NYT website front page has been in a state of flux all morning. The initial story was heavily centered on ROTK. We'll have to wait for evening or tomorrow to see what story(s) they decide on.
- side note: When you have a word like "story" how do you properly signal that it might be multiple. "story(s)" or "story(ies)". I know as tempted as it is to all of you, please avoid diving into RegEx.
I'll give you a 1/10 possibility that Clinton was a rapist. There's certaintly not enough evidence that I'm going to convict him of it. He also was not an accessory to murder, no matter how much right wing radio wants to make him out to be. It's an irresponsible claim, are many of the claims about Bush.
I won't defend Clinton as being an ideal person. His a liar and a cheat. I will say that he did a pretty good job leading the country, making peace across the world, etc.
Read some quality left wings books, I'm starting to appreciate the right wing variety.
Being able to set the settings in UT myself was great for me as well. But, I was fairly hardcore at the time. I had played at college extensively and when I went back home for the summer (no broadband), I thought my skills would rot. Playing against pretty even competition, they did to some degree. That's when I set the bots to their highest level. My game improved dramatically because it had to. I was crisper at finding cover, and more accurate in my shooting. By the end of the summer, I was finding myself dodging a rocket, a jumping off a ledge, and turning mid-air to head shot a bot who was mid-air and at range with the sniper rifle.
Because I was playing at too hard of a difficulty level, I got better. Don't take that option away from me.
Disclaimer: The following is half joke - sadly it's only half.
It's just beyond their imagination that someone other than them could do a decent job at it. So when somebody makes the president look bad, and may even endager their continued power, that person risks the success of the war on terror. I would cite Bush's coments in the State of the Union speach suggesting that not reelecting him would effectively give up on the war on terror. Discouraging behavior that could cause a loss of Rupublican power must be done at any cost, even one that presents a set back to the war.
Spying on Democrats is a natural and proper course of action then. It's almost a shame the CIA won't do it for you.
Much more important is solidifying your base. You know that most Americans won't notice a judge being appointed without approval from the senate, especially if you announce it friday afternoon. You do know that the not discussed part of the Republican base that would appreciate an appointment of an argueably racist judge to a federal bench on the weekend of Martin Luther King day would appreicate that action and be sure to vote. Karl Rove was sitting in his office and got to put a check next to his todo list item: "Secure the racist vote."
I could continue to rant at this point, but I won't. Clinton was a good president, and would have been great if he didn't act so stupidly. He at least half deserved to be impeached. His behavior embarassed his office and interferred with the progress he was making on many fronts.
But folks, it's time to stop calling Bush a liar. It's just not fair. To be a liar, you have to actually understand what you're talking about.
Proper haiku is defined by the number of Japanese characters involved. The whole 5-7-5 concept is a rough approximation that they give to secondary school teachers who enforce it to teach students discipline. If you're writing in English, you can drop the 5-7-5 nonsense, try to approximate that a bit and write some poetry. More important to haiku is the use of nature imagery used to discuss the human condition. That being rather tough, and difficult to grade, it's not a big focus for most jr. high or high school students.
You're welcome:). I tend to reply to those who reply to my comments out of courtesy if nothing else. I figure that's why they made the feature that lets you check if anyone replied to you.
I hadn't thought very much about funness of games in the past, never for more than a minute or so while doing something else. However, reading your comment was a "well duh" moment for me. It all came together a bit. Looking at your website url, I'm fairly confident you think more seriously about games than I do.
Regarding games taking us more seriously, I only wish. I've been in a rut for a while now without finding a game I can really get into. My wife would tell you that NFL 2K3 is it, but let's face it, sports games only go so far. My favorite game right now www.hattrick.org is one of those that you can only spend so much time on.
Dead on. I should have replaced "fun" in my what's important for video games with something more akin to "rewarding". When one thinks back to playing Doom 2 as a youth, it wasn't fun as much as it was scary, intense and challenging. "Fun" games don't get much better when you play them in the dark.
