Pretend you are a criminal with a gun, which you probably obtained illegally. Now pretend you want to mug someone.... There is only one sure-fire way to minimize the risk to essentially zero: shoot first! You didn't want to kill the person, but you got frightened by the intensity of this conflict situation, the risk just seemed too large.
This assumes that criminals are rational people. They aren't; most of them are irrational and stupid. You're saying "Trust in the criminal! If you don't carry a gun, he won't hurt you -- he'll just politely take your money and be on his way!"
As for our "hero" who shot the two robbers dead, who we instinctively want to cheer, I doubt he even feels like a hero... This must have been highly traumatising for all of them.
Ah, yes. Better the defenseless family was robbed and possibly murdered by the criminals, eh? Then they can be content in their moral superiority, as their coffins are lowered in the ground.
Everyone becomes more afraid of becoming a victim, so people buy more guns. The criminals become more afraid, because they realise the risks of their enterprise are much higher. So they learn to shoot first.
Once again, you're assuming that criminals are rational. They're not. Look: the criminals already have guns. So if citizens suddenly have guns too... the dumbass criminals who don't wise up to the situation will start getting killed. The streets aren't a place where criminals "learn to shoot first" -- they'll get iced before they can learn.
Better to just avoid the situation completely. Don't let the cycle even begin. And that means unarming society - especially the criminals, but also the populace.
Unarming society is impossible. Look to Great Britain's example if you need to: right now, people aren't allowed to defend themselves, and criminals are the only ones with guns. Does heavily-armed Switzerland have a problem? (Alright, I know this argument is well-worn, but hey...)
Ack. Some problems with my post, but it's only/., after all. I'm sorry this isn't Usenet, so we can't have a real discussion on this, but I hope I made my position clear.
That would work if criminals were rational. Unfortunately, they're not only irrational, but also stupid.
No. It works irrespective of the rationality of the criminal.
If law-abiding citizens are armed, then dumb criminals attack them, and the criminals are shot and (hopefully) killed. If law-abiding citizens are not armed, then dumb criminals attack them, and the criminals succeed.
The theory works, but it expects too much out of the lowest form of society.
No. It expects nothing from the scum of society.
If criminals don't wise up, they'll get forcibly educated by one of their intended victims.
I don't know who this Mouse character thinks he is, but unless he drew his version before 1976, HE is also in violation of copyright law.
Way to read the article, buddy:
Drawings attached to the complaint, dating from the early 1960s, pair a small, two-legged eyeball with a large, dull-witted monster character in a "buddy" relationship.
I have 2 names for you: Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman. Chemists from UofUtah. Alright, so maybe they were just negligent in not performing more tests -- it is kinda hard to match the kind of blatant bullshitting Schön was pulling.
Check out the Guardian's top 10 scientific blunders page. They've got psychologists, physicists, chemists... all working to pull down science's reputation.
Sure it's nice to try to sleep in a college apartment complex on Friday night at 10PM without a bunch of noise, but the US Constitution doesn't give us those rights.
I think I should point out here that the Constitution doesn't give us any rights, it simply spells out some of the inherent rights we possess as human beings -- free speech being one of these. And, as others have pointed, in Amendment 9, it is explicitly mentioned that enumerating some rights doesn't mean those are all we get, so to speak.
Yes, you are prevented from skipping the warning on most DVDs, but again, they aren't 120 seconds long.
The point isn't the length of the warning, it's that on a DVD player and DVD that I bought, I am prevented from skipping through parts of the data stream. It is a wretched and disgusting thing to watch my DVD player flash a "not allowed" icon up when I try to do something, because the manufacturer has conspired with the content cartel to remove functionality (or add a "functionality" I don't want!) from the device.
The same thing happens with my Realmagic Hollywood+ program on my windows partition, but happily when I'm in Linux, MPlayer and Xine will let me do whatever I want. Unfortunately, support for my DVD decoder card isn't quite where it needs to be (you can check out the state of affairs at the DXR3 and Hollywood+ driver project page), so the DVD quality is a little off in Linux.
Actually, the example of being unable to skip the FBI warning is a good one to show non-techwise people, who might zone out if you tried to explain the entire CSS encryption and region-coding scheme to them. I watched something with my mom recently, and she definitely noticed when I pointed out how we were being forced to watch the warning screen.
Yeah, uh, believe me when I say Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is not the time for subtitles.
