hard drives and 16GB of RAM.
But again, what about the OS needs to change to accommodate that? WinXP can handle 2 TB hard drives just fine. And 16 GB of RAM is neither common nor a necessity for most users. Best Buy still sells plenty of computers with 4 GB of RAM.
Now what we do (and did) need is a good 64-bit operating system, and XP-64 never fit the bill. But what are the alternatives? Vista was a mess. Win7 is good on newer hardware, but only the OEM versions are sold anymore. Today there's a choice between sticking with XP, buying Win8, or taking a chance on an eBay copy of Win7. I did the latter for my wife's computer, but it's hard to recommend for the general public.
I'm not disagreeing that we need to move on. But Microsoft has spent most of the last decade screwing up their upgrade path. Maybe if they stopped wildly redesigning the UI every time they put out a new OS, more people would have upgraded by now.
Computers in 2004 weren't all that different from today's computers, though. The AMD64 instruction set was out and consumer-level 64-bit CPUs were available. PCI Express and Serial ATA were standardized the previous year. DDR2 was in use, and you can still buy that today! The biggest changes in PC hardware since 2004 have been multi-core CPUs (which XP handles just fine) and solid state disks, which aren't exactly a compatibility killer. There have been a lot of huge changes in the mobile space, but that has nothing to do with XP. Virtualization is a big deal for servers now, but there are plenty of applications where it's irrelevant.
As a gamer, I upgraded to Win7 for hardware support and newer versions of DirectX. Aside from that, I didn't see a compelling reason to do so. It's not like I could suddenly do anything new with my computer. I can understand why people wouldn't want to shell out tons of money to upgrade. And then there are embedded applications. Where I work we have a ~$20k oscilloscope that runs XP. We're certainly not going to throw *that* out.
Maybe checking the status of an oven (or oven timer?) over the net is useful, but there's no reason to allow the network to turn it on. Separate device control from device status at the hardware level, and you at least keep people's houses from burning down.
It's teaching a shortcut for doing arithmetic -- one that's easy to do in your head, in fact. The idea is to do the subtraction in pieces by getting to round numbers. So in the example, 15 - 7, you start by getting to 10 (15 - 5 = 10), then you have 2 more left from 7 so you subtract that too (10 - 2 = 8).
The end result gives you 15 - 5 - 2, but to write it that way you have to already know how to break up the 7. Doing it one equation at a time lets you apply the method to larger numbers.
When people buy Channel 5 perfume, or a Dior bag, they do not buy a perfume or a bag, they buy a marketing image.
Fluke isn't selling a style or a marketing image or any other form of consumer entertainment. They're selling high-quality multimeters. The style is to make their products look distinctive. The impounded products we're talking about here clone the style, but not the quality. It's the total opposite of media piracy or knock-off perfume, where the end product is identical.
No, you don't understand, this thing looks *exactly* like a Fluke. It's not just that they used the color yellow, it's that the shape and coloring are similar enough to be misleading. Without a clear view of the label at the top, a lot of people would think it was a Fluke. I applaud SparkFun for wanting to sell cheap multimeters, but I've seen plenty of other $15-30 multimeters and none of them looked like a grey market clones of an existing product line.
Yet, [Houston doesn't] have the pollution problem of Paris, LA, Mexico City, or Beijing.
Are you sure we don't? I looked at some EPA data, and it seems like on our bad days (in August) we're up in the particulate range that Paris is in now. We also have a lot of trouble with ozone. I'm pretty sure LA's air quality is better than ours now, or at least was for several years.
I don't think comparing Houston to Mexico City or Beijing makes sense. They have a lot more people crammed into a smaller space with worse cars.
There is no center. The expansion happens everywhere at once. A mediocre but helpful analogy is to the surface of an expanding balloon. Imagine drawing a bunch of dots on the surface. As the balloon expands, every dot moves farther from every other dot. There is no center -- or rather, *every* point looks like a center.
(Note that in this analogy, the universe is the *surface* of the balloon only. The 3D expansion of the balloon has a center, but the 2D stretching of the surface does not. It's a bit confusing, which is why it's a mediocre analogy.)
What I'm saying is, I don't think that even if the missiles were headed this way, Obama still wouldn't have the guts to give the order for a counter-strike.
He doesn't have to actually do it. All he has to do is project enough uncertainty to stop Russia from launching a first strike. That's enough for MAD.