My personal tastes tend to be away from "fun" games as often as not. However, when I had to tell someone why I liked the most recent Zelda, I stuggled a bit before describing it as "just a joy to play." That's a fun game. Civ 3, is challenging, interesting etc, but not something you'd watch somebody else play if only because most of the interesting events are happening inside the head of the player.
Sometimes there is a whole lot of fun in digging deep, seeing the amazing varities of play and using that "research" to explore and have a blast within a game. Witness the Civ series.
Othertimes, you dig and you dig and as much as you want the super-deep game to be fun, it just never really materializes. Witness MOO3.
The authors are right though. We shouldn't say simplie is bad. Likewise, we shouldn't say complex is bad. Games need to evaluated for how fun they are. If they are meant to be complex and do that well, great. If they are meant to be simple and do that well, great.
We should evaluate games like Ebert does movies. Based on what they re meant to be. He really liked Tomb Raider because it was fun, there were nice breasts and life was good. The movie did what it was supposed to well. He also really likes the recent film Monster, which has a very low hotness factor, but is deep, moving and has excellent acting. While not "fun", it does what it's meant to do very well.
Good point, but you're missing a subtlety. You can't just hire 2200 $50,000 employees. You need managers to manage them and probably managers to manage the managers. Those jobs are typically more expensive. At the same time, you need to buy / lease space for all the new people to sit in, pay for electricity, buy them computers, etc. For a large company it might be safe to assume that you could get 7-10 employees for every million dollars you spend. That gets you about 800-1200 jobs.
Thanks to all the other posters who corrected what he said about the median. Frankly, the median is one of the most useful measures of 'average' in that it disregards extreme cases on either end. If you take Joe Typical broadband customer and find out what he uses, the median is probably it. Where it isn't as useful is if you don't have a roughly normal distribution, but instead have bimodal or something. For instance if there were a bunch of high end users and a bunch of low end ones, as in:
In the above case, the median is 30, but that really doesn't tell you much. However, in a normalish distribution you would find the median to be close to a mean calculated without outliers. Let's face it though, without knowing what the distribution looks like, the median isn't very useful, neither is the mode or mean. If we had all three, we might be in better shape, but still fairly in the dark.
I have to imagine that broadband usage is distributed fairly normally and that the median is a quite reasonable measure. It'd be much lower than most slashdotters use, but I'd guess most slashdotters wouldn't use more than a factor of 10 more.
I tend to agree with the ISP though, that if you're using enough bandwidth to satisfy 100 of their average customers, something needs to change. You should either be on a differant plan and pay more, the other customers should pay less, or you need to bring down the usage. Now, if they write bad contracts, feel free to exploit them. Otherwise, they should let you know how much is appropriate usage and ask you to stick to that more often than not. I also feel that if you have to part ways with them, you shouldn't have to pay any "get out of the contract" fees as by leaving you are already doing them a favor.
There's a Dilbert on this subject. He's asked who can the company outsource and responds with something like: technically you could outsource everybody and run the company with just one smart employee, and between the two of us, I was the one who knew that.
Children, as a matter of law, are not expected to be able to always make good decisions. They can't consent to sex, buy liquor or tobacco, go to an R rated movie, enlist in the army, decide which medical procedures are appropriate for themselves etc.
The arguement against tobacco ads with cartoons is essentially that kids are dumb enough that you can "make" a significant portion of them do what you want them to with clever advertising. The same could be said for adults, but their considered not as impressionable.
Yes, parents have a responsibility to make sure kids get moral instruction. That said, one wants to give parents ample time to instruct before the child starts smoking, drinking and doing other things his surroundings (freinds, media, parents, etc) make it seem is cool.
Some games are for adults and should be clearly marked as such. For the most part, the 'M' on them means that. There is a failure to educate parents on the seriousness of video games and on the labelling scheme. There is a similar failure of parents to care. Aweful stories in the media should help this. At the same time, the gaming community should consider if ten year olds should be able to buy 'M' games and if retailers should be gently questioning parents who buy them.
It's even more unethical to leave one's job over who management is suing and leave your wife and children unsure of where their next meal is coming from. Get off your high horse.
