> Actually, you really didn't need to read any farther > than this to know you were about to get an eye-full of hysterical bullshit:
Greenpeace themselves admit the trial is badly flawed:
Greenpeace said the Russian trials were also badly flawed. Half of the rats in the trial died, and results were taken from those that survived, in breach of normal scientific practice.
Why is this flawed? Perhaps those that died were more susceptible for some reason. For all you know, fewer GM'd rats died, merely "almost dying", but leaving those that lived in worse shape.
In any case, more trials would be needed. I recall people getting all bothered about Olestra because some people would get abdominal cramps, and it turns out it causes a whisker less cramping than eating normal chips did.
> from Planetfall to Fable to Beyond Good & Evil to Deus Ex
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is an excellent example of "lose to win". I'll be in the middle of battle vs. a monster or something, when suddenly the monster casts a spell on me -- the world turns into a swirl of colors and my character is frozen, unable to move. My sight cannot even see what is going on -- there's nothing but bright colors striping across the screen and crazy sounds coming out the speaker, but I know the monster is still beating on me.
Eventually I get bored as the spell never wears off, so shut down my computer. I log back on, and I am dead, standing back in the village at my bind spot. The strangest part: every single monster has this spell, though I only seem to encounter one that casts it every 15-45 minutes or so, rarely any longer than that. I've even seen monsters cast it on me from behind when running around in town, at least I assume so though I have never seen them.
Gods, the unending brutal graphic violence of "Loom" still haunts me in the wee hours of the night. Some times I still wake up screaming. Sometimes there is blood on my pillow as I realize I have bitten through my upper lip.
I don't. It may be highly polished, but it's just another in a long line of games where you scour the world looking for stuff. After failing to rescue Captain Picard, I wandered out into the world and thought, wth, now what? Indeed, it's non-linear gameplay seemed a drawback at that point. Now what? I don't have the time sink to scour the entire world looking in every last nook and cranny for that one little dodad to power up.
I've been doing this going back to the original D&D gold box games and Might and Magic. I'm done with it. I prefer the technically open but much more linear games like KotoR or an RTS (not that there have been any good ones since Sacrifice five years ago...)
Isn't this lowballing, and thus illegal (even if unintentional)?
How does "oops, we charged too little, send it back or let us charge you more" differ from "Well, I went in back to talk to the boss, and I promised you too low a price, I will lose my job unless you pay a little bit more"?
PLEASE don't pull a KoToR II lamer by making us "Jedi" from the start (which is good) but keeping us from getting a light saber for 1/3 the game. Someone needs a slap!
And please make the light sabers power-uppable with crystals and whatnot like KoToR. That, too, is sweet.
Here's how to fix the problem. When such a page would be linked to in the cach, instead put up the following:
This page is cached, but your government officials will not let you read it. Here are their names and addresses, and the date of the next election, and the challengers to them who have signed a document that they will reverse this ruling if elected:
Censor: Hercule Poirot Free Speech Challenger: Agatha Christie Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007
Censor: Phinneas d'Satay Free Speech Challenger: Mannequin Pisse Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007
etc.
Tailor it per local region if that can be determined from the IP.
[Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Sarcastic Nobody's Listening Mode] Stop. Don't do it. Accidently inducing an ice age will kill billions of people.[/sarcasm]
- You could play a dragon in addition to the regular classes and races. A dragon would take over 2 years to get to full strength, but when they did, they'd be an even match for any other 3 maxed out characters. A dragon would build a lair and assemble a horde of loot, and this would attract adventurers (these other chars) to try to come take it from you.
- Like City of Heroes, it was to have full, true 3D movement. Many races could fly, and by fly, I don't mean just hover a few feet above the ground, but otherwise stuck to the ground like in most games (with the accordingly idiotic concept that there are some hills too steep to fly up.:rollseyes) Magic would also allow flight.
- Races of radically different size, from giant dragons to tiny pixie-like things. (Personally, I got highly irritated at EverQuest when they re-did their models, getting rid of the "fatty" ogres and trolls and replacing them with more normal humanoid forms and making that the default view, even if the old way was still optional as a setting. That's when EQ jumped the shark in my opinion.) I have seen very few games where the "many races" like gnomes, dwarves, and elves, weren't just scaled and thickened or thinned normal numan bodies. The vast majority of games still don't understand this. WoW partly gets it with gnomes, and CoH with the "huge" body style and the "squiddies", but that's about it. If they even do a "radically" different race, it's usually just a cat head on a human body (e.g. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes).