Personally, if the missiles were in the air, I wouldn't actually retaliate, at least not massively. If the U.S. is already doomed, what benefit is there from killing 140 million Russians, almost none of whom had any say in the launch decision? We couldn't even enjoy watching Russia burn, since their missiles will arrive first. Maybe I'd launch a couple missiles at Moscow to try to decapitate their government.
I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.
I've been going back and forth on this. I keep hearing it's really good, but I hate having to reinstall Origin for one game. I wish EA would stop holding their games hostage. But wishing for EA to be less greedy is pretty hopeless.
Interns, sure. But internships are often done through colleges that the company has a relationship with. Once you graduate, those opportunities are gone.
Society needs revenge for certain crimes, for the sake of all our mental health. When we see evil people going unpunished, or even rewarded, it depresses us. Can you provide any rationale for why we should care so much about the comfort of a serial killer? Try to do so without appealing to some mystical, absolutist morality. Good luck.
Your premises are flawed, but I'll answer anyway. Solitary confinement cannot be societal revenge because it's not publicized at all. What society sees is an arrest, a public trial, and a prison sentence. Extra disciplinary punishments inflicted by prison guards are not public and do not involve due process of law. If solitary confinement is overused (as the article says), then it stops being discipline and starts being extrajudicial torture. That's obviously bad.
(If you don't see how extrajudicial torture is obviously bad, then let me tell you about this great deal you can get on 8x10 ft apartments...)
You have your credibility backwards. Blue's News predates Wikipedia by five years. It's not as big a deal as it used to be, but it's still a good news aggregator for video games. It's got useful information in a lightweight, text-focused design that doesn't arbitrarily change every 18 months.
Oops, I was looking at the first link and didn't even notice the video embedded in the Slashdot article. My comment is about the video in the Orlando Sentinel article.
The video is almost five minutes long and mostly computer animations. Actual footage of the moon can be found in three segments:
2:13 - 2:23 Examples of previous impact flashes 3:00 - 3:08 Full-speed MIDAS video of the big flash 3:20 - 3:30 Slow motion MIDAS video of the big flash
Duke Nukem Forever, too, I actually quite enjoyed and really just found how deep they dipped into the toilet humor to be regrettable... well that and the dream sequence level.
I interpreted the completed and polished parts of DNF as a brilliant satire on modern FPS games, with tongue-in-cheek "explanations" for things like regenerating health and bad vehicle controls. The commentary on the role of NPCs was particularly excellent. I think I'm the only one who interpreted it that way, though.
They were both excellent and revolutionary, but also very different games. Deus Ex was more dialog based, while HL2 focused more on visual storytelling. Deus Ex had a series of self-contained locations, while HL2 gave the illusion of a continuous journey. Deus Ex let you influence the story, while HL2 plunged you into a flow of events beyond your control. I love both of them, but one is not a substitute for the other.
Nope. Trespasser was.
Oops, forgot about Trespasser. Not a great example, but a legitimate one. Thank you for the correction.
It still compares favorably with AAA shooters released in the last year.
You have got to be kidding. The Doom 3 engine is vastly superior to Source in every way.
I'm talking about the game, not the engine. But in terms of graphics, HL2 does have a distinctive and well-executed visual style that still stands up today.
Speak for yourself.
I did. That's why I started the sentence with "personally". I'm glad we can both find games that we like.
Not to that extent. The skyhook tracks in Bioshock Infinite at least had different shapes. I'm glad you enjoyed Doom 3 more than I did, though.
It's a FPS, what did you expect? You go in. You shoot monsters or bad guys, and kill the boss at the end.
Even in 2004, there was more to it than that. Wikipedia has a list of shooters that you can sort by release date. Looking at 2003-2004, I see:
* Unreal 2, which had a hub-based mission structure with consistent secondary characters. (I liked it, but nobody else did.) * Vietcong, which tried to capture the feel of the Vietnam War (and did okay, IMHO). It was also one of the first games to allow iron sight aiming instead of crosshairs. * Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi, which I didn't play but I know had randomly-generated environments. * Far Cry, which had semi-open world gameplay with stealth mechanics, plus a cool setting and okay story.
Going farther back, we have games like NOLF2 (comedy), Battlefield 1942 (vehicles galore), the first Aliens vs. Predator (play as an alien), System Shock 2 and Deus Ex (action RPGs), etc. So there was quite a lot of precedent for shooters being more than running and shooting around the time Doom 3 came out.
I disagree. The recent Serious Sam releases were great, and showed that the old-school FPSs formula still makes for a good game in today's world. Fast paced, lots of shooting, and meaningless plot.