Yup, that's what I thought as well. The thought "they couldn't afford that" went through my mind so I assumed some enterprising enterprise who needed web connectivity on its boats was being a facilitator. Didn't think that the US Navy would be the guilty part though.
Those three are not all in bed together. If they all knock Linux a bit, it's because they're all competing with it. That said, of the three, only Sun releases products installed with Linux. They just suggest Solaris is better.
It is unfathomable for Sun to work with Microsoft. Hang out around Sun people or listen to McNealy and you'll know what I'm talking about. Linux may or may not be a threat to them, but they absolutely hate Microsoft - to a fault. They're not going to work with Microsoft to try and undermine something. Not a chance of there being a conspiracy.
Many are argueing that spammers will be clever enough to eventually figure out which spamholes are indeed bogus. I think that might be fine. By making them spend the time to find, use, fail and retest you've made their life harder and their spamming more expensive. That's where the victory is, not in any given spammer failing long term.
If spamholes are used en-masse spammers will have to spend increasing amounts of time to find legitimate open relays. This is a similar approach to what the RIAA is doing with seeding P2P networks with trashed files. While once you download a song, you can see it's bad, you become frustrated and the value of the service declines.
We can't keep spam from happening, but we might be able to make it financially and emotionally not worth it. Part of this effort, of course, is educating people not to try it out or using technology to filter it away before some idiot buys herbal viagra. The other part is messing with their technology like this, calling their 800 numbers, pressing lawsuits that cost them attorney fees etc.
I don't think these people have a huge impact. Very popular science fiction authors, on the other hand, have a huge impact. Their imagined toys move deeper into the geek conciousness and are more likely to be realized.
This is all well and good but if you are going to have differant tarrifs for game consoles and personal computers, I think it is quite obvious which category the PS2 is more appropriate in.
The PS2 is console.
You can argue that it can have properties associated with computers, and computers can be made to be like a console, but that doesn't change prima facia case.
Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. This is one of those circumstances.
You are right that consoles are turning into highly specialized computers and the destinction is blurring rapidly. My arguement is based on "if you have differant tariffs..." More approiately, we can decide that we shouldn't have differant tariffs because of the blurring that has been discussed here in absurd depth.
I've played this MUD for years and really love it. I honestly think the key to its success is that it totally and fully rewards grouping. This encourages relations to be formed and maintained. Actually caring about the other people in a MUD makes life much much more interesting. Frankly, I think this aspect is much more appealing than its standard claim to fame: players can band together and form their own kingdoms. If they do, the staff makes custom skills for the kingdom and builds a small area for them. Very cool.
I think that the reason to keep the price high is not to lose less money per unit. Instead it is to associate themselves with the PS2. They are saying, "We're not a weak console like the GC, we are a top notch one like the PS2."
Price fixing is when Sony, Microsoft and Ninetendo get together in a room and say, "Let's all charge $500 for a console."
This is anticompetitive behavior because now to buy a console a person has to pay $300. The companies have decided not to compete on price but instead to ream the public.
Instead what is happening is Ninetendo is charging $100 in order to sell more. Microsoft has decided they'll lose sales if they are too much more expensive then Sony but will lose money if they get to be as cheap as Nintendo. So they have decided to target their price @ Sony's level.
Of course, if Microsoft and Sony have got together and decided to keep the price where it is, then that would be illegal.
In short, you can set your price whereever you want to. You can't talk to you competitors and decide on a price together.
Of course IANAL and such things, but that's my understanding.
Stores could slightly liberalize their policies but require a drivers license to return a game. If they find you repeatedly returning games, they refuse the return. Sure abusers can abuse them once, but if it's only once then they afford that for the benifits of better customer relations in general.
You see this approach in super-sophisticated, cutting edge retails like Foley's.
Slashdot Mirror
NYT website front page has been in a state of flux all morning. The initial story was heavily centered on ROTK. We'll have to wait for evening or tomorrow to see what story(s) they decide on.