- Construction of buildings, including tunneling underground.
1. That's only because some people playing the "politician" class have made it impossible for other politicians to legally kill off their political enemies.
Owning corporations, multi-million dollar penthouse apartments in New York and Paris, and hillside mansions in California, with gorgeous uberbabes lying around your built-in pool sucks?
I think you mean the PHAT LOOT is much harder to come by because real life isn't set on "don't hurt me daddy" difficulty level.
Well, if a physics experiment is to destroy the Earth/universe, I would expect this as much more likely than accidentally creating a black hole/strange matter/lower energy state matter that consumes the Earth.
Seriously.
From a computational standpoint, quantum mechanics, behind the scenes, could be running (us in a virtual world) that is completely deterministic. So this would stress that computer possibly beyond the breaking point, "crashing" this world. Or, alternatively, it will fail miserably as that super-reality-computer handles it gracefully, which would also be of extreme interest to us. Or perhaps digital computers, or what passes for them in that world, can operate many times faster than here, and such calculations (like the perfect game of chess) might be trivially quick there.
Analyzing the picture, based on unalterable (or probably unaltered) features like the center of the eye and the bottom of the top incisors, the heights of the pictures are identical to within a pixel or so. But the width (outer edge of eye openings) differs by about 8%. The left one is 118 pixels and the right one is 109. This means that you can select the right one in MS paint and "stretch/skew" it horontally by 118/109 = 108% and get the proper scaling.
It does look a little surprised-looking still, but it's really just kind of more like Lynne Russel, Uberbabe, from CNN. And, quite frankly, you'll find a hard time even searching Hollywood for a better looking face than that. One would also have to catch her unawares to make sure she wasn't deliberately going wide-eyed here.
Apparently he also changed the shape of her skull, enlongating it, and thus amplifying the "surprised" look.
The surgeon may have a legitimate beef here. Especially if she's deliberately wide-eyed in the second shot, and that's not just the surgeon changing the shape of the eye openings in addition to the brows.
> I'd hit it.
That goes without saying, before or after. Any girl with creamy white skin and black or very dark brown hair is hot, even if ugly, and she's far from that.
That's not funny, man. I dropped my kid off at a Saturday "play Warhammer in the back room of a hobby shop" day. When I went to pick him up, that place was stink-kee, and it wasn't him! Phew! Those high school and college boys need to bathe before coming down.
Well, thank goodness they'd need a warrant at least to look at these new records.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
Well, at least there aren't top-secret huge pipes going from the larger providers directly into NSA and CIA supercomputer centers.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
You ever wonder if the larger service providers are exchanging the government allowing the "two-tiered Internet" thing in exchange for the pipes? No, the government is looking out for our best interests, not looking to extort spy ports out of businesses.
> I seem to recall there was a freezing effect on the bosses when > you used the holy water. It is awesome for Frankenstein
Sigh. Gotta love game designers. Frankenstein('s monster) is undead, but he's not an unholy undead!
He's resurrected using electricity to reanimate him. That's the whole point! Hence holy water wouldn't work on him -- it's a mechanical, physical reanimation without "life force" or "spirituality" or whatever, as opposed to skeletons or zombies (which have disturbed spirits bound to them) or vampires (which still have their own but the body has died), which both thus would be affected by holy water.
Man, I haven't been this upset at a game goof since EverQuest allowed monks to not have a patron god.
Slashdot Mirror
> than this to know you were about to get an eye-full of hysterical bullshit:
Greenpeace themselves admit the trial is badly flawed:
Why is this flawed? Perhaps those that died were more susceptible for some reason. For all you know, fewer GM'd rats died, merely "almost dying", but leaving those that lived in worse shape.
In any case, more trials would be needed. I recall people getting all bothered about Olestra because some people would get abdominal cramps, and it turns out it causes a whisker less cramping than eating normal chips did.
> from Planetfall to Fable to Beyond Good & Evil to Deus Ex
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is an excellent example of "lose to win". I'll be in the middle of battle vs. a monster or something, when suddenly the monster casts a spell on me -- the world turns into a swirl of colors and my character is frozen, unable to move. My sight cannot even see what is going on -- there's nothing but bright colors striping across the screen and crazy sounds coming out the speaker, but I know the monster is still beating on me.