Thank you for providing a counterpoint. My memory of the first Serious Sam mostly involves running backwards in circles, but I know a lot of people enjoyed it.
1. It was way too dark. They designed it to show off John Carmack's fancy new real-time lighting engine, but went too far. You couldn't use a flashlight and a weapon at the same time, which was ridiculous and broke suspension of disbelief. (One of the first mods was called "Duct Tape", and did exactly what you'd expect.)
2. The gameplay was repetitive. Every time you found a lit hallway with an item at the end, you knew that taking the item would cause the lights to go out and monsters to appear from behind hidden doors. This happened way too often, further breaking suspension of disbelief.
3. The story wasn't very exciting. It's Doom. You already knew what was going on before you even started the game.
4. Half-Life 2 came out three months later and revolutionized first-person shooters, particularly in the area of in-game storytelling. It was also the first (?) FPS to have a real physics engine with interactive environments. It still compares favorably with AAA shooters released in the last year. Doom 3 seemed mediocre by itself, but in comparison it looked even worse.
That's the history. Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. It is to first-person shooters what Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). All Doom's got are space marines and monsters, which is the same recipe that ruins most of the Aliens games. But that's another rant...
Slashdot Mirror
When did marriage become a basic human right?
There are many possible answers to that:
1. It was always a basic human right.
2. Around the same time freedom of association became a basic human right.
3. Around the same time the idea of basic human rights developed.
As a matter of American law, it goes back at least as far as 1967 with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also mentions marriage:
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Why is the government involved pro or con with it to begin with?
By law and custom, marriage is a special relationship. It involves things like formalized joint property ownership, inheritance rights, power of attorney, and responsibility for and authority over children. Historically, marriage sometimes involved a legal union of two people into one person, with the woman's identity disappearing. (This is a bad thing and is no longer done in the U.S., but it was there.)
Why is it only limited to two people?
It may be possible to create a form of marriage that works for three people, but it's not necessarily straightforward. One example is automatic power of attorney when one partner is in the hospital and unable to make decisions. With a bilateral marriage, their spouse has full decision-making power. With a multilateral marriage, what do you do if two spouses disagree about treatment? I don't know if that's showstopping problem, but it doesn't exist in the context of gay marriage, which is functionally identical to straight marriage.
People here tend to forget that the UN is filled to the brim with corruption.
Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.
That their human rights body is chaired by countries with the worst human rights records -- and worse, that this is allowed to continue -- demonstrates why everything that comes out of the UN should be looked at with the greatest scepticism.
Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.
But computers in 2004 may have had a 20GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Today they have 2TB hard drives and 16GB of RAM.
But again, what about the OS needs to change to accommodate that? WinXP can handle 2 TB hard drives just fine. And 16 GB of RAM is neither common nor a necessity for most users. Best Buy still sells plenty of computers with 4 GB of RAM.
Now what we do (and did) need is a good 64-bit operating system, and XP-64 never fit the bill. But what are the alternatives? Vista was a mess. Win7 is good on newer hardware, but only the OEM versions are sold anymore. Today there's a choice between sticking with XP, buying Win8, or taking a chance on an eBay copy of Win7. I did the latter for my wife's computer, but it's hard to recommend for the general public.
I'm not disagreeing that we need to move on. But Microsoft has spent most of the last decade screwing up their upgrade path. Maybe if they stopped wildly redesigning the UI every time they put out a new OS, more people would have upgraded by now.
Computers in 2004 weren't all that different from today's computers, though. The AMD64 instruction set was out and consumer-level 64-bit CPUs were available. PCI Express and Serial ATA were standardized the previous year. DDR2 was in use, and you can still buy that today! The biggest changes in PC hardware since 2004 have been multi-core CPUs (which XP handles just fine) and solid state disks, which aren't exactly a compatibility killer. There have been a lot of huge changes in the mobile space, but that has nothing to do with XP. Virtualization is a big deal for servers now, but there are plenty of applications where it's irrelevant.
As a gamer, I upgraded to Win7 for hardware support and newer versions of DirectX. Aside from that, I didn't see a compelling reason to do so. It's not like I could suddenly do anything new with my computer. I can understand why people wouldn't want to shell out tons of money to upgrade. And then there are embedded applications. Where I work we have a ~$20k oscilloscope that runs XP. We're certainly not going to throw *that* out.
Maybe checking the status of an oven (or oven timer?) over the net is useful, but there's no reason to allow the network to turn it on. Separate device control from device status at the hardware level, and you at least keep people's houses from burning down.