- side note: When you have a word like "story" how do you properly signal that it might be multiple. "story(s)" or "story(ies)". I know as tempted as it is to all of you, please avoid diving into RegEx.
Not only can't people under 18 vote, but a key demographic for this game 18-25 yr olds don't vote very much.
I'll give you a 1/10 possibility that Clinton was a rapist. There's certaintly not enough evidence that I'm going to convict him of it. He also was not an accessory to murder, no matter how much right wing radio wants to make him out to be. It's an irresponsible claim, are many of the claims about Bush.
I won't defend Clinton as being an ideal person. His a liar and a cheat. I will say that he did a pretty good job leading the country, making peace across the world, etc.
Read some quality left wings books, I'm starting to appreciate the right wing variety.
Being able to set the settings in UT myself was great for me as well. But, I was fairly hardcore at the time. I had played at college extensively and when I went back home for the summer (no broadband), I thought my skills would rot. Playing against pretty even competition, they did to some degree. That's when I set the bots to their highest level. My game improved dramatically because it had to. I was crisper at finding cover, and more accurate in my shooting. By the end of the summer, I was finding myself dodging a rocket, a jumping off a ledge, and turning mid-air to head shot a bot who was mid-air and at range with the sniper rifle.
Because I was playing at too hard of a difficulty level, I got better. Don't take that option away from me.
Republicans do care about fighting terrorism.
Disclaimer: The following is half joke - sadly it's only half.
It's just beyond their imagination that someone other than them could do a decent job at it. So when somebody makes the president look bad, and may even endager their continued power, that person risks the success of the war on terror. I would cite Bush's coments in the State of the Union speach suggesting that not reelecting him would effectively give up on the war on terror. Discouraging behavior that could cause a loss of Rupublican power must be done at any cost, even one that presents a set back to the war.
Spying on Democrats is a natural and proper course of action then. It's almost a shame the CIA won't do it for you.
Much more important is solidifying your base. You know that most Americans won't notice a judge being appointed without approval from the senate, especially if you announce it friday afternoon. You do know that the not discussed part of the Republican base that would appreciate an appointment of an argueably racist judge to a federal bench on the weekend of Martin Luther King day would appreicate that action and be sure to vote. Karl Rove was sitting in his office and got to put a check next to his todo list item: "Secure the racist vote."
I could continue to rant at this point, but I won't. Clinton was a good president, and would have been great if he didn't act so stupidly. He at least half deserved to be impeached. His behavior embarassed his office and interferred with the progress he was making on many fronts.
But folks, it's time to stop calling Bush a liar. It's just not fair. To be a liar, you have to actually understand what you're talking about.
Proper haiku is defined by the number of Japanese characters involved. The whole 5-7-5 concept is a rough approximation that they give to secondary school teachers who enforce it to teach students discipline. If you're writing in English, you can drop the 5-7-5 nonsense, try to approximate that a bit and write some poetry. More important to haiku is the use of nature imagery used to discuss the human condition. That being rather tough, and difficult to grade, it's not a big focus for most jr. high or high school students.
You're welcome :). I tend to reply to those who reply to my comments out of courtesy if nothing else. I figure that's why they made the feature that lets you check if anyone replied to you.
I hadn't thought very much about funness of games in the past, never for more than a minute or so while doing something else. However, reading your comment was a "well duh" moment for me. It all came together a bit. Looking at your website url, I'm fairly confident you think more seriously about games than I do.
Regarding games taking us more seriously, I only wish. I've been in a rut for a while now without finding a game I can really get into. My wife would tell you that NFL 2K3 is it, but let's face it, sports games only go so far. My favorite game right now www.hattrick.org is one of those that you can only spend so much time on.
Dead on. I should have replaced "fun" in my what's important for video games with something more akin to "rewarding". When one thinks back to playing Doom 2 as a youth, it wasn't fun as much as it was scary, intense and challenging. "Fun" games don't get much better when you play them in the dark.