Eventually I get bored as the spell never wears off, so shut down my computer. I log back on, and I am dead, standing back in the village at my bind spot. The strangest part: every single monster has this spell, though I only seem to encounter one that casts it every 15-45 minutes or so, rarely any longer than that. I've even seen monsters cast it on me from behind when running around in town, at least I assume so though I have never seen them.
> even those from Lucas Films Games
Gods, the unending brutal graphic violence of "Loom" still haunts me in the wee hours of the night. Some times I still wake up screaming. Sometimes there is blood on my pillow as I realize I have bitten through my upper lip.
"I told ya not to hard code it in there."
Just be glad we aren't on "war time" or something like that.
"Here's your official platform"
Three months later
Sony, or MS, or Atari, or someone: Here's a better one, and a bunch of games?
Now what?
Comission: We legally put you out of business. Stop it or go to jail.
Is this the world you want? Not me, pal.
> I think Oblivion handled this well
I don't. It may be highly polished, but it's just another in a long line of games where you scour the world looking for stuff. After failing to rescue Captain Picard, I wandered out into the world and thought, wth, now what? Indeed, it's non-linear gameplay seemed a drawback at that point. Now what? I don't have the time sink to scour the entire world looking in every last nook and cranny for that one little dodad to power up.
I've been doing this going back to the original D&D gold box games and Might and Magic. I'm done with it. I prefer the technically open but much more linear games like KotoR or an RTS (not that there have been any good ones since Sacrifice five years ago...)
Particles with far more energy collide with the Earth, Sun, and Moon for billions of years and we're all still here.
Isn't this lowballing, and thus illegal (even if unintentional)?
How does "oops, we charged too little, send it back or let us charge you more" differ from "Well, I went in back to talk to the boss, and I promised you too low a price, I will lose my job unless you pay a little bit more"?
> Quantum Computer Demoed, Plays Sudoku
Meh. I'll believe it when I'm simulated by it.
WTF difference does it make whether people screw off surfing from work "at home" instead of work? Why would the data rates change?
PLEASE don't pull a KoToR II lamer by making us "Jedi" from the start (which is good) but keeping us from getting a light saber for 1/3 the game. Someone needs a slap!
And please make the light sabers power-uppable with crystals and whatnot like KoToR. That, too, is sweet.
Here's how to fix the problem. When such a page would be linked to in the cach, instead put up the following:
This page is cached, but your government officials will not let you read it. Here are their names and addresses, and the date of the next election, and the challengers to them who have signed a document that they will reverse this ruling if elected:
Censor: Hercule Poirot
Free Speech Challenger: Agatha Christie
Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007
Censor: Phinneas d'Satay
Free Speech Challenger: Mannequin Pisse
Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007
etc.
Tailor it per local region if that can be determined from the IP.
9) Wait a few years
10) Profit!
I want my Glamdring! Me big warrior! I'm gonna be a ranger and slaughter people like Aragorn!
"Ok, sir. Here's your wiffle bat."
WTF is this? WTF do you mean Frodo the thief outdamages Aragorn!??!?! Who the F*** DESIGNED THIS GOD D***** POS?!?!?
(wiff wiff)
"Oh, casters can outdamage you, too."
What casters? The two greatest casters in the entire world, Gandalf and Saruman, could barely whip up a fireball or induce a small local avalanch.
"And we won't even get into the bards."
WTF is a bard?!?!? There are no bards in Lord of the Rings. Why is my sword so weak?!? Why!
[Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Sarcastic Nobody's Listening Mode] Stop. Don't do it. Accidently inducing an ice age will kill billions of people.[/sarcasm]
Some highlights from my memory:
:rollseyes) Magic would also allow flight.
- You could play a dragon in addition to the regular classes and races. A dragon would take over 2 years to get to full strength, but when they did, they'd be an even match for any other 3 maxed out characters. A dragon would build a lair and assemble a horde of loot, and this would attract adventurers (these other chars) to try to come take it from you.
- Like City of Heroes, it was to have full, true 3D movement. Many races could fly, and by fly, I don't mean just hover a few feet above the ground, but otherwise stuck to the ground like in most games (with the accordingly idiotic concept that there are some hills too steep to fly up.