After having watched the sub on my dvd maybe 3 times, I tried out the dub when I watched it with a friend. It was fucking horrendous... just randomly altered the meanings of scenes. I started cringing at the desert scene in the middle of the film, and didn't stop until it finished. Never again! Anyway, the sound of the original movie is one of its best parts, and switching the native Chinese dialogue with English just doesn't preserve that dynamic.
The emphasis today is on special effects and graphics -- without 3D animation and full-motion video clips seamlessly (cough) integrated into the game play, the execs figure it won't sell.
No. This stereotype seems to be pretty popular, but it's not true. Happily, the game industry continues to avoid descending into the Hollywood model of churning out poor films and music.
Right now, as in the past, games with good gameplay will outsell pretty games with poor gameplay. If suits want to be obsessed with graphics, they can -- but they'll be out of work pretty soon. I mean, what's the best-selling game for almost the past 2 years? The Sims, a game with not-at-all polished graphics. Diablo II's graphics were pretty dated by the time it came out, but it sold a boatload of units, and it still has a massive following on Battle.net (I just escaped its grasp several months ago).
... my kids spend more time playing old FUN games such as Dragon Warrior IV, Solstice, Landtalker, Shining Force II than they do Final Fantasy XI...
I happen to not have played any of the console games you mention, but I was down with the SNES back in the day... and there are just as many FUN games now as there were back then. For every Final Fantasy 6, Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana you throw at me, I can answer with Deus Ex, Homeworld, Baldur's Gate II and Alpha Centauri.
I'm not really sure you've ever read anything by Kevin J. Anderson.
I've read most of his Star Wars books, and the 3 first Dune prequels.
He's one of the best science fiction authors out there today...
Like another poster, I have to assume here that you just haven't read a lot of SF. Are you seriously going to compare Kevin J. Anderson to... I don't know, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R. R. Martin, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe... Much of their work is literature; Kevin Anderson doesn't write particularly bad stuff, but it sure as hell isn't very deep.
... including some of his work on the "TV novelization" Star Wars series (I'm assuming you think this genre is stupid or something).
It's not stupid, it's just an often-entertaining series of books to flesh out the Star Wars universe. It's not going to win any SF awards.
Hmmm... Some notes: the only Peter Molyneux games I've played are Dungeon Keeper and Black & White. So when I mention him as a "fantastic" game developer, I'm going off his good reputation (which from what I've seen is 90% from Populous) and my positive impressions of the above games.
He comes up with great concepts that are fun for a little bit, until you realize that your entire function as a player is basically housekeeping.
Enh... I guess you just don't go in for the entire "god game" genre. There's a difference between "housekeeping", and only being able to influence the game indirectly, through the actions of your underlings. You can definitely shape the outcome of a game, it's just that you have to do it in the roundabout way that fits into the game's concept. Housekeeping is boring, but that kind of micromanagement isn't really the point of a god game; if I find myself doing it, I've usually lost focus of the big picture.
As far as the interview... as soon as I read the first question, I thought "stock interview". It was the same boring questions everyone asks. Peter was just giving his stock answers. I've definitely seen more interesting stuff from him.
BTW, I think you would have found Dungeon Keeper (and Syndicate, from what I've heard) much more "lengthily playable" than some of his other games. Dungeon Keeper is more... concrete, in how you act in order to beat each level. Also, it simply kicks ass -- a shitload of fun, and just a great concept, both thematically, and in the tools you get to build your evil army.
I agree with your first point. Gamespy is turning out to be a bad thing.
OTOH, your Peter Molyneux-bashing is a bit tiresome.
Since when do you create sequels to horribly flopped games?
Pretty hard to call Black & White a flop... a brief
Google search netted me this page, which notes that B&W sold > 2 million units worldwide. As far as the game itself... I've come back to it several times since it was released, and I always get bored after a couple weeks of playing it. But I like it; and I know many other people who liked it as well.
As usual, the fact that your circle of friends didn't like B&W is pretty poor evidence for it being a bad game.
Oh, and before people start yelling at me; being horribly overhyped is NOT a definition of a succesful game. (Daikatana anyone?)
Daikatana wasn't a "successful game" because it sucked ass. It would have sucked ass even if Romero hadn't hyped it to the moon for ~4 years.
What are the game producers going to do when they finally get to the point where the games look like real life, but still have the entertainment value of the movie "Glitter" or "It's Pat"?
When that happens, the game industry will be almost indistinguishable from Hollywood. There will be little technological advancement, and most publishers will churn out derivative, mass-market gaming pablum identical to what has come before it.