My personal tastes tend to be away from "fun" games as often as not. However, when I had to tell someone why I liked the most recent Zelda, I stuggled a bit before describing it as "just a joy to play." That's a fun game. Civ 3, is challenging, interesting etc, but not something you'd watch somebody else play if only because most of the interesting events are happening inside the head of the player.
Sometimes there is a whole lot of fun in digging deep, seeing the amazing varities of play and using that "research" to explore and have a blast within a game. Witness the Civ series.
Othertimes, you dig and you dig and as much as you want the super-deep game to be fun, it just never really materializes. Witness MOO3.
The authors are right though. We shouldn't say simplie is bad. Likewise, we shouldn't say complex is bad. Games need to evaluated for how fun they are. If they are meant to be complex and do that well, great. If they are meant to be simple and do that well, great.
We should evaluate games like Ebert does movies. Based on what they re meant to be. He really liked Tomb Raider because it was fun, there were nice breasts and life was good. The movie did what it was supposed to well. He also really likes the recent film Monster, which has a very low hotness factor, but is deep, moving and has excellent acting. While not "fun", it does what it's meant to do very well.
Good point, but you're missing a subtlety. You can't just hire 2200 $50,000 employees. You need managers to manage them and probably managers to manage the managers. Those jobs are typically more expensive. At the same time, you need to buy / lease space for all the new people to sit in, pay for electricity, buy them computers, etc. For a large company it might be safe to assume that you could get 7-10 employees for every million dollars you spend. That gets you about 800-1200 jobs.
Thanks to all the other posters who corrected what he said about the median. Frankly, the median is one of the most useful measures of 'average' in that it disregards extreme cases on either end. If you take Joe Typical broadband customer and find out what he uses, the median is probably it. Where it isn't as useful is if you don't have a roughly normal distribution, but instead have bimodal or something. For instance if there were a bunch of high end users and a bunch of low end ones, as in:
50*100, 200*95, 50*90, 1*30, 100*15, 100*10, 100*5
In the above case, the median is 30, but that really doesn't tell you much. However, in a normalish distribution you would find the median to be close to a mean calculated without outliers. Let's face it though, without knowing what the distribution looks like, the median isn't very useful, neither is the mode or mean. If we had all three, we might be in better shape, but still fairly in the dark.
I have to imagine that broadband usage is distributed fairly normally and that the median is a quite reasonable measure. It'd be much lower than most slashdotters use, but I'd guess most slashdotters wouldn't use more than a factor of 10 more.
I tend to agree with the ISP though, that if you're using enough bandwidth to satisfy 100 of their average customers, something needs to change. You should either be on a differant plan and pay more, the other customers should pay less, or you need to bring down the usage. Now, if they write bad contracts, feel free to exploit them. Otherwise, they should let you know how much is appropriate usage and ask you to stick to that more often than not. I also feel that if you have to part ways with them, you shouldn't have to pay any "get out of the contract" fees as by leaving you are already doing them a favor.
There's a Dilbert on this subject. He's asked who can the company outsource and responds with something like: technically you could outsource everybody and run the company with just one smart employee, and between the two of us, I was the one who knew that.
Regarding children and freewill:
Children, as a matter of law, are not expected to be able to always make good decisions. They can't consent to sex, buy liquor or tobacco, go to an R rated movie, enlist in the army, decide which medical procedures are appropriate for themselves etc.
The arguement against tobacco ads with cartoons is essentially that kids are dumb enough that you can "make" a significant portion of them do what you want them to with clever advertising. The same could be said for adults, but their considered not as impressionable.
Yes, parents have a responsibility to make sure kids get moral instruction. That said, one wants to give parents ample time to instruct before the child starts smoking, drinking and doing other things his surroundings (freinds, media, parents, etc) make it seem is cool.
Some games are for adults and should be clearly marked as such. For the most part, the 'M' on them means that. There is a failure to educate parents on the seriousness of video games and on the labelling scheme. There is a similar failure of parents to care. Aweful stories in the media should help this. At the same time, the gaming community should consider if ten year olds should be able to buy 'M' games and if retailers should be gently questioning parents who buy them.