It's teaching a shortcut for doing arithmetic -- one that's easy to do in your head, in fact. The idea is to do the subtraction in pieces by getting to round numbers. So in the example, 15 - 7, you start by getting to 10 (15 - 5 = 10), then you have 2 more left from 7 so you subtract that too (10 - 2 = 8).
The end result gives you 15 - 5 - 2, but to write it that way you have to already know how to break up the 7. Doing it one equation at a time lets you apply the method to larger numbers.
When people buy Channel 5 perfume, or a Dior bag, they do not buy a perfume or a bag, they buy a marketing image.
Fluke isn't selling a style or a marketing image or any other form of consumer entertainment. They're selling high-quality multimeters. The style is to make their products look distinctive. The impounded products we're talking about here clone the style, but not the quality. It's the total opposite of media piracy or knock-off perfume, where the end product is identical.
No, you don't understand, this thing looks *exactly* like a Fluke. It's not just that they used the color yellow, it's that the shape and coloring are similar enough to be misleading. Without a clear view of the label at the top, a lot of people would think it was a Fluke. I applaud SparkFun for wanting to sell cheap multimeters, but I've seen plenty of other $15-30 multimeters and none of them looked like a grey market clones of an existing product line.
Yet, [Houston doesn't] have the pollution problem of Paris, LA, Mexico City, or Beijing.
Are you sure we don't? I looked at some EPA data, and it seems like on our bad days (in August) we're up in the particulate range that Paris is in now. We also have a lot of trouble with ozone. I'm pretty sure LA's air quality is better than ours now, or at least was for several years.
I don't think comparing Houston to Mexico City or Beijing makes sense. They have a lot more people crammed into a smaller space with worse cars.
There is no center. The expansion happens everywhere at once. A mediocre but helpful analogy is to the surface of an expanding balloon. Imagine drawing a bunch of dots on the surface. As the balloon expands, every dot moves farther from every other dot. There is no center -- or rather, *every* point looks like a center.
(Note that in this analogy, the universe is the *surface* of the balloon only. The 3D expansion of the balloon has a center, but the 2D stretching of the surface does not. It's a bit confusing, which is why it's a mediocre analogy.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
What I'm saying is, I don't think that even if the missiles were headed this way, Obama still wouldn't have the guts to give the order for a counter-strike.
He doesn't have to actually do it. All he has to do is project enough uncertainty to stop Russia from launching a first strike. That's enough for MAD.
Personally, if the missiles were in the air, I wouldn't actually retaliate, at least not massively. If the U.S. is already doomed, what benefit is there from killing 140 million Russians, almost none of whom had any say in the launch decision? We couldn't even enjoy watching Russia burn, since their missiles will arrive first. Maybe I'd launch a couple missiles at Moscow to try to decapitate their government.
You pay property taxes on a yearly basis, and death taxes when you die.
Technically, *you* don't pay anything -- you're dead. The people receiving unearned income from your estate pay the taxes.
I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.
I've been going back and forth on this. I keep hearing it's really good, but I hate having to reinstall Origin for one game. I wish EA would stop holding their games hostage. But wishing for EA to be less greedy is pretty hopeless.
Currently at #1: Rush Limbaugh's self-insert U.S. history fanfic.
I swear to you I am not making this up.
Perhaps Randall should pass on publicizing this particular honor.
Interns, sure. But internships are often done through colleges that the company has a relationship with. Once you graduate, those opportunities are gone.
Society needs revenge for certain crimes, for the sake of all our mental health. When we see evil people going unpunished, or even rewarded, it depresses us. Can you provide any rationale for why we should care so much about the comfort of a serial killer? Try to do so without appealing to some mystical, absolutist morality. Good luck.
Your premises are flawed, but I'll answer anyway. Solitary confinement cannot be societal revenge because it's not publicized at all. What society sees is an arrest, a public trial, and a prison sentence. Extra disciplinary punishments inflicted by prison guards are not public and do not involve due process of law. If solitary confinement is overused (as the article says), then it stops being discipline and starts being extrajudicial torture. That's obviously bad.
(If you don't see how extrajudicial torture is obviously bad, then let me tell you about this great deal you can get on 8x10 ft apartments...)
Oh look, a bank-like entity failed and people lost money. Good thing the FDIC is there to--
Oops.
If cryptocurrencies are going to repeat the last 100+ years of economic history, can they hurry up and rediscover monetary policy too?