Guys like Warren Spector, Peter Molyneux and Sid Meier will continue to make fantastic and innovative "art-house" games, which will be enjoyed by all those in the know, but most of the market will consist of soulless copycat releases.
Basically, warp drives are run off antimatter -- but dilithium is the only known substance that doesn't react to antimatter, when subjected to an EM field. So the dilithium just processes the antimatter.
I'll be charitable and assume you're just ignorant, and not a troll.
We all know how rockets work: propellant is shot out the back of the rocket engine, and as it pushes off surrounding matter, the reactive force propels the vehicle forward according to Newton's third law.
LOL. "pushes off surrounding matter"? There's no matter in space to push off of... Rockets work in space because of conservation of momentum.
Example: a dude sitting on a sled on a frozen pond, with a sackful of bricks. When he throws a brick off the sled in one direction, the sled moves in the other direction. Because there is very little friction between the sled and the ice, the sled keeps moving. Throw more bricks, and the sled will go faster.
To make everything clear: the sled is like a rocket, the bricks are like fuel, and space has even less friction than a frozen pond. Because the total momentum of the system must be conserved, as fuel is burned and exhaust is generated, the rocket moves forward.
Bandwidth is a commodity (I think it was the commoditization of bandwidth that is the part of the reason for the telecom collapse) like water or electricity: cheap, but not infinite.
It seems this viewpoint pops up whenever a cable/DSL story gets posted on/.
But isn't bandwidth fundamentally different from electricity and water, in that the latter 2 cost money to generate or pump? With broadband, once you lay the pipe, it doesn't cost anything to actually pull data up and down. Or is there a significant overhead for the ISP in managing all these bits flying around? So that more traffic takes more computing power, and would therefore have to be supported with more money?
Don't bother, I'll review the movie right here. Let's see... um, Kirk and company hijack the Enterprise and scoot their asses over to the Genesis planet, Kirk's son gets killed, Christopher Lloyd gets iced, and Spock is resurrected on Vulcan.
A director's cut is an edition of a film with scenes added or modified from the theatrical release -- presumably the suits forced modifications on the director, which he remedies on the DVD/video release. It's "what the director wanted". You're complaining about "Behind the Scenes" documentaries or something...
Check out this spew from their senior vice president of business development:
"It was a terrible experience," he said. "Here's this format that everyone believed in. Yeah, the economy is in the pits and it will be hard to find another job, but with that much effort put into a format that the consumer needs, that was the real disappointment."
Oseth also said that he believes the technology won't go away.
"I think because it's the right answer for the consumer, there will be a company looking to pick up the pieces of DataPlay."
I guess you can admire their audacity, in declaring that consumers "need" their freedom-disabling chunks of plastic...
I, however, will just laugh. If, indeed, "everyone" at this company believed in this format, I'm glad to see them tank. There was some sick shit going on there; here's hoping someone incompetent buys them up and kills their wonderful "technology".
Washington, Taiwan's main trading partner and arms supplier, has said the island's failure to protect intellectual property rights is causing hundreds of million dollars damage annually to U.S. recorded music, software and motion picture industries.
Oh, that's great! So the slump in music industry revenue is due to Taiwan's copyright protection lasting 50 years, instead of 70 like the US... I suppose the RIAA can stop lobbying Congress to lock down all our computers now, and focus instead on squeezing those last few hundred million dollars out of Taiwan.
What's that you say? The movie industry is enjoying record profits? How is this possible, when in addition to Taiwan's criminal 50-year copyright protection, Jack Valenti assures me that 50 TB of pirated movies in DivX flows through the Internet each day?
Slashdot Mirror
Ack. Some problems with my post, but it's only /., after all. I'm sorry this isn't Usenet, so we can't have a real discussion on this, but I hope I made my position clear.
If law-abiding citizens are armed, then dumb criminals attack them, and the criminals are shot and (hopefully) killed. If law-abiding citizens are not armed, then dumb criminals attack them, and the criminals succeed.
No. It expects nothing from the scum of society.If criminals don't wise up, they'll get forcibly educated by one of their intended victims.
Check out the Guardian's top 10 scientific blunders page. They've got psychologists, physicists, chemists... all working to pull down science's reputation.
The same thing happens with my Realmagic Hollywood+ program on my windows partition, but happily when I'm in Linux, MPlayer and Xine will let me do whatever I want. Unfortunately, support for my DVD decoder card isn't quite where it needs to be (you can check out the state of affairs at the DXR3 and Hollywood+ driver project page), so the DVD quality is a little off in Linux.