It's even more unethical to leave one's job over who management is suing and leave your wife and children unsure of where their next meal is coming from. Get off your high horse.
Yup, that's what I thought as well. The thought "they couldn't afford that" went through my mind so I assumed some enterprising enterprise who needed web connectivity on its boats was being a facilitator. Didn't think that the US Navy would be the guilty part though.
Those three are not all in bed together. If they all knock Linux a bit, it's because they're all competing with it. That said, of the three, only Sun releases products installed with Linux. They just suggest Solaris is better.
It is unfathomable for Sun to work with Microsoft. Hang out around Sun people or listen to McNealy and you'll know what I'm talking about. Linux may or may not be a threat to them, but they absolutely hate Microsoft - to a fault. They're not going to work with Microsoft to try and undermine something. Not a chance of there being a conspiracy.
Many are argueing that spammers will be clever enough to eventually figure out which spamholes are indeed bogus. I think that might be fine. By making them spend the time to find, use, fail and retest you've made their life harder and their spamming more expensive. That's where the victory is, not in any given spammer failing long term.
If spamholes are used en-masse spammers will have to spend increasing amounts of time to find legitimate open relays. This is a similar approach to what the RIAA is doing with seeding P2P networks with trashed files. While once you download a song, you can see it's bad, you become frustrated and the value of the service declines.
We can't keep spam from happening, but we might be able to make it financially and emotionally not worth it. Part of this effort, of course, is educating people not to try it out or using technology to filter it away before some idiot buys herbal viagra. The other part is messing with their technology like this, calling their 800 numbers, pressing lawsuits that cost them attorney fees etc.
It's a guerrilla war, I hope we win.
I don't think these people have a huge impact. Very popular science fiction authors, on the other hand, have a huge impact. Their imagined toys move deeper into the geek conciousness and are more likely to be realized.
Um... Two of the contributors listed it as one of their must haves.
This is all well and good but if you are going to have differant tarrifs for game consoles and personal computers, I think it is quite obvious which category the PS2 is more appropriate in.
The PS2 is console.
You can argue that it can have properties associated with computers, and computers can be made to be like a console, but that doesn't change prima facia case.
Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. This is one of those circumstances.
You are right that consoles are turning into highly specialized computers and the destinction is blurring rapidly. My arguement is based on "if you have differant tariffs..." More approiately, we can decide that we shouldn't have differant tariffs because of the blurring that has been discussed here in absurd depth.
I've played this MUD for years and really love it. I honestly think the key to its success is that it totally and fully rewards grouping. This encourages relations to be formed and maintained. Actually caring about the other people in a MUD makes life much much more interesting. Frankly, I think this aspect is much more appealing than its standard claim to fame: players can band together and form their own kingdoms. If they do, the staff makes custom skills for the kingdom and builds a small area for them. Very cool.
I think that the reason to keep the price high is not to lose less money per unit. Instead it is to associate themselves with the PS2. They are saying, "We're not a weak console like the GC, we are a top notch one like the PS2."
My bais - I only own a GC.
Sure.
Price fixing is when Sony, Microsoft and Ninetendo get together in a room and say, "Let's all charge $500 for a console."
This is anticompetitive behavior because now to buy a console a person has to pay $300. The companies have decided not to compete on price but instead to ream the public.
Instead what is happening is Ninetendo is charging $100 in order to sell more. Microsoft has decided they'll lose sales if they are too much more expensive then Sony but will lose money if they get to be as cheap as Nintendo. So they have decided to target their price @ Sony's level.
Of course, if Microsoft and Sony have got together and decided to keep the price where it is, then that would be illegal.
In short, you can set your price whereever you want to. You can't talk to you competitors and decide on a price together.
Of course IANAL and such things, but that's my understanding.
Stores could slightly liberalize their policies but require a drivers license to return a game. If they find you repeatedly returning games, they refuse the return. Sure abusers can abuse them once, but if it's only once then they afford that for the benifits of better customer relations in general.
You see this approach in super-sophisticated, cutting edge retails like Foley's.
The service you are thinking of is GameFly .