- Races of radically different size, from giant dragons to tiny pixie-like things. (Personally, I got highly irritated at EverQuest when they re-did their models, getting rid of the "fatty" ogres and trolls and replacing them with more normal humanoid forms and making that the default view, even if the old way was still optional as a setting. That's when EQ jumped the shark in my opinion.) I have seen very few games where the "many races" like gnomes, dwarves, and elves, weren't just scaled and thickened or thinned normal numan bodies. The vast majority of games still don't understand this. WoW partly gets it with gnomes, and CoH with the "huge" body style and the "squiddies", but that's about it. If they even do a "radically" different race, it's usually just a cat head on a human body (e.g. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes).
- Construction of buildings, including tunneling underground.
1. That's only because some people playing the "politician" class have made it impossible for other politicians to legally kill off their political enemies.
2. How do you know you can't reroll?
> Yeah, but the PHAT LOOT sucks ;-)
Owning corporations, multi-million dollar penthouse apartments in New York and Paris, and hillside mansions in California, with gorgeous uberbabes lying around your built-in pool sucks?
I think you mean the PHAT LOOT is much harder to come by because real life isn't set on "don't hurt me daddy" difficulty level.
Well, if a physics experiment is to destroy the Earth/universe, I would expect this as much more likely than accidentally creating a black hole/strange matter/lower energy state matter that consumes the Earth.
Seriously.
From a computational standpoint, quantum mechanics, behind the scenes, could be running (us in a virtual world) that is completely deterministic. So this would stress that computer possibly beyond the breaking point, "crashing" this world. Or, alternatively, it will fail miserably as that super-reality-computer handles it gracefully, which would also be of extreme interest to us. Or perhaps digital computers, or what passes for them in that world, can operate many times faster than here, and such calculations (like the perfect game of chess) might be trivially quick there.
Ok, gotta pull out the Dilbert in me here...
Analyzing the picture, based on unalterable (or probably unaltered) features like the center of the eye and the bottom of the top incisors, the heights of the pictures are identical to within a pixel or so. But the width (outer edge of eye openings) differs by about 8%. The left one is 118 pixels and the right one is 109. This means that you can select the right one in MS paint and "stretch/skew" it horontally by 118/109 = 108% and get the proper scaling.
It does look a little surprised-looking still, but it's really just kind of more like Lynne Russel, Uberbabe, from CNN. And, quite frankly, you'll find a hard time even searching Hollywood for a better looking face than that. One would also have to catch her unawares to make sure she wasn't deliberately going wide-eyed here.
Apparently he also changed the shape of her skull, enlongating it, and thus amplifying the "surprised" look.
The surgeon may have a legitimate beef here. Especially if she's deliberately wide-eyed in the second shot, and that's not just the surgeon changing the shape of the eye openings in addition to the brows.
> I'd hit it.
That goes without saying, before or after. Any girl with creamy white skin and black or very dark brown hair is hot, even if ugly, and she's far from that.
...although statistically you would probably have much more reason to doubt it was a fair coin than that you just got lucky 1000 times in a row.
Actually a world with (water) oceans is loaded with oxygen, and probably does have a lot in the atmosphere too.
That's not funny, man. I dropped my kid off at a Saturday "play Warhammer in the back room of a hobby shop" day. When I went to pick him up, that place was stink-kee, and it wasn't him! Phew! Those high school and college boys need to bathe before coming down.
Well, thank goodness they'd need a warrant at least to look at these new records.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
Well, at least there aren't top-secret huge pipes going from the larger providers directly into NSA and CIA supercomputer centers.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
You ever wonder if the larger service providers are exchanging the government allowing the "two-tiered Internet" thing in exchange for the pipes? No, the government is looking out for our best interests, not looking to extort spy ports out of businesses.
> I seem to recall there was a freezing effect on the bosses when
> you used the holy water. It is awesome for Frankenstein
Sigh. Gotta love game designers. Frankenstein('s monster) is undead, but he's not an unholy undead!
He's resurrected using electricity to reanimate him. That's the whole point! Hence holy water wouldn't work on him -- it's a mechanical, physical reanimation without "life force" or "spirituality" or whatever, as opposed to skeletons or zombies (which have disturbed spirits bound to them) or vampires (which still have their own but the body has died), which both thus would be affected by holy water.
Man, I haven't been this upset at a game goof since EverQuest allowed monks to not have a patron god.