Actually, the example of being unable to skip the FBI warning is a good one to show non-techwise people, who might zone out if you tried to explain the entire CSS encryption and region-coding scheme to them. I watched something with my mom recently, and she definitely noticed when I pointed out how we were being forced to watch the warning screen.
Submitters think up the titles; Michael had nothing to do with it.
After having watched the sub on my dvd maybe 3 times, I tried out the dub when I watched it with a friend. It was fucking horrendous... just randomly altered the meanings of scenes. I started cringing at the desert scene in the middle of the film, and didn't stop until it finished. Never again! Anyway, the sound of the original movie is one of its best parts, and switching the native Chinese dialogue with English just doesn't preserve that dynamic.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/23/ 197234&mode=nested&tid=155
Right now, as in the past, games with good gameplay will outsell pretty games with poor gameplay. If suits want to be obsessed with graphics, they can -- but they'll be out of work pretty soon. I mean, what's the best-selling game for almost the past 2 years? The Sims, a game with not-at-all polished graphics. Diablo II's graphics were pretty dated by the time it came out, but it sold a boatload of units, and it still has a massive following on Battle.net (I just escaped its grasp several months ago).
I happen to not have played any of the console games you mention, but I was down with the SNES back in the day... and there are just as many FUN games now as there were back then. For every Final Fantasy 6, Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana you throw at me, I can answer with Deus Ex, Homeworld, Baldur's Gate II and Alpha Centauri. Baldur's Gate kicked ass.As far as the interview... as soon as I read the first question, I thought "stock interview". It was the same boring questions everyone asks. Peter was just giving his stock answers. I've definitely seen more interesting stuff from him.
BTW, I think you would have found Dungeon Keeper (and Syndicate, from what I've heard) much more "lengthily playable" than some of his other games. Dungeon Keeper is more... concrete, in how you act in order to beat each level. Also, it simply kicks ass -- a shitload of fun, and just a great concept, both thematically, and in the tools you get to build your evil army.
Am I the only one who could never beat that boss on the pirate ship?
OTOH, your Peter Molyneux-bashing is a bit tiresome.
Pretty hard to call Black & White a flop... a brief Google search netted me this page, which notes that B&W sold > 2 million units worldwide. As far as the game itself... I've come back to it several times since it was released, and I always get bored after a couple weeks of playing it. But I like it; and I know many other people who liked it as well.As usual, the fact that your circle of friends didn't like B&W is pretty poor evidence for it being a bad game.
Daikatana wasn't a "successful game" because it sucked ass. It would have sucked ass even if Romero hadn't hyped it to the moon for ~4 years.Guys like Warren Spector, Peter Molyneux and Sid Meier will continue to make fantastic and innovative "art-house" games, which will be enjoyed by all those in the know, but most of the market will consist of soulless copycat releases.
Basically, warp drives are run off antimatter -- but dilithium is the only known substance that doesn't react to antimatter, when subjected to an EM field. So the dilithium just processes the antimatter.
Example: a dude sitting on a sled on a frozen pond, with a sackful of bricks. When he throws a brick off the sled in one direction, the sled moves in the other direction. Because there is very little friction between the sled and the ice, the sled keeps moving. Throw more bricks, and the sled will go faster.
To make everything clear: the sled is like a rocket, the bricks are like fuel, and space has even less friction than a frozen pond. Because the total momentum of the system must be conserved, as fuel is burned and exhaust is generated, the rocket moves forward.
But isn't bandwidth fundamentally different from electricity and water, in that the latter 2 cost money to generate or pump? With broadband, once you lay the pipe, it doesn't cost anything to actually pull data up and down. Or is there a significant overhead for the ISP in managing all these bits flying around? So that more traffic takes more computing power, and would therefore have to be supported with more money?
Someone care to fill me in?
Sound about right?
A director's cut is an edition of a film with scenes added or modified from the theatrical release -- presumably the suits forced modifications on the director, which he remedies on the DVD/video release. It's "what the director wanted". You're complaining about "Behind the Scenes" documentaries or something...
Check out http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Gandhi
I, however, will just laugh. If, indeed, "everyone" at this company believed in this format, I'm glad to see them tank. There was some sick shit going on there; here's hoping someone incompetent buys them up and kills their wonderful "technology".
What's that you say? The movie industry is enjoying record profits? How is this possible, when in addition to Taiwan's criminal 50-year copyright protection, Jack Valenti assures me that 50 TB of pirated movies in DivX flows through the Internet each day?
Right....