You have your credibility backwards. Blue's News predates Wikipedia by five years. It's not as big a deal as it used to be, but it's still a good news aggregator for video games. It's got useful information in a lightweight, text-focused design that doesn't arbitrarily change every 18 months.
Oops, I was looking at the first link and didn't even notice the video embedded in the Slashdot article. My comment is about the video in the Orlando Sentinel article.
The video is almost five minutes long and mostly computer animations. Actual footage of the moon can be found in three segments:
2:13 - 2:23 Examples of previous impact flashes
3:00 - 3:08 Full-speed MIDAS video of the big flash
3:20 - 3:30 Slow motion MIDAS video of the big flash
Duke Nukem Forever, too, I actually quite enjoyed and really just found how deep they dipped into the toilet humor to be regrettable... well that and the dream sequence level.
I interpreted the completed and polished parts of DNF as a brilliant satire on modern FPS games, with tongue-in-cheek "explanations" for things like regenerating health and bad vehicle controls. The commentary on the role of NPCs was particularly excellent. I think I'm the only one who interpreted it that way, though.
No it didn't. Deus Ex did.
They were both excellent and revolutionary, but also very different games. Deus Ex was more dialog based, while HL2 focused more on visual storytelling. Deus Ex had a series of self-contained locations, while HL2 gave the illusion of a continuous journey. Deus Ex let you influence the story, while HL2 plunged you into a flow of events beyond your control. I love both of them, but one is not a substitute for the other.
Nope. Trespasser was.
Oops, forgot about Trespasser. Not a great example, but a legitimate one. Thank you for the correction.
It still compares favorably with AAA shooters released in the last year.
You have got to be kidding. The Doom 3 engine is vastly superior to Source in every way.
I'm talking about the game, not the engine. But in terms of graphics, HL2 does have a distinctive and well-executed visual style that still stands up today.
Speak for yourself.
I did. That's why I started the sentence with "personally". I'm glad we can both find games that we like.
2. The gameplay was repetitive.
Isn't every game?
Not to that extent. The skyhook tracks in Bioshock Infinite at least had different shapes. I'm glad you enjoyed Doom 3 more than I did, though.
It's a FPS, what did you expect? You go in. You shoot monsters or bad guys, and kill the boss at the end.
Even in 2004, there was more to it than that. Wikipedia has a list of shooters that you can sort by release date. Looking at 2003-2004, I see:
* Unreal 2, which had a hub-based mission structure with consistent secondary characters. (I liked it, but nobody else did.)
* Vietcong, which tried to capture the feel of the Vietnam War (and did okay, IMHO). It was also one of the first games to allow iron sight aiming instead of crosshairs.
* Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi, which I didn't play but I know had randomly-generated environments.
* Far Cry, which had semi-open world gameplay with stealth mechanics, plus a cool setting and okay story.
Going farther back, we have games like NOLF2 (comedy), Battlefield 1942 (vehicles galore), the first Aliens vs. Predator (play as an alien), System Shock 2 and Deus Ex (action RPGs), etc. So there was quite a lot of precedent for shooters being more than running and shooting around the time Doom 3 came out.
I disagree. The recent Serious Sam releases were great, and showed that the old-school FPSs formula still makes for a good game in today's world. Fast paced, lots of shooting, and meaningless plot.
Thank you for providing a counterpoint. My memory of the first Serious Sam mostly involves running backwards in circles, but I know a lot of people enjoyed it.
1. It was way too dark. They designed it to show off John Carmack's fancy new real-time lighting engine, but went too far. You couldn't use a flashlight and a weapon at the same time, which was ridiculous and broke suspension of disbelief. (One of the first mods was called "Duct Tape", and did exactly what you'd expect.)
2. The gameplay was repetitive. Every time you found a lit hallway with an item at the end, you knew that taking the item would cause the lights to go out and monsters to appear from behind hidden doors. This happened way too often, further breaking suspension of disbelief.
3. The story wasn't very exciting. It's Doom. You already knew what was going on before you even started the game.
4. Half-Life 2 came out three months later and revolutionized first-person shooters, particularly in the area of in-game storytelling. It was also the first (?) FPS to have a real physics engine with interactive environments. It still compares favorably with AAA shooters released in the last year. Doom 3 seemed mediocre by itself, but in comparison it looked even worse.
That's the history. Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. It is to first-person shooters what Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). All Doom's got are space marines and monsters, which is the same recipe that ruins most of the Aliens games. But that's another rant...